Poem by Osip Mandelstam

Monument to Mandelstam in Russian city where he was exiled

Seamus Heaney called the wonderful Russian poet Osip Mandelstam "the Lazarus of modern poetry." His life's heartbreaking end in a Stalinist purge is something I think about frequently. The Soviets suppressed his work after about 1928, but the burial was premature; his wife Nadezhda, who wrote the inspiring and generous memoir, Hope Against Hope, hid some of it and memorized some of it and so it survived and is now appreciated, even in Russia, as some of the greatest of the 20th Century. Much of it is very difficult, even beyond comprehension for me, without notes. Sometimes whether I can get anything out of it depends on the translation, of course. But much of it is bright and filled with meaning expressed in concrete images. (By the way, Mandelstam wrote lively prose as well.)

This title-less poem (many were given only numbers, not titles, this one was #8), translated by James Greene, is one of the bright and beautiful ones. To me, anyway. I like the idea of uniqueness unto eternity. I especially like "I am gardener, flower too..."

[8]
What shall I do with the body I've been given,
So much at one with me, so much my own?

For the calm happiness of breathing, being able
To be alive, tell me where I should be grateful?

I am gardener, flower too, and un-alone
In this vast dungeon.

My breath, my glow, you can already see
On the windowpanes of eternity.

A pattern is imprinted there,
Unknown till now.

Let this muddle die down, this sediment flow out.
The lovely pattern cannot be crossed out.
                 - Osip Mandelstam, 1909

Poem by Samuel Beckett

Beckett tends to go over my tiny head housing its small brain. But this one, run across frequently in John Montague's anthology The Book of Irish Verse, brings me pleasure, especially the notion of squandering courage, even as I am still figuring it out. Let me know if you can help.

Gnome
Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through the world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning
                      - Samuel Beckett

Poem by Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mew, British, 1869 - 1928

This one is in the vernacular so let me translate a little to get you started. The first line is saying "Some said because he wouldn't speak." The fourth line means "He must be bird-witted." In the second stanza, the fourth line means he would "sit and talk with his shadow." The sixth line means "And there ain't no memory on the place." The poem is easy to read if you go slow the first time and just go with the sound.

The poem like the poet, Mew, is beautiful (okay, maybe not physically, but give her a break, she was a great poet who killed herself by drinking Lysol) and sad. It stands out for me of course because of "the spider's lace" and the "whizzle and race of the dry, dead leaves." 

But mostly for its subject, old taciturn Dave, so obscure, an object of some scorn perhaps, who here is allowed to have been talented in his work and especially to have loved, even if the thing he loved, nature, Arracrombe Wood, wasn't inclined, or able, to love him back exactly. Maybe that was the point.

       Arracombe Wood
       Some said, because he wud'n spaik
       Any words to women but Yes and No,
Nor put out his hand for Parson to shake
       He mun be bird-witted. But I do go
       By the lie of the barley that he did sow,
And I wish no better thing than to hold a rake
      Like Dave, in his time, or to see him mow.

       Put up in a churchyard a month ago,
'A bitter old soul,' they said. but it wadn't so.
His heart were in Arracombe Wood where he'd used to go
To sit and talk wi' his shadder till sun went low,
Though what it was all about us'll never know.
       And there baint no mem'ry in the place
       Of th' old man's footmark, nor his face;
       Arracombe Wood do think more of a crow --
'Will be violets there in the Spring: in Summer time the spider's lace;
       And come the Fall, the whizzle and race
Of the dry, dead leaves when the wind gies chase;
       And on the Eve of Christmas, fallin' snow.
                                -Charlotte Mew (1921)

Mother's Day - a poem

Mother's Day

3 springs running the sisters

planted a dogwood in the yard

and 3 summers running it died barren

The 4th spring they gave her red

and white cut flowers meant to die

Today the koi have left L.A.

They are coming north in tanks

When they come they will have come to heal

her mind. 50 summers on 

the sisters truck solely in the perishable.

                                      - J. O'Brien 

                                                                                                                      

                                                                                 

Göran Rosenberg tells the truth about memory

It is still a time, although perhaps less so than it was 10 years ago, when new or young authors choose to write memoirs instead of novels based on their early lives. It has always struck me as a purely commercial decision, and probably a correct one, in this time of "reality" shows and embarrassment celebrity. These memoirs, sometimes by people too young to have done anything, or who the only thing they've done is get addicted to heroin or alcohol or sex, are right smack in that category of the scripted reality of humiliation and embarrassment. 

And because memory is unreliable, and perhaps also because they were drunk or high or fucking so much, they get things wrong and sometimes this gets them in trouble. Whereas if they had changed a few names and worked their imaginations a bit, there might have been come grumbling from the real-life models for their characters, but there'd be nothing much anyone could do about their dissatisfaction.

Swedish journalist Göran Rosenberg has written a memoir of his father in which early on he explores the truth about memory. Through a series of coincidences, evil and otherwise, and questionable decisions by others overwhelmed with horrific responsibilities in the ghetto of Lodz, Rosenberg's father survived Auschwitz, was re-united with the woman he loved, who also survived the camp, and then re-located to a relatively welcoming Sweden. You might think he was lucky, but the heavy burden of what he lost, his history, culture and people, in the end proves too much for him.

It is a beautiful and painful book which I read while traveling in Turkey this spring. To me, it is restrained in the telling and the writing, as any book about the Holocaust, especially by one who did not experience it first hand, perhaps ought to be. The facts themselves can provide whatever emotion and drama you need.

All this is just an excuse for me to post a great passage from early in the book, about memory. A Brief Stop is beautiful, occasionally poetic, occasionally it reads like the script from an early experimental film, like that one with all the ants and the hand:

Actually, to be perfectly honest, what I can remember of these events is fragmentary at best. The early mornings with the garbagemen are fragments of the sleeping apartment, the sun-warmed pavement, the pungent yet sweet smell of the garbage, the clatter of the dumpsters, the dirty, oily overalls, and the vinyl seat sticking to my bare legs. I'm not even sure if the fragments are real, still less whether I've put them together correctly. I'm not sure I remember the fragments either, if remembering means actively recalling something. How can you recall something you haven't yet named and therefore don't yet have a word for?

Reflections then, rather than fragments: diffuse reflections of physical perceptions, of sensory experiences without words or order. Jumping on the ice floes: the rasp of frozen trousers on skin blue with cold, the glare of chalk-white faces in a black door opening, the pressure of hard hands, the sound of sharp voices, the feel of a thrashing. In my world, thrashing is a word linked to the sensation of ice floes.

Other words may come later. Words like dread and desperation, and, later still, words for nightmares wallpapering the small apartment facing the railroad tracks, and even finally the words for what the man who is my father and the woman who is my mother might think and feel when their united nightmares suddenly stand before them in the winter darkness of the hall, dripping deep-black water on their threshold, the thin ice crunching beneath their feat, the lethal cold burning against their skin.

Only much later can sensations turn into stories. Only much later can mute expanses of wordlessness be strewn with shattered fragments of language.
                                                    -  Göran Rosenberg
                                                        From A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz

The saddest poem I have ever read at 4 in the morning

Trees & ghost trees on the cover of the Russian anthology

Couldn't sleep last night. I did drift off once, but came back wide awake, so got up and went to the next room. Earlier I had been reading a biography of Chagall. It was 1920 and he'd been driven from Vitebsk by the machinations of his enemies in the art world there. The Civil War was raging. There was little food in Moscow. People were starving. The daughter of the great poet Marina Tsvetayeva starved to death. I fell asleep, woke up, grabbed an anthology of Russian poetry at 4 in the morning, I had to be up for good at 7. I found the section on Tsvetayeva and around 4:15 a.m. read the saddest poem I have ever read. I have no idea if it is about her lost daughter. But I imagine it is.

To Kiss a Forehead is to Erase Worry -- 
To kiss a forehead is to erase worry --
I kiss your forehead.
To kiss closed eyes is to bring sleep -- 
I kiss your eyes.
To kiss lips is to give water -- 
I kiss your lips.
To kiss a forehead is to erase memory -- 
I kiss your forehead.
                         - M. Tsvetayeva
                           Translated by John Glad

Bereft of purpose, void of use

Depressive poet James Thomson

Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
Can life still live on?..
He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours,
Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
The works proceed until run down; although
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.

           From "The City of Dreadful Night"
                      Section II
                      1874

I wouldn't say this passage from Thomson's (perhaps better known as "B.V.") long poem "The City of Dreadful Night" describes the effects of depression as universally as Antonio's speech in The Merchant of Venice (See: Such a want-wit sadness makes of me); but...sometimes...  Born in Scotland, he was for a time a schoolmaster in England, where he did most of his writing. He suffered from what in those days was called "constitutional melancholia." He was addicted to opium. But he was an interesting poet, sometimes called a British Poe. He wrote a book about Walt Whitman. He may have influenced Melville. He died homeless, two years after "City of Dreadful Night" was published. (See also: Line from poet James Thomson, aka B.V.)                                                                              

Two spring poems by Jeffers

Last week, after spending an entire morning, a weekday morning, creating the preceding post, the one about Joan of Arc, so that 12 people would read it, I felt a potent combination of guilt and futility. It really is not something I should be doing, except maybe late at night instead of watching stupid TV before bedtime. ("Promising myself before bedtime to contend more urgently with the problem. From nothing, nothing comes..." - opening lines of a poem by R.S. Thomas.) 

An iris in my garden this morning

I think about that futility this morning as I type up these two poems by Jeffers and this little intro. I was going to post "Gale in April" because today it is still rather newly April and we have had a little storm or two, though nothing you would call a "gale." But the truth is, I have always liked "The Maid's Thought" because of its unexpected description of mating deer and for, of course, "it is time for us now/Mouth kindling mouth to entangle our maiden bodies..." Certainly it is a spring poem, full of calm and color and desirous life. I will put "Gale in April" below it. It might not look great on your phone because of those very long Jeffersian lines.

My creased Tamar, plain-looking but important

"The Maid's Thought" and "Gale in April" are from Jeffers' breakthrough collection from 1924, Tamar & other poems, his first collection in which he had found his voice, and the one a few critics discovered and soon he was famous for awhile. Jeffers paid for the publication of the book himself. There were 500 copies. Most of them ended up in storage at his home, called Tor House, in Carmel. Mine has a crease in the cover that makes me think it was at the top of a bundle of others and tied up with string, and so is one of those that sat in Tor House for a long time. I like to think that anyway.








The Maid's Thought

Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something.
The west wind is dead, the waves
Forget to hate the cliffs, in the upland canyons
Whole hillsides burst aglow
With golden broom. Dear how it rained last month,
And every pool was rimmed
With sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines.
Now tall and slender suddenly
The stalks of purple iris blaze by the brooks,
The pencilled ones on the hill;
This deerweed shivers with gold, the white globe-tulips
Blow out their silky bubbles,
But in the next glen bronze-bells nod, the does
Scalded by some hot longing
Can hardly set their pointed hoofs to expect
Love but they crush a flower;
Shells pair on the rock, birds mate, the moths fly double.
O it is time for us now
Mouth kindling mouth to entangle our maiden bodies
To make that burning flower.
                                            -Robinson Jeffers
                                             Tamar & other poems
                                             1924

Gale in April
Intense and terrible beauty, how has our race with the frail naked nerves,
So little a craft swum down from its far launching?
Why now, only because the northwest blows and the headed grass billows,
Great seas jagging the west on the granite
Blanching, the vessel is brimmed, this dancing play of the world is too much passion.
A gale in April so overfilling the spirit,
Though his ribs were thick as the earth's, arches of mountain, how shall one dare to live,
Though his blood were like the earth's rivers and his flesh iron,
How shall one dare to live? One is born strong, how do the weak endure it?
The strong lean upon death as on a rock,
After eighty years there is shelter and the naked nerves shall be covered with deep quietness,
O beauty of things go on, go on, O torture
Of intense joy I have lasted out my time, I have thanked God and finished,
Roots of millennial trees fold me in the darkness,
Northwest wind shake their tops, not to the root, not to the root, I have passed
From beauty to the other beauty, peace, the night splendor.

                                                    -Robinson Jeffers
                                                     from Tamar & other poems
                                                     1924

Joan's leap at Beaurevoir

Contemporary woodcut of Joan being led to prison

Back in the strange days of the poetry and the second sight, I'd hoped I might write a poem about this. But the muse absconded before I could do that. (Please come back, I need you, I love you.)

I still think about it, though, about Joan's leap at Beaurevoir, about the one time she went against her voices, as I continue to consider the great saint often. I re-read the trial transcript, always anticipating the questions about Joan's escape attempt from the tower, when contrary to the apparent urgings of Saint Catherine, she exited the window, perhaps 60 feet up, possibly using a homemade rope, which broke. Joan was knocked unconscious, and her leg was damaged in the fall. She was recaptured quickly. (She'd tried to escape before. In her cell at Beaulieu she'd pulled up loose boards, let herself down to the ground floor, where she found herself just outside the door to her guards' room, and the keys by the door. She was caught just as she was about to lock them in. But she was irrepressible.)

Despite the great pain of knowing its outcome for Joan, the trial transcript is inspiring reading. As W.S. Scott says, "Her patience, her good humor, her religious faith, and her common sense -- a quality which so strongly marked everything she did and said -- never failed."

All of that is here in this very brief excerpt regarding her escape attempt at Beaurevoir:

Concerning the tower of Beaurevoir:

She answered: I did not do it out of despair, but in the hope of saving my life and of going to help a number of good people who were in need. And after leaping she made a confession and asked pardon of Our Lord. And she believes that she did wrong in making the leap.

She said also that she knew by revelation from Saint Catherine that she had received forgiveness after she had confessed. And it was by Saint Catherine's advice that she had confessed it.

Asked if she had been given a heavy penance, she said that she herself bore a large part of it in the hurt she received in falling.

The transcript

Such a want-wit sadness makes of me

In sooth I know not why I am so sad,
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn:
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself...  

                     The Merchant of Venice  
                     Act 1, Scene 1 

Shakespeare knew.

These are the opening lines of The Merchant of Venice, in which that very merchant, Antonio, describes his condition to his friend, Salerio. It is a perceptive description of a certain kind of depression, with which you feel a thing like sadness but which isn't actual sadness - you have nothing in particular to be sad about. (Although this condition often causes you to mine thoughts and memories that increase your sadness, it tempts you to inflate things or deflate things as necessary, to see the bad as worse and the worst in everything.) As Antonio says, the feeling wearies you; you are sure it wears on your friends and family, your co-workers and your neighbors. Certainly it wears you down physically and emotionally, but you cannot trace its origins in any very satisfactory way. Whatever it is and wherever it came from, it clogs and slows your mind, robs you of whatever spirit and wit you might formerly have possessed, and just makes you feel generally dumber than you used to feel. 

Shakespeare being Shakespeare, surely he was capable of describing this condition perfectly without ever having experienced it. However, it's what ensues that makes me think the author may well have suffered himself from depression. As the scene progresses, Antonio's friends try to cheer him up, despite his suggestions to them that it's futile, that "I hold the world...a stage, where every man must play a part,/ and mine a sad one." Still, they keep trying. "Let me play the fool," says Gratanio, "with mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come." 

Again, Shakespeare might have understood or imagined, accurately, that this is what happened with certain sad people who cannot be roused from their condition. But it has for me the feeling of lived experience. Because it is what happens. Loved ones and other kind people see you in what looks like sadness and try to help you. They want you to feel better and so they do for you the things that for them would lift them out of a bad mood or a melancholy day. But it doesn't work the way they had hoped it would.

Antonio's friends try to show understanding, try to help him make sense of what he is feeling. They suggest to the importing-exporting merchant from Venice that he is worried about his ships at sea, laden with his goods. But he tells them he is not worried. Only Salerio, inadvertently, says something that rings true. "Your mind," he tells Antonio, "is tossing on the ocean." Salerio means that Antonio is imagining his ships in peril. He's wrong, but as a description of Antonio's state of mind, probably he is not far off the mark. One way or another, Shakespeare knew.

Pregenital impluses in need of negation

I've found myself reading old anthropology texts, nearly 100 years old, as a friend pointed out, ones which I'm told marked the beginning of a change in the attitudes of anthropologists who studied contemporary African and other native tribes. Previously, these academics had seen the communities and nations they studied as inferior, primitive, superstitious and irrational in their beliefs about life and the natural world. But beginning in the early 20th Century, in part with the book I'm reading now, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, that began to change. The author, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, an Oxford-trained anthropologist, lived for almost 2 years, in the late 1920s, with the Azande, of what is today the new and troubled country of South Sudan. Back then it was part of the Republic of Sudan, under the colonial rule of the British, in cooperation with their protectorate, Egypt.

In writing about the integral role witchcraft played in the lives of the Zande people, Evans-Pritchard made no judgements. He described, explained, worked to give context and perspective. His answer to those in the West who might think it was absurd for the Zande to believe that every death was the result, not only of a natural cause, but always, in addition to that, witchcraft, was to quote a Zande friend: "Perhaps in their country people are not murdered by witches, but here they are."

Anyway, all this is to introduce a passage I ran across, not from E.E. Evans-Pritchard, but from Norman Brown's Life Against Death, that, though written later, echoes those earlier, condescending attitudes of anthropologists and that, full of dated jargon as it is, amazes me in its opacity, although I admit that I have not come to terms (by negation) with my own pregenital impulses. But I am trying.

Archaic man is preoccupied with the castration complex, the incest taboo and the desexualisation of the penis, that is, the transference of the genital impulses into that aim-inhibited libido which sustains the kinship systems in which archaic life is embedded. The low degree of sublimation, corresponding to the low level of technology, means by our previous definitions, a weaker ego, an ego which has not yet come to terms (by negation) with its own pregenital impulses. The result is that all the fantastic wishes of infantile narcissism express themselves in unsublimated form so that archaic man retains the magic body of infancy.

Unearthed

For too many years, all through the late 2000s, I was obsessed with a website and organization called EDAN, which stood for Everyone Deserves a Name. It is probably still out there but I had to stop looking at it. EDAN's site had 2 kinds of lists. One was a state-by-state list of missing persons, usually with photographs -- sometimes those awful, speculative, age-enhanced photographs -- and details of their lives, along with the "circumstances of disappearance." It was eerie, and also endlessly mysterious to me to see how many people there were who seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth, suddenly, never to be seen again. If the person had been missing a long time, then in the picture they might have a period haircut or jacket or dress -- from the 60s, 70s or 80s -- and it was as if they were frozen in time.

The other list was of unidentified bodies found across the country, with the little that was known of the deceased, and how he or she was killed. Sometimes the state of the remains did not allow for much description. This list also had computer approximations of what someone might have looked like based on their skeletal remains. These reconstructions all looked alike to me, humanoid as opposed to human, and I don't see how they could have been helpful. Sometimes there was only a piece of clothing to describe. A blue fleece jacket or striped socks. Sometimes the personal descriptions were very precise because the person had just died. Often these were homeless people, or migrant workers from Central America who had been hit by cars while trying to cross a busy highway near San Diego, or who had died in the Arizona desert. Sometimes they would post a photograph of a tattoo, just a segment of an arm or leg, and I would think about the day they got that tattoo, the impetus, the design decision, what they paid, who they couldn't wait to show it to, if the killer noticed it.

"...found in a field by a farmer plowing."

I remember it seemed to me that many of the bodies had been found by plowing farmers, in late winter or very early spring. They had been unearthed, and I always thought that "unearthed" could be a word meaning, to die, to leave this world, this Earth. But sometimes I thought the living were really the ones who were unearthed, for a time, while we're alive, because we had made ourselves separate from the earth, from our origins, like we were too good for the mud and muck we came from. 

There are people who are convinced that there was a serial killer at work in Galveston, Texas, in the mid-80s. In something I read about it, a police officer said that, whoever the killer was, he was "raising one boatload of hell." I remember thinking how evocative, even precise, that phrase was. I could picture rising out of the earth, out of some dry farm field, a giant boat loaded with evil death. I remember thinking how this killer really was bringing into this world a kind of hell for his victims and their families. It seemed to me that a lot of women in that part of Texas were being found in fields by farmers and that they had come to a sad unearthing. I wrote this brief poem, which you should try to read as if I hadn't told you all this.

Unearthed

Always the unidentified remains.

What was once us

is again the alien other

whose circumstances of reappearance

are her circumstances of disappearance,

by the laws of earth and heaven 

terrestrial, mineral, like all the women

killed in Galveston Texas

in 1986

by someone raising

one boatload of hell:

found in a field by a farmer plowing.

Killing the Haybuyer, 1916 - found poem

In the early 90s I worked at a wonderful used book shop in Rochester, NY, called Small World Books. It still exists, but in a different location in Rochester, still run by the same great book man, my friend, Rocco Pellegrino. (Let Rocco give you a youtube tour.) As always at used book shops, we would find interesting things in old books and once I found a post card with a simple message from Mildred to Mabel that seemed to me somehow melancholy. Also, read a certain way, a bit sinister, although I'm sure I was making that up. Fairly sure. Probably the melancholy, too. I adapted it, for a bit of rhythm and meaning, into this old poem (Sackets Harbor, by the way, is a village in far Upstate New York, on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario):

Killing the Haybuyer, 1916

Dear Mabel,

When are you coming down?

When you come will you bring your hoops?

I want to borrow them for a week.

Am going to finish that diary I started last summer.

Mother says tell you to bring down that white waistcoat

and she will put new sleeves on it.

Did you go to church yesterday?

Fr. Baldwin is here killing the beef.

Also a haybuyer.

Father went to Sackets Saturday.

Taylor’s found a ring.

Mildred

Western New York, winter, 2014.  Pic: Rocco Pellegrino

Thomson's Woodbrook and the poetry of Kavanagh

From my last trip to rural Ireland.

Many times while reading Woodbrook, David Thomson's beautiful memoir of his ten years in rural Ireland in the 1930s and 40s, I was reminded of the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (see Poem by Patrick Kavanagh), which so often described the inner lives of Irish farmers. Thomson writes about how financial troubles often meant that men in rural Ireland would get married quite late in life and sometimes never. They would end up, like Macguire in Kavanagh's famous poem, "The Great Hunger," living with their mother most of their lonely lives. In a happier section, Thomson's description of the preparation, anticipation and final pleasure of a post-harvest barn dance at Woodbrook brought to mind very specifically Kavanagh's poem "Iniskeen Road: July Evening," which I will put below an excerpt from Woodbrook about the Harvest Dance.

I knew one man who walked thirty-three miles to get to it in one day and thirty-three miles home when it was over. Some came in traps or on sidecars, a few on horses or sharing a motor-car or ass-cart -- old people that is -- but mostly they were young and had bicycles. The assembly of bicycles, traps, tethered horses, jennets, asses made it seem like a fair held at night...

The weather sometimes stopped us from fixing the date ahead. We would decide in the morning to have the dance that night. Tom, who was a good accordionist and leader of the band, would then be out most of the day on his bicycle gathering the players. One of the fiddlers lived at Ballyfarnan, seven miles to the north; and the best man on the squeeze-box, the old type of melodeon, at Croghan, five miles to the south. Drums and tin whistles were nearer. We would stop the Dublin-Sligo bus which passed Woodbrook gates at about two o'clock and tell the driver to spread the word along the Sligo road. The news would pass from farm to farm at dinner time. No private invitations were needed.

                                                                                 from Woodbrook by David Thomson

Now the Kavanagh poem I was reminded of. (I have never been able to figure out what the Selkirk reference is supposed to mean exactly, like it as I do...)

Iniskeen Road: July Evening

A friend I made on an Irish walk one day.

The bicycles go by in twos and threes --
There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn to-night,
And there's the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.

I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing. 

               - Patrick Kavanagh

                 from Ploughman and Other Poems

 

David Thomson's Irish elegy - Woodbrook

Cover of my Folio Society edition of Woodbrook

I love an angry memoir as much as the next angry person, but sometimes you just want to be enveloped by love and kindness. Woodbrook came to me at a good time. Thanks, David Streitfeld, for the recommendation. An elegy to a country, a family and a girl he loved, the thing that struck me most about Woodbrook was author David Thomson's warmth and generosity, how he found the goodness and strength of each person he met in his ten years as tutor to the children of Charlie and Ivy Kirkwood, and as an extra hand around their farm and estate in County Roscommon, called Woodbrook. The book is full of great, eccentric characters, fascinating diversions into Irish history and, in passages, a kind of erotic infatuation. Whenever the object of Thomson's obsession, the Kirkwood's daughter, Phoebe, enters the picture, everything seems to stop and go dark but for a spotlight on her, her clothing, her shoulders, hair, facial expressions, scent.

In a way, this memoir represents the other side of William Trevor and John McGahern, to me the twin towers of late 20th Century Irish fiction, particularly the short story. Their stories and characters can be beautiful and full of love and lust, but there tends to be a spirit of lamentation more than elegy. Fine with me. But Thomson is different. He lacks bitterness, utterly, even about this story's sad end. (Okay, there is a certain bitterness toward England for its historic treatment of the Irish, but of course that is unavoidable.) 

(See also: Thomson's Woodbrook and the poetry of Kavanagh.)

To pick an excerpt is difficult. Should I pick one that shows Thomson's love for Phoebe? Or his admiration for her parents? Or his insight into the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in the Ireland of the 1930s?

This is about Phoebe's mother, Ivy Kirkwood, and the difference between her and a family aunt who lived on the estate, but who longed for more of a social life:

Ivy liked being with other people and was full of curiosity about them and their furniture and houses; she had a distinctive kind of beauty and enough reserve to make her seem mysterious. Everyone wanted to get to know her better and her engagement book, like her card at every ball, was filled too quickly for her liking, but she was less dependent on all that than Topsy had ever been. She had had a better education, her musical talents had been fostered, she could read with enjoyment and knew how to choose books that were not boring or stupid. Her loneliness in childhood and the unhappiness that grew between her and her father had uncovered resources within her which did not need stimulations from outside. The dances, games and rushing about that Topsy always longed for were to Ivy, who had too much of them, a tempting distraction from activities she valued more.

                                                        - from Woodbrook by David Thomson

Further reading/listening:

A Raidió Teilifís Éireann documentary about Woodbrook the place

Seamus Heaney on his friend, David Thomson

Knives With No Handles

Knives With No Handles

Out of the after-quiet of harvest

the empty heavens of a taut remark,

the sure drought of a raised hand --

foggage and dust across a brown field.

Still for a blood harvest we sing --

you in your frenzies, mine this disjointed

JimO’Biad (with the dust and squandered hay,

our voices flung by wind) --

to soothe what doesn’t scan,

to make a richer field for planting,

only to return to the old domestic atmospherics,

familiar weather patterns feeding a seasonal harvest

feeding a sun-glinting scythe of hurt producing -- what?

Time to think is like time gathering knives without handles. 

                                                            -J. O'Brien

*Foggage is the dying grass left after harvest or grazing season is over.

 

Self-Criticism in February - Poem by Robinson Jeffers

Jeffers' home in Carmel, Calif.

This is a re-post based on the season. The first time I posted it, it was because a Yevtushenko poem had brought it to mind. This time it's the turning of the calendar finally from what always seems to me to be the longest month, into the month of the title. I've always loved this title. And in the poem, I like that the speaker seems to win the argument with himself. I love the accusation "It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately." The poem is from the 1930s, but surely like Jeffers' "present time," ours can seem as if it is "founded on violence" as well.

Self-Criticism in February

by Robinson Jeffers

The bay is not blue but sombre yellow

With wrack from the battered valley, it is speckled with violent foam heads

And tiger-striped with long lovely storm-shadows.

You love this better than the other mask; better eyes than yours

Would feel the equal beauty of the blue.

It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately.

But the present time is not pastoral, but founded

On violence, pointed for more massive violence: perhaps it is not

Perversity but need that perceives the storm-beauty.

Well, bite on this: your poems are too full of ghosts and demons,

And people like phantoms -- how often life's are --

And passion so strained that the clay mouths go praying for destruction --

Alas, it is not unusual in life;

To every soul at some time. But why insist on it? And now

For the worst fault: you have never mistaken

Demon nor passion nor idealism for the real God.

Then what is most disliked in those verses

Remains most true. Unfortunately. If only you could sing

That God is love, or perhaps that social

Justice will prevail. I can tell lies in prose.