Philip McDonagh, who was published in one of the five-poet Dedalus Introductions in 1989, is currently Irish Ambassador in India.
As is the diplomat's lot, he has been based in many corners of the globe, something which is evident throughout this cosmopolitan collection. McDonagh's travels are reflected too in the titles of the book's five sections: Rome, Geneva, Copenhagen, Carraroe in Saxony, and India.
Reading through the first three sections, the reader settles down comfortably with a wistful series of travelogues, many dealing with lost love and featuring several felicitous lines and phrases, often to do with the Yeatsian heart: "the heart - that most feminine quarter"; "Why rehearse,/where heart and heart undressed?"; "a nightdress, discarded,/ radioactive with scent". As well as these personal aperçus, most of the poems have a historical charge to them which are more or less successful, according to the weight of the occasion. For instance the poem about the death of Daniel O'Connell, 'The Journey of the Liberator', has moments of affecting pathos (though it is excessive, as in other cases, to have the subject identified at the end - "white-haired, vein-handed, still-hearted/Daniel O'Connell". We know: "homecomings to Derrynane" and so on). The historical occasions of some other poems are simply too lightly accidental, especially (and unfortunately) the book's opening poem, about the election of the Pope: "It isn't every day they make a Pope". Well, no: but . . .
But then comes the fourth section, which gives the book its title, a single long poem, thinking in Dresden of the recent death of the poet's Carraroe mother, interwoven with the terrible history of that city in 1945. He wanders through a Dresden church, to find,
within a chapel's vaulted space,
a marble altar where the prayer
rebuffed one February night
in 1945 is written
high on the wall.
It is audacious to invoke the bombing of Dresden in a context of private grief, but it is entirely warranted in this wonderfully sustained long reverie-poem. In fact, the most unusual thing about this book in our era is that the long poems here are consistently the best. The pattern is sustained through the Indian poems of the book's final section which are just as impressive as the Dresden poem. These are mostly longer short poems, based on a number of haunting case-histories: 'Kalapani', the notes explain, is the repressive colony prison in the Andamans. Here the language precisely measures up to the historical event, as in the hauntingly statistical last line here: "its exemplary punishment,/as the death-rate in Kala Pani reaches /one hundred per thousand per year". The story of the final poem, 'Madurai Mission', is expounded at length in the notes, as the book climbs to a powerful climax.
Biographical evidence suggests that Carraroe in Dresden is organised chronologically. If so, McDonagh's poems are strengthening dramatically. He is only just past 50, so there is time for the last two sections here to bear remarkable fruit.
Bernard O'Donoghue's latest collection of poems, Outliving, is published by Chatto
Carraroe in Saxony
By Philip McDonagh
Dedalus Press, 86pp. €10