New and Selected Poems E-Book

Michael D. Higgins

• Herausgeber: Liberties Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Michael D. Higgins is one of Ireland's leading public intellectuals. As well as having made a significant contribution to public life, he is a prolific poet, whose work ranges from the personal to the political, and geographically from the west of Ireland to Nicaragua and the Middle East. Here, he has gathered together the very best of his poetic output over the years. In these poems, he casts a wry, compassionate eye on human weakness and resilience, and the centrality of love to all human relations. Throughout it all, his yearning for a world marked above all by social justice stands out. This collection is a treasury of the very best of his writing over the years and is sure to delight younger readers as well as his established followers.

Leseprobe

New and Selected Poems

Michael D. Higgins

Dedication

For Sabina, Alice Mary, John Peter, Michael, Daniel and friends who have passed on, for those who remain, and for those for whom I wait in anticipation

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Treacy, Niall Baneham, Noreen King and the invaluable editorial assistance offered by Seán O’Keeffe

Note

Some of the poems included in this collection previously appeared in The Betrayal (Salmon Publishing, 1990), The Season of Fire (Brandon, 1993) and An Arid Season (New Island, 2004).

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Note

Foreword by Mark Patrick Hederman

I

Early Days

The betrayal

Relatives Assisting

The Master

Requiem for a parish priest

The death of the red cow

Dark memories

Against all certainty

Sunday ceremonies in Clare

Brothers

Katie’s song

My mother married my father in Mount Melleray in 1937

The ass

Horseshoe

Too close to the ground

Inadequacy

One’s own story

In memory deposit

Of sons and fathers

Of sons and mothers

The poisoning

The ruin

II

Of Rural Realities

Sense memory

The Inter

The age of flowers

Stargazer

The delivery

The collecting

The death of Mary Doyle

The Raft

Meeting

On making the Three Decades

After-Mass meeting

The man who never had a visitor

Toes

Questions without answers

Our Lady of the Trolleys

The storyteller

Discourse of crows on a late-winter morning

III

The Gaze Not Averted

Beyond the I

Take care

Foxtrot in San Salvador

Black Tuesday

Goodbye Mr Michael

Pol Pot in Anlon Veng

Under the mango tree

When bells ring

And the trees wept

Minister for Justice addresses new Irish citizens who were previously non-persons seeking asylum or work

IV

Of Irony and Insufficiency

A race-week reflection in the university city of Galway, 1970

Bank manager faints at the mayor’s ball

Jesus appears in Dublin in 1990 at the Port & Docks Board site

The minister’s black car

An Irish architect reflects on his success

Revivalists

Ritualists

V

Of Friendship, Loss and Hope

The truth of poetry

Of possibility

Of little flowers

The ebbing tide

Memory

Of utopias

Copyright

Foreword

Poetry in the broadest sense is probably our only way forward in destitute times. Perhaps it is unfortunate that we have to rely on such fragile antennae, but, at the moment, it is all we have got. At other turning points in history, science, philosophy, ethics or theology may have been sufficient; in the complicated and unpredictable times in which we live, art alone can provide the weak, yet indispensable, instrument wherewith to chart a way forward. It is almost as if the place we have reached in the tunnel we are burrowing is too narrow for grown adults to scramble through and we have to persuade children to ease their way through the opening, take the fall on the other side and then help us negotiate a passage for the rest.

‘The poet’, to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase, ‘is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist’. This is consciousness before and after it enters the idiom of rational thought. Mind is certainly an important part of the poetic act, but it is only one element. Heartwork is more essential. The finished form is filtered through consciousness, which is the place where many forces and energies meet to emerge as self-expression. The act of poetic creation opens the poet to worlds beyond the conscious mind. The poem is a use of words in whatever way is necessary to convey the new kind of reality which the poet experiences. The poet allows him or her self to be a filter for something beyond the self, something transcendent. This means that poetry is not the work of their own hands entirely; they leave themselves open to what is beyond the autonomous powers of their creative activity. Through the particular gifts of the poet, what is always entirely new, because it was never before articulated in history, becomes embedded in the familiar because it emerges in the form of a poem.

Understood in this way, poetry can be, and should be, a guide towards the future, an essential voice in the drama of creating a more habitable planet. If invited to undertake such a role, the danger is that poetry can become ‘political’, either in the sense that it produces politics or derives from politics. Although few believe that poetry should be ‘political’ in this sense, the discoveries it makes and the dimensions it reaches should be incorporated into the structures which are devised to achieve optimum quality of life for all inhabitants of our planet. In other words, poetry should certainly inform politics. Otherwise the pendulum swings into the other danger area, where poetry is siphoned into its own space and cultivated for its own sake, without connection with, or influence on, the way we live. Such limitations relegate it to the level of entertainment.

Michael D. Higgins exercises the ambiguous dexterity of being both poet and politician. But his poetry is not the fruit of his politics; it is the other way round. He takes time out from the hectic world of politics to make the difficult and dangerous journey to the depths of his own humanity and comes back with wisdom gleaned from that harrowing expedition.

Your face haunts me, as do these memories;

And all these things have been scraped

In my heart,

And I can never hope to forget

What was, after all,

A betrayal.

Everything we do in life is a betrayal of what is left undone. The politician betrays the poet; the teacher betrays the pioneering inventor. We cannot do everything we ought to do. No matter what good action we undertake someone in the world is neglected by our alternative attentiveness. And yet, as we move forward step by step, our carelessness is offset by our commitment to essential causes. Michael D. has campaigned for human rights in Turkey, Western Sahara, Nicaragua, Chile, Gaza, The West Bank, Peru, El Salvador, Somalia. He has fought against dogmatic blueprints for our future whatever their provenance. ‘Nothing is inevitable’ and ‘everything is possible’ have been the liberating bumper stickers of his political campaigns.

These poems unearth the provenance of his subtle alignment with the poor and the weak in our universal society. His book is ‘the salt of tears,’ ‘a deposit in memory of our sea beginnings’ where ‘is lodged the long sigh of all our time, lost in endless space.’ These are womb poems, deep memories of the time and place where we were born. ‘I’ve been born and once is enough./ You don’t remember, but I remember,/ Once is enough’(T. S. Eliot again). Where and when we are born are less essential anecdotes: some years before the outbreak of the Second World War when Ireland entered ‘An Arid Season’. However, despite that trauma ‘The task lies in getting beyond that to the hope that solidarity and commitment brings.’ Michael D. the politician has a way forward for the author of these poems. And a wonderful sense of humour alleviates the sometimes scarifying memories of childhood.

Above all this anthology of poems, collected over a lifetime of snatched breathing spaces, is homage to our most precious gift of language. It is exploration of meaning beyond the inevitable claptrap of politics and the normal currency of words. At a time when language loses meaning, when life becomes commodity, when values are lots at the auctioneers’ disposal, our personal duty is to return to the source where the heart utters truth in stammering soliloquy, where

The stuff of hope beckons.

Out of the darkness

Abbot Patrick Hederman OSB June 2011

I

Early Days

I was born in Confraternity City, Limerick, in 1941, but remember little of my early years. We left at the age of five. My father’s pub, however, I do remember. My mother occasionally brought me in to see him standing behind the teak counter in his long apron. I recall the magic trapdoor that covered the cellar; somebody once fell down through it. Downstairs he bottled stout, and I recall his head emerging as he rolled barrels up the stairs. Around the pub itself were the snugs, cloister-like.

My father was the youngest of a family of ten children. As a boy he had been apprenticed to a grocer in Ennis. Thanks to the assistance of an Australian relative, he had got a chance his widowed mother could not give the older children. His eldest sister emigrated to Australia before he was born. The others had scattered; two of my aunts lived with my uncle on the small family farm from which he had come.

Only much later was I to know what my father’s life had been like before those early years in Limerick. It was to be pieced together through a hundred fragments of conversation and a thousand chance encounters. My uncles had, with my father, fought in the War of Independence. When the Civil War came, he went with what he called the Republicans – or what Paddy Cooney would call the Irregulars. My uncles went with the Treaty side.

In those early years I remembered my mother straight-backed for the only period of my life. We were in the brief comfortable period of my parents’ life – about eight years in all. As he had been arrested and detained to the end of the Civil War, my father had lost his job. He had also been harassed in County Clare in his home parish by those who, at that stage, would not speak after Mass to a Republican. He left, and rented, and later bought, a pub. My mother, after her own mother’s death, left her home in County Cork. She had known my father there in the 1920s – and had married him in 1937.

All four children – twin girls followed by two boys – were born in a space of four years, around my mother’s fortieth birthday. This was a favourite topic with her. ‘Marry before you’re thirty or else don’t marry at all’, she would say. It was perhaps her second most depressing remark. The most depressing was: ‘If I was starting again, it’s into a convent I’d go.’

I remember her in her long fashionable leather coat pushing me along the Jamesboro Road in Limerick. Later, the coat was cut down for one of us to wear. My father had been told that I should have Guinness to build me up as a child: I recall being brought by him into the snug in another Limerick pub – Gussy O’Driscoll’s. He also brought me into a billiard hall. These images are the ones I have of the period before the most traumatic event of my life.

One day, I woke to hear my mother crying. My father was attempting to rise out of bed but was unable to do so. The ambulance was coming, and we children were all bundled off to a neighbour. It was exciting, I recall. But I can still see my mother, out on the street looking after the ambulance, and crying.

‘What is to happen to us?’ she said. Every day she visited him. For weeks he was near death. Then he began to recover and we went to see him. We brought oranges and apples for him. The nuns always seemed to be talking to my mother about how difficult a man my father was. He was not a good patient.

All that time my father was ill, in 1946, my uncle and aunt visited him in hospital. On their way home, they would call on my mother and us children. They had concluded that my mother could not manage four children. Unmarried and childless, they persuaded her that, at least for a period, they would take my four-year-old brother and myself to live with them on the farm in County Clare. My mother was too ‘soft’ in her approach to the world, in their view. They had never completely approved of my parents’ marriage.

On 15 August 1946, the Feast of the Assumption, they collected us in their 1938 black Ford motor car. I can remember only parts of the journey. I recall that we drove at dusk up through some fields to their home, which was a single-storey three-bedroomed farmhouse. The traditional large kitchen and one room were thatched, and one room was slated. This was to be my home for thirteen years.

I recall in particular the excitement of my aunt at having two young children coming to live with them. My brother John and I experienced all the sensations of the country. I learned how to milk a cow, burying my forehead against the udder, watching the milky foam rise against the rivets on the side of the galvanised bucket. I learned how to draw a calf, the legs appearing first from the cow. I learned to plough, holding the handles steady so as to break the earth evenly. I learned to sow turnips and knew the names of twenty different types of apple tree.

In time, we went to a small national school. In the single large room, the master, William Clune, taught the senior classes at one end, while at the other end, Miss Hastings taught the infants and juniors. At lunchtime, the schoolchildren would erupt out onto the hard-packed earth that constituted the playground, leaving Mr Clune and Miss Hastings to the ritual of setting out their lunch.

In the playground, the idea was to commit yourself to every scrumlike encounter. We all went barefoot in summer – not from necessity, but by choice. This enabled a kind of County Clare kung fu to develop in the skirmishes. Going home over the dusty gravelled road, we picked sugar beet which had fallen from lorries. Before crossing the fields, we stopped to look at the train bringing Mr O’Dea’s beets to the factory. In the winter we brought turf, and on the wet days toasted bread in front of the school fire.

By now, my uncle was growing ill and had taken to bed. He was tended to by my aunt, who also had to care for her disabled sister. This sister slept behind a special wooden construction in a corner of the kitchen; she died within two years of us arriving at the house.

I recall her wake vividly. The good bedroom had been reconstituted as a parlour, where the women were served port wine. In the barn, the men drank glasses of porter filled from large jugs. My aunt was laid out in the kitchen. The coffin, surrounded by candles, lay on a table. It is the smell of wax and wine that I recall. That and the fact that a man who was eating ham sandwiches was advancing towards one of our middle-aged female neighbours. We had been put in bed in the other room but got up again. We were excited because our father was due from Limerick.

He had been looking for work. His business, which had been in decline before his illness, was now gone. He had sold his house and was living with my mother and twin sisters in a rented house in Limerick. Whenever he came, he gave us money and sweets. Now we learned that he had decided to rent a grocery shop. We thought this was extremely exciting but the reality for him was very different. Rationing had come, and nobody could move their ration book to him. My father came on one occasion, and all he had to give me was a little badge from his coat.