ESSAYS: The Poet's Chair: The First Nine Years of the Ireland Chair of Poetry, By Paul Durcan, John Montague & Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, The Lilliput Press, 264pp. €20THE POET'S chair, the jacket illustration suggests, is an unassuming stool that would sit neatly in any farmhouse, or retro, kitchen, writes Vona Groarke.
It's a curious image: none of the lectures collected here could be rightly characterised as homely, folksy or particularly wooden. Perhaps the illustration suggests qualities to be expected of Irish poets or poetry: humility, endurance, a sentimental obsession with the past, rurality, poverty? If so, the contents are a disappointment: the poets whose lectures are included here seem mindful of the possibility that if one sits too long on a sugán, one might just find oneself longing for an Eileen Gray armchair. These 11 lectures (two are reprinted in their original Irish) are sleek, ambitious and well put together. They combine reminiscences, analyses, investigations and enthusiasms to offer an overview of contemporary Irish poetry that is as concerned with modernity as with tradition.
The Ireland Chair of Poetry was established to mark the award to Seamus Heaney of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. To date, three poets have been Ireland Professors of Poetry: John Montague, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Durcan, each appointed for a period of three years. (Michael Longley has recently taken up appointment as the fourth.) The Professor is attached to three universities - Trinity College Dublin, Queen's University Belfast and University College Dublin - spending one year and delivering a public lecture in each.
THE ESSAYS COLLECTED here do not try to hide the fact that they originally ventured out as public lectures. They do not seem to have been particularly reworked for publication: indeed, the first five words of the first essay in the volume, by John Montague, are "As I began this lecture". He offers a breezy and relaxed account of his poetic genesis, considering how it is that a poet might assemble a voice from the bits and pieces of circumstance, heritage, family, community and one's own reading. Once the voice has been found and poets come into their own, he claims, they "start to look like their poems, or the reverse". Thus, the "uncompromising and abrasive rhythms of The Great Hunger" reflect the "gangly and cantankerous figure of Kavanagh", and the poems of Seamus Heaney may "often look as robust and sturdy as the man himself". As a theory, it will only ever go so far, but this is the kind of idiosyncrasy that makes the Montague essays such an enjoyable read.
Alongside his more chatty moments runs a vein of serious consideration that befits a celebrated literary critic: "every country, every nation, perhaps every province", he proposes in his "Short Thoughts on the Long Poem", "aspires to an epic". His survey of some of the great long poems in the English language from Paradise Lost to Hart Crane's The Bridge, Thomas Kinsella's translation of the Táin to Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, shows a kind of imagination that is orchestral, wide-ranging and vigorous.
His essays are the most outward-looking of this collection, certainly in terms of their scope of reference. More a Marcel Breuer chair than an Eileen Gray, his way of locating contemporary Irish poetry in the stream of international movement and achievement is both useful and illuminating.
Another outward glance is Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's account of her years in Turkey as a young bride, "Kismet". Her memories of gradual assimilation into family life there dovetail into a fascinating interpretation of how her encounters with Turkish culture informed her commitment to writing Irish-language poetry.
An essay entitled "The Hag, the Fair Maid and the Otherworld" looks at how her investigations of the Irish oral tradition have helped her poems to "tell stories with a slant". Particularly interesting is the parallel between herself and Italo Calvino, who spent several years "swimming in the unconquerable tide of folklore", and whose work underwent great formal changes as a result, notably in his extraordinary novel, If On a Winter's Night a Traveller.
"Public Access Denied" is a lively and valuable guided tour of several landmarks of the Irish language literary landscape that sees in the relative obscurity of such sites as Uisneach, ("the geographical and spiritual dead centre of Ireland"), Ráth Cruachan (starting point of the Táin) and Rathleigh House (home of Art Ó Laoghaire and Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill), striking evidence of how the Irish-language literary tradition is too often overlooked.
Paul Durcan's essays on Anthony Cronin, Michael Hartnett and Harry Clifton reveal him to be an oddly geometric essayist, approaching subjects from acute, and sometimes difficult, angles. Moving from McDaid's to Brooklyn Bridge to Andropov's Moscow and back to the Stella Gardens in the Dublin docklands, the essay on Cronin, for example, masterfully holds the road while swerving from personal memory to more detached consideration of the formal and thematic gambits of his chosen poems.
EACH DURCAN PIECE is resolutely celebratory, designed, it would seem, to argue the achievement of each poet before a resistant audience. The same essay on Anthony Cronin, for example, is set out like a legal argument and concludes, "I rest my case". Ultimately, one comes away from these essays as much struck by Paul Durcan's capacity for wholehearted and vivid enthusiasm as by the poems he writes about.
In terms of craftsmanship and style, this collection demonstates that the poet's chair is a carefully made artefact. Surprisingly supportive, sturdy and polished, it should prove as enduring as any well-made stool or elegant armchair. Rest here a while.
Vona Groarke is a poet. Lament for Art O'Leary, her version of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, will be published next month by The Gallery Press