Gunpowder, Bernard O' Donoghue. Chatto and Windus, 1995. £6.99 PB.
So It Goes, Eamon Grennan. Gallery Press, 1995. IRL £6.95 PB, £12.95 HB.

PAT BORAN

(Irish Studies Review)

In his provocative small book of essays on poetry and writing, The Triggering Town, the American poet Richard Hugo writes: "A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or 'causes' the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the writing of the poem." He goes on to suggest that by concentrating on detail, a poet has a better chance of discovering the generated subject. "Often, if the triggering subject is big (love, death, faith) rather than localized and finite, the mind tends to shrink." From this it is a short step to the maxim, "Think small!" and the notion that "all good serious poems are born in obsession."

Obsession a virtue? Obsession a prerequisite for the making of 'good serious poems'? Certainly Eamon Grennan and Bernard O'Donoghue in their own ways have produced, in these and earlier books, good and serious poems, but does that necessarily imply the presence of obsessional qualities in their work? Actually, I think so. Maybe that has as much to do with the fact that I happen to be reading Hugo's essays at the moment, but then that's valid too. All reading involves comparisons and connections, with times, places, people, with other books. Which is why we come back to books and poems. We change and they appear to change along with us.

So let's let Hugo's notion piggyback a while.

So It Goes is Grennan's fourth collection, made up for the most part of what the blurb calls 'elegies and muted celebrations'. In lesser hands, these two categories might remain mutually exclusive. In Grennan's the two are very often one: those who are mourned are those whom we love, and the naming of love is always a form of celebration. "So we live here, forever taking leave," says the epigraph from Rilke to Part One; "And the world returns once more," says the same poet's epigraph to Part Two. The world leaves even as it remains, passing continuously through our grasp, but we love it in its coming and its going, and in our own coming and going, too.

If, however, this was all the poems took on, this kind of generality beloved of reviewers, they should be in danger of the fault pointed out above by Hugo: they would force the mind to shrink. But Grennan is courageous enough to trust the details, the triggers, to generate his haunting and beautiful poems. One might even say that it is his 'good eye' for detail that reveals his 'obsession': light.

Grennan has a painter's sensitivity to light, nowhere more apparent than in the present volume (though it might be remembered that his second book was entitled What Light There Is). The presence and absence of light, light qualified and qualifying, light in all its manifestations - as noun, as verb, as adjective.

A cursory inspection of even the title pages will show that visual sensitivity: 'Glimpses', 'Whistling in the Dark', 'From the Plane Window', 'Towards Dusk the Porcupine', 'Angel Looking Away', 'These Northern Fields at Dusk', 'On Fire' - a great many of the titles, at some level, calling on and appealing to the sense of sight. And this is even before the poems proper begin.

What is remarkable about these poems is that, just as elegy and celebration are not mutually exclusive in Grennan's hands, neither are the often conflicting emotions triggered by observation and memory. In 'Bubbles', for instance, he writes of "these floating tears of light" which, when caught on the tongue, make up "this game of beauty and bitter taste"; while in 'Journey', leaving a city containing "Mortuary after mortuary / of spent cars, ghosts / of tenement windows / flapping plastic" the speaker of the poem looks out a plane window -

Below us,
a firmament of cloud
fashions a soft nest
for sunlight

-- seeing first something intangible (cloud), then tangible (nest), then intangible again (sunlight)

If light, then, is one of the major triggers in this book, it follows that its absence also carries weight. However, things are never simply black and white, and Grennan's pallet or Pantone book is far from monochrome. Light is always a real, an individual, a transforming presence. But even its passing is not necessarily its end, as absence is not necessarily something less solid than presence. Again in the poem 'Bubbles' he writes of his mother "in the home of slow bodies" searching for the escaping words of a song while "absently holding / any hand that's offered". (This line takes on unsettling and beautiful ambiguities in the 'light' of later poems.) And in the wonderful 'Women Going' a woman in a doorway at the start of the poem becomes by the end "this absence beating its stone wings", conjuring up images of graves and headstones that sit uneasily with, but never quite obliterate, that door.

As a metaphor for these poems, this might not be a bad one: a burial place that is also a door. But it reduces the poems and deprives us of their light.

If Grennan's 'obsessions' are light and shade, presence and absence, Bernard O'Donoghue's, at least at first glance, seem to be predominately events from his early years. Since his first book, Poaching Rights (Gallery Press, 1987), O'Donoghue's gaze has been firmly set on 'incidents and episodes from his upbringing in County Cork' as the blurb on the new book has it. Indeed, there are poems in Gunpowder which would not have been out of place in that first small collection. However, the danger with this kind of critical summarising is that it tends to take no notice of the on-the-ground goings-on that make a landscape home. Far from nothing ever changing in O'Donoghue's remembered youth, things were/are happening all the time.

This is, perhaps, the reason he goes back to people via events. In a youth which at times appears almost mythological, action rather than description often provides the real way in. It is interesting to note, for instance, that almost all of his best character portraits are drawn by an action (seldom grand) rather than by a direct physical description, that is by a verb or adverb rather than a noun: "A stranger's / eye-contact, held guiltily too long," ('The Rainmaker); the not too competent local mechanic who must bend down "and peer in hope / Under the bonnet" ('Amateurs'). Even when a poem begins with description, attention is often immediately drawn on to a more telling action:

The chemist's perfect hair and her scent of roses
As we drudged in on our farmer's errand,
Coughing inferiority
('Aurofac 20')

In this sense one might be tempted to say that at least one of O'Donoghue's 'obsessions' is narrative. And in truth there is much in this notion. Indeed, to my mind, the weaker poems here are often those which drive on with the story, passing a point of poetic 'closure' in favour of a termination of narrative. I'm thinking, for instance, of 'Ceo Draiochta (Magic Mist)': a man in a field of wheat having trouble with a threshing machine; "the gloss-painted orange boards / Got slippier" and then his dozing friend Leary leaping to his feet,

hearing two things:
The machine's bellow rapidly sinking
And a scream that those of us in school
That famous day heard from two miles away.

For me something is lost in the next 19 lines, almost-half of the poem: "Matt Bridgie slipped into the drum. / His leg was taken off from the knee down." The chilling ending of a scream two miles away is passed over for:

Matt showed signs of a latent
Family talent for composing verse,
And often sang well past closing-time.

For me, the combination of the scream and "that famous day" had done all the work.

And yet it might be a mistake to think that O'Donoghue is a slave to the facts. The beginning of the poem 'Caedmon', for instance, suggests that stories, too, can be forms of disguise: "Far be it from me to start telling / The truth at this stage of my life"; and later in the same poem, a muse-like apparition advises:

Take your note from me.
Sing about the locals here and how
The whole thing started

- sounding a similar note to Kavanagh's "I made the Iliad from such / a local row".

While a few poems in Gunpowder make use of literary references (Hamlet's "very like a camel" in 'Doubt', for instance) and wonderful arcane morsels such as

The Egyptians, according
To Herodotus, passed laws
When drunk at night, then
Reconsidered them sober
In the morning
('In Vino Veritas')

most display detail and event as if in the present or very recent past, which is what gives them their vitality.

But is this relentless autobiography (literal or embroidered) a form of obsession, to get back to where I started? Possibly. One of the finest poems here, 'The Wisdom of Saving', remembers the life of a 'Horse Guards' savings box the speaker of the poem received as a child, but which now, after his father's death, contains only "A box of matches (Maguire and Patterson), / A handkerchief, and, for some odd reason, / A worn down shaving brush." And it is interesting to note that it ends:

I don't think now
That any new obsession will displace
Those. And they'll themselves be looked at less and less.

© copyright Pat Boran