Loss of an honest and searing voice

How grimly appropriate that at this time of crisis for liberal unionism, one of the most essential voices to have emerged from contemporary Ulster Protestant culture should have fallen silent. The relatively muted response to the untimely death on June 20th of the poet James Simmons is, in its own way, an eloquent comment on the embattled values he articulated.

He was too honest about sexual intimacies, too savagely secular, too generous in his embrace of Ireland as a whole, to be a cultural icon of unionism. He was also too searing in his indictments of violence, too effective a destroyer of nationalist myth-making, and, again, too painfully honest about sex, to be a comfortable figure for nationalist Ireland. So, since no one wanted to claim him, he went to his grave unburdened by official lamentations. Yet in some respects, his loss represents something similar to David Trimble's resignation: the difficulty of finding a space for Protestant values beyond the traditional totems of the tribe.

At some level, the crisis in the peace process and the relative neglect of James Simmons are connected. One way to think of the Belfast Agreement is that it brought the tools of the poets to bear on the political problems of Northern Ireland. Over decades of conflict, politicians and churchmen had turned language into a frozen shard, to beat the other side on the head. The poets kept language alive as a field of ambiguities and complexities.

In the Belfast Agreement, the politicians belatedly discovered the uses of this ambiguity, and adopted a fluid, deliberately uncertain vocabulary whose power lay in its ability to mean subtly different things to different people. Both the success of the agreement and its present difficulties are rooted in that ambiguity.

BUT Simmons's political poems have no truck with ambiguity. When, in the early 1970s, he had the guts to confront atrocities in verse, he did so directly. He adopted the simplest and clearest of forms, the ballad. After the Red Hand Commando murdered a Catholic shopkeeper on the Crumlin Road in November 1972, he wrote The Ballad of Gerry Kelly, Newsagent.

After the IRA set off three bombs in the small mixed village of Claudy on the morning of July 31st, 1972, killing nine people, he wrote Claudy: And Christ, little Katherine Aiken is dead, and Mrs McLaughlin is pierced through the head.

Meanwhile to Dungiven the killers have gone, and they're finding it hard to get through on the phone.

He took a form - the instant ballad whipped up to immortalise local heroes - and turned it back on those same local heroes. In later poems, he went further. Using his apparently anomalous position as an Ulster Protestant with a deep knowledge of the rest of Ireland, he did something for which I suspect nationalist Ireland will never forgive him. He appropriated Gaelic forms to excoriate the IRA and to honour its victims.

In From the Irish, he used the formula of the praise-poem from the old Irish sagas to devastating satiric effect. The first line is: Most terrible was our hero in battle blows; the last: By proxy his bomb exploded, his valour shone. In Lament for a Dead Policeman, he transformed the great Gaelic Lament for Art O'Leary into a haunting memorial for a Catholic member of the RUC.

This ought to have made him a cultural hero for the Protestant community from which he came. And yet he was far too true to the obligation he acknowledged in his last collection, The Company of Children, "not to connive with your own tribe". He practised that parity of disesteem which Edna Longley has suggested is the necessary kind of equality for both traditions.

He insisted on reminding his fellow Ulster Protestants that since we didn't reform ourselves, since we had to be caught red-handed, justice is something we have to be taught.

Above all, he offended against the sanctimonious strain in the official culture. His honesty about the messy stuff of his life - sex, betrayal, divorce - undermined the Protestant self-image of decorum and control.

And they got him back for it. A few years ago, after he established The Poet's House in Islandmagee, Co Antrim, with his wife and fellow poet, Janice, they applied for planning permission to extend the building to accommodate the demand for their creative writing courses. For once, the small-minded puritans had him in their power. After a debate in which one unionist councillor produced a volume of Simmons's poetry from a brown paper bag and proceeded to read some passages about sex, permission was enthusiastically refused. He and Janice had to slip across the Border to Falcarragh, Co Donegal, where the Poet's House was re-established.

The banishment was as much symbolic as real. For as "culture" takes the place of violence as a surrogate battleground in the new Northern Ireland, James Simmons's refusal to connive with any tribe is barely valued. And yet, if his own people had learned to love him and nationalist Ireland had learned at least to respect him, the peace process would not be in such terrible trouble.

fotoole@irish-times.ie