POETRYNear the end of this very tight selection from his lifetime's work Bernard O'Donoghue has placed the poem Telegrams.
It contains three short stanzas that embody an entire world of Irish emigration; a world of estrangement, pubs, music, Bristol workmates, Camden Town and mailboats. Irish labourers at work in England couldn't return home without their 10-shilling "sailing tickets". The only other way to board the mailboat without a "sailing ticket" was to present an urgent telegram from home, a telegram to prove that a close relative had died. In a way, O'Donoghue has been receiving these telegrams from Cullen, Co Cork, all of his writing life. Each of his books has been a presentation of such telegrams:
No getting on without them: that is except
if you could show an Irish telegram
to the man at the barrier: "I must get back
for the funeral, sir; my mother's passed
away."
This Selected Poems gives us an opportunity to look at the assembled luggage of all those journeys, real and imagined. Unlike the Anglo-Irishwoman Elizabeth Bowen, who felt most at home while on that mailboat between England and Ireland, O'Donoghue is rooted, or earthed, to that one spot in Cullen, the farm his widowed mother abandoned when she went away to teach in England. The tone of his voice in these poems is continuously that of an English-educated son in the company of his Irish mother; it is a humane tone, illuminated by flashes of irony and learning. But that lost childhood is nearly always communal, and in a characteristic Co Cork way. In Munster Final he writes:
We will be back next year, roaring
ourselves
Hoarse, praying for better luck. After first
Mass
We'll get there early; that's our only hope.
Keep clear of the car parks so we're not
hemmed in, And we'll be home, God willing, for the
cows.
This selection, then, is a Co Cork Feis, a feast of character and story; but without that self-limiting local impulse toward nostalgia. The work is more deliberate, intense and literary. In truth, these poems mark the journeys of a Medieval scholar at Wadham College, Oxford, as he tries to bridge the gap between what he knows now and where he has once lived. It is an impossible task to amalgamate such an estranged Irish nature and English nurture, and this effort to make such lost worlds cohere is what fills his work with stress and creative tension. The poetry is full of immediacies, as well as the small bothers of a rural household: "Where did I leave my cap? Some day/ I must look. Maybe in the room/ where the stuffed otter twists to face you" he writes. Or "The cows' repulsive body-heat/ Kept the car warm through frosty nights" and "Maybe tomorrow, James. Maybe tomorrow/ we'll take you to the station".
The latter line is taken from In Millstreet Hospital, a short poem of great warmth and fatalistic surrender. Each poem has that signature line or two, adult speech remembered from childhood: as local as Millstreet, but as universal as Zima Junction. Yet, there is no going back. Ireland can only be recaptured in the mind, as Helen Dunmore observed. The poems selected here, from The Weakness (1991) to the superb, Whitbread prize-winning Gunpowder (1995) and Outliving (2003), demonstrate an incredible fidelity to Irish material; an almost unnatural obsession with such material. A lifelong academic, O'Donoghue has never strayed across the electric fence of his farm to exploit the long acre of Oxford modernists and Martians. With a farm of his own from childhood, he never needed the free grazing offered by changing literary fashions. From the beginning, he has paid his full rates to Irish childhood and come home each day for the cows.
In an early poem, The Potter's Field, taken here from The Weakness (1991), but a poem I first remember reading in the Gallery Press Poaching Rights of 1987, O'Donoghue proclaimed his aesthetic territory to the literary world. Gifted from the beginning, he has never wavered from the fidelities that have made him a very fine poet:
My tears-of-god bloom as red here beside
The Queen Elizabeth and Iceberg roses
As on their native drywall back in Kerry.
The soil's hospitable; the air is delicate.
So I think that now I'm well enough heeled
in
To rate a plot inside the graveyard wall,
Escaping Giudecca . . .
Thomas McCarthy is a Co Waterford poet who works with Cork City Libraries. His latest book is Merchant Prince (2005)
Selected Poems By Bernard O'Donoghue Faber & Faber, 117pp. £12.99