POET REMEMBERED:BEING A FRIEND of the late John O'Donohue was a special experience – a blessing. His presence preceded any words that might later be exchanged. He had a capacity to create a reassurance and make a bridge of understanding that was instinctive, pre-verbal.
He visited me frequently during my stay in hospital in 2005. Before I opened my eyes I knew he was there. At this time he was working on a lecture for John Dillon’s seminar on Neo Platonism. He was preparing his paper, later published as a pamphlet with the title Towards a Poetics of Possibility. We discussed utopian studies, hope, possibility, and Ernst Bloch before, seeing my energy ebbing, he told me to keep my spirits up and left with a typical John O’Donohue invocation and blessing. For so many, he was a special friend.
I had suggested to him earlier that he should write a book on friendship. I felt his previous work and his ongoing great project, a work on Meister Eckhart, had prepared the ground. He was, however, reluctant to embark on anything that might delay the big work on Eckhart. My suggestion was made after I had launched Divine Beauty for him.
In a foreword to a new publication of John’s first poems, Echoes of Memory, Lelia Doolan quotes John’s mother’s remark in 2003: “Ah poor John, Beauty has him killed!” After Divine Beauty, the major work was his focus.
The book on friendship was not to be. It remains my hope, and the hope of so may others, that his work on Meister Eckhart can be completed by some appropriate scholar. In the meantime, Echoes of Memory has just appeared.This is an early John O’Donohue, but all of the central themes of the later works are present.
Echoes of Memorywas first published by Salmon in 1994 and has just now been published in a handsome hardback edition by Transworld. It appears after his untimely death in January 2008 and, of course, after such works as Anam Cara, Eternal Echoes, Divine Beauty and Benedictus.
Echoes of Memoryhas a thematic connection to all of these works, as well as to John's lesser known Towards a Poetics of Possibility, written just three years before his passing. The vindication of memory is a recurring theme through all his works. In memory is lodged not only what was experienced, but what was imagined as possible. Possibility was not the stuff of fantasy but rather the human spirit in the midst of that which challenged and contradicted it.
The poems in the collection show further the value John saw in the definition of what was truly human as being part of a divinity shared with nature. This profound and actual humanity he brought to friendship. Friendship consisted of a celebration of a shared divinity located in every living thing. Such a version of divinity allowed for a form of fragile intimacy
Nor was nature exhausted by the encounter. The human subject was stretched into such a context of time and space as allowed for the dignity of a life, but reminded of its transitory nature.
The poems in the recent publication, Echoes of Memory, reflect this.
These are the poems of a young man working within ancient categories and contradictions, including engaging with the cultural rituals that seek to resolve such an unavoidable paradox as that of our possessing an infinite imagination but a finite physical life. These contradictions are engaged without any descent into sentiment.
Running right through the four sections, and the more than 50 poems, is a commitment to the truth of the senses. The senses are the source of the spiritual legacy that later philosophical work would see as that legacy of a life.
It is because the senses are recognised that exile and the desert experience can be understood. So too, the journeying between the warmth of human hearths and bleak rock gets recognised in such poems as Taken, written in memory of his father:
“Were you able
To sense the loss
Of colours, the yellows
And cobalt blue that you loved,
The honey scent of seasoned hay
You carried through the winter
To cattle on the mountain?”
As I read these poems, I thought of Wordsworth’s poem, Michael – in particular the line that ends “and never lifted up a single stone”. The sheepfold would never be finished. The father had lost his companion son to the city. There is a similar sense of loss in John O’Donohue’s evocation of rural tasks and intimacies.
In Voices at the Funeral, human strategies of transition between life and death make the basis of a reflection that presents the body for burial as a vessel of life, but not the totality of life:
“Neighbours lay her out, wash her beads of
life-sweat.
True to custom, don’t throw this water out,
But distribute it to plants she grows”
In John O’Donohue’s poems there is no descent to the pseudo-pastoral. The hard edge of intellect informing heart is retained. Memory is a recurrent theme, sometimes as sensory recall of sensations lost, of beauty that was ephemeral, but, perhaps most important of all, in terms of John O’Donohue’s later work, as a sacred repository of all that had been the stuff of hope, the promise of possibility.
The last section in Echoes of Memory – "Icons of Love" – is anticipated in the collection by such an early poem as Woman and Steel, but all of the later section is concentrated on a delicate, sustained, beautiful and erotic set of poems that deal with love and intimacy.
Reading the poems, I feel the loss of a friend who was overflowing with life at its most powerful and compassionate, but at the same time, I am grateful for these fragments, that taken together make a powerful testament to a life so rich but ended too soon. These poems are the early promise of a life given generously, given to all who met John. Evidence of a unique openness to vulnerability, joy and our fragile earth, they will obdure, as will our memories of him.
