Peggy O'Brien, Ed.
The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry 1967-2000
Wake Forest University Press: $17.95, 313 pp.
Irish women have been "twice colonized," as Peggy O'Brien puts it - once by Imperialism, and again by sexual discrimination. But that does not mean their art must iconoclastically tear down every last remnant of the past, in myth and history. Nor, more importantly here, does it mean their art must give over the adventurousness of a modern Cu Chulainn for the cowardice of a political program determined to make impossible reparations for past ills.
Though O'Brien's dedication proclaims a special commitment to "Irish womanhood," no reader of contemporary poetry ought to remain ignorant of the fantastic fecundity that has swept the Emerald Isle in the years since Seamus Heaney began publishing. And while this renaissance cannot be contained within gender lines, no reader of this anthology will long doubt that Irish women writing today have come across a diverse array of powerful voices that stand equal to, or above, any in North America or England.
O'Brien has collected large samplings from the works of nine poets: Eavan Boland, Eilean ni Chuilleanain, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Rita Ann Higgins, Paula Meehan, Moya Cannon, Mary O'Malley, Kerry Hardie, and Medbh McGuckian. Of these, McGuckian stands out as a raving genius whose imagination overpowers, but never subdues, the insufficient language in which it finds expression:
Keeping magic out has itself the character of magic - a picture held up captive and we could not get outside it for it lay in our language in the uniform of a force that no longer existed.These lines from "Pulsus Paradoxus" give a better summation of the attainment of this anthology than perhaps any review could. Irish poetry has always thrived on and conquered the repressions of imperialism and genocide and civil war. The inability to escape the historical picture, and the reasonable doubts that mere escape is ever a solution, has forced McGuckian, and nearly all the artists of her country, to work a magic within constraints.
The result: a poetry always confronting and intimate with the realities of the present and history ("I am learning my country all over again, / how every inch of soil has been paid for / by the life of a man, the funerals of the poor," from McGuckian's "The Albert Chain"); a poetry so demanding in form (especially Eavan Boland's), commanding in language (Ni Dhomhnaill writes in Irish, with facing English translations) and unsurpassable in aesthetics, that these women stand not as mere token recipients of equality after centuries of inequality.
Mark Levine
Enola Gay
University of California Press: $13.95, 79 pp.
In this, Levine's first collection since his 1993 debut Debt, the poet and The New Yorker columnist shows himself to be a master of lyricism and accretion, of whom numerous flaws can never quite get the better.
True, the volume opens with the prosaic "Then for the Seventh Night," whose repetitions grow only more cloying as they gain in meaning (for then we cannot afford to ignore them): "He could hear the sound of the one train . . . // He missed his mother. He would look for her still . . . // he distrusted his voice." And it is also true that Levine crafts scattered, uneven verses whose oblique stances don't always surrender rewards worthy of the efforts undergone in the reading ("I came whistling into daybreak / among marketplace skins and the poison shingles / Another ferry collided with its version of fog / down there, in the dredged channels").
By the end, one may wonder if it matters which lines are a part of which poem; too often, they seem arbitrary and unrewarding constructions. But by the final "Wedding Day," it is difficult, if not impossible, to deny that Levine has some quantity of brilliance. This most obviously is the case in such poems as "John Keats," where Levine conflates the personal with the public. As in all great drama, personal pathos, in Levine's hands, soon rises to the level of shared tragedy:
Our pilgrimageHis stanzas, often lacking in verbage - or at least any action that forces one from image to image, line to line - have a lapidary and autarchist intelligence to them. They do not require merely a sensitive reader complacent with prettiness or diminutive craft. Rather, Levine's isolated images and work in sum are a poetics of engagement. Perhaps they should not be read as gem-like but as cannonballs and meteors. Such is the case with the final, wrenching stanza of "Horizon," which contemplates our perceptions of last century's world wars:
is long and narrow and pitted with traps
scattered by man and by beast: mud; vipers; opiates;
virus; fallout . .
Sadness. The ever-changing grasses.That crack in the window is no precious image. Rather, Levine has captured our perhaps sad failure to learn from the world - to widen our understanding of it - in spite of our ineluctable sensation of living in an ever-lengthening history. Levine is no more an Imagiste than was Ezra Pound when he called up Tiresias to contemplate the ever-deepening tragedy, and wonder, of life and death.
The invention of prison. The crack in the
window that grows longer, not wider.
The sale of our invisible telescope.
- James Wilson