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by Michael Peverett

Across the shelved Atlantic groundswell
Plumbed by the sun's kingfisher rod,
We sail to locate in sea, earth and stone
The myth of a shrewd and brutal swordswoman
Who piously endowed an abbey.
Seven hours we try against wind and tide,
Tack and return, making no headway.
The north wind sticks like a gag in our teeth.

This comes from near the beginning of the title poem of Richard Murphy's first poetry collection, Sailing to an Island (1963).  (An earlier version of the poem was published in 1952 when the author was only 25.)

"Plumbed by the sun's kingfisher rod" works with four images.

1. The track of the sun on the sea.
2. A penis - (compare the use of the word rod in "Seals at High Island", a wonderful poem that you can read by following the link given below).
3. A kingfisher's lateral flight over water (and its dazzling colours).
4. A fishing rod. ("Kingfisher" was a reasonably well-known brand of bamboo fly rod.)

Contrasted with the bold extravagance of this line, but just as skilful, is how the rhythm of repeated but unavailing effort gets evoked by the internal rhyme in this:

Seven hours we try against wind and tide.

The aimed-for island is Clare Island and the swordswoman Gráinne Ní Mháille (Grace O'Malley, c. 1530 - 1603). Her story interweaves with the English re-conquest of Ireland, that brutal colonization ("Spenser's colonization", we poetry fans like to call it). BTW, Gráinne met Sir Philip Sidney, as well as Elizabeth I.

Colonialism of some kind or another is a big theme of Murphy's poetry. He was himself Anglo-Irish, of wealthy Protestant Ascendancy stock, and is the first poet I've researched for whom one of the best sources is Debrett's. His family were colonial administrators. He fell out with Faber in 1984 when the new editor Craig Raine didn't want to publish (or rather, re-publish) a poem about the estate in Rhodesia that Murphy's father bought when he retired from being mayor of Colombo. According to Murphy's Poetry International page, Raine mistook a subtle exploration of colonial guilt for unreconstructed imperialism. That may be unfair to Raine. He may have been fed up with colonial perspectives, guilty or not.

"Making no headway", the author and his companions don't make it to Clare Island. Instead they stop at another island, Inishbofin. The poem ends with the whisky- and sea-drunk poet getting to his room and discovering, in a woozy moment of revelation, the mystery inherent in the most commonplace of objects: "here is a bed". Here on an island.

I think this is a beautifully inclusive poem, because some of the sea-intoxicated confusion is Murphy's recognition of his own muddled thinking e.g. about establishing a fishing business here in Cleggan Bay,  he, an outsider. At Inishbofin, the drink doesn't entirely dispel the courteous distance between Murphy and his island hosts. It's a theme that returns in the second poem, "The Last Galway Hooker":

One calm evening he sold me the Ave Maria.

This line draws attention to the very thing it seems to hold in reserve: that it's Murphy's money that is really the agent here. And that there's a necessary coolness about commercial transactions. Money does not always make other people happy. Murphy is not ignorant of, but is willing to accept responsibility for, the unmanning effect of this sale on the boat's former owner.


Sailing to an Island is one of those mainstream collections that are divided into themed sections. This can be a bad idea if the collection you are sub-dividing is vulnerable to a charge of slightness. The later sections of Sailing to an Island look like they're influenced by Lowell's subdivisions of Life Studies (1959). But, Murphy's poems about Roethke and Wittgenstein in apposition to e.g. Lowell's "To Delmore Schwartz", or Murphy's poem about his grandmother in apposition to e.g. Lowell's "Dunbarton" - no, these are damaging comparisons. Nearly all of what interests me about Sailing to an Island is in the three boat poems that constitute the first section.

The third of these boat poems is "The Cleggan Disaster", a title so admirably direct that it eventually claims attention, and then provokes a question: how does a modern poet get to write this? And it's a good poem; these are the opening lines.

Five boats were shooting their nets in the bay
After dark. It was cold and late October.
The hulls hissed and rolled on the sea's black hearth
In the shadow of stacks close to the island.
Rain drenched the rowers, with no drying wind.

The contrast with the "holiday fashion" of the first poem is intended and powerful. Murphy did not need to invoke a muse to underline what we can immediately feel, a different level of language for a bigger theme.

In a way it is a plainer style. There is a lot of story to tell, and the language has to keep its distance. At first reading it's the artistry of a short story that we appreciate, for instance the confident delay of nearly a page before Concannon, the story's seeing eye, is introduced.

Yet the language isn't so plain that, even at this early stage, we can't register, as from somewhere far off, the remote rumble of alliterative doubling: hulls/hissed, rain/rowers, drenched/drying.

I didn't really quote this opening for didactic purposes, though. I just wanted to remember, before I take Island down to Barnardo's, the marvellously wide-ranging effects of that improbable word "hearth",  which deserves a Prynne-style twenty-page exposition. That, and "the shadow of stacks". (When description is like this, description is what I like best.)

The unanticipated disaster occurred soon after nightfall on 28th October 1927. 44 fishermen from in and around Cleggan (Connemara) were drowned because of a sudden storm in Cleggan Bay. It was a traumatic event for the local area; fishing in small boats almost disappeared for many years, affecting every aspect of the lives of those thinly-populated communities. The event is still remembered and commemorated (e.g. in the recent Vertigo Films documentary An Bathadh mór).

In this context Murphy's poem is not entirely the author's property; it belongs to a people. But that's the very essence of epic narrative. Murphy came to know Patrick Concannon, who survived the disaster and brought his crew home (though he was blinded in the process). And pursuing my earlier theme, this was partly because Murphy was able to get himself into the position where he was handed something now very rare, a genuinely epic subject: a poem about a people, and about a way of life, and about an event that altered it forever. A poem, also, that is centred on work, on an all-male cast of breadwinners. On the sea, among islands. And obviously the uneasy sense of appropriation is there, and is not to be ignored. But the poem was a gift as well as an appropriation. Despite all these features of atavistic epic, obvious once they're pointed out, it doesn't come over as being an exercise in a literary mode. Unobtrusively borne within the plain story, those features manifest themselves as power, and account in part for the unusual brilliance of the narrative, compared to most contemporary "narrative" poems, which seem to struggle with legitimacy, and end up not telling their stories very well.

So maybe his thinking wasn't so confused, after all. Because part of Murphy's intention when he started to mess with the fishing business was avowedly poetic. He wanted to forge a stronger language from his sea-experience. And he did, and all his best poems bear the mark of it.

Poetry is colonialism, too.

*

NOTES

In career terms, it was that familiar pattern, a cable-car ascent followed by a prolonged tramp downhill. Prior to the falling-out, Murphy (b. 1927) had been an established Faber poet for twenty years, a regular Poetry Society recommendation, and a regular part of the literary scene, pal of Auden, Lowell, Roethke, Hughes, Plath, etc. Afterwards, Murphy's poetry was re-published by the Gallery Press in Ireland and by Wake Forest UP in the USA. But in 2012, I don't think any of his poetry is still obtainable in the UK - a fate that I imagine all too often befalls poets in their eighties.

A few choice poems, including "Sailing to an Island", can be read in full on the Poetry International Web.

There's also an interesting interview with Eugene O'Connell, from 2007.

Ricorso is an invaluable source of information on Murphy, as on so many other Irish writers.

The fullest commentary I've found on Murphy's work is this review of his memoir The Kick. But I can't tell you who wrote it. Text on the web, (like the text of much-copied medieval poems), is prone to shed meta-information like an author's name unless it's secured within the text itself. I, Michael Peverett, should know better than to forget that lesson from my Langland studies...

A Galway hooker is a kind of boat, silly!

Patrick Tierney's ballad verses "The Bofin Disaster", written just after it happened in 1927, can currently be seen here.

From what I can gather, Patrick Concannon's blindness was temporary; perhaps a bit like photokeratitis, though the poem seems to suggest that it was the constant battering of sea-water that caused it. At any rate, there's no hint of it in this interesting memoir by the Breton Nationalist Yann Fouéré, who came to know Pat Concannon in the early 1950s, during his exile in Ireland.

After ‘The Marriage of Faustus and Helen’

II


Suppose suppose you forgot
just for a second all those smutty
wings – ambivalence of old
& dove right there where it’s at.
Blessed foretaste! The cage
is not a pulley system –
or trap, but has a lake
inside, mirrored, a valley too


that glitter-balls its way through
to a new sort of freedom: spherical.
Know that, whatever happens, I will
meet you in this place afterwards.
It could’ve been nothing
but we called it – now it belongs to us permanently.


& city sirens cry out celebratorily
& thousands of skin molecules moisten
under ground, happy we’re almost
in each other’s way again; almost
fall down the escalator for joy!
What surprise – all that tumbleweed
& other dust collected in a coronet
to be offered half perfectly again;
with the graceful thud of a passing train.


O, I’ve known swallows touch the ground
too soon, only to be trounced;
epillions neglected, rubbished for not meeting
the house martin in his nest. I’ve taken
to the edge of cliffs, jumped part way
only to stub my toe on the small distance
(because my eyes were closed!)


You wouldn’t lead me to that kind of death –
but the littler, more perfect one, stringing me out
with songs of such fitting striation
that you cannot leave: they are smiling in wax,
dipping a toe into the whole part,
where you, at once impressed & beautifully propelled,
resist frowning, but know you belong…


III


A different paradox / doxography. That he is
not quite there must be an understanding
to cope. Then, unbind the little bine
around your throat, on your way over
just one of this city’s many superb bridges.
Here. Glancing over the side


fear, not in an eagle, but a duck, this time
not driving – speed was its destruction
& spouted malice, a rich Hellespont,
where formal information gathered
that we did not ask for, but survived.
Erasmus would have had a field day,
or Helen, at our new found humanism.


So spins the little world for those who think
it through: to mend unthreadable their
troubled love of twisting. & life is long –
& worries less the need for song.





-----------------------------------
This poem was published in IMAGINARYLOVEPOEMS (Paris: Corrupt Press, 2011)

Emily Critchley holds a PhD in contemporary, American, women’s poetry and philosophy from the University of Cambridge. She is the author of several critical articles - on poetry, philosophy and feminism - and several poetry publications. Her Selected Writing, 'Love / All That / & OK', was published by Penned in the Margins in 2011. In 2004 she won the John Kinsella - Tracy Ryan prize for poetry, at the University of Cambridge, and in 2011 was joint winner of the Jane Martin Prize for Poetry. Critchley teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich, London.

List of Publications:

The Dirt Glitch Land Alter Affair (Cambridge: Arehouse, 2003)
How to make Millions (Cambridge: Arehouse, 2004)
I just want you to know that we can still be friends (Intercapillary Space, 2005)
When I say I Believe Women… (London: bad press, 2006)
Of All the Surprises (Switzerland: Dusie, 2007)
Who handles one over the Backlash (Norfolk: Oystercatcher press, 2008)
Hopeful For Love Are Th’ Impoverish’d Of Faith (Southampton: Torque press, 2010)
Love / All That / & OK: Selected Writing (London: Penned in the Margins, 2011)
Sonnets for Luke (Liverpool: Holdfire press, 2011)
IMAGINARYLOVEPOEMS (Paris: Corrupt Press, 2011)
This is not a True Thing (London: Intercapillary Editions, forthcoming)

The self-conscious ambivalence of Douglas Oliver’s cover title ‘The Diagram- -Poems’, with its torn dash, opens a speculative link between poetry and diagramming not present in the first page’s alternative title, ‘The Diagram Poems’.[1] Is there a connection between the diagrams, on the verso, and the facing poems? Is this an ekphrastic or a procedural connection?

The cover photograph by Mike Russell, with its pen-drawn pictogram on a board pad, illustrates the pedagogical role of diagrams. But Oliver’s surreal set uses diagrams which ‘plot and transform movements of several groups of raiders as they make commando-style seizures of key sites’, as he prose-notes at the start. The diagrams are linked to the co-ordination of activities: they also transform the structure of these activities. Diagrams are ‘piloting devices’ for thought.[2] They are kinetic (dia-gram, the moving form); they record and inform action. But they are also metaphorical – formulating and testing hypotheses or complex information problems through iconic thought.

In Oliver’s first diagram poem ‘Team Leader’ the human co-ordinator (we presume the get-away driver) becomes bodily part of the organised geometric imaginary of car and driving process. He switches on an ‘internal driver’ which steers his human operations: the movement of ‘blood’, the ‘eyes (…) sighting’ and finger which ‘points left’, the ‘crook of elbow / in the hollow where car axles break’, and ‘his gloves mirror(ing) an inset which is / a steering wheel’ - all corporeally following the pattern of the car. In the second poem, ‘P.C.’, a diagrammatic image is redrawn three times as ‘conjurors in corridors’, ‘a vaccinated dog’ or ‘the parachute / dynamic of an old-fashioned aviator / ejecting from arrowed lines’. Oliver shows we are ‘All foreigners to these three visions’, which are ‘portals’ without which ‘none of the other movements can be complete’. These alien ‘portals’ offer intersecting configurations of the event plane; they are also undisclosed ‘visions’ depending on alien sets of perceptual inferences.

Oliver considers various procedures of the diagrammatic. Military operations and signalling (‘incurable warfare’, ‘old-fashioned aviator’, ‘the sergeant’, ‘the airman signal’). Networks of action and ‘standard procedures’ (the poem ‘Central’ maps within itself internal communications and telephone exchanges, a sonic infrastructure beyond cables). The ‘totemic’ mapping of taxonomies of fauna, as in the third poem, ‘The Fire Station’. His diagrams (redrawn in this edition by David Chaloner) map the idiosyncratic as well as the replicable – ‘Arrest’ includes a block demarcating a ‘captured funeral party’ at a bank. The human figures in action are rendered in the same sparse scientific line, caught between the utilitarian functions of tools and circuits. One stick figure in a clamp enacts ‘the span of life / so inevitable and yet adjustable’ – where the girth of space around him as ‘life’ shows the large metaphorical stretch of spatial quantification. The poem ‘Gold’ maps ‘the mid-point of this fortune’ in a figural geography ‘between two hazardous / and likely banks of dread’.

This gold – bank or cash desk – is schematised again in ‘U’, faced with a drawing of magnetic interactions, with the magnet ends marked with orienting labels ‘Law’, ‘Personal Valuables’, ‘Attack’, and ‘Escape’. The poem, if a key to the image, suggests that the magnetism represents the systemic forces of ‘banking magnates’, ‘the hierarchies of their laws’, and investments as ‘fields of force’ – as well as a form of metal hoarding which can be mapped against ‘the arrows / of acquisition, law and management’. This diagram is familiar to the plotting of magnetic fields and conductivity; but with its labels (‘mistake’, ‘one-way’) it also resembles, fleetingly, a picaresque treasure map (with its final ‘arrow pointing to an unseen cemetery’).

The final diagram offers an elegiac infograph marked ‘all directions unsure’, encompassing ‘funeral’ and ‘hearse’, but also a stranded label without a key (‘Code W-1 of the Cloaca’) and, below, an illogically centrifugal arrow sequence of traumas and trauma victims (the circle-with-arrow form usually indicates a continuous cycle; here, it appears to show unpinned causal relations between ‘2 Women 16 men’, ‘Captured Beaten The Gauntlet Tortured’, and ‘3 men killed in cold blood or allowed to die’). In the lower right quadrant of the figure, a toponym marks empty space as ‘Festival of the wild beasts’. The two semi-circles of police encircling a wood with a helicopter prompt Oliver’s ‘This diagram could again spring a picture / encircling like buttocks’. The diagram is a culturally generative form: it springs pictures ‘again’. The poem’s title ‘The Diagonal is Diagonal’ plays with the literal referential quality in a disingenuous way: the poem also envisages actual movement in the diagram (‘the rush of a diagonal’) as well as cognitive movement (‘the arrow of a bad thought’), as, earlier, Oliver asked the reader to somehow follow the pointed finger into symbolic temporal content (‘escape if you can / into the arrow of time’; ‘directed futurewards by a will / that isn’t mine’).

This skeletal stretch of relations renders, again, a life path: ‘down the swift diagonal / that slants from the cemetery in courage’. The identification of ‘points’ as spatial landmarks in a life is transformed into emotional content, writing of ‘the innocent point exactly neighbour to that other start / from which team leader became a finger pointing left’, left being ‘the old sinister direction’ which was ‘from the beginning, / the cemetery’. ‘It is my dead son who always brings me to this point / of innocence in the heart of swift cruelty’, the arrows allegorise.

The motifs of the text – escape routes (‘It’s a clear path / across the street’) and arresting forces related to the bank heist, and the repeating of funerals and cemeteries – each in some way speak to the role of diagrams in presenting routine patterns of data and action, and also the eventful break from these. The diagram exists between fixity and transformation. Even trauma, here, is a kind of diagram of lost innocence (‘all these started in the drawings from the point / neighbour to / the point at which the innocence stays clean’). We have ‘no right to borrow it, jig it into shapes, / display it like a wound’. These are the human narratives expounded from diagrams. To the speaker, the use of these diagrams is always a ‘borrow’ (‘my right is minimal’). Grief, too, is a ‘borrow’, ‘nothing / without the original movements’. The sparseness of the diagrams challenges the speaker’s models of understanding; they dramatize the ‘remote’ sense of ‘consequence’ with confused emplacement of bizarre toponyms and arrows (whether these are events in space or time is unclear). The diagrams here are a ‘handwork of the mind’ , being the griever’s mind. Loss falls back, as if on an infrastructure of mourning according with external instruction (‘it was an academic drew the arrows and the loss of hope’).

The prose note at the start anticipated the sequence as a diagrammatic heist, ‘taking over a fire station and the central telephone exchange, raids on three banks, and the final getaway’. Graphic functions can be used to arrange and incite break-out, as these imagined guerrillas escaping the financial system with the loot. But in the last poem, ‘The Diagonal is Diagonal’, there is no final high-jinks getaway. ‘It all turns so really funereal for us / as brave as that and as flawed / just a final diagram almost straight / and a heart on which the diagram is scored / besides the death of innocences we have known / and even caused a little in the scarface heart’. Diagrams are not transcendent. In Oliver they can be like scars: the continued arrival and operation of knowledge in one’s body and heart. But the pattern of grief is somehow mundanely stranding, too: ‘now the picture transforms no longer; it is the picture’.

Notes:
[1] Douglas Oliver, The Diagram-Poems (London: Ferry Press, 1979), unpaginated
[2] John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London: Continuum, 2006) p. 176

Amy Cutler has recently launched Land Diagrams, an ongoing series of 'twinned studies' in which commissioned writers respond to the same visual encoding of landscape.

Mark Dickinson reviews:

J H Prynne, Pearls That Were, Equipage, 1999
Harriet Tarlo, Love/ Land, rem press, 2003
John Kinsella, Sheep Dip, Wild Honey Press, 1998

Download essay as a pdf


17/04/2012

J H Prynne, Pearls That Were, Equipage, 1999:

J H Prynne’s poetry, gathers together communication at its most difficult & conflicting. The disorientation of sense can be quite a discomforting experience, but its difficulty is really just a lived obstruction to the reception field, as what nestles between ‘wounds’ can reveal itself in the [1]‘the show to hope again’. I think the making of poetry of this kind is complex, but a necessary complex, that gathers together a granulation tissue ‘around the wound’. The physical embodiment and contextual realism may indeed be read as a ‘bar to wing,’ within the ‘trembling brilliance’ but the lineation does not assimilate a totalised subversion of reception; it electrifies from within a disjunctive sense order, the possibility of conjecture. At the linguistic level the syntactical line and counter-phrase forms hairpins that are essential (‘in parvo’) for a viral transmission within the language string ‘. So to reiterate, the disjunction (non-segmented rather meta-stranded) is not what it may appear to be, but it may feel ‘like eyelids over grit’.

In the face of any crisis, at the point of an immediate saturation experience between memory and forgetfulness, is the unspeakable act. But individually, historically and politically we must collectively repair. A sensational transformative rendering simply accommodates a nullifying print, but conjectures and the quivering condition of what remains possible may say, or imprint via connective hairpins, as a gift economy on behalf of the communicated transport of response. A traver/sing of condition accrues a correspondence of testaments and embeds within them an ‘open’ response with the frugality of, “linguistic disobedience”.

Six sections into Pearls That Were the continuity of the quatrains modify to ‘Lobster-orange’ and the resounding shrill of the Rienzi as hero/ mob incline the same orifice of terror & power, ‘quite sheer’ ‘and awash’. This is not felt as a breaking apart of the quatrains as a metered musicality, but I do sense a crisis of deliverability in the modality of lyric, as a vessel of critical dialectic expression.[2]

In Prynne we read the arrangement that articulates the morphological & dynamic infusions of ‘the waves still/ recoiling their crested and turbid confusions’ and very ‘Much like waves upon a shore’, a resistance becomes physically and mentally tiring. But there are no mechanised aids to buoy, knowing the sounds, and navigating such strong syntactical currents is always pressing against a need to just say “fuck it, I’m drowning!” But you can’t always swim against the rip, sometimes you have travel obliquely & ‘flicker some hope remaining.’


Notes:

[1] The word ‘show’ here is problematic, but even subjugated to the a quivering register of a thingly spectacle, the word ‘hope’ still holds, especially with the condition and support of ‘again’.

[2] A bugbear this entire sentence, but there’s despair enough to ‘joint screaming with rind orange’.