The Poetry of Science - essay

This piece first appeared in Poetry Ireland News in summer 2012. I write from a personal perspective here on how I moved from the world of science to the world of poetry, reflecting on what I see as the relationship between science and art and their necessary functions as different approaches to knowledge in contemporary society – an increasingly relevant question, I feel. In any case, I hope you find it interesting.

For more essays  from Poetry Ireland's archive, you can find a full index here. Well worth a visit!

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The Poetry of Science

Look into the cup: the tissue of order
Forms under your stare. The living surfaces
Mirror each other, gather everything
Into their crystalline world...

- Thomas Kinsella, 'Phoenix Park'

The first poem that filled me with a genuine excitement was encountered one day in a stuffy classroom in my final year in secondary school. It was Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Mirror in February’. I enjoyed poetry but this poem seemed different and more immediate. It was written by someone not distant from me in time and language, but a poet still writing as I read it – Kinsella then being the only such living poet on the English syllabus.

I faced a dilemma as I approached my Leaving Cert exams. As well as English and History I was also passionate about Maths and Physics. The question was which would I prefer to study at University? In the end, I chose Natural Sciences and found myself in Trinity College, daunted at first by the transition to higher mathematics, chemistry and physics. Thankfully, after the terror of the first term, I settled in and was an eager student, choosing to major in Experimental Physics under the guidance of my supervisor, one Prof Iggy McGovern – known to many of you now as the author of two excellent poetry collections.

At that time neither Iggy nor I talked about poetry, though I had continued to read it as I headed towards my finals, with friends in the English Department recommending poets like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and other modernists. Whilst I was sometimes baffled by these poets, I enjoyed the challenge such work provided. After graduation, I worked for about a year as a research assistant at the Department, but found I had no stomach for the often repetitive and slow nature of research physics. Despite my passion for the subject I didn’t see a direct future in it, and after a period of crisis decided to revisit that earlier moment of reflected encounter in ‘Mirror in February’ and try my own hand at writing poetry. My progress was reasonably quick and within a few years my first published poem, ‘Apple’, appeared in Poetry Ireland Review 47, edited by Moya Cannon, in autumn 1995. It was a piece about Newton.

I had no concept of myself at that point as a ‘scientist-poet’. It just seemed natural to me that with a background in physics – and a passion for all the sciences – that this world-view would seep its way into what I was writing as subject matter, explored in the unique vocabularies that science also provided me with. For example, in an early poem, ‘Dragonflies’, I describe the dragonflies as ‘they dart from one point to another / plotting the water’s surface / with their ghost geometries’. For me, nature poetry after Darwin had to somehow reflect this altered view of the natural world. I also found in scientific figures rich material for poems, writing pieces about Einstein (‘Einstein’s Compass’) and Galileo (‘The Moons’) as well as Newton. I also became quite fascinated with natural history and a series of poems followed about paleontology, geology, insects, astronomy and even mathematics.

At the same time, I naturally also wrote about more immediate and personal concerns: family, lovers, friendship, loss and grief. The type of material that perhaps we expect to see in a contemporary poetry collection. The difficulty I faced was how to make these different types of subject-matter work in some unified way to form a collection itself. It took me some time to achieve this, but eventually I realised that these subjects- the philosophical and the personal - could exist side by side, the intimate, personal dramas placed against the grand backdrop of geological and even cosmological time, perhaps in the way the gods provided the epic context for the lives of mortals in classical literature. For me, the fleeting moments of lived experience are placed against the vista of what we might call ‘deep’ time.

Inevitably, I faced the question in doing this: what is poetry’s relationship to science? I think we have to be clear here and say that the arts and the sciences serve different, though no less important, functions. Science’s job is to examine disparate phenomena and find a law or theory that shows how they are connected. This hypothesis is then tested and if proven true gives us an ‘objective’ truth. Poetry also tries to find patterns of connections and draw unexpected material together to form a coherent poem, but it can never aspire to the empiricism of science, nor should it. In the end, a poem can only persuade rather than prove. It captures something of the ‘subjective’ experience of living, though by means that make such an experience recognisable or comprehensible to another person. We might borrow an important concept from science and call this a form of ‘resonance’.

And perhaps by writing about science I’m attempting to bring these seemingly abstract and even distant ideas into some kind of imaginative resonance with the nature of our lived lives, so that they too may form part of the fabric of our experience in the process; that such ‘ideas’ may also be felt as the ‘tissue of order’ that Kinsella speaks of in ‘Phoenix Park’ – an order that both disciplines search for, albeit in very different fashions. That is, at least, something of what I hope to achieve in my work.

June 2012

Apple                                     

Red of course. The colour

of blood. Shining and smooth,

its form perfected and round.

An emblem of the human

mind, nestled up there

among the leaves innocent

of its fate, swaying

in a green dream about

to waken. Ripe and

waiting for the final

nudge, the soft slap

              of the breeze, to fall

              down to the ground

              with a thud beside

              the place he sits, to

              start again the ancient act

              of the naming of parts.

              from In the Library of Lost Objects (Ward Wood Publishing, 2011)

 

 

 

 

My intro to 'All the Barbaric Glass' by David Butler (2017)

I was flattered when David Butler asked me to launch his latest collection All the Barbaric Glass last spring. David really is a marvelous poet and I am also a huge admirer of his debut collection Via Crucis - so much so that I wrote to his publisher to congratulate him for publishing it. David manages in his poetry a delicate mix of verbal dexterity, vivid imagery and heartfelt feeling. I recommend his work highly to you if you've not encountered it yet.

For now, here are my introductory remarks on the collection. It can be purchased directly from his publisher Doire Press, who are doing great work in finding - and publishing - original voices in contemporary Irish poetry - including, of course, David Butler himself.

A Question at the Shoreline: ‘All the Barbaric Glass’ by David Butler

All the Barbaric Glass was launched at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, on 23^rd March 2017.

The opening lines of the first poem, ‘Breaking’, of David Butler’s second collection, All the Barbaric Glass, acts as a statement of intent for the work, one which he steadfastly adheres to throughout:

                        There are times you need

                        to step outside of colloquy;                

                        to mute the looping newsfeed,

                        the tinnitus of the immediate.

This is a collection that consciously steps beyond ‘the newsfeed’, the constant information thrown at us both in daily life and in the online sphere. That world occasional encroaches on this mission in certain stray moments, but David resolutely stays the course to give us something beyond mere reportage or internet chatter.

The striking imagery of the collection reminds us that this work exists at a boundary, most obviously, that of the physical landscape of the shoreline, the place between land and sea. The shoreline is a very real and concrete location throughout the poems, but subtly reaches the level of metaphor also, representing as it does so the space between life and death, loss and love found, the solid ground of the present and the less certain waters of past and future.

This notion of the blurring of boundaries is heightened also by the fact that many poems take place in the gloaming, the dusk-light, that liminal space between day and night, becoming the shadowland of the poets inner, self-questioning thoughts.  The passage of time is marked out through these scenes as when a young child finds a dogfish washed up on the beach and the poet observes:

                                                            ...Small wonder

the child with bucket stands and stares

                        and starts to hear the song of sand;

                        the whisper in the hourglass.

Such philosophical preoccupations are threaded throughout the work but there are also more emotionally direct pieces, most particularly those about his father and late mother, such as ‘Death Watch’, ‘Watcher’, and ‘Family Album’. His father’s descent into Alzheimer’s is not just observed, but observed closely and felt to the core. In the poem ‘Father’, David takes us far beyond cold statistics or even, indeed, the powerful testimony of loved ones seen on a segment on the TV news, to a fully articulated statement that captures the heart-breaking reality of the condition as experienced by both the father suffering it and the son’s efforts to try to understand it:

                        What unsigned city is it you wake in,

                        featureless, or with such altered features

                        the streets are not familiar, or if, with

                        shifting familiarity, like dreamscapes

                        you wake from?

The autumnal/wintry setting that pervades the collection also seems to suggest that the work exists in the wake of such loss and questioning, where we view the shoreline differently again – not just as haunting but as one now ‘haunted’ by personal grief.

It should be obvious by now how beautifully written these poems are. However, this isn’t achieved through a relaxed, easy lyricism but rather a starkly elegant one. There is an exactness and precision to these poems, an angular beauty, we might say, somewhat reminiscent of the that most descriptively rigorous of Irish poets, Thomas Kinsella. Take these lines from ‘Correspondence’:

                                                There are more

                        tongues here than in a metropolis

                        gorse and cowslip and insect

                        all flash their intimate semaphore;

                        a corncrake croaks Morse; while a skylark

                        hoisted high as radio-mast,

                        is twittering its incessant machine-code

It is this sense of rigour which offers a controlled, formal elegance to the language, the observational accuracy perhaps reflecting David’s studies in engineering at university. There is an eye to detail, as ‘Correspondence’ shows, that other writers may well miss.

However, there are also moments of counterpoint placed in the lattice of such a grief-work, where splashes of colour interrupt the wintry shoreline scenes and present their own vivid reality. In ‘Grand Bizarre, Istanbul’

                        Suddenly the senses are ablaze: scent

                        has tumbled into an Aladdin’s cave

                        that illuminates the throve of memory...

while in ‘Mellifont Abbey’, bees

...fumble inside auricular lilies          

drunk on summer’s insistent song.

At the same time, the contemporary world of the ‘looping newsfeed’ and internet babble breaks through on occasion (as it must), impinging on the other reflections of natural setting. Yet found amid this ‘tinnitus’ is more important news, news that matters and captured in the vision of “all the suitcases, empty as grief / that bob on the Aegean...” bringing us closer to the scene, however briefly, of distant calamity.

To end, I just wanted to note something I only fully appreciated on a second reading of All the Barbaric Glass and one that strikes me as important and central to this books appeal. That thing is the presence of the question mark throughout these poems. So often when poets ‘question’ (especially these days) they are questioning others in accusatory tones for their social or political ineptitude, their incompetence, faults and lack. The ‘other’, in this sense, is always an easy target for lazy vitriol.

Here, though, the questions are those asked of oneself, offering a form of self-reflection and self-questioning that, in the end, is a method of self-interrogation that leaves no place to hide for the poet in these poems. This is not, in the end, a collection that offers easy resolution or explicit consolation, though nor is it one lacking in humanity or tentative hope.

The last two poems of the book demonstrate this unerring honesty. In ‘The Injunction’, the poet remembers the Deutsche Grammophon records his father would play on the old record player in the living room when he was a child, and how: “Still it reverberates / like a paternal caveat: /the cough of the stylus defluffed; / the circuitry clearing its throat; / the expectant static...” In the beautifully strange, and slightly chilling, final poem ‘Restless’ two lovers look out onto the sea as they walk the shoreline. She imagines she spies a body bobbing in the surf, just beyond the rocks. They peer out together, more alert now. He questions her assertion, then responds:

                        It’s not, I say again, less sure.

                        Less sure of myself, too

                        and of us,

                        with the sea and wind and world enormous about us.

March 2017

           

Meeting the Poet (Thomas Kinsella) - memoir

In late 1999 I co-edited (with Theo Dorgan) the anthology Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry. In part, we funded the book by making available a limited edition of copies signed by the ten section editors. In January 2000, I was fortunate enough to go to Thomas Kinsella's home in County Wicklow to get him to sign these copies. It is always difficult to say who your favourite poet is, but in my case Kinsella - at his best - always comes top of that list. As you might expect, I decided to detail our encounter though with no sense that this meeting was as special to Kinsella as it was to me. Here is the piece I wrote, a few years after the fact. I'm happy to say that at nearly 90, Tom Kinsella is still going strong and creating wonderful work and is receiving much deserved (extra) attention in recent years.

Meeting the Poet

Love, it is certain, continues till we fail,

Whenever (with your forgiveness) that may be...

                                                                        – ‘Phoenix Park’

As we bumped over a pothole the car made a sudden adjustment veering momentarily off the road. I turned away from the window. My girlfriend, Paola, was driving. She licked the paper of a roll-up which she held in her left hand, then glanced at me, a smile flickering across her lips.

“So, what’s he like? This Thomas what’s-his-name?”

I recovered the lighter from the floor and leaned over to light her cigarette. “Very intimidating by all accounts.”

Paola inhaled, held the smoke in her lungs for a moment, then exhaled. “Great. At least he lives somewhere remote.”

We drove deeper into the mountains. Beyond the rain-streaked window, I saw a burnt-out car rusting on the hillside. The sky had grown heavy with rain cloud, the slate bowl of the sky fringed by bronze that was reflected on the surface of the lake down below us in the valley. It seemed like the perfect stage for a Kinsella poem: an ancient landscape with its primal weather; the ochre of the decaying car lying amongst the granite boulders scattered on the mountainside by retreating glaciers.

In the boot of the Daihatsu Charade, bubble-wrapped and boxed, were special editions of a poetry anthology on which I had worked – with Theo Dorgan – as general editor. We had managed to get the signatures of the nine other section editors, but Thomas Kinsella had proved elusive. He had recently returned from a visit to America and was reluctant to travel to Dublin. I volunteered to go to his house in Wicklow to make the task as painless as possible – or, perhaps more truthfully, that I would get to meet him.

*

The Kinsellas’ house was hidden from the narrow country road by a wall of oak and hazel and pinned in from behind by the steep incline of a large hill, rainwater spilling down its side in white threads that gathered in a stream at its base. As I lifted the dead weight of the box of books from the boot of the car, a woman in her early seventies emerged from the porch with a wry smile. She introduced herself to us as Eleanor. It was a peculiar feeling seeing her standing there in front of the old farmhouse in flesh and blood. She had been frozen in my imagination as the younger woman in the poem ‘Phoenix Park’ who lay “brilliant with illness, behind glass”.

That poem had been written long before, but I had heard she had been ill again for many years. I was surprised by her skittery vitality as she darted to the boot and lifted the smaller, second box. I followed her into the large, open-plan living room and placed the box onto the mahogany table at its centre. She joked that Tom was in his garret and would be down shortly, then whisked Paola away to help her make lunch.

I stood in the room for a time alone in the gloom of rain-light that seeped in from a window, which stretched almost the entire length of the gable. Above me were exposed rafters and the vault of the ceiling. Along the walls bookcases, and a stark ink drawing of a black crow, an illustration by Louis le Brocquy from The Táin. On the opposite wall there was a Navaho wall hanging, its intricate pattern of earthen-coloured lines reminding me, strangely, of a schematic for an electronic circuit board.

'The Tain' illustration Louis le Broquay

As I began to take the books from the boxes a man appeared in the doorway, instantly recognisable from the photograph on the back of the Collected Poems: the thick glasses and grey beard, “the dry, down-turning mouth” on which one could never imagine a smile forming. I was surprised, though, by Kinsella’s physical size as he stood there in a leather waistcoat. The rumours of his decline seemed premature. He held out his hand and simply introduced himself as Tom, then sat down at the table. It appeared he wasn’t a man interested in small talk.

I opened the first book on the title page. He took an elegant silver-nibbed pen from his inside pocket and signed, with total concentration, in a spiky hand. There was an awkward pause before I opened the next one and he signed again. We continued in this ritual for perhaps half an hour, the silence of the room punctured only by the sound of rain tapping on the window and the occasional laughter that echoed down the hallway from the kitchen.

Just as Tom had finished signing the last book, Eleanor craned her head around the doorframe and announced cheerily that lunch was ready. Tom seemed a little surprised that I was being invited to stay. As I gathered up the books and put them back into the box, I was overcome with the need to tell him that it was reading his poem ‘Mirror in February’ in school that really got me interested in poetry. I realised I may not have another chance so I said, “If it hadn’t been for ‘Mirror in February’ I’d probably be doing something different with my life. It’s the poem that made me want to write.”

After the minutes of rain measured silence I thought my confession must have sounded ridiculous, all the practiced eloquence in the car on the way to this encounter falling apart into a blurted platitude. He stood back with what seemed like genuine surprise, and smiled, “Go way. Really. Tell me.” He waited expectant for me to provide a bigger explanation. Despite having read most of his work, I suddenly felt self-conscious and tongue-tied, as though the weight of posterity on me was too great in that room. I could only muster, “It was the first poem I encountered that was written from a world I recognised.”

As we stood there beside the imposing table, he seemed to relax a little, began to discuss the choices certain editors had made. This had been a difficult part of the process of putting the book together. Theo and I had wanted all the editors to meet up but because the logistical difficulties involved, we decided to send lists around to each so there was no overlap in poems, or over-representation of a given poet.

Tom had chosen to make his selection from the 1930s. He spoke about the failure of Irish poets to grasp modernism. Despite his abrasiveness, at times, on the subject, I detected a sense of isolation on his behalf. No Irish poet had embraced elements of the Modernists more than Kinsella and his profile, it seemed to me at least, had suffered as a consequence due to his work's apparent experimentalism and ‘difficulty’. 

He grew silent for a moment, then mentioned how he had grappled with whether to select anything by Brian Coffey. He put it to me bluntly: “Do you think I should’ve included him?”

I hadn’t expected that. Again, I had a chance to say something incisive, make an impression on my poetic mentor. But I’d never read Coffey and knew for some reason that to admit as much would meet with his disappointment, or perhaps even disapproval. I answered with an attempt at authority: “Well, some of his work is quite interesting, but I think your choice of Devlin was better.”

He nodded. I suspected my opinion didn’t matter to him, but it was surprisingly generous gesture to pretend that it did. 

At that moment Eleanor reappeared in the doorway. I was relieved that my knowledge would not be tested any further through more discussion. Tom and I followed her into the kitchen where we found Paola sitting at the pine table with a relaxed smile, and a mug of tea in her hand.

                       *

 As we drove home in the darkness, Paola and I were quiet. I thought of the car out there somewhere in the darkness, rusting a little more in the rain, the boulders still fixed where they had come to rest so long ago, infinitesimally more weathered and rounded. In a way, it was an apt image for the encounter with the poet; his solemn work with the hint of something ancient and immoveable; my dislocation in such a landscape; my fumbling in his formidable presence.

            There was the poem I wished I had talked to him about: a poem about Eleanor, sick in a hospital in the Phoenix Park. Over lunch all four of us had talked for several hours about their time in America and, at Tom’s insistence, religion, a topic that seemed to fascinate him despite his own equivocations on the subject. (I was a practicing Buddhist at the time which he seemed to find curious.) Then, sitting around the table by the bright pink Aga stove, Eleanor then told us about an illness which left her in a state of near-paralysis for several years. After a time, she had recovered unexpectedly and completely.

I thought of all Tom’s probings and doubts as we sat there in the bright, airy space drinking tea. I remembered the Navaho rug in the dark living room, its coloured grids and pattern of connections – that phrase in ‘Phoenix Park’ about “the tissue of order”. But the poem was about more than order. It attempts to answer the question: “What was in your thoughts… saying, after a while, / I write you nothing, no love songs, anymore?”

 As we left the Kinsella’s house in the twilight, Eleanor and Tom stood in the bell of porch-light waving us off. Eleanor had told us to call in again if we were in the area. I knew we wouldn’t – or I wouldn’t have the courage.

The lights of Dublin spread out before us as Paola and I descended from the foothills towards the city, the bay a dark entrance scooped out of the grid of streetlights and housing estates. In the boot of the car, two boxes of books signed and ready to be delivered into the world. I had finally met the poet who first gave me the shock of excitement that words on the page can make as they struggle to “elicit order from experience.”  

But it was the question in the poem that drew my attention again. Like the poet and his wife in ‘Phoenix Park’, Paola and I had also made a journey before a departure. As we pulled up outside our flat in Mountpleasant Square, the rain finally eased. Paola opened the hall door for me as I carried the boxes up the narrow staircase, then placed them on the floor beside all the other boxes that were stacked about the room – separately labelled and divided in piles.

Soon, Tom and Eleanor would also pack up their life in Wicklow and leave that primal place to return to their second home in Philadelphia, both now seeming to exist as real people in my memory, but also, somehow, mythic figures frozen in a frieze in the porchlight - 'brilliant behind glass'.

Thomas Kinsella

Galway, 2004

'Summer Rain' Review - Books Ireland

Books Ireland has been a mainstay of the Irish publishing scene for many years. It is a subscription based magazine (print and digital) and is always worth the price of admission. I encourage you, therefore, to support this enterprise if you have the means to do so. You can find out all about it at: Books Ireland Magazine

I was delighted to learn that my collection Summer Rain is reviewed in the current (May/June) issue and reproduce here for those interested. I should say, it is a very thoughtful and considered piece on the collection by poet and children's writer Catherine Ann Cullen, whose own work is well worth seeking out.

For now, here's the review:

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Summer Rain. Noel Duffy, Ward Wood Publishing, 87pp

"Closely observed trifles"

Duffy has studied experimental physics, and one of the pleasures of his work is the way it reflects the connections between science and poetry. This collection is a trilogy of sequences that help the reader appreciate the life of the eminent physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, the father of atomic theory, with stunning poems about stars, water and snow; and of ten individuals united by the presence of rain and human frailty. From the cover photograph of electric light on puddles to the last poem, ‘Autumn Almanac’, with its

                        water dripping

                        into the empty basin –

                        full by morning

this is a book of perpetual motion, of ripples constantly extending outwards.

Duffy explains in the preface that Boltzmann’s theories show ‘how the complexity of life (an ordered state) could arise without defying this fundamental law of entropy as he had proposed it’. The length of this preface, two and half pages, was my one quibble – a short paragraph about Boltzmann would have sufficed.

Boltzmann’s struggles with depression, with other scientists and with philosophy are foregrounded in ‘Games of Chance & Reason’, a series of eight poems, many subdivided into sections, named for the years between 1895 and 1907. The sparse narrative allows the drama of the story to unfold quietly. We observe Boltzmann’s moods, from buoyant to manic to depressed, as his theories fail to convince many of his contemporaries. In the opening poem, ‘1895’, he tells his students that, in return for their attention, trust and affection, he

            will give everything I have of myself,

            my entire way of thinking and feeling.

By ‘1905’ he is repeating this to another group but, ten years on, we feel his sense of desperation as a student dares to challenge his authority.

            Each of the ten poems in the final sequence, ‘Summer Rain’, is a monologue in the voice of a character on whom the rain impinges. But from Sophie, who gets soaked as she waits for a bus, to Gerard, the blind pianist, who reaches for the black umbrella his son tells him is ‘pink with yellow gorillas’, to Muriel, a nun who has lost her faith but prays ‘that it may wash away my sin, that I may believe in him again’, rain is not all that these characters experience in common: they also share a sense of movement, like Boltzmann’s atoms. Muriel’s anxiety for change is echoed in Sophie’s imagining how she might dare make physical contact with a woman she loves: ‘Will people stare if I reach for her hand?’ Ailish, who has just reconciled with her husband, feels ‘the pebble of what once was pass between us / beady and hard and durable’. Richard, the embalmer, presides over ‘the natural order, to pass from this state to another.’ Christine, the haematologist, declares that ‘most bloods are as they should be…’, but tries to dismiss mental images of those close to her as she examines the slides, and ‘to be as dispassionate as the lens’ stare’ when she sees that all is not well for a woman patient. Gerard, who lost his sight in a rugby game, asks ‘who can ever know anything for certain?’

            For me, it is the middle section of this book that is most satisfying. Its title, ‘Into the Recesses’, is a quote from Wordsworth’s ‘Guide to the Lakes’ (‘A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable’). In a review of the ‘Guide’ in 1906, Virginia Woolf praised Wordsworth’s facility in giving us

                        these closely-observed trifles which only a very penetrating

                        eye after long search could have selected and described… all

                        through this minute and scrupulous catalogue there runs a

                        purpose which solves it into one coherent and increasingly

                        impressive picture… he sees them all as living parts of a

                        vast and exquisitely ordered system.

Woolf’s words could almost have been written about Duffy’s collection, which echoes Wordsworth especially in the middle section, with poems that reference his Lake District haunts of Rydal, Beacon Tarn and Skiddaw. Duffy’s ‘Snow Over Grasmere’, set in the place Wordsworth called home for fourteen years, typifies the beauty of this sequence. Duffy describes the snowflakes

                        dissolving in clusters on the water’s brim

                        returning to their element in a different form,

                        the singular structure of each untangling

                        into the molecules of their making, melting to

                        a common unity before forever fading within it.

This precise description has Duffy the scientist looking at snowflakes through a microscope, seeing their ‘singular structure’ and their ‘molecules’, while the ‘common unity’ echoes the snowfall as unifying force in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.

            Duffy earns our trust as both scientist and poet in this collection. His ability to blend the two makes his poems echo long after they are read. He sees into the life of things, and allows us to look through the microscope with him.

Catherine Ann Cullen is A&L Goodbody Writer in Residence at St Joseph's School, East Wall, Dublin, and works on the Trinity College Access Programmes. Her most recent poetry collection The Other Now was published by Dedalus Press in autumn 2016.

Review of 'Summer Rain' - Dublin Review of Books

I will publish posts in the coming weeks about poetry in general (I'm very keen to share a wonderful video interpretation of a W.S Merwin poem) but for now, I thought to focus on my own recent collection and reproduce this very substantial review of Summer Rain by poet Enda Wyley in The Dublin Review of Books. 

Before that though, I will add that the DRB is a wonderful resource regarding Irish literature and culture, in all forms, and you can visit their homepage and read many excellent articles at: http://www.drb.ie/home

So, here's the review.


*


'The Kingdom of Water' 

Noel Duffy’s third collection, Summer Rain, is structured into three different parts – each exhibiting a poetic range, an experimentation in form and theme which mark a departure from the more lyrical, autobiographical work of his previous volumes, In the Library of Lost Objects (2011) and On Light and Carbon (2013).

These are new sequences from a poet eager to take chances in subject matter and to push forward the boundaries of his craft. At the same time these poems protect what has been a striking feature of Duffy’s work to date – a fascination with the sciences, stemming from his studies in experimental physics at Trinity College, Dublin.

In the light of this interest, it seems entirely fitting that Summer Rain begins with a section “Games of Chance & Reason”. Here, eight poems, dated 1895–1907, follow the final years of the brilliant Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. This is an unusual choice of subject for poetry – one better suited to a physics lecture or a scientific journal, you might think. And yet it is a measure of Duffy’s development as a poet that he has created a convincing verse drama infused with a dialogue that would work as well on radio as it does on the page.

In a compact preface, he explains the importance of Boltzmann’s theories. “Using a deceptively simple starting point, he posited that atoms existed and if we measure their behavior in vast numbers using statistical methods, all the laws of classical thermodynamics could be fully understood.” Boltzmann also believed that pockets of order existed within disorder. Duffy explains how this “gave a working foundation for how the complexity of life itself (an ordered state) could arise without defying the fundamental law of entropy as he had proposed it”.

These are challenging ideas and ones which today have defined Boltzmann as one of the most gifted physicists of the nineteenth century. But in his own lifetime he encountered much opposition to his ideas, most especially from the positivists – scientists who only believed what evidence could actually prove. Chief amongst these was the forceful proponent of positivist philosophy Ernst Mach.

It is out of the conflict between Boltzmann and Mach that Duffy develops an intriguing poetic argument. Ideas and counter-ideas battle for the truth.

Ludwig stands in the small wood-panelled
lecture room, a dozen or so students facing him
in rows. ‘I ask you to place your faith in me,
for there are those who say I am a charlatan
or a fool. And some who say I am both!

Of course, he was neither a charlatan nor a fool. And ultimately, it is his genius that Duffy celebrates, in poems which expose the thrill of Boltzmann’s discoveries, the excitement of his ideas – as well as the disillusionment and ultimate tragedy of his story.

Now all seems lost; lost to him in dispute
and the over-labour of duties. He knows
this cannot go on, that he falters more
with every step he tries to take, each ending,
it seems, in failure and regret.’

“Into the Recesses”, the second section of Summer Rain, moves us into a new imaginative zone, with an epigraph from Wordsworth as our guide. “A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.”

Sixteen observational nature poems follow, using twenty-first century knowledge as a means to reimagine pantheism. The poems succeed because of their powerful attention to detail and their allegiance to Duffy’s interest in physics.

In “Surface Tension” carefully chosen words like “membrane” and “meniscus” are subtly scientific, helping this small poem to lodge itself memorably in the reader’s imagination.

Water too has a skin,
that membrane that separates
its world from our own, the meniscus
that trembles in the light
late evening breeze, not breaking it
but forming small rivulets
upon its surface, a flickering
of light playing on the eye
separating our world from theirs;
the kingdom of water;
the kingdom of air.

Water flows purposefully throughout the poems in this section. In “Storm over Skiddaw” sheep huddle together while “rain falls down / heavily about them”. A waterfall is wonderfully described as a “cascade of quicksilver/ force”, finally slowing down to a “cantering measure” in the poem “Tyneware Waterfall”, while in “Molecules in Motion”, waters are “flowing downriver towards the lake / and the human scale of the waiting landscape”. These are poems which skilfully celebrate the cycle of water in a diversity of natural settings. They are carefully honed, complement each other and make for an arresting second part of an intriguing collection.

Duffy concludes his third collection with a series of ten intimate monologues, set in contemporary Dublin – although the city is secondary to the voices of each speaker, all specifically named and all very different in their concerns and experiences. Broken marriages, drugs, emotional problems, disappointments are the fabric of these poems as we are introduced to the troubled and disaffected of the poet’s making. And yet there is an overriding humanity flowing like the rain through the days of each speaker, which offers some consolation for the future.

Muriel, though devastated by her loss of faith, tightens her coat about her, walks out onto the streets, hoping the rain will wash away her sin “that I may believe in Him again / Jesus who no longer lives with me / Pray for me …”. Richard’s job is to clean dead bodies and yet he ponders how “there is a tenderness, in the end, in this work I do”. “Caroline”, the final poem of the collection, encapsulates the humane, enquiring voice which flows as consistently as water throughout the three sequences of Summer Rain – a collection, which for all its exactness of structure, should ultimately be enjoyed for its great empathy and craft.

I pick another canvas
from the pile stacked along
the studio wall, blank and waiting
for a truer mood. I will paint
the smell of rain instead and start
with earthen brown and red.

1/1/2017

Enda Wyley is a poet and children’s author. She has published five collections of poetry with Dedalus Press – most recently Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems (2014). She was the recipient of The Vincent Buckley Prize for Poetry and the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for Poetry (2014). She is a member of Aosdána.

Wild Cherries - poem

I never knew my maternal grandfather. When I try think of him the image that comes to mind is that of his namesake, my Uncle Dinny. I was so delighted my uncle made it to my launch in September but saddened to say now that he died a few weeks ago. So, I'm not sure if this poem is about him (indirectly as a guiding character) or my granddad himself, though they were, in the end, quite different men - though great musicians both. I can see no immediate place for this poem in terms of work I am currently writing. I decided, in any case, to add here to have it available somewhere as a standalone piece, though it throws up a somewhat complex range of emotions. In any case, here it is. 


*

Wild Cherries 

In Memory of Denis O’Brien

i. Prelude

You were a man I never knew

and never will – one whose life

mine depends upon, yet you are ghost

to me, grandfather, dying far away

across the sea before I was born,

fading like all others to an imagined past

that I will never understand or fully grasp.

ii. 'The Rath'

O’Brien’s Bridge and the stony fields,

the lands your father and his brothers ploughed,

their lasting mark upon the landscape

of their birth to leave their old life behind

with the promise of a better future

in this newly-minted Nation: a good holding

far from the wild Atlantic shore

and the winding roads of County Clare,                   

a farm in north county Dublin, Kilsallaghan,

as much country back then as the lands

your father had come from, its soil

dark and rich and good, but too little of it,

in the end, for all his sons to prosper by.

Young you left and went to the city.

iii. Uniform

My mam said you looked as smart                

as a policeman in your dark navy uniform,

the JJ&S insignia on your cap marking you

employee of John Jameson & Sons,

Whiskey Makers since 1781, a good job

by any measure as you led your dray horses

down along the banks of the Liffey and on

to the docklands where the barges waited

with their cargo of amber, ready to move

this seemingly inexhaustible bounty

to the four corners of town and country.

iv. Music

I will never know your gait or manner

or how you held yourself as you walked

into a room or pub, though I heard once

that you could set the place alight with talk

or your playing on the fiddle, a Woodbine

browning your fingers at the tips as it burnt

down to a butt, a pint of Guinness and a Jemmie

on the table before you as you played reels

and jigs at the barroom or kitchen session,

these places where happiness found you, music

your one true gift to those you tried to love

though sometimes failed, you sliding then into the well

of drink and the sinking regret that fell over you,

stumbling home late below the Harvest Moon

rising above the rooftops of these regimented streets,

no crops to be gathered in this over-filled place,

just to walk and walk and never reach home,

the darkness and the dark thoughts descending again

as if the very stars had died and dimmed to silence.

v. Exile 

You were not one spoken of often
as though something unspeakable had happened
to cast you in shadow; perhaps that day you laid
an envelope of money on the kitchen table
and told my grandmother that she’d never see
or hear from you again – the poor woman,
her nerves already gone – then hugging my mother
in the scrap-filled yard, telling her
what an elegant young woman she was
and why couldn’t her younger sister be like her,
ladylike and well-mannered in all her ways
instead of a tom-boy staying out late
and chasing boys twice her age.
                                                     Gone,
half the children were sent to relatives in the Rath,
my mother, the eldest, left to raise the rest,
stealing from her the hope to go on in school,
though she never said a bad word against you.
It was just how life was, she said, in the tough
trenches of the 1950s, getting by day to day,
depending on the kindness of neighbour
while working long hours in a sewing factory,
half her siblings more like cousins in the end,
big-boned men like him and country in their ways.
 
And so, grandfather, you chose your exile
the day you left that envelope on the table
leaving for Manchester on the morning ferry
to work the building sites and never come back,

taking digs in Levenshulme, your fiddle sold,

and dying there at sixty in the deep of sleep,
though three of your sons by your side by then
at least, returning you safely home by night 

so that you could be laid to rest, finally, in Irish soil 

- the year Kennedy died.

vii. Memory

I try to fill the gap with fragments, anecdotes

and clues, though no concluding image comes

to mind to complete my rag-tag picture of you.

How we each pass with our dying breath into

the foreverness of forgetfulness – like the land

you once walked with your brothers so many years before,

the hope you felt out there in the wide open fields

fading now to a monochrome photograph

of another time, a different place; and the stories

that may yet still await to add again your human face

to those gathered around the family fireplace:

this partial and imagined portrait I try make for you

– grandfather I never knew.

'Summer Rain' - Launch Photos

Well, I had a great launch for my collection Summer Rain at Books Upstairs in Dublin at the end of September. Here is some photographic evidence!

Old friends gather, including Sarah Douglas and Greg O'Brien

Poet and novelist David Butler sets the formal proceedings going by welcoming the audience and introducing the wonderful poet Peter Sirr to say some words about the collection. 

Peter spoke to the gathered audience with his extremely lucid (as ever), close reading of the work. It was a true honour to have him there on the evening.

Peter's summary of the collection as 'a book in three movements, symphonic in its breadth' was extremely humbling to hear... 

Finally, I face my nerves - and the audience - to say some words of thanks to the many who have helped me along the way with this one.

Physics corner: Poets Iggy McGovern, Kate Dempsey and Ross Hattaway read as I read - from my own collection, mind. Otherwise, that would be just rude...

I finish my short(ish) reading from the book with the monologue 'Ailish', one of my favourite pieces from the collection. 

The Host with the most, D Butler, returns to the floor and wraps up the speechifying, inducing folk to have (another) glass of wine and buy the wares on offer!

Old pals, Brian Walsh and Greg O'Brien chatting afterwards...

...while, thankfully, I had some books to sign.

My great friend from New York, Beth Phillips, chats with my mam.

The rest of the family had come in numbers also. My uncle Dinser and aunt Margaret, with my brother Paddy and his partner Valerie.

Still signing books, thankfully, when ambushed with a man-hug by my old pal and neighbour, Mick Cregan. 

My uncle Frank, original toubadour of the family, talking to my brother Aidan.

To finish, a shot of me - book in hands - ruminating afterwards... Naturally, we all then headed to the nearest tavern...

My profound thanks to all who came along to make the launch such a special occasion. Massive thanks also to Books Upstairs for hosting the event and their long and enduring support of contemporary Irish writing and my publisher Ward Wood for their continued support in publishing my work. And finally, special mention for my good friend Steve Wilson who took the wonderfully atmospheric photographs on the night.


Till the next one!