Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (18 page)

Derek Mahon
(
b
. Belfast, 1941) is the most formally accomplished Irish poet of a generation including Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. His early influences included Yeats, MacNeice
and Beckett along with the French poets he has continued to translate. Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ [
42] is one of the great poems of the 20th century. It doesn’t just make you pause for thought as you read and re-read it, it almost makes you feel more human. The poem’s evolving interplay between thought and feeling – enacted through its engagement with language – produces a delicately balanced response in the reader. Those particular sensations of sound and symbol evoked by this poem trouble the meaning, but you shouldn’t expect to understand any poem at one reading. Just as you listen to songs – or sing them – again and again, so poems need to be read, re-read, read out loud and read again. Of all the poems in this anthology, the ones which I feel give the most with each re-reading are those by Derek Mahon, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill and T.S. Eliot.

The mushrooms in Mahon’s ‘Disused Shed’ have been waiting in the dark ‘since civil war days’. Their presence is symbolic, standing for all the marginalised people and mute victims of history. Charged with meaning and remembrance by the poem, this forgotten shed behind the rhododendrons is an imagined lost world (‘one of those places where a thought might grow’) remembered from
Troubles
(1970), a novel set just after the First World War in the decaying Majestic Hotel in rural Ireland by J.G. Farrell, to whom the poem is dedicated (Mahon’s friend was a polio victim, and died in Ireland in a drowning accident not long after the poem was written). Written during the Irish ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s, the poem is both timeless and timely, as Seamus Deane points out: ‘It is a poem that heartbreakingly dwells on and gives voice to all those peoples and civilisations that have been lost and/or destroyed. Since it is set in Ireland, with all the characteristics of an Irish “Big House” ruin, it speaks with a special sharpness to the present moment and the fear, rampant in Northern Ireland, of communities that fear they too might perish and be lost, with none to speak for them.’

Mahon’s poem achieves its remarkable effects through sound, beginning with a mellifluous evocation through consonance and assonance of fading sounds in the first stanza, through which the first sentence unspools to the metre like a rollcall, with a breath-jump across the stanza gap at the end of line 10, not
meeting the first full-stop until the end of the 13th line of the poem, at the light-giving keyhole. Edna Longley’s close reading of this poem shows how from this point ‘rhythms expressive of the mushrooms crowding to the poem’s keyhole, of growth and accumulation, answer those of diminuendo’, and also how complementary rhythms trace the ‘posture’ of ‘expectancy’ and ‘desire’ asserted in the narrative. The ten-line stanzas which Mahon handles with such delicacy and consummate skill are “big houses” of his own building indebted to past models, to his formal masters W.B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice. 

Czesław Miłosz
(
b
. Lithuania, 1911-2004) was Poland’s foremost modern poet, often described as a poet of memory and witness. Born in Lithuania (then ruled by Tsarist Russia), he worked for underground presses in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, later becoming a diplomat and given political asylum in France in 1951. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.
‘Encounter’ [38], ‘A Confession’ [78].

Edwin Morgan
(
b
. Glasgow, 1920-2010) was not only one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20th century but also one of the most versatile English-language poets and translators of any period, an intellectual polymath with a relish for both traditional forms and for concrete or sound poetry. The vitality and breadth of his work owes much to his voracious appetite for life and literature, his immersion in Russian, French and many other languages, his engagement with art, film, science and science fiction, and his belief that ‘you can write poetry about anything. You really can! The world, history, society, everything in it, pleads to become a voice, voices’.
‘Strawberries’ [59], ‘Trio’ [85].

Les Murray
(
b
. Nabiac, NSW, 1938) is Australia’s best-known poet, a prolific and popular but controversial writer. Encompassing all Australian life – including the natural world – his poetry is dramatic and highly engaging, enlivened by humour and self-mockery, plain-speaking but also complex. While wedded to traditional verse, he is an inventive and exuberant poet: invigorating the ballad form, ‘translating’ voices from nature into poetry, imitating Aboriginal songs. Like America’s Walt Whitman
he champions his own ‘vernacular republic’, but his critics accuse him of blinkered nationalism and reactionary rural conservatism.

Murray’s poem ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’ [
90] is about not being afraid to show our emotions: giving physical expression to the way we feel, here by crying in public. There’s also a sense of mystery in this: no one knows why the man is crying, and Murray evokes the baffled, communal response to a spectacle both ordinary and extraordinary by echoing a famous poem by ‘Waltzing Matilda’ author ‘Banjo’ Paterson in his opening lines. Every Australian of Murray’s generation would know by heart ‘The Man from Snowy River’ which begins: ‘There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around / That the colt from old Regret had got away’, but instead of bushmen from different cattle-stations, Murray homes in on men reacting from familiar Sydney locations, drinking or eating in Repins and Lorenzinis, or watching the horse sales at Tattersalls.

Pablo Neruda
(
b
. Parral, Chile, 1904-73), known in Chile as ‘the people’s poet’, was one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. He served his country as a diplomat for many years, but also spent long periods in exile. His poetry embraces both private and public concerns: he is known both for his love and nature poetry and for works addressing Latin American political history and social struggle. His early poetry was fiercely surreal, reflecting ancient terrors, modern anxieties and his near-religious desolation. The Spanish Civil War changed his life and work as he moved to a personal voice and to more politically involved and ideological positions.

The turning-point came with his epic volume
Canto general
(1950), including ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu’, which marked ‘a new stage in my style and a new direction in my concerns’. Standing on the hallowed Inca ground, Neruda vowed to make the stones speak on behalf of those who had built and laboured on it. What had begun as a poem about Chile turned into one that expressed the whole geological, natural and political history of South America.

His later work was elemental in its concerns, including the three books of
Odes
, which gave material things a life of their
own. Nothing was ordinary in Neruda’s poetry: anything could be magical; womanhood was linked to the regeneration of earth and the cyclical processes of nature.
‘Sweetness, Always’ [82]. 

Alden Nowlan
(
b
. Nova Scotia, 1933-83) is Canada’s most popular modern poet, widely celebrated for his heart-warming, plain-speaking poems. Born in the Nova Scotia backwoods, he left school at 12 and worked in a sawmill before becoming a local newspaper reporter. His early poems bear witness to the harshness and hypocrisy of lives brutalised by poverty and ignorance in a remote Canadian backwater. But as Nowlan finds love and lifelong friendship, so his work achieves authority and lasting warmth. His poems present universal portrayals of human life: teasingly ironic, wryly humorous, sympathetic, quizzical and morally astute. ‘Great Things Have Happened’ [
55].

Naomi Shihab Nye
(
b
. St Louis, Missouri, 1952) is an American writer, anthologist, educator and ‘wandering poet’. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she has published over 20 books. She gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. Through her empathetic use of poetic language, she reveals the shining nature of our daily lives, whether writing about local life in her inner-city Texan neighbourhood or the daily rituals of Jews and Palestinians in the war-torn Middle East.
‘Kindness’ [91].