What has Mary O'Donnell to do to get the respect and success she deserves? asks Kevin Myers
She has written fine novels and many wonderful poems, yet she still hasn't broken through the crust between her and the warm sea of acclaim - that strange surface on which the weightless footfall of the trite, the insubstantial unerringly finds the vital crack to that balmy ocean of celebrity below. Yet Mary has been taking her huge and many talents over this same hard plain for years now, and still the surface holds.
Why? Luck, of course, is one reason. Much of success in life, especially in the arts, depends on the random movements of the roulette wheel. The right words at the right time in the right place. Hitting a mood. Random historical events outside one's control. (At Swim Two Birds was published on September 2nd 1939. At Swim, Two Boys was published on September 11th, 2001). And of course the essential unfairness of the universe. That's that.
Get on with it.
Well, you can certainly say of Mary O'Donnell that she has unfailingly got on with it, and uncomplainingly too. She has always been prepared to take risks.
Her sexual frankness in her last novel got The Poor Prudes, pinched as prunes, clucking in disapproval, which says more about their sad lives and their sadder libidos than it does about her work. But of course, reviews do affect sales.
So. No blockbusting novel yet. And now she's back to her poetry, with a beautiful autumnal collection, September Elegies, (Lapwing Press, Belfast). And then what? For will it be reviewed? Will it be acclaimed? Will it even be read? Or will lines which should be engraved in stone perish unseen within their still unopened covers? And yet, and yet: who that has ever penned verse would not be pleased to have written these words from "Homes"?
some middle-aged girl or boy
will know everything
is borrowed:
a home, a wife's or husband's
body - a gift,
as yours has been, your skin
ardent as the moon
burrowing across the sky
to this room,
far from where you sleep.
Simplicity is there, and passion, and a wide embrace of tactility, time and emotion. An elderly couple, arms linked, watch athletes swim and cycle on the Cooley Peninsula - inexplicable that they
once lived so. . .
The death of her father last year informs and inspires many of the poems. Needless to say these are not maudlin affairs, but studied and gentle meditations upon life and love, upon the vital, unimportant details of daily existence, and upon the tiny quotidian duties of those who attend upon the last days of a loved one's life.
None of this is sentimental or depressing or oppressive - just a reassurance and a reminder of the certainties of life and death, the only guarantees that unite us all.
She is good on sex too: "The Muse Demands My Tongue" should be read and remembered by every teenage girl as a lode-stone, a guide towards that strange place where heart and vulva meet.
He took the trouble
to learn my language, that
we might speak
in the intervals between silence, hardly knowing his own fluency.
"Give me your tongue, please give me your tongue!" he urged. And later. . .
The tip of his tongue read
the stories
in my mouth, my tongue
turned pages
in his, I savoured his
verbs and nouns grew wet with runs of adjectives.
In other words, she does Eros very well indeed - sensuously, warmly, tenderly and always with humour: lust without wit is for the farmyard. But she also does landscape very well, as "Watertimes" shows: a trip to Kerry, a sheep's skull, ochre seaweed, shorelines - long, bare
vertebrae,
bare, white, of no
living use,
the impossible journey out or back, the idea that strikes with no antidote. Her evocation of winter is quite brilliant:
. . . would one day call in
the vilest
winds, spiteful
permafrost, gather every sliver of ice,
weaving crystals
like a madwoman knitting bits of
steel. Sharp
sharp, honing the shaft
in such a way
the icicles know her grip, the
toothed head narrows
to the tip of impacted venom.
I write all this with absolutely no hope whatever of changing anything. Mary O'Donnell's is the secret, unseen star of Irish writing: it as if her light emerges from behind a hill at some dark hour after midnight when people are looking elsewhere; and, sensing something behind them, they turn to scan her quadrant in the black sky, just as her star steals once again behind the hill.
But this cannot go on for ever; the season when she rises above the horizon glowing as fixedly as Mars must be upon us soon.
The hour will come, so
the leaves say
the quarter hour and minute, even the second will come
when the sky
falls through bare branches.