Wind down with a bit of poetry in the run-up to Christmas

As the Christmas creep progresses on its merry way, having started in earnest on November 1 and not letting up for what seems a long time yet, there’s scant relief to be found from the jingle bells unless you go live under a rock or inside a Trappist monastery. Turning the TV off helps. And the radio. But most of us are required to spend time online, where the bombardment is even worse. Maybe winding down with a bit of poetry might help? There are a few volumes here this week that might keep the happy holiday hounds at bay.

New Weather and Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon, Faber, €14.39 each

Paul Muldoon has had two volumes of poetry recently published, New Weather and Howdie-Skelp. New Weather is a reprint of his first collection, in celebration of its silver jubilee. First appearing in 1973, it made quite a splash, helped along by Seamus Heaney, who could see Muldoon’s talent. In his introduction to this anniversary edition, Muldoon writes: ‘Reading New Weather with the dubious advantage of hindsight, I’m struck less by how “other” it looks than by its fairly obvious influences. I’m thinking of the English poets – Larkin, Hughes and Gunn – who were so at the fore at the time and whom I’d studied extensively at school.’ He goes on to blame John Donne for his more ‘outlandish metaphor making’! One imagines that Donne would take it on the chin.

The second volume, just in paperback, borrows its title from the slap a midwife gives a newborn baby to cry. In Muldoon’s part of the world it is known as a ‘howdie-skelp’. It’s fascinating to read these collections, his first and his most recent, and to witness what the intervening 50 years have brought to his poetry. In this latest volume, there’s a ‘remake’ of Eliot’s The Waste Land, a crown of sonnets inspired by Covid-19 (a crown of sonnets is also known as a sonnet corona; that’s a sonnet corona inspired by the Coronavirus. Geddit?).

There’s an elegy to the poet Ciaran Carson and a lot more; this is quite a fist of a book. It’s not without its challenges but worth every moment you spend, and indeed re-spend, in its company.

Pure Filth, Aidan Mathews, Lilliput, €15

I first came across Mathews when I picked up his short story anthology, Charlie Chaplin’s Wishbone, and I was dead impressed. He has toiled in RTÉ for most of his working life but has still managed to bring an impressive body of written work into the world, in plays, poetry, fiction and essays. His latest poetry collection recalls, as does Muldoon’s, the dark days of lockdown, but there’s a lot more besides that and those of us of similar vintage to Mathews can’t help but be lifted by the zing when he recalls his – and our – halcyon days. While he writes of lockdown visits, smiling at his grandchildren through the glass of a window he is not allowed to open, he writes too (with wit and gratitude) about his kidney transplant.

He also writes about church and state, but not polemically, rather as something mysterious, like an unsolved, or unresolved, riddle. He writes of family, grandchildren, the inevitability of a son settling in Australia. There’s a deep well of affection here for his hometown, the shambolic, neglected, divided city of Dublin and what MacNeice once called ‘her seedy elegance’. This is no pastoral work, it must be said. Mathews’ great strength is in gleaning unvanquished beauty from the humblest thing, maybe the ugliest thing and perhaps the pure filth of it. A magnificent work.

Desire, Micheal O’Siadhail, Baylor University Press, €25

Micheal O’Siadhail is an Irish poet and academic who has made his home on the other side of the pond. But his roots run deep and there’s a distinctly Irish flavour to some of his verse. This collection focuses squarely on the Covid pandemic and the planet-wide reverberations still being felt, and acutely too, as we beat time waiting on the inevitable next plague. In some snips from his introduction, O’Siadhail writes: ‘Lockdown, the prison term for when prisoners are confined to their cells following a disturbance, entered our common parlance.’ ‘…think of how we fly all over, trailing pollution behind us, and how Covid-19, hitching a lift, raged across the globe.’ ‘The ultimate question in our frail and passing human lives must be: what do we desire?”

In four long poems, bookended by an epigraph and epilogue, O’Siadhail asks the tough questions; of science, of faith, of money and power, of our unjust social infrastructures, of our truly insatiable greed. Just what is it we desire and why are we willing to thwart the force of Mother Nature herself to get it? In some ways this collection feels like being wakened by a slap on a cold and wintry dawn. But, with the true heart of a poet, O’Siadhail has faith. Pots and pots of it for us to explore. This collection should be read especially by those of us happy to forget the dreaded plague, to file it away under ‘Unpleasant Memories’ even as we tend the graves of loved ones lost to Covid. O’Siadhail insists that we remember, and in the remembering, we brace ourselves and change our ways.

Wild Hope, Donna Ashworth, Black and White, €14.99

I’ve never considered poetry to be an elitist sport, although I know that plenty do, though I’ve never figured out why. But for some poems that might have a more general appeal, most especially in the darkest days of winter, Donna Ashworth has produced this volume, a collection she says in her introduction ‘…to remind you of what you already know to be true… you simply must have hope. It is the light. It is the key. It is the fuel. And when you cannot find yours, you can happily borrow mine.’ Ashworth’s previous volumes, six of them, have all, according to the publishers, been bestsellers. So this new volume is bound to fly among the converted and maybe pick up some more new fans along the way. Who doesn’t need a bit of hope?

Footnotes

Winter solstice gatherings are not just happening in Newgrange this year, but in several significant locations around the country. See dochara.com for more information. And bring a flashlamp!