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Home , Augustus Young, Gerry Murphy (poet), Greg Delanty, Joan Denise Moriarty, John Montague (poet), Maurice Riordan

English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980 English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980 Clíona Ní Ríordáin English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980 Clíona Ní Ríordáin Institut du Monde Anglophone Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 Paris, France

ISBN 978-3-030-38572-9 ISBN 978-3-030-38573-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38573-6

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland I ndil cuimhne Tomás Ó Ríordáin Foreword

Opening my advance copy of this book on my computer, I was caught by a fragrance reaching me—not from the decade that is its subject—but from the early 1960s, from my own undergraduate years in University College Cork. A delightful time, a moment of freedom to discover people and ideas that were contemporary, with eccentric but mostly benevolent teachers to look after the past centuries—I have never learned so much or so fast, about life, art and philosophy, as I did then in a small, provincial, traditional college, in a provincial city. Of course that whiff is the fragrance of youth, but not only—the city had a musical, theatrical, cin- ematic and artistic culture of the kind that flourishes in places where the whole audience moves in a body from play to concert, cinema to gallery; and the university drew on a large province, for which it was still a true centre for commerce, culture and education. Of the five years I spent as a student, what I remember most vividly is the sense of a cohort, of a group of people thinking, arguing, reading and discovering life, together. But Clíona Ní Ríordáin’s book makes me ask, what was missing? Lit- erary culture was lopsided. Although Cork had produced notable writers who were still alive and writing, notably Seán O’Faoláin, who had challenged the narrowness of the national debate by founding The Bell in the 1940s, much of their work was officially unavailable. Censorship was active and especially directed at fiction by Irish authors. There was a Film Festival where we saw uncensored European films, but no Book Festival to bring us The Golden Ass or The Well of Loneliness. Although (of course)

vii viii FOREWORD we procured and read the banned books, native and foreign, we were also absorbing the message that literature and the state were at odds. And poetry, though (again of course) we were reading poetry, seemed remote from the place and time we were living in. Something that for the almost- clandestine poet I then was gave a feeling of unreality to the pursuit. So that it was an apocalyptic moment when a newly appointed lecturer, Seán Lucy, read the poems of the emigré Corkman Patrick Galvin to a student society—I can still hear his slightly Anglo voice almost possessed by the rhythmic violence of Galvin’s ‘The Kings are out’:

With knives of ice Anddressedtokill The wine ﬂows down from Summer Hill Christ! Be on your guard tonight The Kings are out …1

Galvin was to stay abroad for almost another decade but the unmistake- able voice continued to be accessible in the broadsheets and pamphlets that occasionally erupted from his English base. I left Cork for Oxford and then Trinity College Dublin. I went on writing, and presently published poetry in Dublin, returning to see family and friends—and then in the early seventies I happened into a student event, the launch of the Irish-language journal INNTI, that showed how much things had changed in the College. Poetry was not just visible, rooted in the place and the voices of the students who were writing, it was unapologetically in print and challenging a national readership. Older poets in English and Irish, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Direáin, Pearse Hutchinson, were there to validate a student enterprise. The phenomenon of INNTI has been widely commented on; now Clíona Ní Ríordáin (who is among those who have written on that group of poets) turns her attention to the English-language strand of poetry writing that surfaced at UCC in the same period. The two lines are entangled, some poets writing in both languages, and it must be that the simultaneous presence on the campus of two writers whose verse was celebrated in Irish and English, respectively, Ó Ríordáin and John Montague, helped to precipitate that sense of possibility, that made people identify themselves as poets. Ní Ríordáin’s study draws on Karl Mannheim’s concept of a “generation” and points to the introduction of free secondary education in the FOREWORD ix

Republic by Donogh O’Malley at the end of the sixties as the public event that gave young people in Munster permission to develop their imagina- tions in new ways. I’d suggest that the rapid withering away of censorship after 1967 (when a new Act liberated a huge backlog of previously banned books) must have added to the sense of freedom. But her focus on an educational centre and on the impact of some exemplary teachers is both just and a corrective to the widespread emphasis on individual talent as the sole source of poetry. But John Montague’s influence was decisive. He was ten years younger than the agonising bachelor Ó Ríordáin; he was embarking on his second marriage; he was professional and international in his approach. Thomas McCarthy is quoted: “New collections of poetry came our way, our attention was drawn to reviews. We were made familiar with the activities that are the norm in a literary life”. McCarthy, the late Seán Dunne, Greg Delanty, Theo Dorgan, Gerry Murphy, Maurice Riordan and the late Gregory O’Donoghue, all born in the 1950s and all undergraduates in the 1970s, went on to make a mark as poets, widely various in style but all engaged in the life of poetry in their country and abroad. The progres- sion happened “in due course”, if at uneven pace; the absence of women from the procession has been remarked. The mutual support of a cohort seems to have been lacking; female poets were perhaps still moving to a different time signature. Clíona Ní Ríordáin comments on the poetry of this “generation” with perceptive enthusiasm, showing also how by retrieving, collecting and republishing the poems of Patrick Galvin they constructed a forebear for themselves. She pays due tribute to Seán Lucy who as Professor of English welcomed Montague to the College, and to his student, the academic, novelist in Irish and English, and poet of Cork’s southside, Robert Welch, who was born in the late 1940s, left Cork by 1970, but remained attached to the tradition, co-editing the Galvin volume. An important fea- ture is her analysis of other publishing projects, the anthologies including Seán Dunne’s Poets of Munster, Greg Delanty and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Jumping off Shadows‚ and Seán Lucy’s Five Irish Poets published in Cork in 1970 by the local Mercier Press. Those titles tell us something about a national (and international) background. From the mid-1960s onward, the notion of “Ulster poetry” as possessing a claim to be on the one hand the Irish poetry best worth attending to—and on the other hand not quite Irish at all—was made in certain quarters on the back of the appearance of a bunch of major talents x FOREWORD in the North. The cultural-geographic-political assertion drew responses both inside and outside Ulster, and the notion of Munster as an equivalent cultural entity was canvassed. Lucy, on the other hand, was implicitly claiming that his five Cork poets have as good a right to claim a central role as poets based in or published in Dublin. All of this academic, cultural and literary context is visible in the published books, the obituaries and library catalogues. Ní Ríordáin has gone deeper: into the archives of the student journal The Quarryman, into interviews and memoirs, and into the social history of the city. This is, in her telling, a closely woven story where trade unionists like Michael O’Riordan, journalists like the late Robert O’Donoghue, friend of Galvin and father of Greg, ancestral figures like “Father Prout” (Francis Sylvester Mahony, author of “The Bells of Shandon” and much else), musicians like Aloys Fleischmann, Geraldine Neeson, circle around each other. The effect is to give us a real sense of the way these literary lives were lived, in a real place. National and local politics are a necessary complication; after all, Thomas McCarthy was labelled “The Fianna Fáil poet”. International connections range from the impact of the Penguin Modern European poets to McCarthy’s fantasies of the eighteenth-century Merchant Princes to the 2005 project of translating Eastern European poetry. In saluting her book I am especially grateful for this thickness of detail and people, and most of all for the sense of place that seems so effortlessly evoked. The physical shape and outlook of the city underlies so much, its vertig- inous sightlines—Redemption Road to Collins Barracks, or Sydney Place to the Bus Station, as in Seán Dunne’s lovely poem where he watches the flashing of the passport photo machine from his tower house:

The passport photo booth ﬂashes in the bus station near the river. I watch it from my high window: a message sent with a mirror from desperate souls in a valley, frantic for answers in the far hills.2

Here is a reminder that the life of poets is bound up with the close ties of youthful friendships, but also, by virtue of presence and place, with FOREWORD xi those lucky encounters that show us the ﬂashing messages it can take a lifetime to decode.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

“The Bus Station” from Collected (2005) is reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Seán Dunne and The Gallery Press. “Sydney Parade” appeared in THE SHELTERED NEST (1992).

Notes

1. Patrick Galvin, The Selected Poems, (ed. G. Delanty & Robert Welch), Cork University Press, 1996, p. 97. 2. Seán Dunne, Collected, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 2005, p. 81. Rimbaud in Cork

You sailed out on the Prinz von Oranje, Sporting the azure and orange of the Dutch Army, To carry its ﬂag through a sweltering landscape (good-bye to Europe, anywhere will do), Under the smouldering crest of the Krakatoa. Months later you signed on The Wandering Chief , A lean deserter, leaving off tropical fruit, You took the name of ‘Holmes’, heading home; (did you swim to Napoleon’s bleak St Helena?) Finally you docked in Queenstown, alias Cobh: But what befell you, that lost day in Cork? * Bemused by a signpost reading ‘Charleville’,

xiii xiv RIMBAUDINCORK

Rimbaud stumbles into the Long Valley, Meets Humphrey Moynihan, and staggers back; ‘This man has deranged all his senses!’ He stays long enough to sign the Visitors’ Book; Then in the Corner House, surrounded again By those petulant accents of Cork (a chorus of aggrieved doves), he ﬁnds Gerry Murphy, Who slaps him on the back, buys a round of Murphy, And brings him to meet McCarthy in the Library. At long last, the voice of sanity! ‘That Charleville signpost leads to North Cork, And not your famous French birthplace. Better leave for Waterford or Wexford, To embark again on the Continent. If you get lost, look up Dorgan in Dublin; He’s a sailor himself, and knows the ropes.’

* In the attic of his Cork B&B, Is there still a dusty sailor’s trunk Impounded by an angry landlady? ‘That skinny Frenchie had no English money. There’s nothing in here but a scribbled RIMBAUDINCORK xv

Notebook: Hallucinations, I think, the cover of it, Tomorrow I’ll burn it, or take it to the ﬂea market! John Montague Acknowledgements

The idea for this book emerged from a conversation I had with Terence Brown over lunch at the Orléans SOFEIR (Société Française des Études Irlandaises) conference that was held in 2007. At the time, I had ﬁnished my Ph.D. and was looking for new topics, new poets, and new pathways to explore. He recommended that I read the work of Greg Delanty, suggesting that after spending so many years reading Northern poets I should turn my interests southwards. From that initial suggestion, the project took shape and form, enabling me to explore a world of poetry that had been there on my doorstep all along. Many people have helped me in the writing of this book. First and fore- most, I would like to acknowledge the poets themselves, Greg Delanty, Theo Dorgan, Thomas McCarthy, Gerry Murphy and Maurice Riordan. They made themselves available for interview, shared their memories and, in some cases, their papers with me. They were most encouraging in their support for this venture. The late John Montague also answered many queries and gave me a lengthy interview. I would like to thank Eliza- beth Wassell for her permission to use John Montague’s poem “Rimbaud in Cork” as the epigraph for this work. William Wall wrote a long text detailing information about his years in UCC. Thanks are also due to Sheila Pratschke who was the Director of the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris for the duration of this project. She facilitated meetings with many of the poets included in this book. Peter Fallon of Gallery Press shared his archive of Seán Dunne material with me, and Trish Edelstein gave me every encouragement.

xvii xviii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Gemma McCrohan kindly provided me with a copy of a programme she had made about Seán Dunne for RTE. I acknowledge also the help of Pat Boran and John F. Deaneof Dedalus Press for their responses to my questions regarding Gregory O’Donoghue. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin also agreed to be interviewed and introduced me to the late Robert Welch, who shared memories with me, as did Colm Breathnach and the late Liam Ó Muirthile, whom I met during a fine afternoon in Dublin in the company of Greg Delanty. Louis de Paor spoke at length to me about INNTI and UCC in an interview in Paris. Catherine Phil MacCarthy also talked to me about her time as a student in the English department in UCC. Patrick Cotter of the Munster Literature Centre has been constantly supportive of the project, giving an interview, providing bibliographical information, and aiding in the logistics of a conference held in the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2008. It was on that occasion that I first met many of the poets. Paul Durcan, in the course of many conversations, also shared his memories of UCC in the 1970s with me. To him too I owe a debt of gratitude. I owe thanks also to members of the faculty at UCC who shared their insights on the period with me: Maeve Conrick, Patricia Coughlan, Col- bert Kearney, Grace Neville, Seán Ó Coileáin, Patrick O’Donovan and Pádraigín Riggs. Thank you to the UCC archivist Caitriona Mulcahy. I would like to express my gratitude also to the staff in the special collections department of the Boole Library, (director Crónán Ó Doibhlin) and Sheyeda Allen, Mary Lombard, Peadar Cranitch for their patience and diligence in pulling out copies of the President’s Reports and round- ing up copies of The Quarryman. Special mention must go to the late Helen Davis who, over cups of coffee in the Rest, gave me the benefit of her knowledge of UCC, both as a student and member of staff, and was always full of ideas for possible new people to quiz or sources to hunt down. I would also like to thank the staff of the Cork City Library (Special Collections) and the staff of the National Library of Ireland for their help, together with the librarians in the Hesburgh Library, especially Aedín Ní Bhróithe-Clements, at the University of Notre Dame, who were most helpful in locating obscure texts. The CNU (Conseil national des universités) in France funded a six- month sabbatical in 2011, enabling me to work on the project. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, in particular Carle Bonafous-Murat, Wesley Hutchinson and Christine Raguet, for their encouragement. The Sorbonne Nouvelle also gave me a grant ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xix for a Jeune chercheur project, which enabled me to organise the “Poètes traducteurs, poètes créateurs” conference in November 2008 which brought many of the poets included in the volume to Paris. I am also indebted to Paul Bensimon, Stephanie Schwerter, Órla Ní Ríordáin and Rícheal Ní Ríordáin, who patiently listened to and reread endless excerpts from the work in progress. I want to thank Pascale Sardin of the Uni- versity of Bordeaux for her careful proofreading of the manuscript. I am immensely grateful to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin who took time out from her busy schedule as Ireland Professor of Poetry to read the manuscript and write a very generous Foreword. I acknowledge the organisers of the following conferences who allowed me to try out parts of the book in a number of papers: IASIL (Interna- tional Association for the Study of Irish Literatures) Porto, SAES (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur) Limoges, SOFEIR (Société Française des Etudes Irlandaises) Nantes, EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies) Vienna, The Law, Literature and Translation Conference Trinity College Dublin, The British and Irish Contemporary Poetry Conference Belfast, the 2013 Notre Dame Irish Seminar. John Goodby was most helpful: his detailed knowledge of contemporary Irish poetry, coupled with his first-hand experience of Cork, made him an ideal interlocutor. John McCourt and Alexandra Poulain encouraged me to keep going when my morale was flagging. Robert Tromop and Christine Van Dalen sustained me with both intellectual and terrestrial nourishment. Tom Murphy of The Irish Examiner helped with research- ing the history of the poetry published in The Cork Examiner during the 1970s. Nora Hickey M’sichili, Donal Ó Drisceoil and Patrick Cot- ter helped with permissions. Sinéad MacAodha offered Barry’s Tea and stimulating conversation at crucial moments. Do mo thusimitheoirí, Máire agus Tomás Ó Ríordáin, gabhaim buíochas don chabhair a thugadar dom leis an leabhair seo, don ghrá a chothaigh siad ins na healaín, agus don tacaíocht a bhí ar fáil uatha i gcó- naí. I also want to thank my children, Patrick and Anna O’Mahony, for understanding that poetry is important, always, at all times of the year (even during the holidays). Finally, my greatest debt of gratitude is to James O’Mahony, who stepped into the breach whenever he was needed and provided endless logistical backup and moral support during the years that this project has taken. xx ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the permission of the following to quote from the authors’ work:

Greg Delanty from The Hellbox, Oxford Poets, 1998; Collected Poems 1986–2006, Carcanet, 2006; The Greek Anthology Book XVII, Carcanet, 2012; by kind permission of the author and Carcanet Press. Theo Dorgan, from What This Earth Cost Us, Dedalus Press, 2008; Greek, Nine Bright Shiners, Dedalus Press, 2014; Orpheus, Dedalus Press, 2018; by kind permission of the author and Dedalus Press. Seán Dunne, from The Sheltered Nest, Gallery Press, 1992; In My Father’s House, Dublin, The Gallery Press, 2000, Collected, The Gallery Press, 2005; by kind permission of the estate of the author c/o the Gallery Press. Patrick Galvin, from New and Selected Poems, ed. Greg Delanty and Robert Welch, Cork University Press, 1996; by kind permission of Macdara and Gráinne Galvin. John Montague, New Collected Poems, Gallery Press, 2012; by kind permission of the estate of the author c/o the Gallery Press. John Montague, “Rimbaud in Cork”, by kind permission of the estate of the author, c/o Elizabeth Wassell. Paul Muldoon, translation of an extract from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, The Fifty- Minute Mermaid, Oldcastle, Gallery, 2007; by kind permission of the author and the Gallery Press. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Cork, Gallery, 1977; by kind permission of the author and the Gallery Press. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, The Fifty-Minute Mermaid, Oldcastle, Gallery, 2007; by kind permission of the author and the Gallery Press. Thomas McCarthy, Extracts from published and unpublished diaries and letters; The First Convention, Dolmen Press, 1978; The Lost Province,Anvil Press, 1996; Mr. Dineen’s CarefulParade: New and Selected Poems,Anvil Press, 1999; Gardens of Remembrance, New Island Books, 1999; Merchant Prince, Anvil Press, 2005; The Last Geraldine Ofﬁcer, Anvil Press, 2009; Pandemonium, Carcanet 2016. Gerry Murphy, RiodelaPlataandAllThat, Dedalus, 1993; Torso of an Ex-girlfriend, Dedalus 2002; End of Part One, New and Selected Poems, Dedalus, 2006; My Flirtation with International Socialism, Dedalus, 2010; Muse, Dedalus 2015; by kind permission of the author and Dedalus Press. My Life as a Stalinist, Southword, 2018; by kind permission of the author. Gregory O’Donoghue, Making Tracks, Dedalus, 2001; Ghost Dance,Dedalus, 2006; by kind permission of Dedalus Press. Maurice Riordan, Floods, Faber 2000; The Holy Land, Faber 2007; The Water Stealer, Faber 2015; by kind permission of the author and Faber. Contents

1 Beginnings 1

2 A Terrace of Generations 27

3 The Brindled Cats: Language and Translation 43

4 Journeys to the Past: Identities, Histories, and Myth 69

5 The Grumbling Questioning Poet: Politics and Social Engagement 99

6 Conclusion 115

Bibliography 121

Index 131

xxi CHAPTER 1

Beginnings

Abstract This chapter examines the emergence of a generation of English-language poets in UCC between 1970 and 1980. It compares the relatively little critical attention they garnered by comparison to the Irish-language poets who were associated with the journal INNTI.The chapter then offers an overview of the social and economic climate in Cork during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It highlights the absence of women writers in the cohort under study. An account is given of the changes occurring in University College Cork in the wake of the O’Mal- ley Education Act of 1967. The presence of tutelary ﬁgures among the staff is discussed, chief among them Seán Lucy and John Montague.

Keywords UCC poets · INNTI · Tutelary ﬁgures · Seán Lucy · John Montague

In the late 1960s and 1970s, a number of remarkable poets emerged from University College Cork. They wrote both in Irish and in English. The Irish-language poets, now known as the INNTI poets, after the name of the journal edited by Michael Davitt in which their work was published, are widely acknowledged as forming an important group and occupying a special place in relation to Irish language literature. Several studies have been devoted to their work1 and they have been subsumed into the canon—appearing regularly in school textbooks and on university courses.

Comparatively little has been written however about the English-language poets,2 Greg Delanty, Theo Dorgan, Seán Dunne, Thomas McCarthy, Gerry Murphy, Gregory O’Donoghue, Maurice Riordan. This was symp- tomatic of a wider lack of interest highlighted by Sebastian Barry in his anthology The Inherited Boundaries: Younger Poets of the Republic of Ire- land.3 In his introduction, Barry underlined the richness of the poetry being written in the Republic of Ireland by poets born in the 1950s, and although he acknowledged the due recognition awarded Northern poets, his anthology hoped to find an audience for the poets he had selected. Thomas McCarthy, who was included in Barry’s anthology, has compared the act of writing poetry in those years to “gardening in the rain”. This eloquent metaphor became the working title for my study. The present volume seeks to redress the balance, to remedy the benign neglect by drawing attention to the writing of this cohort of English language poets. Other young poets had emerged from UCC before that date, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin,4 or Augustus Young,5 for instance, yet they seem to have evolved as talented individuals,6 finding a poetic voice in isolation, without a sense of a network or a collective identity. Paul Dur- can7 was also a student at UCC during the period under review. However, he was an established poet at that stage, having already published several volumes of poetry, for that reason his work is not included in the study. His presence in the college at that time was nonetheless a vital one and I have established a series of correspondences between individual poems in his work and those that figure in the work of the other poets. While concentrating on the English language poets, this study proposes to look at both English and Irish language groups as an organic whole and examines the circumstances and the context in which they came to poetry. In so doing, I will pursue the traces and trails laid down by Frank Sewell who suggests that a dialogue between Irish poets writing in the Irish and English languages has been insufficiently acknowledged and studied.8 I will also address the claim made by Seán Dunne in his anthology Poets of Munster that apart from attending University College Cork in the 1970s: “they have little else in common”.9 Ten years later, in the preface to an anthology of poetry written by poets educated in UCC, Jumping off Shad- ows (edited by Greg Delanty and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill), Philip O’Leary invoked the tripartite obsessions of Daniel Corkery10 (“The Religious Consciousness of the People, Irish Nationalism and the Land11”) as a yardstick to measure the younger poets’ work. O’Leary underlined the new generations’ divergence from the themes that dominated Corkery’s 1 BEGINNINGS 3 oeuvre. Nonetheless, the inclusion of Corkery’s chief preoccupations signals his totemic presence in the literary historiography of the city. Corkery was Professor of English at UCC from 1931–194712 and is remembered today for his critical work, as the author of The Hidden Ireland; yet, he was also a poet, dramatist, short story writer and novelist. Although the figure of Corkery cannot be discounted entirely as an influence (he was the subject of Thomas McCarthy’s MA thesis), I would argue that the literary forerunners of this particular generation are to be found elsewhere. Chief among these avatars is the figure of the nineteenth-century Cork-born poet Francis Sylvester Mahony,13 better known as Father Prout. Mahony’s prodigious output included many translations or pseudo translations from a variety of European languages. Another influence was that of Corkery’s former protégé, Seán O’Faoláin,14 an intellectual engagé, and editor of The Bell. Both Mahony and O’Faoláin managed to combine writing about their native place with a cosmopolitan disdain for the constraints of such a small, often narrow- minded city. My project combines biographical writing with studies of the work of each of the poets. In keeping with the developments in the study of biography, and more broadly the contemporary interest in life-writing,15 the approach adopted here as a result is that of a group biography, as such it brings together common thematic strands in the work of the poets. The biographical element seems vital in this the first extended study of this group of poets. As well as proposing a linear narrative of the poets’ lives, I place them in a wider socio-historical perspective, examining the social fabric of their lives, in Bourdieu’s terms their habitus. I attempt to assess how these poets can, after the studies of Karl Mannheim, be con- sidered to be a generation of poets. For Mannheim, in his seminal essay “The Problem of Generations”,16 a generation was not to be understood in a biological sense of being members of a same family group; rather it entailed a cohort of people born around the same time. Significantly, Mannheim took into account the sociological dimension of the environment the group were born into, location and the socio-historical events playing an important role in determining the sense of identification shared by a group of young people in their formative years. The generation, in Mannheim’s elaboration of the term, became a potential source of identity and political mobilisation. It is the capacity for self-identification and the political content of their poetry, I argue, which set these Cork poets 4 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN apart from many of their counterparts, whose treatment of politics is more ironic and circumspect. This book shows how a group of poets, growing up in Ireland, at a time of profound social change, emerged from the education system convinced of their calling as poets. Their place in that education system was linked to Donogh O’Malley’s educational reform.17 Their youth was also marked by change in the Catholic Church,18 and social unrest on a global scale. Their sense of vocation was reinforced, it is my contention, by an environment favourable to such aspirations. While many, if not all of the poets,19 came to University College Cork destined in their own minds for poetry, they found in the atmosphere and the air of the campus, a milieu congenial to the poetic voice. Key to their development, I argue, was the presence of tutelary figures, or mentors, to use the term employed by David Wyatt in his study of the sixties generation in the United States.20 The sense of comradeship and the mutual support that emerged among this group of poets mirrored other moments in Irish literary history, creating movements of cohesion described by Dillon Johnston in his book The Poetic Economies of England and Ireland, 1912–2000.21 English Lan- guage Poets in University College Cork examines the environmental factors at the university that led to a flowering of such vocations. It also looks at the impact of the 50th anniversary of the celebrations of the 1916 Rising, where the role of poets as men of action, central to the self-determination of the state, was underlined. Of importance too is the fact that almost all of the English language poets are sympathetic to the Irish language. They demonstrate a deep- rooted connection to the language, that manifested itself often, via translation or rewriting. Poetry by Theo Dorgan, for instance, was published in one of the first numbers of INNTI .Atthisdistance,andwiththecurrent perspectives on the decline of the language among Gaeltacht speakers, and increasing marginalisation of the language within the living structures of Irish society, it may be hard for us to realise how the language in the period under study continued to be seen as an integral part of Irish society and Irish identity. Irish language communities were being set up outside Gaeltacht areas in the 1960s, notably in Ard Barra in Glanmire, County Cork at the end of the 1960s. Seán Ó Riada moved his young family to Cúil Aodha in 1963 with a view to them growing up in a Gaeltacht community,22 and poets, such as Michael Hartnett, were to turn to Irish as their language of choice. This engagement with a living, breathing Irish 1 BEGINNINGS 5 language is confirmed in the ambitious programme laid out in the 1965 White Paper.23 For UCC students, the presence of the poet Seán Ó Ríordáin24 on campus meant that a living poet of the language was in situ, as a daily reminder that poetry in Irish was possible. His work was shot through with anxieties about language, the obligations of the Irish language poet, and the attractions of English (“an striapach allúrach”25/the foreign har- lot) whose siren call he resisted.26 Ó Ríordáin’s work is marked by the influence of Daniel Corkery, whose summations to be faithful to the native, Ó Ríordáin both respected and detested in equal manner. Ó Ríordáin’s presence on campus was due to the good offices of Seán Ó Tuama,27 Professor of Irish, poet, critic and playwright, and together with Seán Ó Coileáin, one of Ó Ríordáin’s most ardent defenders. The presence of a poet on campus prefigured the influx of writers in residence that became habitual in later years and was one of the ways in which UCC dis- tinguished itself from other educational institutions at the time.28 Ó Ríordáin and Ó Tuama can be seen as offering an attachment to the Irish language heritage that ran counter to the narrow-gauge nationalism proposed by Corkery. Ó Tuama sought to place the poets of Early Modern Ireland in a European context, tracing the relationship between amhrán na ndaoine and l’amour courteois in his influential book Amhrán Grá na nDaoine.29 Ó Ríordáin’s poetry reflected existentialism and reconnected Irish with the European tradition. Critics have identified Ó Ríordáin’s poetry as a vector for introducing modernism to the Irish language. Barry McCrea has suggested that it was the minor status of the language that attracted Ó Ríordáin in the first place, in an interesting comparison with Pasolini he suggests that, “[…] Ó Ríordáin did not give the gift of literary modernity to Irish but rather, in its ruined state and in his own ambitious angst-ridden relationship to it, Irish gave an expression of modernity to Ó Ríordáin30”. In this study, I explore the cohort’s relationship with the Irish language, suggesting that rather than seeing it as a language of patriotism, Catholicism or cultural nationalism, Irish represented a space of creative othering that enabled both their writing and their imagination. The connection to the Irish language and the circulation between Irish and English poetry as a phenomenon at that period in time are under- scored by the publication of Thomas Kinsella’s The Táin by the Dol- men Press (1969), in a form that renewed interest in Irish mythology and legends. The emergence of Kinsella as a writer, and the presence of 6 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN a publishing house of the stature of Dolmen on the island should not be ignored. Dolmen’s three inaugural editions, Wormwood (Thomas Kin- sella), All Legendary Obstacles (John Montague) and Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (Austin Clarke), signalled on Liam Miller’s part a desire to intimate the beginning of a second revival in Irish poetry.31 It was significant too in the poetic economy of the time that the undertakings of the Mercier Press attempted to echo and amplify that movement. Seán Feehan’s independent press, always run as a commercial venture, aimed to publish books of Irish interest that were not religious in content. For a time, he joined forces with Seán Lucy to publish a series of books,32 which were distributed through a network of small shops throughout Ireland. Several of the poets interviewed for the study have mentioned the fact that these books were available in their hometowns. Cork, for all its delusions of grandeur and importance,33 is a small city on a small island on the periphery of Europe. Seán Dunne in his introduction to Poets of Munster makes reference to Seán Ó Ríordáin’s verses on “ceol cheanntar”, literally the music of a locality. In examining the work of the poets assembled here issues of regionalism, centre and periphery must also be addressed in any work that deals with writers who are linked to one peripheral location.34 What is the relation of poets attending a small regional university to the centre/capital? The friction between Dublin, the capital, and Cork, “the real capital of Ireland” or the Passover City, has long been a creative force; writers native to Cork, such as O’Faoláin and his contemporary Frank O’Connor,35 decried the narrow mindset of the Cork people and were only too eager to escape its confines. The cries of provincialism thrown at Irish literature by metropolitan writers can only have a greater echo in the small regional centre that is Cork. It is perhaps no accident that so many of the poets in this volume were resolutely turned towards the influences of European poetry in translation and also asserted their interest in American poetry. In both cases, their vision linked them to an elsewhere, enabled them to resist the pressures of a post-Yeatsian Irish poetry, still attempting to find a new direction and resisted also the traditional locus for the Irish poet, London and the pieties of the English tradition. While Patrick Crotty,36 in the introduction to his anthology of Modern Irish Poetry acknowledges the regional characteristics of Munster poetry, he prefers to underline in that respect the outstanding achievement of the Irish-language poets and dwells on the “vestigial life of the language in the Irish countryside”.37 However, it is important to emphasise that this 1 BEGINNINGS 7 present study is not a further attempt to balkanize the literary horizon in proposing a new distinct category of UCC poets, Cork poets or even Munster poets. Rather it is an attempt to account for the presence and development of the poets under consideration by reflecting on a number of the key features of their writing. It also aims at complexifying the narrative of Irish poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, offering another locus of production, and a focus that includes places other than Northern Ireland and Dublin, thus filling a critical-historical gap. The advancement of this project has been complicated by the fact that the quantity of archival resources available to the researcher is limited. Although papers belonging to one of the poets have been acquired by the National Library of Ireland, these had yet to be catalogued when the study was being written.38 For a lot period of time, they remained inacces- sible to scholars wishing to read them. In other instances, the papers have not been acquired and archives have been destroyed. In response to this dilemma, I have undertaken a number of interviews with the protagonists and with many of their contemporaries. In so doing, I have employed methods which take their inspiration from sociological fieldwork, notably from the Guide de l’enquête de terrain,writtenbyFlorenceWeberand Stéphane Beaud (La Découverte, 1997). The resulting oral archive of retrospective memories was invaluable but the method employed engenders its own problems. What is the value of retrospective witnessing? Mem- ory is by its very nature flawed and gapped, highlighting certain aspects, occluding others. Nonetheless, the interviews in themselves constitute a valuable resource, a trace of an era, giving voice to a generation of writers who emerged at a moment of flux in Irish history, a period charac- terised by Diarmaid Ferriter in his study of the 1970s, as being that of an ambiguous republic.39 My work in this area has been supported by wide reading in the field of biographical writing in journals such as Biography (University of Hawaii), the work of scholars such as François Dosse, or biographers such as Benoît Peeters in the self-conscious development of the form. Wherever possible these oral archives have been cross-referenced with archival material available in UCC itself. To that end, I have made use of college calendars, the presidents’ records, undergraduate magazines, UCC statistics on registration. People have also generously given their personal records, and the poetry community as a whole has been very supportive of the project. 8 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

Ireland, it is widely acknowledged, is obsessed by history and I have been well served in the number of books written both about the history of the period in general and about the history of Irish universities in particular. Of great use to me was the work of Cork historian John A. Murphy whose work on the history of UCC, The College,40 provides a lively testimony to the periods of change and turmoil experienced by the college in the decades that were of interest to me for the purposes of this study. With the exception of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,41 the poets of this generation who have made the greatest impact to date are male. And while I have referred to Seán Ó Ríordáin as an enabling forerunner, in this regard he must be viewed as less than encouraging. Ó Ríordáin said Ní file ach filíocht an bhean42 [poetry and not the poet is female]. Jump- ing off Shadows does include poems by Catherine Phil MacCarthy43 and Liz O’Donoghue,44 however, their poetry seems to have been more difficult to sustain initially, their voices were heard less often, returning with greater force in later years after a period of silence. This is the case for Catherine Phil MacCarthy; her poetry has gathered force and impetus over the past number of years, culminating with the award of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize in 2014. Her first published collection (a joint volume with Susan Connolly) appeared in 1991. Poetry, like power, would seem to have been distributed according to gender at that time. This view is supported by the misadventure of The Field Day Anthol- ogy of Irish Writing.45 Eavan Boland,46 commenting on the male view of literature, claims that “(Irish) men tend to see the literature as it was con- figured without women as real Irish literature and the other as ‘writing by women’—it’s not a conscious but a subliminal decision. Women are essentially quarantined”.47 Elsewhere in her writing, Boland has written per- suasively of the difficulty of emerging as an Irish woman poet.48 While the poets studied in this volume came to adulthood ten years after Boland, it would seem that the same principles continued to apply. Were the emerging women’s voices consigned to the “muted and ancillary roles”49 that Patricia Coughlan has said were attributed to women in the fifty years that followed the foundation of the Irish State? It would appear that the issue of gender and the place of Irish women poets had yet to be addressed in the male-dominated literary and academic circles covered by the remit of this book. These issues were later to become “central in the 1980s”50 as John Goodby acknowledges in Irish Poetry since 1950. However, at the time under study, those changes 1 BEGINNINGS 9 were still in the future. Indeed, the liminal, subaltern place of women in the universities was a widespread phenomenon and not just confined to UCC. A volume devoted to the role of women in Trinity College Dublin51 underlines the many inequalities faced by women there. The challenges to the system in force were led by among others a certain Mary Bourke (later Robinson), founding member of the Irish Women’s Liber- ation Movement established in 1970, who would later become professor of law at Trinity College Dublin and first woman President of Ireland. English Language Poets in University College Cork examines the historical setting and background in which the poets came to adulthood, both in Ireland in general and in Cork in particular, describing the city and the university which the poets inhabited in the 1970s. I was fortunate that two of the poets, Seán Dunne and Thomas McCarthy each wrote a volume of memoirs, which have proved to be invaluable sources in docu- menting the atmosphere and events of the times. The book examines the work of the poets in five chapters. This chapter is an exploration of the political and geographical background of the poets; Chapter 2, entitled “A Terrace of Generations”, studies at greater length the notion of a generation of poets. Chapter 3, called “Brindled Cats” after a poem by Gerry Murphy, will examine the poets’ preoccupation with language and translation, questioning the possibility of a cross- fertilisation between Irish and English and making the connection to the influences of European poetry. Chapter 4 looks at myth and history. It also analyses the place of Cork in the poetry of these poets, relating their vision of the city to that of their literary forerunners. Chapter 5 and final chapter looks at the poets as écrivains engagés, political beings involved in the struggle for social justice and equality, enabling an in-depth examination of issues of class, politics, ecology, and the perceived dangers of committed poetry. The chapter also examines the related issue of the ballad as a poetic form in Irish literary history. The city to which the student poets came at the beginning of the 1970s was a busy thriving place; it had recovered from the doldrums that had beset it in the interwar period.52 Elizabeth Bowen’s sketch of the city contained in a letter written to Charles Ritchie in 1945 captured a sense of the place53:

Oh yes and I went to Cork [city] on Friday, in the Gates’ lorry. What a fascinating city it is […] It’s very Continental; or rather, it’s so un-English (much more un-English than Dublin) that there’s nothing to call it but 10 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

Continental. It has a long and highly animated river front, lined with puce and pistachio coloured buildings. Several small steamers, with guns still mounted, along the docks. A long wide serpentine main street, which used to have beautiful buildings but they were burned down by the Black and Tans, or the IRA, during the troubles, and they have now been replaced by vast modern stores, Burton the ﬁfty-shilling tailor, Woolworths, etc. However most of the older part of the town’s intact.54

For Bowen, Cork had something foreign about it, an element that made it different from the rest of Ireland. Surrounded by a rich hinterland with the ﬁnest deep-water port in the British Isles, Cork had for centuries been a locus for trade and exchange. It was the second city of Ireland until 1841, in terms of population, when it was overtaken by Belfast; Cork was a merchant city where connections to the exotic elsewhere were constantly maintained. Unlike Dublin, ensconced in the English speaking Pale for centuries, Cork retained its Irish-speaking arrière-pays until the beginning of the twentieth century where the language continued to be spoken in places, such as Carrignavar, located within a twenty-mile radius of the city.55 In 1971, Cork had a population of 128,645,56 a thriving industrial base,57 with big factories like Fords, Dunlops and Sunbeam Wolsey employing thousands of workers. Cork Airport had been opened on the outskirts of the city in 1961. The city was home to two daily newspapers, The Cork Examiner, and its sister publication, The Evening Echo, a publishing house, an array of bookshops (APCK, the Mercier, the Lee Book- shop, Liam Ruiséal among others), several theatres, cinemas (including the Savoy with seating for 1800), a Film Festival (established in 1956)58, The Crawford School of Art and Design, and a vibrant musical scene that included an orchestral society, a school of music, and a choral festival. It had been a university city since Queen’s College Cork, established under the 1845 legislation, opened its doors in 1849. The novelist Eilís Dillon,59 arrivinginthecityfromGalwayuponher marriage to the academic Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin,60 recollected the sur- prises awaiting her when she came to Cork at the beginning of the 1940s, highlighting in her account the very real social divide that separated the well-to-do merchant families from the urban poor, contrasting the swag- ger of Cork with the uncertainty of Galway, a phenomenon visible both within the city where the old-moneyed Cork families continued to thrive, and in the countryside where: 1 BEGINNINGS 11

[…] the voices were stronger and more deﬁnite than any one would hear in the West. The nationalist people were immensely proud of their contribution to the War of Independence and were the nearest thing I had ever seen to Goldsmith’s ‘bold peasantry, their country’s pride’.61

This divide was also alluded to in an article by J. J. Lee in The Cork Examiner, the concluding article in a series on “The History of Cork”, published in 1985, the year Cork celebrated the 800th anniversary of the granting of its charter:

Cork acquired a rentier mentality, with the commercial classes astutely con- serving the accumulated capital of the city’s golden age. Family ﬁrms pre- dominated […] Businessmen ran their ﬁrms as tenants ran their farms, with a view to keeping them in the family, and to avoiding unnecessary risk. It was virtually impossible for outsiders, irrespective of their ability, to break into the charmed family circles. Comfortable stagnation bred something of the secretive, almost furtive attitudes in Irish businessmen that are associated with peasant mentalities.62

The social divide and the large industrial base also ensured the presence of an organised labour movement in Cork. Its beginnings can be traced back to figures like Michael O’Lehane (1873–1920) who set up the IDAA trade union to represent draper’s assistants at the beginning of the twentieth century.63 This tradition was pursued by Michael O’Riordan (1917– 2006), he fought on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War; on his return, after internment in the Curragh during the Emergency (the name by which the Second World War was known in Ireland), he became a trade union activist in the ITGWU (Irish Transport and General Workers Union) in Cork, and later in Dublin. A vibrant echo of that tradition is to be found in the poetry and prose writings of Patrick Galvin (1927– 2011),64 who after years spent outside Cork, returned to the city at the end of the 1980s. Together with his wife Mary Johnson, Galvin was an active figure in Cork’s literary and musical world, founding the Mun- ster Literature Centre in 1993. The preface to Patrick Galvin’s New and Selected Poems, published in 1996 and co-edited by Greg Delanty and Robert Welch, underlines his relationship with radical liberalism and with the working-class tradition of the city: “Cork had (and still has?) a working class not easily cowed and one keenly concerned with issues of social justice”.65 It will become obvious that Galvin, with his preoccupation for 12 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN social justice, his surrealist verse, and his attention to the oral tradition, would prove an exemplar for younger Cork poets. The Cork Examiner, though a daily national paper, was very much a regional newspaper, constantly referencing the province of Munster. Leading articles were placed under the headings The World, The Nation, The Province.66 Accounts of sporting events lauded Munster players, reinforcing a sense of provincial identity, even in the advertisements placed in the pages. Geraldine Neeson67 and Robert O’Donoghue68 devoted articles to a wide variety of cultural topics. O’Donoghue was responsible for the inclusion of new poetry in the Examiner, and the poetry col- umn was to provide many poets with their first payment for poems. Seán Dunne spoke of O’Donoghue with admiration as the man “who always seemed to have a cigarette, a theory and, if I needed it, a fiver”.69 The Examiner was later to employ Paul Durcan; his series of articles, initially devoted to contemporary poetry, provided an extraordinarily learned and broad initiation into the topic.70 Cork at the end of the sixties, like the republic as whole, had benefit- ted from the opening of the Irish economy to the world market.71 Full employment seemed possible, and with renewed confidence Irish people who had emigrated in previous years were returning to the country at the end of the 1960s, and the early 1970s.72 Thomas McCarthy in his memoir, Gardens of Remembrance, underlines the exceptional nature of those years: “It was the first and the last times in Irish life when people seemed entirely absorbed in the present”.73 For all that, severe social inequalities persisted. Cork remained, as Eilís Dillon intuited, a divided city, symbolised by the well-to-do citizens inhabiting the twin-peaks of Montenotte and Sunday’s Well, while the poor clustered in the areas which had been traditionally allocated to those who lived outside the city gates, Blackpool, Gurranabraher, the marshes.74 Henry Alan Jeffries highlights the lack of private house building in Cork in the interwar years and notes that when building of private housing did take off, in the 1950s, very little was undertaken on the north side of the city.75 Ireland’s economic development, under the stewardship of TK Whitaker, had moved away from a protectionist, pre-industrialised state dependent on agriculture,76 yet its development was blighted by the fail- ure to provide free secondary education to the masses,77 and, despite opposition to the issue,78 Donogh O’Malley forged ahead and introduced 1 BEGINNINGS 13 an education bill in September 1966, making an impassioned speech about the one in three citizens who do not receive any further education.79 As a result, free secondary schooling became available to a cohort of pupils who under the previous system would have stayed at primary school until they reached school-leaving age, which was raised to 15 in 1972. Seán Dunne refers to the change in mentalities that the opportu- nities of employment and further schooling opened for the people who lived in the working-class estate, St John’s Park Waterford, in his memoir In My Father’s House:

Our parents mostly had grown up in an impoverished Ireland. Now, as people stayed at home and factories seemed to be opening everywhere, there was a desire to get on in life. It was no longer the case that children would leave school, like my father, at the age of thirteen; neither would they walk barefoot through the streets and lanes with nothing before them only the boat to England or America.80

The poverty of previous generations seemed to be a thing of the past. Thomas McCarthy’s memories of the small west Waterford town of Cap- poquin are also of full employment:

Young men and women crowded the streets, pouring out of The Cappo- quin Bacon Factory and O’Connor’s Chickens to change their cheques in Maurice Kelleher’s or James Russell’s shops. It was the era of the blue- collar hero. Education was laughed at. Jobs were easy to come by, especially if you had a friend or a lover already working in ‘the Factory’ or O’Connor’s.81

A knock-on effect from the legislation was the provision of higher education grants82 that ensured that children reaching a certain level of educational attainment would also have access to a university education through the provisions of a grant scheme.83 This change is borne out in the statistics. Universities across the country were transformed by this development, which was coupled with the student revolt that spread across Europe in the summer of 1968. University College Cork was no exception. The portals of the university were opened to people who in some instances were not alone the ﬁrst in their families to go to university but also the ﬁrst to attend a second-level institution. Seán Dunne underlines what the change the absence of school fees meant: 14 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

When the time came for me to attend secondary school, my aunt encouraged me to think of going there. In time, I became the ﬁrst person in my father’s branch of the Dunne family to sit the Leaving Cert exam—a situ- ation that would bring its problems as well. The fees for secondary school had been prohibitive, but changes in the system meant that everyone who wanted to could attend secondary school and, with the help of a scholarship, go on to university. This was the path I would eventually take, along with a number of my friends, and it was an unknown territory for all of us.84

The university that admitted them was undergoing a period of tran- sition. The institution devoted to educating the children of the middle- class burghers of the city and the surrounding areas evoked with much vehemence by Seán O’Faoláin in Vive Moi!,85 or indeed in David Mar- cus’s Oughtobiography: Leaves from the Diary of a Hyphenated Jew,86 was changing. The portrait of the university outlined in those volumes is of a sleepy place, a bastion of privilege for the children of the well-to-do families in the city. However, John A Murphy’s account of the college in the 1950s records the beginning of a process of change, pointing to the high number of scholarship students and the intense intellectual debate and exchanges that took place, particularly within the walls of the Honan Hostel where, in the main, scholarship students lodged.87 Many talented individuals were on the university staff, among them were Seán Ó Tuama, professor of Irish, who, as we have seen earlier, encouraged and nurtured the talent of the budding Irish-language poets that formed the INNTI group. However, as Thomas McCarthy underlined in an interview, there was a recognition that Seán Ó Tuama was interested in literature in general and not just in Irish language literature, the choice of the language of expression was an accident of fate. Oth- ers like Professor Aloys Fleischmann88 had a profound inﬂuence on the musical affairs of the country that ranged far beyond the walls of the university. He established the Cork Choral Festival in 1954, he also directed the Cork Symphony Orchestra, which he set up in UCC in 1934, and gave invaluable support to Joan Denise Moriarty89 in her ventures to develop Irish ballet. This undertaking led in 1973 to the founding of the Irish National Ballet, which was based in Cork. The university recruited new members of faculty, creating a position of lecturer in Irish history, for example, to which they appointed John A. Murphy in 1962. Among the faculty recruited the same year was 1 BEGINNINGS 15

Seán Lucy, himself, like Murphy, a graduate of UCC. Lucy succeeded Bridget G. MacCarthy90 as Professor of English. Born in India in 1931 to an Irish father soldiering in the British Army, Seán Lucy was a poet at heart; his collection of poetry Unfinished Sequence and other poems was published in 1979. Former students recall with great affection his stirring declamation of poetry in lectures, but most of all the encouragement and constructive criticism proffered to would-be poets. He readily com- municated his passion for the form and began to surround himself with likeminded spirits. Lucy had been in college with the composer and musician Seán Ó Riada91 who had taken up a post as a lecturer in music in UCC in 1963,92 and it was through this connection that John Montague came to Cork. Ó Riada and Montague met through the offices of Garech Browne, with whom Montague had founded Claddagh Records. In his memoir, The Pear is Ripe, Montague pays tribute to the extraordinary talent of Ó Riada, not just where traditional Irish music is concerned but also in the area of jazz and classical music. In Montague’s account, it was Ó Riada who recommended Lucy to him: “‘There’s someone there,’ he assured me, ‘you’ll understand him yet.’”93 At the wake afterwards, it was Ruth Ó Riada, Seán’s widow, who commanded him to return to Ireland: “Ó Riada’s wife Ruth glimpsed me as I entered the wakehouse. ‘Seán told me a lot about you,’ she said, and added firmly, ‘It’s time for you to come home’”.94 The cohesion between poets, musicians and scholars was apparent at Pléaraca an Riadaigh held on the third anniversary of Ó Riada’s death when all strands of the Irish arts world, from the Irish Ballet Company, soprano Bernadette Greevy, pianist Charles Lynch and traditional musicians like Tomás Ó Canainn (at the time, a lecturer in the engineering department in UCC) and The Chieftains, joined John Montague, Seán Lucy and Thomas Kinsella for two-day event in honour of the man.95 Thomas McCarthy recalls Montague’s arrival in a series of diary entries written to honour Montague’s 60th birthday:

January 15. Cork. Bleak incessant rain hammering off the roofscape below our house. Corkery rain O’Connor rain. Just like the rain that was beating down on Cork during the ﬁrst winter the Montagues spent here. John arrived here to stay after years of wandering and, in particular, the collapse of his life in Paris. Yet his new love, Evelyn Robson, was also French. Seán Ó Riada, the composer, had persuaded Seán Lucy to invite Montague to Cork, to take him away from Paris where—Ó Riada feared—he was 16 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

becoming too much a “pet” of the Paris scene. When Montague arrived in Cork in the early Seventies, he was bursting with energy: energy radiated from his massive physique, always clad in a massive overcoat, ﬁlling space with the same kind of weight as Ted Hughes.96

And that kind of energy was needed to bring poetry to a city connected in literary life to the short story form, to the city recreated by Frank O’Connor and Seán O’Faoláin. The association was there in John Montague’s mind. He had met O’Faoláin in Dublin and for him O’Fao- lain was an exiled Cork man. He also got to know Frank O’Connor’s friends, notably Nancy McCarthy. Montague would meet with them after artistic events in the Opera House and at events organised by the Cork ArtsSocietywhenhecametoliveinCork:

And through the Cork Arts Society on Lavitt’s Quay, we were welcomed by a small group of Cork people connected with the arts: the sculptor Seamus Murphy, his wife Mairead, and journalists like Geraldine Neeson and Robert O’Donoghue. I remember, as a kind of revelation, Seamus showing me how to walk home across the town at night from his house, always keeping ‘the much divided flood’ of Spenser’s Lee in view. I came to feel and affection for the terraced streets of this hilly city, an Irish Bergen or San Francisco, from which I could gaze down at the flashing harbour lights, reminding me that Cork was still a bustling port. I resolved to try and find an eyrie, from which I could view this urban energy, from the trains drawing in and out of Glanmire Station, to the maritime gleam and clang of the dockyards, and the occasional plane climbing from the then- little airport.97

For Thomas McCarthy too, Cork city was linked to short story writers: “While in secondary school we had studied the social-realist stories of O’Connor and O’Faoláin, so I’d already decided that Cork was not a city of poets. The short-story writers must have forced the poets to ﬂee”.98 Together Montague and Lucy would make a space for poetry at the university and encourage the talents of the students who were already convinced of the importance of poetry. Thomas McCarthy, for instance, evokes his complete immersion in poetry in those days:

A university education provides a youth with my background—rural quasi- working class—with insulation; one is insulated from the forces that swept through one’s childhood, political and social. University is the ﬁrst ivory 1 BEGINNINGS 17

tower that is given to us: we either use the ivory tower well, like Yeats, or badly, like the witch in Rapunzel. Campus life removes us from our original context; we are rescued from the swineherds. But in 1975 or 1976 I was completely absorbed into the world created by books—I wandered from campus café to pub to campus café carrying Jeffares’s Commentary on the Variorum Edition of the Poems of William Butler Yeats.99

John Montague, in an interview for this book, himself evokes the energy and spirit of Cork that seemed to be in the air at that time in accounting for his decision:

I wanted to move back to Ireland because of all that was happening in the world. And after teaching in Berkeley and at Nanterre I wanted to ﬁnd an exciting place in Ireland to stir matters up and so, in January 1972, I yielded to Seán’s entreaties and came.100

The energy and enthusiasm of Montague and Lucy were reﬂected in a change in the university syllabus. University calendars from the 1970s trace the evolution of courses available. Although initially rooted ﬁrmly in an examination of texts and authors from previous centuries, the syllabus was renewed under the guidance of Montague and Lucy to include modernist poetry (Montague recalls their “Waste Land duet”101) contemporary poetry, particularly American poetry. Montague also recalls how he was determined to change the mode of teaching, encouraging exchanges between teachers and students, galvanis- ing them with stirring analyses of Wordsworth, attempting to reproduce the style of teaching he had been exposed to in the United States:

But brimming with the zeal of Berkeley and Vincennes, I could not give standard lectures, to be taken down diligently by a battalion of docile pens, and then learnt by heart for the examinations. I had been exposed to a new way of teaching, with an attempt at exchange between student and teacher, and where it was assumed that the classroom was a forum for dialogue and challenge, and the teacher was not a separate and sacred being, despite his solemn gown. (Which in any case I decided not to wear.)102

Perhaps just as important as the changes in syllabus and style were the initiatives taken in bringing important poets to the university. John Mon- tague’s extensive contacts meant that he was able to invite poets of the stature of Robert Graves or Hugh MacDiarmid to UCC. Montague also 18 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN established his own small press, The Golden Stone,103 which published a number of select editions. Among them was an edition of André Fré- naud’s poems translated into English by Montague and his second wife, Evelyn Robson. Entitled November, the book was illustrated with wood- cuts by Raoul Ubac. Frénaud came to Cork in 1977 for the launch, and the two poets read together at UCC. The English Literature society was also very active, inviting Seamus Heaney and Michael Hartnett. The university also had a successful publishing outlet for the students with the student magazine The Quarryman appearing regularly. It contained the writings of many emerging poets. However, notably under the stewardship of Greg Delanty, it also spread its net to include older more established writers to participate as well, weaving the new writers into part of the literary fabric of the age. Theo Dorgan writing of the moment in history, which saw the INNTI poets emerge, is also writing about the time when he and the other poets came of age:

The power of the State to contain reality had withered. The electronic age and the ﬁrst world generation were upon us, rock and roll had thun- dered out across the world and the short-lived counter culture, for a dizzy moment, held the commanding heights. The ﬁrst trans-national generation had arrived to claim their place in the sun […].

In the following chapters, the spotlight will be turned on the poets themselves and on their work.

Notes

1. Filí INNTI go h-iontach, Léachtaí Cholmchille, IM XXVI, 2011, Filíocht Ghaeilge na Linne, monographs on the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill have been published. 2. With the notable exceptions of John Kerrigan and Ray Ryan. 3. Sebastian Barry, The Inherited Boundaries: Younger Poets of the Republic of Ireland, Dublin, Dolmen, 1986. 4. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (b. 1942), Poet, translator, professor emerita of English at TCD. 5. Augustus Young, nom de plume of James Hogan (b. 1943), avant-garde poet and epidemiologist. Now lives in France. The poetry anthology, Jumping off Shadows, Greg Delanty and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (eds.), Cork University Press, Cork, 1995) provides a 1 BEGINNINGS 19

very useful guide to the poets who attended UCC in the second part of the twentieth century. 6. Both Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Augustus Young were the children of members of faculty at UCC. Ní Chuilleanáin’s father, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, was Professor of Irish and Augustus Young’s father, James Hogan, was Professor of History. 7. Paul Durcan (b. 1944), Irish poet. Former Ireland Professor of Poetry (2004–2007). He was a student in UCC during the 1970s, where he studied archaeology and medieval history. He also edited the initial numbers of The Cork Review. 8. See the introductory chapter to Frank Sewell, Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000. 9. Seán Dunne (ed.), Poets of Munster: An Anthology, London and Dingle, Anvil and Brandon, 1985, p. 25. 10. Daniel Corkery (1878–1964), Cultural nationalist, poet, short story writer. Professor of English at UCC. Author of the inﬂuential Hidden Ireland (1924) a study of the poetry of Munster in the eighteenth century. 11. Philip O’Leary, Introduction to Jumping off Shadows: Selected Contem- porary Irish Poets, op. cit., pp. xvi–xxii. 12. Daniel Corkery’s appointment to UCC is recounted in Seán O’Faoláin in Vive Moi! O’Faoláin was the unlucky candidate who got two votes. O’Faoláin’s adventures, he claimed, “would have enchanted Gogol”. Vive Moi!, London, Sinclair Stevenson [1963] 1993, p. 263. 13. Francis Sylvester Mahony (1804–1866), poet and journalist born in Cork. Educated at Clongowes Wood College and on the continent. Ordained a priest in Lucca, appointed to the diocese of Cork. Went to London in 1834 and there contributed to Fraser’s Magazine through the Cork connection of Willam Maginn. He published The Reliques of Father Prout in 1837, the imaginary translations of an imaginary parish priest, with line drawings by Daniel Macalise. He settled in Paris in 1848. He is buried in the vault in Shandon. 14. Seán O’Faoláin (1900–1991), born in Cork. Inﬂuential novelist, short story writer, editor of The Bell. 15. See, for example, the work undertaken in Oxford at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College. 16. Karl Mannheim, The Collected Works of Karl Mannheim, Vol. 5, London, Routledge [1952] 1997, pp. 276–320. 17. Donogh O’Malley introduced free education in 1967. This act made secondary education free to all pupils. The old scholarship system for access to university was also replaced by means-tested grants, thus ensur- ing access to higher education for a far greater number of students. 20 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

18. Among the declarations made during Vatican 2 was the statement on education Gravissimum educationis, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_ gravissimum-educationis_en.html, consulted 20 March 2012. 19. This is the case for both Thomas McCarthy and Seán Dunne for instance. They both came to university having had poems published in local journals or newspapers. 20. David Wyatt, Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 21. Dillon Johnston, The Poetic Economies of Ireland and England, 1912– 2000, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Of special interest for this study is the last two chapters pp. 128–208. 22. See the account in Tomás Ó Cannainn’s biography, Seán Ó Riada, His Life and Work, Cork, The Collins Press, 2003, p. 89. 23. Athbheochan na Gaeilge. The Restoration of the Irish Language.Arnalea- gan ag an Rialtas faoi bhraid gach Tigh den Oireachtas, BAC, Eanair, 1965. However, as Terence Brown has pointed out in Ireland a Social and Cultural History 1922–2002, London, HarperCollins, 2010, p. 259, the White Paper also acknowledges the implicit bilingual nature of the country as it stresses the fact that competent knowledge of English is required. 24. Seán Ó Ríordáin (1916–1977), born in Baile Mhúirne, Irish-language poet recognised as being a proto-modernist. He was a very influential figure in modern Irish literature. 25. Seán Ó Ríordáin, Brosna, Dublin, Sairséal & Dill, 1964, p. 8. 26. See Frank Sewell on the conflict felt by Ó Ríordáin with regard to writing in Irish, and the dangers of impurities in the language, which Sewell refers to as writing with la plume de ma tante/my aunt’s pen, Sewell op. cit., pp. 28–33, and later characterises him as being caught between Corkery and Joycery. Ibid., p. 37. 27. Seán Ó Tuama (1926–2006), born in Cork, poet, dramatist, critic. Pro- fessor of Modern Irish UCC. 28. Ó Ríordáin himself felt guilt at this post where he was supposed to be available to speak to students but which he felt was not real work. After his death, many uncashed paychecks were found among his belongings. I am indebted to Professor Seán Ó Coileáin for drawing my attention to this fact. For an account of Ó Ríordáin’s appointment to UCC see Seán Ó Coileáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin Beatha agus Saothar, BAC, An Cló- chomhar, 1982, p. 349. 29. Seán Ó Tuama, An Grá in Amhráin na nDaoine, Dublin, An Cló- chomhar, 1960. 30. Barry McCrea, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 2015, p. 75. 1 BEGINNINGS 21

31. See on this topic Thomas Dillon Redshaw, “Liam Miller and Poetry Publishing in Ireland” Irish University Review, Spring/Summer 2012, pp. 141–154. 32. Seán Lucy (ed.), Love Poems of the Irish (1967), Five Irish Poets (1970), and Irish Poets in English (1972), Cork, Mercier Press. 33. For an analysis of some of these illusions see Kieran Keohane, “The Accumulation of Cultural Capital in ‘Cork: European City of Culture 2005’”, The Irish Review, Vol. 34, 2006, pp. 130–154. 34. See the discussion on this topic in relation to Seamus Heaney in Hans Werner Ludwig, “Province and Metropolis, Centre and Periphery”, Hans Werner Ludwig and Lothar Fietz Poetry in the British Isles; Non- Metropolitan Perspectives, Cardiff, Cardiff University Press, 1999, pp. 47– 69. 35. Frank O’Connor, 1903–1966 nom de plume of Michael Francis O’Donovan. Contemporary and friend of O’Faoláin, pupil of Corkery. Short story writer and novelist. 36. Patrick Crotty, Emeritus Professor of Irish and Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen also attended UCC in the years under review. 37. Patrick Crotty, “Introduction”, Modern Irish Poetry an Anthology, Patrick Crotty (ed.), Belfast, Blackstaff Press [1995] 2003, pp. 5, p. 1–7. 38. This is the case for the papers of Greg Delanty for instance, acquired during the boom years of the Celtic Tiger they languish in an outly- ing depot of the NLI awaiting cataloguing. The acquisition of Delanty’s more recent papers by UCC library in 2016 is to be welcomed. 39. Diarmaid Ferriter, Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s, London, Profile Books, 2012. 40. John A. Murphy, The College: A History of Queen’s/University College Cork, Cork, Cork University Press, 1995. 41. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (b. 1952), born in Lancashire, brought up in Kerry. One of the INNTI poets. A strong, vibrant, original voice. Her poetry has been much translated into English, notably by Paul Muldoon 42. Seán Ó Ríordáin, Tar Éis Mo Bhás, Baile Átha Cliath, Sáirséal - Ó Mar- caigh, [1978], 1982, p. 45. 43. Catherine Phil MacCarthy (b. 1954), student of English at UCC in the 1970s, she went on to study at TCD and the Central Drama School. The author of five individual collections, originally published by Salmon and Blackstaff, she is now part of the Dedalus Press stable of poets. 44. Liz O’Donoghue (b. 1960) explains in an interview that she fell silent as a poet because she was caught up in the everyday business of raising a child and making a living. She attributes her return writing to a conversation with Gerry Murphy, http://fishousepoems.org/archives/liz_ odonoghue/liz_odonoghue_qa_on_becoming_a_poet.shtml, consulted 14 June 2012. 22 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

45. The initial publication of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature (1992, gen. ed. S. Deane) accorded very little space to Irish women’s writing. Two further volumes were published in 2002 to correct this oversight. 46. Eavan Boland (b. 1944), born in Dublin. Educated at TCD. Poet and critic. Professor at Stanford University. 47. Eavan Boland quoted in Katherine Martin Gray, “The Attic LIPs”, Bor- der Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities, Kathryn Kirkpatrick ( ed.), Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2001, pp. 269–298, p. 273. 48. Eavan Boland, Object Lessons, Manchester, Carcanet, 1995. 49. Patricia Coughlan, “Irish Literature and Feminism in Postmodernity?”, Journal of HJEAS, Irish Literature and Culture: Getting into Contact, Vol. 10, No. 1–2, Spring/Fall 2004, pp. 175–202. 50. John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 227. 51. Susan M. Parkes (ed.), A Danger to the Men?: A History of Women in TCD 1904–2004, Dublin, Lilliput Press, 2004. 52. See Barry Brunt, “Industry and Environment”, The Atlas of Cork,J.S. Crowley et al. (ed.), Cork, Cork University Press, 2005, pp. 369–376. 53. As Kevin Hourihan has pointed out in “Cork City in the Twentieth Century” (The Atlas of Cork, op. cit., pp. 265–277), little centre city urban modiﬁcation occurred between the time of Bowen’s writing this letter and the urban renewal projects undertaken between 1986 and 2005. Photographs of the city centre in the early 1970s show a city centre not dissimilar to that captured by Bowen, with the exception of the mounted guns and Burton’s Penny Tailors. In 1977, Burton’s had become Burton, Montague Co. Ltd. Thoms’ Commercial Directory, http://www.corkpastandpresent.ie/places/stpatricksstreet/ businessdirectories/1976/, consulted 18 June 2012. Photographs, Cork Examiner Photo Archive. 54. Victoria Glendinning (ed.), Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen & Charles Ritchie Letters & Diaries 1941–1973, London, Simon & Schuster, 2008, pp. 47–48. Bowen’s enthusiastic account of the wide range of cosmetics available in Cork city contrasts with Con Houlihan’s memory of the penury that pervaded the city in the immediate post-war period. See http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/ con-houlihan/when-brown-paper-wasnt-for-parcels-1473265.html, consulted 06 June 2012. 55. See 1901 census for Cork and the surrounding areas. 56. Source 1971 Census, Central Statistics Ofﬁce. The population of Cork had increased by 7.5% at the end of the decade, reaching 138,267 in 1979. 1 BEGINNINGS 23

57. As Henry Alan Jeffries points out the end of the Second World War Cork’s industrial base was languishing, a result of the economic war, the closure of the British Naval installation and the decline in the Naval trade as a result of the “Emergency”. It was only in the 1950s that the situ- ation began to improve with the establishment of the Marina Industrial Estate, the Irish Refining Company and the Verolme Dockyard among others. Henry Alan Jeffries, “Modern Cork”, Cork Historical Perspectives, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2004, pp. 206–216. 58. For an account of the Film Festival and cinema-going in Cork see Kieran O’Connor, “Milk Baths and Monkey Suits: A Brief History of the Cork Film Festival”, The Cork Review, 1997, pp. 18–21. 59. Eilís Dillon (1920–1994), novelist and children’s author. Best known for her children’s book The Island of Horses and the historical novel, Across the Bitter Sea. Daughter of Thomas Dillon (1884–1971) Pro- fessor of Chemistry in UCG. Mother of poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. After Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin’s death, she later married scholar and critic Vivian Mercier (1919–1989). Her great-grandfather, William Kirby Sul- livan, had served as President of Queen’s College Cork from 1873 to 1890. 60. Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin (1902–1970), Professor of Irish in UCC from 1950 to 1965. 61. Eilís Dillon, “A Writer in Cork”, Cork Writers and Writing: The Cork Review, 1993, p. 36. 62. J. J. Lee, “Rebuilding Confidence”, Cork Examiner, Wednesday 27 November 1985, p. 8. 63. The celebrated American labour organiser known as Mother Jones was also born in Cork. Mary Harris was born near the North Cathedral in Cork in 1837. Her family emigrated to America after the famine and she became involved in the labour movement at the age of 60. 64. Vincent Woods presented an edition of the Arts Programme on RTE Radio 1 devoted to Patrick Galvin on 30 May 2011, “Patrick Galvin Remembered”, it is available at http://www.rte.ie/radio1/artstonight/ 300511.html. 65. Greg Delanty and Robert Welch, “Introduction”, New and Selected Poems of Patrick Galvin, Cork, Cork University Press, 1996, pp. vii– xvi, p. xi. 66. The Cork Examiner, 1971–1979. Microfilm, NLI. 67. Geraldine Neeson (née Sullivan) 1895–1980, was a pianist and music teacher. A student of Tilly Fleischmann, she pursued a lifelong friendship with the Fleischmann family. She was bridesmaid to Muriel Murphy on her marriage to Terence MacSwiney. She was a regular columnist with The Cork Examiner, writing articles on art and music. 24 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

68. Robert O’Donoghue (1929–2008), playwright, critic, columnist, literary editor of The Cork Examiner and father of poet Gregory O’Donoghue. 69. Seán Dunne, “Introduction”, The Cork Anthology, Seán Dunne (ed.), Cork, Cork University Press, 1993, pp. 1–22, p. 7. 70. Paul Durcan Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 45,797/1-9. 71. By 1973, foreign firms accounted for almost a third of all manufacturing jobs in Ireland. Cormac Ó Grada, A Rocky Road: The Irish Economy Since the 1920s, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 115. 72. Emigration had declined and the population of Cork had grown steadily from the 1961 census (CSO Statistics 1961, 1966, 1971, 1979 census results on line). Diarmaid Ferriter makes the point that the people who left in the 1960s did so for career, income or education goals. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, London, Profile Books, 2010, p. 542. 73. Thomas McCarthy, Gardens of Remembrance, Dublin, New Island Books, 1998, p. 25. 74. This division corresponds to the mythologised version of Cork City as represented in Frank O’Connor’s short stories. It is supported by the autobiography of the Cork poet Patrick Galvin, Song for a Raggy Boy: A Cork Boyhood Trilogy, Dublin, New Island Books [1999] 2002. 75. Henry Alan Jeffries, Cork Historical Perspectives, pp. 210–211. 76. For an account of the modernisation of the Irish economy, see Cormac ÓGrada,A Rocky Road: The Irish Economy Since the 1920s Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600– 1972, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 577–582. 77. See the discussion on this topic in John Vaizey, “Education and the Irish Economy”, The Irish Journal of Education, Vol. i, 2, 1967, pp. 113– 123. See also the discussion in Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, London, Profile Books [2004] 2005, pp. 596–599. 78. As John Coolahan points out, many of the school managers of secondary schools felt aggrieved because lack of discussion and notice. John Coola- han, Irish Education History and Structure, Dublin, IPA, 1981, p. 195. Coolahan notes the rise in numbers attending second-level schools: from 148,000 in 1966/1967 to 239,000 in 1974. 79. Dail debates NAI/DT 97/6/612 Education developments, 14 Septem- ber 1966. Ferriter. 80. Seán Dunne, In My Father’s House, Dublin, Anna Livia Press, 1991, p. 8. 81. Thomas McCarthy, Gardens of Remembrance, op. cit., p. 24. 82. This was also the result of the recommendations of the Commission of Higher Education 1960–1967, set up at the behest of the then Minister for Education, Dr. Patrick Hillery. 83. See John Coolahan, Irish Education, op. cit., p. 248. 84. Seán Dunne, In My Father’s House,op.cit.,p.61. 1 BEGINNINGS 25

85. Seán O’Faolain, Vive Moi!,op.cit. 86. David Marcus, Oughtobiography, Leaves from the Diary of a Hyphenated Jew, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 2001. David Marcus (1924–2009), born Cork. Novelist, poet, editor. Promoter of Irish Writing for many years in the “New Irish Writing” pages in The Irish Press. 87. See John A. Murphy, The College: A History of University College Cork, Cork, Cork University Press, 1995, pp. 267–297. Eilís Dillon and Cor- mac Ó Cuilleanáin administered The Honan Hostel. See essay “In the Honan Hostel”, Eilís Dillon, in The Cork Anthology, Seán Dunne (ed.), Cork, Cork University Press, 1993, pp. 107–114. 88. Aloys Fleischmann (1910–1992), son of Tilly Swertz (pianist and teacher) and Aloys Fleichsmann (choirmaster and organist). Aloys Óg was educated in UCC and in Germany, Professor of Music in UCC in 1934–1980. He was a composer and conductor and did much to advance the cause of music in Ireland. For an account of his early career, see Séamus de Barra’s article, http://journalofmusic.com/focus/aloys- ﬂeischmann-and-idea-irish-composer, consulted 16 June 2012. 89. Joan Denise Moriarty (1912–1992) student of Marie Rambert, dancer, teacher, the driving force behind the Irish National Ballet (1973–1989). See biography by Ruth Fleischmann, Joan Denise Moriarty: Founder of the Irish National Ballet, Cork, Mercier Press, 1998. 90. Bridget G. MacCarthy, author of the two-volume The Female Pen: The Later Women Novelists, 1744–1818, Cork, Cork University Press, p. 194. For an account of BG MacCarthy’s teaching, see Con Houli- han’s article which underlines the fact that MacCarthy also placed great store in poetry, getting students to learn vast quantities of poetry by heart, http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/con-houlihan/ when-brown-paper-wasnt-for-parcels-1473265.html, consulted 6 June 2012. 91. Tomás Ó Canainn, Seán Ó Riada: His Life and Work, Collins Press [2003] 2004, pp. 12–24. Ó Canainn suggests that it was Seán Lucy’s father, Colonel Lucy, whose reference may have helped to obtain the post of Assistant Director of Music at RTE for Ó Riada. 92. Ó Canainn, Seán Ó Riada, op. cit., p. 142. 93. John Montague, The Pear Is Ripe, Dublin, Liberties Press, 2007, p. 202. 94. Idem. 95. Mary Leland, “Vision of Ó Riada Not Buried, Says Poet of Cúil Aodha”, The Irish Times, 30 September 1974, p. 9. 96. Thomas McCarthy, “On the Edge Is Best”, Hill Field: Poems & Memoirs for John Montague on his Sixtieth Birthday, Thomas Dillon Redshaw (ed.), Minneapolis: Coffee House Press/Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1989, pp. 61–66, p. 61. 97. Montague, The Pear Is Ripe, op. cit., p. 209. 26 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

98. Thomas McCarthy, Gardens of Remembrance, op. cit., p. 47. 99. Ibid., p. 44. 100. John Montague, interview with the author. Rue Daguerre, Paris, 2 December 2011. 101. John Montague, The Pear Is Ripe, op. cit., p. 214. 102. Ibid., p. 211. 103. The Golden Stone’s books were printed by Dolmen. There were three editions in all. Montague’s The Cave of the Night, Ó Riada’s Farewell, and Frénaud’s November. CHAPTER 2

A Terrace of Generations

Abstract Mannheim’s thinking on generations plays a central role in this chapter. It presents the biographical details of the poets under study Greg Delanty, Theo Dorgan, Sean Dunne, Gerry Murphy, Thomas McCarthy, Gregory O’Donoghue, Maurice Riordan and discusses their habitus in Bourdieusian terms. The various venues for the practice of poetry in the Cork of 1970s are evoked, and attention is paid to student publications, notably in the journal The Quarryman. Continuing connections between the poets are traced.

Keywords Mannheim · The Quarryman · Greg Delanty · Theo Dorgan · Sean Dunne · Gerry Murphy · Thomas McCarthy · Gregory O’Donoghue · Maurice Riordan

In a university existence a generation, according to Mannheim’s terms, can be formed not just by people taking the same degree together, or by being at university at the same time, but by occupying the same space, publishing in the same pages, reading the same books, exchanging and commenting on each other’s work—the anxiety of inﬂuence, conﬂuence and conversation. The students who came to UCC at the end of the golden Lemass period, before the country was crippled again by another economic recession brought on by the 1st oil crisis, were carefree and

© The Author(s) 2020 27 C. Ní Ríordáin, English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38573-6_2 28 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN unfettered by vocational concerns. For many of these students, the university was unknown territory, a place of experimentation and knowledge rather than a clear plotted path to a job, as it was for so many students from Cork’s professional classes.1 These students read, exchanged books, ideas, rarely went to lectures and came to sample the life that was on offer on campus. They came from different backgrounds. Some, like Greg Delanty (b. 1958), Theo Dorgan (b. 1953) and Gerry Murphy (b. 1952), Gregory O’Donoghue (1951–2005) came from Cork city. Others, like Seán Dunne (1956–1995) and Thomas McCarthy (b. 1954) were born in county Waterford, while Maurice Riordan (b. 1953) hailed from rural East Cork. In common with most adolescents of the time, all of the poets under study were educated in religious run schools (Christian Brothers, Pre- sentation Brothers, Mercy Sisters, Diocesan Seminary), at a time when a nationalist vision of Irish history and the Irish language was still very much central to the curriculum. They were schoolboys when the 50th anniversary commemorations of the 1916 Rising happened, capturing their imagination as much as Cowboys and Indians. Greg Delanty’s poem “The Hellbox” is eloquent on that subject:

And where we played the Easter Rising. I was Fierce Pearse, wheelchair Connolly and Cork’s own Big Fella, Never Joseph Mary Plunkett, wearing my Billy the Kid cowboy hat Pinned to one side Volunteer-style; though somewhat reluctantly I took my turn as being an executing Tommy.2

While Justin Quinn, in his essay “The Disappearance of Ireland”,3 has argued convincingly that concerns about the matter of Ireland were no longer perceptible in the poetry of the younger generation born after 1960, Dublin-born Michael O’Loughlin4 has alluded to the change that happened in the schooling of his generation, where overnight ballads and songs evoking Ireland’s “rebel past” were banned because of the outbreak of the Troubles. For O’Loughlin, the result was a group of writers who rejected political ideology and mistrusted the political narratives imposed by the state. The poets under consideration in this volume often engage with the matter of Ireland through the medium of translation, history and mythology, but are also highly sceptical of any prescriptive national history, frequently highlighting the diversity of the story of the island and referring to poetic models outside the narrowly national or nationalistic. 2 A TERRACE OF GENERATIONS 29

The poets themselves were born in the Munster hinterland, which has sent the vast majority of students to UCC since its inception.5 Thomas McCarthy hails from the small rural west Waterford town of Cappoquin. Born into a staunch Fianna Fáil family, the second of four children, his early life was marked by his father’s depression6; his mother struggled to make ends meet, frustrated by a husband who seemed divorced from the realities of everyday living. McCarthy’s talent for writing had emerged when he was a schoolboy at the Convent of Mercy in Cappoquin. He became the editor of the school magazine, The Golden Fleece, and to ﬁll up the pages wrote some poems himself. This is an account of the event in a text written for the Laois writer’s scheme:

I wrote my ﬁrst poem for a school magazine. Sister Carmel and Brigid Coughlan, our two English teachers, organised a magazine publishing project with the two third year classes at the Convent of Mercy Co-Ed in Cappoquin. I was the editor. As we were short of poems for the Christ- mas issue I wrote a poem about Vietnam. A girl I had a crush on in the classroom next to mine said that she loved my poem. I was thrilled. Sud- denly poetry had power, personal power. Then I began to write love-poems for her. I haven’t stopped writing poetry since.7

McCarthy thus became hooked on the power of the word and convinced of his writing life at the age of 15 or 16.8 More public recognition came later with the publication of one of his poems in The Irish Times while he was still in school,9 earning him the support and encouragement of the literary editor Terence de Vere White. This event was coupled with the influence of Brigadier Denis FitzGerald on his life. McCarthy got a part-time gardening job with Brigadier FitzGerald, a descendant of the Duke of Leinster. Brigadier Fitzgerald had been educated at Eton and Sandhurst and was commissioned in the Irish Guards in 1932.10 Through Brigadier FitzGerald, Thomas McCarthy came to know a West Water- ford ascendency world inhabited by people like Molly Keane (pseudonym of the novelist MJ Farrell) and her husband Senator John Keane (Fifth Baronet of Cappoquin), and Patricia11 and Claud Cockburn. Brigadier Fitzgerald gave McCarthy a garden room in which he could write. The money from his gardening allowed him a discretionary income, which meant that he could indulge his passion for books. When he came to Cork, he haunted the bookshops, in particular the Lee bookshop, an 30 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN excellent second-hand bookshop which also served as a small publishing house. Seán Dunne was the eldest of four children. He grew up in St John’s Park in Waterford city. His father, Richie Dunne, was an unskilled labourer in the paper mills in the city. His mother Maureen died at the age of 33, when Dunne was just 4 years old. His father’s family came from the fishing village of Dunmore East and Dunne spent some of his summer holidays there every year as a child. Life there was rural and rus- tic, with water drawn from the well and the nights marked by the light from the Hook Head lighthouse. His mother’s family, the Walshes, were musicians. Dunne establishes a contrast in his memoir between the rural, sports loving Dunnes and the more artistic, urban Walshes; it is clear that he identifies with the sensibility of his mother’s people, telling of the prize-winning poem she published as a schoolgirl and the influence of her surviving sisters on his childhood. English was the subject that he excelled in at school, but it was also a means of escape, a withdrawal into books and to the imagined life they offered was a consolation. Dunne was encouraged by teachers in his school and attended a writing group in Waterford held in the home of a local poet, Liam Murphy. Before coming to college, he had haunted the local library and read widely, absorbing poetry that was not on any school syllabus. After graduating from UCC, Dunne worked as a freelance writer before being employed by The Cork Examiner in 1986. He went on to become its literary editor. He died suddenly in 1995, aged 39. Theo Dorgan and Gerry Murphy are both from Blackpool, celebrated in Dorgan’s “A Nocturne for Blackpool”,12 and both attended the North Monastery School in Cork city. Dorgan’s father was a factory worker and a trade unionist. Dorgan has spoken movingly of his family’s commitment to education: “the only liberty the children of the working class could have was through education”.13 Dorgan and Murphy display a concern for social justice in their poetry, which reflects the same themes that marked the poetry of Patrick Galvin, an older Cork poet whose work was often anarchic and ironic, and whose “Ballad of James Connolly” has become part of Irish traditional song culture. Dorgan and Murphy are published by Dedalus Press. Unlike Gerry Murphy, Dorgan was educated in the Irish language section of the North Monastery, known as the AG. This was the school attended by Michael Davitt a few years beforehand. Dorgan’s memory of the visit of Davitt to the school selling the first edition of INNTI is 2 A TERRACE OF GENERATIONS 31 linked for him to the realisation that the Irish language was not just a school language or an official version of events:

Michael [Davitt] and Paddy Breathnach came when we were in Leaving Cert with the ﬁrst edition of INNTI and that was a wonderful moment as well. Because I don’t think I’d still have Irish if it wasn’t for that day. I thought, it doesn’t belong to the school; it doesn’t belong to ofﬁcial Ireland; it can belong to me. That was a moment of absolute liberation for me, to realise that I could keep Irish with me after I left because it had roots in the new world not in the old world.14

Dorgan himself, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, published a poem in INNTI but while the question of writing in Irish arose he pursued his writing career in English. He explains:

I wouldn’t have had the same draw towards the Gaeltacht that Liam Ó Muirthile and Michael would have had. Nuala of course was born, well not born, but brought up in it. I didn’t quite have that, but what I did have was the sense that they making an Irish or ﬁnding an Irish that was adequate to the historical moment, to the complexity of our experience.15

As with the other poets, Dorgan also underlines the importance of books in his teenage life. While a universal youth culture of blue jeans and rock and roll created a generational pull among the young people of the world, Dorgan also suggests the great power the paperback book had, making a wide variety of reading material available to people at very mod- est prices: “You were reading the same books. People talk about the internet as a revolution, the paperback was a revolution that had even more of an impact, the internet follows the paperback but there was nothing before that”.16 Maurice Riordan came to university with a deep interest in literature. He had attended St Colman’s College in Fermoy. One of his classmates at the time was Patrick Crotty. Before going to university, they read and discussed poetry intensely during those years of adolescence, with Riordan aware of the original Irish version of his surname “Rioghbhardáin”, poet of the king, playing with etymology as destiny. These exchanges were pursued in UCC with Crotty and with another student of the time, Gregory O’Donoghue (1951–2005). O’Donoghue, son of journalist and playwright Robert O’Donoghue, was perhaps the most precocious of all of the poets under consideration. John Montague singled him out to figure 32 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN in his Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974). His poem, “The Web”,17 was the last poem of the anthology. O’Donoghue’s first collection of poetry, Kicking, was published by Gallery Press in 1975. Riordan and O’Donoghue pursued a similar career path. They went to Canada to undertake postgraduate research, O’Donoghue to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and Riordan to McMaster in Hamilton. O’Donoghue worked on the poetry of John Montague. On his return to Europe, O’Donoghue spent some time in Britain working for British Freight before going back to Cork in the 1990s. While in Canada, he published in the prestigious journal The Exile Quarterly. Eleven of his poems appeared in the 5.3/5.4 double issue in 1978, together with Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, Guillevic and Claude Esteban among others. In Europe, his return to poetry was heralded by a chapbook publication, The Permanent Way (1996), with Three Spires Press, before two collections published by Dedalus. The second publication was a posthumous one as O’Donoghue died unexpectedly in 2005. Riordan on the other hand, while active as a student poet, appeared in many journals, and in Faber Introductions 8, before publishing his first collection AWordfrom the Loki in 1995 at the age of 42. He has since published three other collections with Faber and in February 2013 was appointed to the editorship of Poetry Review, a position he occupied until 2017. He taught in a number of British universities, and was until recently Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. Greg Delanty is the youngest of the poets under consideration. Born in 1958, educated in Coláiste Chríost Rí, where he was encouraged in his writing endeavours by his English teacher John O’Shea. Delanty emigrated to the United States in 1984, on receipt of the Allan Dowling Fellowship. Today, Delanty lives in Vermont where he teaches at St. Michael’s College. In Europe, his work is published by Carcanet Press. Delanty and Gerry Murphy knew each other from their days as school swimmers. Delanty enrolled in UCC in 1979 when the other poets had left the university; yet many of them remained in the city and their traces lingered. Theo Dorgan had become the literature officer with the Triskel Arts Centre18; Thomas McCarthy, who had won the Patrick Kavanagh award in 1977,19 had got a job in the City Library; in 1978, he had spent a year at the Iowa Writers Programme. Their presence and example was a stimulus. Theo Dorgan and Triskel Arts actively encouraged literary events in the city. Triskel was also responsible for The Cork Review,started in 1978 under the editorship of Paul Durcan. 2 A TERRACE OF GENERATIONS 33

Thomas McCarthy and Theo Dorgan have acknowledged that John Montague and Seán Lucy made a difference to their lives as poets. Mon- tague’s very existence in their midst was proof positive that the poetic life was possible:

There is a tendency now to play down the role played by Montague in Cork at that time. Certainly poets emerge out of their own energy mass; they cannot be “created” by another individual. But it is impossible to exaggerate the effect of Montague’s presence. He had the holy status of an “Ulster poet”, the real thing. A nod of approval from him meant a great deal to younger writers, especially to those in his inner circle, Gre- gory O’Donoghue, Maurice Riordan, and Patrick Crotty. The Waterford natives, Seán Dunne and myself, were in the Junior ranks and the outer circle. But we were pleased to hold that position. New collections of poetry came our way, our attention was drawn to reviews. We were made familiar with the activities that are the norm in a literary life.20

McCarthy’s account of Montague’s arrival in Cork and his references to the aura and energia of the “Ulster poet” is indicative of the role Mon- tague was to assume for his students. There is a Yeatsian fin de siècle, hieratic notion of the priestly function of the poet in the description. And it is clear that the younger poets were introduced into the rituals and rites associated with the poetic life: the submission of manuscripts, the role of literary magazines, the view of poetry as an art form where one had to work one’s apprenticeship. McCarthy’s obituary for John Mon- tague, written in the Irish Times in 2016, pays homage to his capacity to fascinate: “Most UCC English students will remember the poet from this era: tall, charismatic, full of fire and brilliant impatience”.21 For Gerry Murphy, his association with UCC came about because of Seán Lucy who encouraged his first poetic endeavours and suggested that he might enrol at the university. Later, in poems published in his chapbook entitled My Life as a Stalinist, Murphy suggests that there was a literary awareness in his family.22 William Wall stresses the fact that Seán Lucy was interested in John Montague’s presence, stature and command as an affirmative poetic presence in his appointment to UCC. He underlines again what a difference Montague made and what an influence he had on his generation: “We were all aware of the international standing of the poet in what was a provincial university in a provincial country 34 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN on the edge of Europe and when we organised readings in hole-in the- corner cafés or the back rooms of pubs he and Seán Lucy would turn up to confer a kind of value on the proceedings”.23 Publishing in the city and within the university itself was to prove an important stimulus to the poets. The Cork Examiner had a poem published monthly. Initially edited by Ger Fitzgibbon of the English department, the responsibility was later taken over by his colleague Tom Mullins. The tradition was renewed in recent years, the Tuesday poems was published weekly in collaboration with the Munster Literature Cen- tre; the recent takeover of the Examiner by the Irish Times group resulted in the cessation of the Tuesday poem. Many of the poets saw their work in print in the Tuesday page during that time. This followed a pattern of poetry publishing that could be seen in the Irish Press andintheIrish Times also. The poets also had publishing outlets at the university. Greg Delanty edited two issues of The Quarryman while at UCC. They were collaborative works with his father, a printer at the Eagle Printers in the city, and were beautifully produced. Delanty reached back to the older poets who had gone before him to include them and many other established writers in the journal. The Quarryman was one of the most well regarded student journals in UCC. Established in 1913 and named after the old playing field in the college, the journal was primarily devoted to literary matters and was published once a year. Contributions came from both students and staff, but guest writers were solicited on a regular basis. The 1962 edition contains a piece by Brendan Behan, while in 1963 John B. Keane was the guest writer. Both poetry and prose were represented, in English and in Irish. Polemical and descriptive pieces were also contributed. In 1967, the journal was censored by the college authorities for articles that were judged to be anti-clerical in tone, a fact highlighted by a very indignant editorial by T. J. Forde. However, the 1970 edition seems to highlight a new student radicalism with its cover illustration of a clenched fist, and a bitingly critical article of UCC entitled, “UCC An Administrative Backwater: An Administrative Slum”24 writtenbyCiaranDriver.25 The pages of the 1970s editions are dotted with the contributions of the poets under study in this volume. The editor of the 1971/1972 edition, John Daly, remarks on the high proportion of poetry received by the journal, awarding The Quarryman Prize for poetry to Gregory O’Donoghue. The following year Patrick Crotty edited the journal. He 2 A TERRACE OF GENERATIONS 35 also mentions the high proportion of poetry submissions and, in a fore- taste of Crotty’s later productions, expresses the hope that the volume can represent an anthology of the college’s best poetry. That year two undergraduate poetry prizes were awarded, one for more established college poets to Paul Durcan and the other to Maurice Riordan. Contributions to The Quarryman sometimes marked a stage in the process of reading and work-shopping that went on continuously during the mid 1970s. The UCC poetry workshop was founded by Thomas McCarthy in 1975; it was then run by William Wall, and later by Louis de Paor. McCarthy had a clear idea of the function and importance of the workshop, “I feel that if a number of us got together into a ‘kind’ of school of poetry we would build up our own sense of importance and dignity—which is the right of every poet”.26 In February, he commented excitedly on the workshop that was taking shape:

Things are really moving now in terms of poetry. My Poetry Workshop idea has really taken off. Twenty students attended last week’s workshop. Five poets read and discussed the structures rather than any philosophy behind the work. This is EXACTLY what a workshop should be.27

Poems were read, exchanged and commented upon in what Gerry Murphy has described as a “robust fashion”. McCarthy mentions the fact that Montague and Greg O’Donoghue attended. McCarthy’s journal reveals that he had a real sense of a school of Munster poetry at that stage: “Montague feels (and I’ve been saying this for two years) that the time is ripe for a new Munster movement in poetry. We all need to look at each other coldly and objectively because within our new workshop there is enough latent talent to form a whole new school of poetry”.28 The “new Munster movement” in poetry and the suggestion of the possibility of “ a whole new school of poetry” is an indication of the awareness that a cohesive mustering of poetic forces was possible. The fact that this is expressed in terms of the province, “Munster”, can also be seen as a possible envisaging of this new poetic school as a response, or at least a poetic stance, that would set those poets apart from other groupings or schools. The poets also had access to a place to showcase their work within the city in the Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Prince’s Street and in other venues in the city. William Wall outlined the reading activity: “During all this time we organised readings in various places – in UCC, 36 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN of course, but also in places like The Lobby bar and the Tubular Gallery (the forerunner of The Triskel Gallery). We were a very active group of writers, much encouraged by Prof. Seán Lucy and John Montague”.29 It is notable that poems in the workshop were presented in both Irish and English. William Wall, for instance, was known as Liam de Bhál at that time. The workshop was facilitated by English department who provided a room for participants on a weekly basis. William Wall also organised school visits to local schools and was responsible for publishing two pamphlets, one of his own poems First Issue, and the other a pamphlet of Thomas McCarthy’s work, Shattered Frost. The pamphlets were printed by the Lee Bookshop. The occasional input of Montague gave energy and focus to the debates of the workshop. McCarthy remembers: “Our workshop soon began to fall apart because of a lack of some authority figure, so we asked Montague to direct some sessions. My poems ‘Death by Fire’ and ‘The Recall of Fitzwilliam’ survived a workshop in his house on Grat- tan Hill”.30 For Gerry Murphy, there are memories of intense discussions sometimes being pursued outside the door, with Seán Lucy being called into adjudicate.31 Editorial and publishing activities can be seen as a way of highlighting the poets’ sense of collegiality, in Mannheimian terms, it was a means of reinforcing the generational impulse. Delanty’s editorial input was significant in The Quarryman and was prolonged in other publishing ventures such as the previously mentioned Jumping Off Shadows (edited with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill) and the Selected Poems of Patrick Galvin (with Robert Welch32) which raised the profile of writers associated with Cork and with UCC; both books were printed by Cork University Press. This collaborative publishing vein continues until today where many of the poets under consideration figure together in Delanty’s widely acclaimed anthology, The Word-Exchange a bilingual book of Anglo-Saxon poetry,33 or in Delanty’s collaboration with Maurice Riordan in his Faber Book of Early Irish Verse. Riordan also contributed a touching foreword to Gre- gory O’Donoghue’s posthumous collection, Ghost Dance, which contains a poem written by O’Donoghue in memory of Seán Dunne:

Blow-in i.m. Seán Dunne 1956-1995

I miss your voice sizzling Brimstone on the phone 2 A TERRACE OF GENERATIONS 37

“that shite editor…!”

Blow-in Tyro from Waterford Steadily taking Cork’s measure— You strolled an Afternoon Into the eve of World War II With the ghost of Elizabeth Bowen,

Watched the heron Curled initial on vellum In the swamplands of the Gearagh,

Shimmer of red admirals On byroads between Ballyvourney and Ballymakeera

While weighing the ﬁsh of Thomas Merton, The berries of Anna Akhmatova.

I have given up doubt. That old. Worn-out coat…

Seán, I have not— Up pop goblins in their best suits: Life is fettered to doubt…

In August a procession Coiled westward through the heat.

Rolling valleys lit with purple scarlet Lanterns of fuschia,

Past the goddess Gobnait’s holy well, Her fertility bees,

To your grave in the Cúil Aodha Of Seán Ó Ríordáin, Seán Ó Riada.34

Studded with quotations and references, O’Donoghue’s poem displays a real knowledge of Dunne’s work and life. As the poem highlights, Dunne 38 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN was buried in the same cemetery in the Cork gaeltacht of Cúil Aodha as the inspirational characters Ó Ríordáin and Ó Riada. And it was the memory of Gregory O’Donoghue at Dunne’s funeral murmuring “We meet in an evil time”, with the echoes of MacNeice, that John Mon- tague used as opening line of his review of Dunne’s Collected, a volume edited by Peter Fallon in 2005. Dunne was the ﬁrst of his generation to die and the church was packed with his UCC friends. Montague noted with wry humour: “Now Seán’s song is ended, as is more recently that of Michael Davitt and Gregory O’Donoghue. Gerry Murphy the ee cum- mings of Cork suspects that someone has a clay model called Cork poet and is sticking pins in it”.35 Montague’s review concludes by calling the Cork poets “a nest of singing birds”, an epithet used to describe his own generation of poets in UCD (Cronin, Hutchinson, Kinsella and himself). The association between the poets was prolonged over the years through a variety of means. At one stage, many of them, Dorgan, O’Donoghue, Dunne and McCarthy, all lived on Wellington Road in Cork, a stone’s throw from Montague’s residence on Grattan Hill. In an article written about the Australian poet Vincent Buckley’s trip to Cork in 1983, Thomas McCarthy evokes the atmosphere of the time:

Here he [Vincent Buckley] was in Cork, rebel Cork, port of departures and transportations, city of a powerful Catholic merchant class, mid-autumn and the days getting darker, the tension of political felling stalking the land; but not in a sinister way. No it stalked rather benignly at that moment in Cork, as if the ghost of Yeats was abroad in the night, humming verses beneath our windows. That day in Cork it was wine and poetry, gossip and impoverished youth that Vincent fell upon in our house. The insanely charismatic Waterford poet Seán Dunne lived in the apartment beneath ours. Vincent said that he felt he’d stumbled upon a commune, an Irish kibbutz, a boarding house in Brooklyn, and he loved it.36

McCarthy’s description, with its shades of Wordsworthian enthusiasm, underlines the cohesiveness of the group of poets, their sense of a roman- tic engagement with their calling as poets and their political concerns. The Yeatsian reference reminds us that this group of poets, not least of them McCarthy himself, continued to engage with the political matter of Ireland, when other poets, under the sway of modernism, and wracked by feelings of circumspection, shunned such controversial topics. Outside the obvious camaraderie, reflected in the dedications of poems for each other and for Montague and Lucy (“Roisin Dubh”, for instance, 2 A TERRACE OF GENERATIONS 39 the final poem in Thomas McCarthy’s first collection, The First Conven- tion was dedicated to John Montague). Seán Dunne, Thomas McCarthy and Greg Delanty would have their first collections published by Dolmen, the publishing house that was so strongly associated with John Montague. Later The Cork Review and The Munster Literature Centre would provide a focal point for their collaborations. A perfect case study of this collaboration is to be seen in the fact that all of the Cork born poets who figure in this book participated in the Cork City of Culture 2005 translation project. This involved translating the work of a representative poet from each of the accession states to the newly enlarged European Union. The collective project, instigated by Patrick Cotter of the Munster Literature Centre, was part of the Euro- pean City of Culture project, whose cultural commissar was none other than Thomas McCarthy. The synergy created meant poets who had trav- elled abroad and settled elsewhere came back to Cork and undertook a new poetry project together, representing a fusion of the creative and the political concerns of the participants, a renewal of the generational cohesion. However, the relationships between the different members of the cohort are also visible in the writing the poets did for other publications. Seán Dunne published a very sympathetic interview with Thomas McCarthy in the Irish Times. The same Seán Dunne chastised Eileen Bat- tersby for suggesting that Theo Dorgan’s first collection had received no reviews: he had reviewed the book in The Cork Examiner. McCarthy and Dorgan contributed essays to the special volume edited by Thomas Dil- lon Redshaw for Montague’s 60th birthday. McCarthy wrote a glowing memorial to Montague in The Irish Times for his 80th birthday, remembering fondly reading from “Farewell in Grattan Hill”: “Montague com- municated an uncompromising view of the poet’s life to all his students and would-be-poets—to be a poet was not something to be taken lightly: it was not a hobby it was a serious way of being”.37 Montague himself had great affection and esteem for his former students: “Overall I would have to say that the students I had for the next half-decade were probably the best students I ever had. And that presents a question. Who is the chicken and who is the egg”.38 In 2011, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Seán Lucy’s death many of his former students and colleagues were present at a memorial event held in Cork to celebrate his life, a posthumous volume of poems was printed by his family for the occasion. 40 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

In the coming chapters, I will move away from these obvious extra- textual and para-textual bonds to examine the connections to be found within the body of the poets’ own work.

Notes

1. John A. Murphy gives an illuminating account of the behaviour of medical students during that time in UCC. The College,op.cit. 2. Greg Delanty, The Hellbox, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 38. 3. Justin Quinn, “The Disappearance of Ireland”, in The Cambridge Intro- duction to Modern Irish Poetry 1800–2000, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2008, pp. 194–210. 4. Michael O’Loughlin, (1958–) Dublin contemporary of this generation of poets. He attended TCD at the same period. Interview with the author June 2015. 5. See John A. Murphy, The College, op. cit. This reinforced by the statistics in President’s Report UCC 1960–1978. These demonstrate that the number of foreign and overseas students dropped in the period under study. 6. Thomas McCarthy has spoken at length about his father in an interview with James Naiden, New Hibernia Review, Vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 71–81. 7. Thomas McCarthy, “Why I Write”, http://www.laoisedcentre.ie/ LENGLISH/engrwww/tom.html, consulted 4 April 2011. 8. Thomas McCarthy, Interview with Catherine Phil McCarthy, Poetry Ire- land, 2008. 9. Thomas McCarthy, “Quiet Death”, Irish Times, 3 July 1971, p. 10. 10. See obituary in The Daily Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ obituaries/1438246/Brigadier-Denis-FitzGerald.html, consulted 12 April 2012. 11. Patricia (née Arbuthnot) Evangeline Ann Cockburn (1914–1989) was a traveller who went to Africa on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society. Later, she became a journalist. Disinherited by her family on her marriage to communist Claud Cockburn, family relations were renewed on the birth of her children. All three of her sons (Andrew, Alexander and Patrick) became journalists. Her autobiography Figure of Eight, London, Chatto and Windus, 1985, tells of her adventures. 12. Theo Dorgan, “A Nocturne for Blackpool”, in What This Earth Cost Us, Dublin, Dedalus, 2008, pp. 20–21. 13. Interview with the author, 17 March 2011. 14. Theo Dorgan, interview with the author, 17 March 2011. 15. Idem. 16. Idem. 17. Gregory O’Donoghue, “The Web”, in Faber Book of Irish Verse, John Monatague (ed.), London, Faber, 1974, p. 384. 2 A TERRACE OF GENERATIONS 41

18. The Triskel Arts Centre, initially incarnated in the mid 1970s as the Tubu- lar Bells Art Gallery founded by Pat McQuiad, emerged as The Triskel Arts Centre in 1978 under the impetus of a number of people including Theo Dorgan, Anne O’Sullivan, Mick Hannigan, Tony Sheehan McQuaid and Robbie McDonald. Theo Dorgan was its inaugural literature officer. The Centre has evolved over the years in the various venues it occupied (Paul Street, Beasley Street, Bridge Street, Tobin Street). Its present composition now includes the venue of Christ Church as well as the Tobin Street premises. The Centre is devoted to the promotion of contemporary culture in Cork. See Robbie McDonald, “A Short History of Triskel: A Safe Harbour for Ships with Deep Keels”, The Cork Review, 1994, p. 22 and Peter Murray, “Triskel Christchurch”, Irish Arts Review, Vol. 28, no. 3, 2011, pp. 120–123. 19. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (1973), Paul Durcan (1974), Greg Delanty (1983) and William Wall (1995) have all won the Patrick Kavanagh award also. 20. McCarthy, Gardens of Remembrance,op.cit.,p.52. 21. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/john-montague-a-noble- procession-of-poems-has-passed-out-of-irish-life-1.2901763, consulted 14 February 19. 22. This is the case especially in the poem entitled “Why I Am a Poet”, where Murphy refers both to his Uncle Paddy’s “kite-like tropes of Omar Khayyám” and his mother’s “lost Rubáiyát”. When questioned as to the reliability of these autobiographical fragments Murphy suggested that they were “flexibly autobiographical”. 23. See his celebratory entry for John Montague’s 80th birthday, http:// www.williamwall.net/Ice_Moon_Blog/Entries/2009/2/28_Happy_ Birthday_John_Montague.html, consulted 7 August 12. 24. The Quarryman 1970, pp. 11–12. 25. Ciaran Driver published several poems in The Quarryman and another journal, Aire. He is Professor of Financial Economics at Imperial College London. Email correspondence with the author 7 March 2010. 26. Unpublished diaries of Thomas McCarthy, entry for 25 January 1975. 27. Ibid., 11 August 1975. 28. Idem. 29. William Wall, correspondence with the author August 2012. While William Wall was part of the original group of poets who studied in Cork in the early 1970s, his poetry has not been included in this study. Wall’s poetry re-emerged after a period of silence in the late 1990s. His career as a novelist and poet has flourished since that date (he has published three volumes of poetry). He is a recipient of many major awards for his fiction and his poetry, including the Patrick Kavanagh Prize for Poetry in 1995. 30. McCarthy, Gardens of Remembrance,op.cit.,p.53. 31. Gerry Murphy, interview with author February 2012. 42 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

32. Robert Welch (1947–2013) was another graduate of UCC. After a BA and an MA (under the direction of Seán Lucy) in UCC, he completed a Ph.D. in the University of Leeds on translations from Irish into English and later was professor of English at the University of Ulster. A respected critic, director of The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature he was also a poet and a novelist who had published work in both Irish and English. 33. Gerry Murphy’s translation for instance comes in for commendation from Christopher Ricks for instance in his review of the volume in The New York Review of Books.Seehttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/ jun/09/mixing-mystery-and-ingenuity/?pagination=false, consulted 12 June 2012. 34. Gregory O’Donoghue, Ghost Dance, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2007, pp. 11–12. 35. John Montague, “Stricken Blackbird”, Irish Times Weekend Review,28 January 2006, 12. 36. Thomas McCarthy, “We Stayed Up Late: Remembering Vincent Buck- ley”, New Hibernia Review, Vol. 14, no. 4, Geimhreadh/Winter 2010, pp. 125–128, p. 126. 37. Thomas McCarthy, “Poet of Exile and Return”, The Irish Times,23 February 2009, p. 16. 38. Interview with John Montague, October 2010. CHAPTER 3

The Brindled Cats: Language and Translation

Abstract This chapter is devoted to the poets’ relationship with language, both via the medium of the Irish language and through their practice of translation. It examines Greg Delanty’s desire to inflect the English language with Cork expressions, that stems from emigrant nostalgia, and it devotes attention to the notion of self-translation, both real and imagined. The influence of John Montague in bringing European poets to Cork is studied. The Russian influence on the poets notably Seán Dunne is studied. The cohesive role of the Cork Translation Project 2005 is also examined.

Keywords Language · Translation · Self-translation · Russian inﬂuence · European poets · Cork Translation Project

The title of this chapter refers to a short poem by Gerry Murphy entitled “Translation and Its Discontents”: Stark moonlit silence/the brindled cat is chewing/the nightingale’s tongues. End of Part One: New and Collected Poems, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2006, p. 179.

“Ten Words in Irish”

do Mháire Davitt

Íimithe ar a Yamaha go Omaha

Mé buartha, buartha, buartha.1

The playful approach to language displayed by Gerry Murphy in his only Irish language poem is paradigmatic of this generation of poets’ approach to the issue of language. It is indicative of their irreverence, not just for the Irish language but also perhaps for the notion of identity and tradition as well. In making a poem that rhymes “Yamaha” with “imithe” [gone] Murphy signals the longing for elsewhere and the open- ness to outside influences that mark both his poetry and the poetry of his comrades. It also signals a capacity to regard the Irish language as a living tradition, capable of encompassing places as far flung as Yamaha or Omaha. Most of all, it de-consecrates the language. The poem is called “Ten Words in Irish” after all, and because of the inclusion of Yamaha and Omaha and their interchangeability through paronomasia, the reader is also aware of the random nature of language hinted at by the title. The reader knows that the word “Irish” in the title could be replaced with “Japanese”, and that “ten” could become “eight”. Irish in this poem has become language like any other. For Murphy, who writes in English, the poem also represents a form of self-translation. In this chapter, I examine the poets’ on-going relationship with the Irish language and with the poetry from that tradition. I also draw attention to the attempt made by Greg Delanty to inflect the English language with elements of distinctive Cork speech and trace the impact of the visits to Cork by internationally celebrated poets like Robert Graves and Hugh MacDiarmid. I highlight the importance of translation as a central strategy in the Cork poets’ renewal of poetic energies and in their search for other exemplars. Finally, I study the expansion of the notion of self-translation, both real and imagined, notably in the work of Thomas McCarthy. 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 45

While Greg Delanty and Maurice Riordan were to make their home outside of Ireland on a permanent basis, it is clear that as the economic slump of the late 1970s deepened, the trope of exile and emigration came to occupy the poetry of all of the poets. Seán Dunne has written moving poems connected to the haunting sites of emigration, like “Throwing the Beads”2 and its companion piece “Exile”:

TheBlueEye

after the Irish of Colmcille, 6th century

There’s a sea-blue eye that stares at Ireland drawing away.

It will never look again at the women of Ireland, or its men.3

Among those who departed was Greg Delanty. Of all the poets studied in this volume, Delanty has explored the trope of exile in greatest depth, notably in a collection entitled American Wake. Many of his poems from the late 1980s are an exploration of exile both in terms of space and language. He outlines his preoccupations in an interview with Catherine Phil MacCarthy:

Your poems evoke a strong sense of place and particularly of Cork City. Does Cork have its own sense of wit and humour and what vision of life does it convey?

Well, Cork is where I lived until I was twenty-eight. Its language/accent is the closest English now spoken to the Irish language and also to Eliz- abethan English. It is the city of Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser as well as of the Gaelic poets Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Seán Ó Ríordáin. Both traditions I work out of in a contemporary fashion. It interested me not simply to record it in poetry, but to give a renewing liveliness. I’m also interested in its lingo, and for the same reason. The lingo is also passing into oblivion, as so much language is - a symbol of mutability again. It does have a particular texture or quality of humour and wit, of slag- ging, or joshing as the Americans call it. It is in many ways an old comedic town. It is also somewhat Mediterranean as is the Southwestern region.4 46 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

The city is linked to nostalgia, a chronotopic association of Cork and childhood. To that end, Delanty maps the city that he knew while growing up. In “The Lost Way”, dedicated to another Cork poet Robert Welch,

You remarked Freeing my tongue’s needle Stuck on its damaged record, How cúpla dán of mine are hearkening back, A kind of grappling for the life buoy’s O Of the roads, streets and life of the drowned city We both hail from.5

The poet, in this account, is drowning outside his native city. If he dubs it drowned (no doubt harking back to the etymology of the Irish word for Cork, corcach meaning marsh), Delanty ﬁshes it back out of the depths, shining lights down the dark side streets of the city, remembering past trysts:

Paradise Place, French Church Street, Half Moon Street, Carey’s Lane, where after Kojak’s Nightclub I pulled off the occasional fumbling dry ride.6

In “The Hellbox”, Delanty also records the betrayal he feels at Cork’s changing features, “My home city, emigrating from itself, changed/so hell for leather, even if was for the better,/ that some of us felt oddly abandoned”.7 He notes the arrival of McDonalds and Burgerland and the new ring road “that the Cork Corporation calls “da Super Highway, / motoring over ﬁelds, woods and railway lines that still/hoot and whistle inside me down the sleepers of the years”.8 Delanty’s record of the city extends to the use of Cork argot and dialect, the volume of Collected Poems includes an index to Cork slang9 with such terms as “lasher”, “cog”, “jag”, almost a found poem in themselves. Delanty pastiches Cork pronunciation, alluding to the famous second city complex in the fear of being disparaged and misunderstood by outsiders:

Outsiders, Especially those from da Pale look down Dare snotty proboscises on our corker Corkonian 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 47

Dat’s not just the closest ding in English to Irish, But as nare to Elizabedan English freisin –which is as good an excuse as any for me sonnets— what wit our ye and how we turn the word beer into what went down to the woods. But why like is dropped into every sentence when dare’s nothing to liken the like to—ya know, like—we can’t say.10

The replacement of the “th” by “d” in this section and the intimation that “beer” in Cork is pronounced “bear” is self-deprecatory. It can be seen as a desire to place the imprint of Irish-English on the English tradition, in much the same way as Heaney did by including words from Ulster- English in his work. Delanty lays before the reader the distinctness of the Cork dialect. Yet, the allusions to Elizabethan English and the suggestion that there is “nothing to liken the like to” also reveal a pride in Corkness, suggesting the place is beyond comparison. This tone is pursued in “Elegy for an Aunt”. Delanty loses his way in India and his encounter with a funeral takes him back to Cork and to his aunt’s funeral, the Lee and the Ganges become one:

I stepped aside from the pallbearers shouldering a tinsel-covered body about the size of Kitty’s, whose bier I bore only weeks ago on the hills down to the ghats of chemical factories lining the Lee, our Ganges.11

Delanty’s comparison “the Lee, our Ganges” is also echoed in his attempt to infuse the poetic language with the “lingo” of Cork.12 As he points out in the glossary that accompanies his Collected Poems many of the words used in Cork were imported from outside and are a testament to the city’s status as a port: “‘dekhoed’, derives from the Hindi word dekho, to look and was introduced into Cork slang via soldiers serving with the British army in India”.13 While dekho is common to much slang in the British and Irish Isles, Delanty’s claim that is a speciﬁcally Cork phenom- ena can be seen as proof of his desire to imbue Cork with a cosmopolitan gloss. Thus, although Delanty appears to be narrowing his perspective, burrowing down into “our Corker Corkonian” English, he also enlarges it, encompassing other linguistic horizons, including the Irish language with the use of “freisin”, meaning “also” in Irish Gaelic, within the body of the poem. 48 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

Expanding the horizons and extending influences were a key factor in the poetic development of this group of poets. John Montague did much to engage this. Together with Seán Lucy, as I mentioned earlier, they modified the university syllabus to include contemporary poetry and American poetry. Montague, the poets have acknowledged, also made his poetry library available to them.14 And he invited other poets, other exemplars on campus. It is in terms of stimulation that Thomas McCarthy defined the appearance of the celebrated poets: “We did get some stimulation. Both Hugh MacDiarmid and Robert Graves, legendary poets were enticed to Cork by John Montague”. To that list of poets can be added the French poet André Frénaud, whom Montague invited to Cork, in 1977. At the time, the two poets read together at the university. Montague launched a pamphlet, Novem- ber, published under his own Golden Stone imprint (Cork, 1977) that contained translations of a selection of poems by the French poet. French translations including “The Huntress” by Frénaud would also figure in The Great Cloak published the following year. Translation and the interaction with other poets were very much part of Montague’s practice, informing his poetry, accompanying his ontological search, elaborating translation as a form of hospitality in a reciprocal translation movement that was practised in turn by this younger generation. Indeed, the whole Cork Translation Project, one of the flagship projects of Cork’s incarnation as European City of Culture, could be viewed as a city-wide extension of the process of translation as hospitality. “The Cork Translation Project”, brainchild of Patrick Cotter and Thomas McCarthy, was undertaken as part of the celebrations for Cork City of Culture 2005. The event coincided with the expansion of the European Union to include the countries from the former Eastern bloc. The expansion was to provide a central theme for the event and the opening ceremony included a parade fêting the new Eastern European member states. For Thomas McCarthy, in his role as Cultural Commissar of the event, it was the opportunity to take up Patrick Cotter’s suggestion that poetry be placed at the heart of the events. And so it was that in months that followed the official opening of the City of Culture festivities a poetry collection by an individual poet, representing the poetic work of each accession state, was published by Southword Editions (the imprint of the Munster Literature Centre). The poets were invited to Cork, and the books were launched in bilingual readings celebrating the culture of the country in question. This admiration for Eastern European poetry was 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 49 common among poets from the 1970s, it is visible in Heaney’s parable poems (Fieldwork, Faber, 1979) but McCarthy’s interest had been awak- ened during his trip to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the friendships he made there. The relationship between Cork and the Eastern European poets has been prolonged through the Cork Spring Poetry Festival. The 2011 edition of the festival for instance featured Kristiina Ehin15 as one of the guest poets; she is the daughter of Andres Ehin, the Estonian poet who featured in the Cork Translation Project.16 Andres Ehin’s poetry was also been translated to Irish, by Gabriel Rosenstock in a dual language volume of haikus, also published in Cork by Southword Editions in 2004. As we saw elsewhere, all of the Cork born poets included in this book participated in the Cork Translation Project, all with the exception of Seán Dunne who had died ten years earlier in 1995. For Dunne also Eastern European poetry, or to be precise Russian poetry (at the time the perception was that of a uniform Comintern Bloc), had a great influence in the formation of his aesthetic sensibility. Seán Dunne placed the poetry of Anna Akhmatova at the centre of his poetic universe. As Stephanie Schwerter has pointed out in her essay “Translating Anna Akhmatova”: Seán Dunne’s Passion for Russia”,17 he identified with the experience of loss and deprivation that lie at the heart of Akhmatova’s poetry. The posthumous collected poems of Seán Dunne, Collected, edited by Peter Fallon (Gallery Press, 2005) contains no fewer than 19 translations. For, as Peter Fallon says in his introduction to Dunne’s work, Akhmatova’s poetry represented “Stations of the Cross, a record of the torment of the individual souls who make up a nation”18 for Dunne. Dunne’s translations punctuate his later collections. The Shel- tered Nest opens with an epigraph from Akhmatova:

I stood among my own, Not under foreign skies Or sheltered by foreign wings, And I survived that time, that place.19

The epigraph goes some way perhaps to explain Dunne’s fascination with exile. Safety and escape it is suggested are to be found elsewhere “sheltered by foreign wings”, Dunne remained at home but was sensitive to a notion of displacement. As David Wheatley suggested when commenting on the Irish poets who remained in Ireland: “Maybe staying at home 50 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN is the deepest form of displacement of all […] the real trick is to turn ‘home’ too into a form of ‘abroad’”.20 For Dunne, translation is a form of linguistic displacement, an inscription of estrangement into his poetic space. The translations of Akhmatova function also as a commentary on his experiences. The Sheltered Nest is dotted with versions of Akhmatova’s poems. “The Sentence”, placed at the beginning of the collection, performs just such a function. The central stanza represents a poetic embodiment of the task that Dunne has set himself:

I’m up to my eyes in things to do: Anything that kills memory and pain, Anything that makes my heart a stone And still explains how to live again.21

And in the poems that follow, Dunne writes out his memories. His sorrow and pain are inscribed deep into his poems. In the weeds, stains and derelict buildings of “The Sheltered Nest”,22 in the evocation of his home in “Sydney Place”,23 with its abandoned bean sprouts and the shadow of the dead pianist Charles Lynch passing with his funeral procession down Wellington Road.24 And if the reader has not understood the roots of this despair Akhmatova is at hand again in “The Last Toast” to gloss the other poems:

After Akhmatova

I toast our wrecked home, The sadness of my life. I raise my glass to you And the loneliness we shared.

And to the mouths that betrayed us, To cold eyes without a hint of pity, To the brutal world and the fact That God, even God, hasn’t saved us.25

As readers, we are perplexed as to the identity of the addressee. It may be Dunne’s estranged wife, it may be the reader, but it is not too farfetched to imagine that Dunne is talking to Akhmatova here and that she alone 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 51 can share his pain, solitude and betrayal. In the posthumous collection, Time and the Island, published in the year following Dunne’s death a new chapter in his life after the age of forty seems to be signalled by the epigraph, this time translated from the Welsh:

A man past forty May ﬂourish like a tree But a grave opened Changes his face.26

However, a translation from Akhmatova is also there to make the change explicit: entitled “Happiness” it tells of delight and warmth, “And the song that once drove you mad/ You sing now with rapture, as if it were new”.27 Dunne’s access to Akhmatova came through the Penguin Modern poets in translation series. Thomas McCarthy acknowledges the import of those volumes:

It is true that new writers can pick and choose from any tradition. We did pick and choose. From Ulster, we picked conservative techniques in writing, but from the Penguin Modern Translations we chose wider political convictions.28

For Thomas McCarthy, like for Theo Dorgan, the inﬂuences were to be found in Modern Greek poetry. Dorgan is also steeped in Greek myth. In one of his recent collections, Greek, he merges the Cork of his childhood with Greek tales and a Greek setting, heading south with the swallows:

My head still full of summer, Running and hurling, space. A fresh year laid out before us.

Head of an argive in the new book, Helmeted, bearded, a temple above him, A trireme below in the bay.

Fresh ink, fresh paper, the world Quietly opening to the south. Where the swallows go. 52 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

Three hundred men and three men. Sparta. The Isles of Greece. Wave-tossed Odysseus. Alexander.29

The stanza in italics operates a superposition. The reader recognises an extract from the opening lines of Thomas Davis’s “A Nation Once Again”:

When boyhood’s ﬁre was in my blood I read of ancient freemen, For Greece and Rome who bravely stood, Three hundred men and three men.30

The line and the enumeration of the Greek myths that inspired it send Dorgan to dream of the Greek Republic and of other settings in the concluding stanza to that section of the poem:

That winter I learned we were poor, climbing Fair Hill in the slanting rain with leaking shoes, to hurl in the mud and the cold; I saw myself growing old there in a small world and I refused. Some dream of otherwhere took hold.31

In the following lines of the poem, the landscapes of Greece and Cork are blended into one continuous soulscape. The ships in Piraeus “are ships that sat heavy with night on Penrose Quay”32 and the poet can see the most emblematic spire of his native city: “The ﬁsh on Shandon glittered over the rimlit ridge,/There were hurlers shouldering and calling on the stone beach”.33 The ﬁnal section of the poem contains lines from the old war song of Munster, “Rosc Catha na Mumhan”, in Irish as the accompaniment to a walk in the agora. Greek faces remind the poet of his mother and father. In the closing lines, the poet indicates his freedom to choose his place, to be a citizen of the world: “The white city of childhood that is everywhere the same./This one life that is everywhere the deep-indented same”.34 Home is elsewhere and everywhere. The other world hinted at by the Greek legends also came from the power of translations, the intermingling of the Irish and the Greek are a testament to the true European nature of this generation of poets. 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 53

In Dorgan’s most recent volume, Orpheus, written in sapphic metre, he offers a retelling of the Greek myth. It is an ambitious long narrative poem, divided into two sections of 33 poems. The formal structure of the sapphic metre (with three eleven-syllable lines, followed by a fourth of five syllables; the last word of the concluding stanza rhymes with the last line of the first) and the overarching frame of the myth offer a dis- tancing stance for the poet. Autobiographical material can be treated via this system, enabling what the poem calls “my mirrored fetch” (p. 20) to appear. The appearance of the term “fetch” is an echo of Ciaran Carson’s use of the word when describing the “takes” he offered in response to the poems of Jean Follain in From Elsewhere (Gallery Press, 2015). In a sense, Dorgan’s Orpheus functions in a similar manner. The Cork topoi are prominent in the contemporary first section, where the autobiographical material is treated through the figure of a travelling guitarist:

On through the ﬂat of the city, past the bars with their babbling lights, gross noise and smells, and on up along Summerhill, my hand trailing the cold sandstone wall. Far

up into Mayﬁeld I followed.35

Yet, these are balanced out by other locales: New York, Rennes and Paris. The meditative, retrospective air lends a memoiristic touch to this section, a notion of taking stock:

The long decades passed: I did my work, I did what good I could all over the turning. I learned, of course you can go home again, found that time parsed and sieved

will yield gold if you’re patient.36

The second section of the volume, again containing 33 poems, can be seen as a fetch on the first more autobiographical section. It is purely mythological and occupies the Greek space, inhabited by Dyads and gods, allowing the poet to use the same material, amplified and distorted by the Greek frame. Published in 2018, in the poet’s 66th year, the number of poems in each section (twice the numerologically significant 33) is a 54 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN confirmation that this is a volume of mature age, of a poet looking back on his life’s work. Gerry Murphy, affectionately referred to as the “Poet Laureate of the People’s Republic of Cork”, has remained in the city of his childhood after a year spent in Israel in 1979. Yet, Murphy’s poetry also walks the tightrope between elsewhere and everywhere. Murphy is an enthusiastic reader of poetry in translation and his poetry is filled with references to “after”. In this he highlights the fact that he is drawing inspiration from other horizons and other political contexts, to the extent that the critics have been annoyed by it:

I found some of the poems well-crafted and black-humoured enough. But if poets must tackle semi-political issues, it seems to me that Nicaragua and the Spanish Civil War are much less relevant than, say, homelessness in this country, urban poverty, joblessness and the like. Far away ﬁelds seem easier to plough than the one you’re standing in.37

Fred Johnson’s cranky criticism aside, it must be acknowledged that Gerry Murphy’s rewriting has many sources. In one of Murphy’s more recent collections, My Flirtation with International Socialism,38 almost thirty poems bear the subheading “after”. The references are to Cavafy, Euri- pedes, Simonedes, Lorca, but “after” also includes references to Mao, Wordsworth, and people he has met. Murphy’s practice of recreation is entirely personal. In “Mayakovsky’s ‘Testament’”, Murphy uses the original Mayakovsky poem as glossed by a German academic, hence the “after Stephanie Schwerter” in the subheading. Murphy uses this reading to generate an entirely new poem:

Mayakovsky’s Testament after Stephanie Schwerter

Our love boat has run aground on a sandbar of the quotidian. You and I are even. There is nothing to be gained in compiling a list of our manifest loss. 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 55

We loved well, we parted well, enough.39

Gerry Murphy’s poem is a reworking of Schwerter’s talk on a Tom Paulin translation of Mayakovsky’s ﬁnal poem, “Last Statement”40 that features in his collection The Road to Inver. Murphy’s rewriting engenders a tighter poem, perfect in its conception. It is an excellent example of his magpie translation technique, where his poetic oeuvre is inﬁnitely expand- able ready to incorporate elsewhere and everything. For all of the poets under review, the Irish language was a preoccupation, a reference. Maurice Riordan was conscious of the Irish etymology of his name,41 making him the poet of the king; for him there was also perhaps the clan-like proximity to Cork’s best-known poet Seán Ó Ríordáin. Ó Ríordáin had after all coined a verb “go Ríordánóinn” out of his last name, in reference to a particular poetic attitude he liked to strike. Riordan’s own poetic oeuvre is studded with translations from the Irish. His most recent collection, Water Stealer is no exception; it includes translations such as “The New Poetry”42 after Eochaidh Ó hEoghusa and “Renunciation”43 after Seathrún Céitinn. Perhaps the most revealing poem of all is the poem entitled “Irish”:

That gleam the sand has before the tide, Its ﬁsh-skin-wet and soft-cement texture, So it stands out as if above the strand --is there a word for it in Irish? So one oarsman seeing its oily sheen shouts Tarringmís chuige! And the other nods.44

The Irish language text is inscribed within the poem, “Tarringmís chuige!”, meaning let’s pull it towards us. The translation is not offered but the search for the lost word propels the poem, from stanza to stanza, like the ﬁshermen’s rope being drawn in. The elusive word is constantly associated with water and describes the very process of composition itself:

And then, as the tongue recoups the sound Effortlessly, the word will shed its lure And be an all-too-easy hook for this effect Of light hitting the sliding planes of water (which for me also involves my armchair, 56 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

the screen, solitude, the grip of coffee).45

Riordan’s ﬁnal stanza speaks of the “gain to the small disablement”, the disablement of the lost language, the lost words and the lost tongue. The image of the tongue recuperating the sound reminds the reader of Montague’s grafted tongue:

To grow a second tongue as harsh a humiliation as twice to be born.46

Riordan’s poem, in the slipperiness of its lost word and in its network of sea images, is also strikingly reminiscent of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem “Cuimhne an Uisce” (“A Recovered Memory of Water” in Mul- doon’s translation of the poem) which is also a poem about language and the poetic process. After evoking the mermaid’s memory of water, Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem in the third stanza evokes the difﬁculty of ﬁnding an adequate expression for it:

Tá strus uafásach ag roinnt leis na mothúcháin seo go léir. Tar éis an tsaoil, níl rud ar bith aici vhun comparáid a dhéanamh leis. Is níl na focail chearta aici ar chor ar bith.47

In Muldoon’s translation, this becomes:

A terrible sense of stress is part and parcel of these emotions. At the end of the day she has nothing else to compare it to. She doesn’t have the vocabulary for any of it.48

Ní Dhomhnaill’s mermaid goes to her therapist and the search for the words adequate to her plight becomes a source for her poem. Riordan also writes a poem about the elusive slippery lost word at the heart of all Irish poetry. In this interplay between languages, we are reminded of the revitalisa- tion of Irish language poetry and of the proximity between the English 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 57 language and Irish language poets of UCC. The INNTI poets co-habited with the English language poets for a short time on the UCC campus. The shade of Seán Ó Ríordáin haunted the quad. At the heart of the writing process of many of these poets is the elusive attempt to capture the lost language in translation. The poetry workshops that were held in the university in the 1970s49 involved both Irish language and English language poets. An awareness of language and heritage were always prominent, even in a jokey way, as I have suggested is the case in Gerry Murphy’s “Ten Words in Irish” for Máire Davitt. Poets of this generation are aware of the possibilities, of moving back and forth between the linguistic barriers of Irish and English in a way that had been difficult until then. Michael Hartnett/Mícheál Ó h-Airtnéide50 and Eugene Watters/Eoghan Ó Tuairsic being two whose other language embodiment involved the translation of the self into another name or another identity. It is interesting to note that the INNTI generation and those who followed saw no necessity to translate themselves or their names. Michael Davitt remained Michael Davitt while writing in Irish, while Theo Dorgan, who appeared in INNTI 2, did so as Theo Dorgan. In fact the introduction to the anthology Jumping off Shadows makes much of the fact that linguistic heritage of the city of Cork was that not just of English (shades of Elizabethan English are evoked) but also Irish. Greg Delanty and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill also stress that the linguistic hinterland of the city continued to contain Irish speakers right up until the twentieth century. The shadows of another language and another tradition were therefore always present for these poets. This is the case in the poetry of Greg O’Donoghue. O’Donoghue is perhaps the most elusive of the poets of this generation. O’Donoghue was also the only one of these poets to figure in John Montague’s Faber Book of Irish Verse. His poem “The Web” is the final poem in the book.51 Mak- ing Tracks, published by Dedalus in 2001 contains poems of his that were published during the long period of silence. Some of them are inspired by Irish, one of them “Nuair Chómhnocas an t-Iolar ar an nGleann”52 [When I spied the eagle in the Glen], originally published in 1978, was dedicated to Seán Lucy. A later poem “Créide’s Lament”53 with its subheading after the Irish is a brooding melancholic composition:

White rage Of the sea Laments a hero 58 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

The marsh heron Cannot distract The lean fox padding To her brood54

The inevitability of death is to be found in the footsteps of the fox, shad- owed by the patterning of the assonance. The proleptic ﬁnal stanza shows how deeply intertwined translation, nature and mood can be:

Pitiful spume Rioting around A Northern rock Keening crash On the Southern shore My life is over My looks show it.55

However, as Delanty and Ní Dhomhnaill intimated in their preface to Jumping Off Shadows, O’Donoghue was also aware of the English language inheritance of Cork. Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh both historical ﬁgures of note in the Cork hinterland are also accorded space in his collection. For Raleigh, it comes in the poem “Rest in Youghal Abbey”, for Spenser the reference is more direct:

Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti

Motes in the south transept on a rhomb of light By the Boyles Italianate mausoleum –

[…] Kin to Elizabeth Boyle From near the strand at Youghal:

Hind in the lupine woods, begetter – The courtly sonnets of the carpetbagger.56

The connection between Raleigh and Spenser hinted at here was also developed by a Cork poet of a slightly earlier generation. Robert Welch, in The Kilcolman Notebook, a novella published by Brandon Press in 1994, 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 59 develops the idea of the exchanges between the two men, in a highly charged erotic text. In O’Donoghue’s poem, the interest is in creating ornate language in the manner of the Elizabethan age, infusing the text with an Elizabethan mode, hence the use of “hind”, “lupine” and “begetter”. However, O’Donoghue is alert to the capacity of language to change gear, to shift abruptly from one century and register to the next, and he does so with the full force of the American slang, “carpetbagger”, reduc- ing all pretensions of grandeur of the colon by demoting him to the status of a common thief. Translation has been central to the composition of two of Thomas McCarthy’s key collections, Merchant Prince (2005) and The Last Geral- dine Ofﬁcer (2009). In both instances, it can be said to have generated the text. Merchant Prince is set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and is voiced for Nathanael Murphy, the eponymous merchant. The central conceit of the book involves the translation of poems from “rough Italian” at the request of the painter James Barry57:

Even then I was clever enough not to promise outright to have these poems printed in translation at my cousin’s press in Cork, but I knew from Mr Barry’s murderous expression that he would hold me under an obligation to translate and publish these poems of Italy in the unfortunate kingdom of Ireland. It is a joy to me now but also an unburdening of a promise to a fellow Corkman, that I have arranged for the printing of these translations of the poets of Italy at dear Mr Harris’s shop in Castle Street.58

The central section of the collection takes the form of a prose narrative written by Nathanael Murphy, and it includes translations from the work of the poets whom Barry is defending. The ﬁrst poem to appear is entitled “The Italian Question”:

Hopeless, hopeless. I place in a boat, this, All my hope, for Italian— The way a mistress or a mother might Place in place a graceful infant

In a little vine-twisted, light ark Of rush leaves, of rushes, Its base made less than feeble, thus, With bitumen and, motherless, 60 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

Set in a Triestine Stream, In a familiar sedge Or thick, thick rushes by the edge Of some Adriatic59;

Those familiar with the work of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill will have identified the poem as being a version of “Ceist na Teangan”60 (The Lan- guage Question). McCarthy has added Italian toponyms to translate the poem out of the Irish context and include it within wider European concerns. However, McCarthy has not just transposed the poem to an Ital- ian context, and he has also transformed Ní Dhomhnaill and her fellow INNTI poets, turning them into Italian characters. Ní Dhomhnaill has become “La Principessa Nigonelli” and her companions are “Luigi da Pora” (Louis de Paor), “Monsignor di Murthillo” (Liam Ó Muirthile) and “Capitano Oschargigi” (Cathal Ó Searcaigh).61 McCarthy includes translations from the works of all of these poets and among the other issues he addresses in the volume is a passionate defence of their poetry enabling a fresh vision of their work through the prism of translation. Translating from the Irish is also a key element in his most recent volume The Last Geraldine Officer.62 Yet again McCarthy creates a persona, in this instance “The Last Geraldine Officer”, Sir Gerald FitzGerald, a composite drawn from two real people, the British soldier and stockbro- ker Brigadier Denis FitzGerald and the Gaelic scholar Brian FitzGerald. The temporal span of the section of the collection devoted to “The Last Geraldine Officer” extends from 1919 to 1950 but the chief interest and the greatest number of pages are devoted to the period of the Second World War. In this collection, as in Merchant Prince, McCarthy’s text is a hybrid one. In Merchant Prince, McCarthy, who is also a memoirist and novelist,63 creates a central prose narrative, “Memory”, bookended by two poetry sections “Blood” and “Trade”. As the trading metaphor would indicate the information circulates between the three sections with dates as indicators sending the reader back and forth finding concordances between the sections, much as a reader of a bilingual poetry volume might move back and forth between the texts in both languages. In the Last Geraldine Officer, McCarthy creates an even more intricate work. The second section of the book, “The Last Geraldine Officer”, contains poems in English on either side of a central core composed of journal entries, recipes and poems in Irish, which are intertwined in no apparent pattern. 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 61

There are twenty-four poems in Irish and twenty-four recipes, echoing the tradition of twenty-four poems offered in exchange for ﬁshing rights in the river. The poems are written in pre-standardised Irish, dating them historically to the pre-Second World War period. No translations seem to be offered for them. The non-Irish language reader can only grasp at a possible coded meaning by identifying a series of proper nouns that remain unchanged tracking them from one text to another. So for instance the poem in Irish “An Chobry Caillte” (p. 141) seems to be referred to in the journal entry for the following pages St Patrick’s Eve 1950 (pp. 142– 143). And indeed, a partial translation for some of the poems is proposed in the journal entries, thus the ﬁrst poem in Irish on page 94 “Smaointe Mheadhon Oídhche” (Thoughts at Midnight) with the echo in the title of “Cúirt an Mheánoíche”, Brian Merriman’s celebrated poem, can be found partially transcribed in the journal entry on pages 106–107. In what follows a comparison can be made between the poem, my literal translation and the prose of the journal. In this short extract, we can observe the inclusion of similes that are not to be found in the journal. The rewriting of the same event in the journal is fragmentary, a reduction, if one were to borrow a term from cookery. The inclusion of the same number of poems in Irish and recipes clearly indicates to us that we are to think along culinary lines.

Smaointe Mheadhon Oídhche

Bheadh lucht na psychanailíse ag déanamh spóirt le m’óige, M’athair caillte, lucht na nGearaltach ar fágháil bháis, teanga nach maire- ann; Caithﬁdh mé fáithim a chuir faoin saoghal san, mo smaointe Mar ruithleaca na trágha, nó glasóg sa ngiorr-thrághadh. An taibhreamh stairiúil. An lá breithe san, 1920 nach mór— Bád na scannán do tháinig chúm ar taoide na h-Abhann Móire, Pictiúrí Essanay mar thaibhsí ar an uisce […].64

[The psychoanalysts would have fun with my youth, My dead father, the Geraldines dying, a language that is no longer alive; I have to draw a line under that life, my thoughts Like the pools on the strand, like wagtails on the sand dunes. The historical dream. That birthday, it was almost 1920— The ﬁlm boat came to me on the Blackwater tide, Essanay pictures like ghosts on the water…] 62 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

And I think how the pyscho-analyst must view this creature in the dark. A father lost long ago, Geraldines of the South swiftly passing away. A birthday long ago in the 1920s, Uncle Walter full of mischief-making, writing Irish words for the Essanay dialogue […]65

In a later chapter, I examine what McCarthy hopes to achieve in terms of history and memory by this technique but here I want simply to underline the fact that through language identity can be maintained, asserted, reduced or dissolved, like the ingredients in the recipes that accompany the poems. In the final journal entry of the poem, McCarthy’s Geraldine Officer drinks a waterless Powers whiskey in a pub on The Strand in Lon- don. Among the working-class Irish navvies he is able to find comradeship through language “Is Éireannach mise freisin” he asserts [I am Irish too] and backs up his claims in the song “Na Connerys”66:

And still/ in my mouth, behind the whiskey breath, Mrs O’Connor’s recipe that my mother saved, her Helvick lobster, her ostrich feathers. / Their sound follows me along The Strand./ Out of the depths of childhood I connect with everything./ Essence of being./ Childhood, poetry/Ireland in the early evening fog.67

Language, in McCarthy’s construction, is an element as essential to memory as Proust’s madeleine, or in this case as Powers whiskey or Helvick lobster. The hybridity and heterogeneity that is suggested in the work of Thomas McCarthy can also be seen in a slightly different fashion in the most recent work of Greg Delanty.68 The Greek Anthology Book XVII also uses translation as its central conceit. This is a form that Delanty had already dabbled in earlier. A sequence of poems entitled “The Splinters” contains a number of poems voiced and in the style of various Irish writers, like Austin Clarke or Patrick Kavanagh for instance.69 As classicists will appreciate, the Greek Anthology, a compendium of occasional poetry written and added to over the centuries, contains no volume XVII. The original volumes, made available to the general public at the beginning of the twentieth century, had a great inﬂuence on writers, notably Ezra Pound. Greg Delanty’s enthusiasm for things Greek is also well documented. It can be found in the translation of the work of Kyriakos Charalambides he undertook as part of the 2005 Cork Transla- tion Project, and in his versions of Aristophanes and Euripedes. With the 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 63

Greek Anthology Book XVII, he goes one step further. Playfully acknowl- edging the existence of 16 books in the preface, he suggests that the other poems “came in”, sometimes with the author’s name “unclear”. He pur- sues the game by regretting the absence of a bilingual format for reasons of space (there is a single text in Greek placed at the start of the volume). After these preliminaries, the poet is then free to slip into a variety of personae—Grigorographos, Gregory of Corkus, Gregor and Danichorus, to name but a few. In a 2007 Poetry Ireland interview with Paul McLoughlin, Delanty acknowledged that this approach was designed to enable him to enter zones within himself that he could not reach when writing out of his Greg Delanty self. The technique allows him to ventriloquise, to step outside his own poetic voice and comfort zone, to become multiple, mag- niﬁed, other. The poet changes tone, adapting to the persona on view. The poems of the Dogus voice are mystical in tenor, echoing the ecological preoccupations of Delanty’s Green Party campaigning life. The Greek references, frequently present in the book, are offset by a juxtaposition with a more contemporary turn of phrase, the unexpected trio of Trauma, Thanatos and Bigwig in “Wonder of Wonders” (166) for instance. Familiar landmarks of the Greek classical heritage are also included, often reframed, as in “The Caryatids in the Acropolis” voiced for Galia of Ithaki:

So when the ruling, puffed-up males Boast this is Democracy’s birthplace, Let them consider us, the silent stone females, Faces erased, holding up the roof-beams of our race.70

The Irish and Greek intertwine throughout, with Derrynane and Delphi coming together for example in a poem titled “Concealment”. Voiced for Heanius, the identity of this persona is easily de-masked, any hesitation removed by the reference to “the gold bar of butter,/rancid or no, left buried in the bog” (78). With this key, the reader understands that the personae also include identifiable characters. Delanty has included poems to many of the other poets referred to in this present volume, like Thomas the Gardener, Mon- tagus or indeed Geryon Morfi. As the illustration on the cover suggests, this book is also a conversation between the poet and friends, acquain- tances, or mentors. Translation for Delanty allows him to explore new 64 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN poetic fields and try out other voices while also extending discussions that the reader can imagine started in Cork many years before. In a sense, he has undertaken the task assigned to himself in an earlier poem:

No siree, I eschew such mimicry and want to be poetry’s Temecoff, who so desperately learned a new tongue That he had translation dreams where tree not just changed Their names, but their looks and character, men answered in falsetto and dogs spoke in the street.71

Among the many elements which unite these poets in a generational impulse is their approach to language and translation. They seek to broaden their palettes, expand and extend their poetic range, adopt new personae to enable them to renew their poetic practice. While this in itself does not sufﬁce to claim that those are characteristics of their generation, I think it is true to say that what I have demonstrated in the previous pages is that a deep conversation and a true dialogue about language, identity and form has been at the heart of their poetry from its earliest days.

Notes

1. Gerry Murphy, End of Part One: New and Collected Poems, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2006, p. 64. 2. Seán Dunne, The Sheltered Nest, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 1992, p. 51. 3. Ibid., p. 52. 4. PN Review 174, Vol. 33, No. 4, March–April 2007. 5. Greg Delanty, The Hellbox, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 29. 6. Ibid., p. 37. 7. Idem. 8. Idem. 9. Greg Delanty, Collected Poems, op. cit., p. 237. 10. Greg Delanty, The Hellbox,op.cit.,p.29. 11. Greg Delanty, Collected Poems, op. cit., p. 128. 12. Seán Dunne in one of his early poems “Wedding Letter to New Delhi” also links Cork and India, this time seeking oriental calm in the poise of the cranes on the Lee (Seán Dunne, Raven Introductions 1, Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1983, pp. 47–48). 13. Greg Delanty, Collected Poems, op. cit., p. 240. 14. Interview with Theo Dorgan, 17 March 2013. 15. See the programme for the festival, http://www.munsterlit.ie/CSLF% 2011%20brochure%20insert%20WEB.pdf. 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 65

16. Andres Ehin, Moosebeetle Swallow (translations Patrick Cotter), Cork Southword Editions, 2005. 17. Forthcoming in a volume of essays devoted to Munster Poetry edited by John Goodby and Clíona Ní Ríordáin. 18. Peter Fallon, afterword to Seán Dunne, Collected, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 2005, p. 199. 19. Seán Dunne, The Sheltered Nest, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 1992, p. 9. 20. David Wheatley in an interview with Bill Tinley, “Interview with David Wheatley”, Graph, http://graphmagazine.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/ david-wheatley/, consulted 13 July 2013. 21. Seán Dunne, The Sheltered Nest, op. cit., p. 18. 22. Ibid., pp. 19–20. 23. Ibid., pp. 24–27. 24. Paul Durcan has also dedicated a poem to Charles Lynch, entitled “The Late Mr. Charles Lynch Digresses”, Paul Durcan, Life Is a Dream 40 Years Reading Poems 1967 –2007, London, Harvill Secker, 2009, p. 114. Charles Lynch (1906–1984), major Irish pianist, dedicatee of Arnold Bax’s Fourth Piano Sonata. He died in poverty, and spent the last years of his life living in a boarding house on Wellington Road, Cork. 25. Ibid., p. 28. 26. Seán Dunne, Time and the Island, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 1996, p. 9. 27. Ibid., p. 16. 28. Thomas McCarthy, Gardens of Remembrance, p. 48. 29. Theo Dorgan, Greek, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2010, p. 11. 30. Thomas Osborne Davis, “A Nation Once Again”, https://celt.ucc.ie// published/E850004-013/index.html, accessed 6 December 2019. 31. Theo Dorgan, Greek,op.cit.,p.12. 32. Theo Dorgan, Greek,op.cit.,p.16. 33. Idem. 34. Idem. 35. Theo Dorgan, Orpheus, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2018, p. 18. 36. Ibid., p. 43. 37. Fred Johnson, ThePoetryIrelandReview, no. 34, pp. 62–67. 38. Gerry Murphy, My Flirtation with International Socialism, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2010. 39. Ibid., p. 68. 40. Tom Paulin, The Road to Inver, London, Faber, 2004, p. 13. 41. Interview with Maurice Riordan, Paris, 12 April 2011. 42. Maurice Riordan, The Water Stealer, London, Faber, 2013, p. 23. 43. Ibid., p. 36. 44. Ibid., p. 21. 45. Ibid., p. 22. 66 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

46. John Montague, New Collected Poems, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 2012, p. 53. 47. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, The Fifty-Minute Mermaid, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 2007, p. 30. 48. Ibid., p. 31. 49. Interviews with Thomas McCarthy (July 2011) and Gerry Murphy (September 2012). See also conversation with Colm Breathnach, Dublin, June 2011. 50. The poets of this generation had an immense respect for Michael Harnett. Thomas McCarthy invited him to UCC when he was the auditor of the English Literature Society in the mid-1970s. At the unveiling of the statue to Michael Harnett in Newtownshandrum on 11 May 2011, the address was delivered by Paul Durcan, also present in UCC during that time. Present in audience was Theo Dorgan. 51. John Montague (ed.), The Faber Book of Irish Verse, London, Faber, 1974. 52. Gregory O’Donoghue, Making Tracks, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2001, p. 36. 53. Ibid., p. 38. 54. Idem. 55. Idem. 56. Ibid., p. 40. 57. James Barry (1741–1806), Born in Cork. Painter, member of the Royal Academy from 1773 to 1799 when he was excluded because of revolu- tionary fervour. 58. Thomas McCarthy, Merchant Prince, London, Anvil Press, 2005, p. 51. 59. Ibid., p. 112. 60. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Pharaoh’s Daughter, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 1990, p. 154. 61. Cathal Ó Searcaigh although not included in the group referred to as the INNTI poets did publish extensively in the review. 62. Thomas McCarthy, The Last Geraldine Ofﬁcer, London, Anvil Press, 2009. 63. Thomas McCarthy, Without Power (1990) and Asya and Christine (1993), Dublin, Poolbeg Press. 64. Thomas McCarthy, The Last Geraldine Ofﬁcer,p.94. 65. Ibid., p. 107. 66. “Na Connerys” is a traditional Irish song about three brothers who were sent to New South Wales. 67. Ibid., pp. 142–143. 68. A version of this account of The Greek Anthology appeared in Southword 23A, http://munsterlit.ie/Southword/Issues/23A/greek_ anthology.html. 69. See Greg Delanty, Collected Poems, op. cit., pp. 60–72. 3 THE BRINDLED CATS: LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION 67

70. Greg Delanty, The Greek Anthology Book XVII, London, Carcanet, 2012, p. 150. 71. Greg Delanty, The Hellbox, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 45. CHAPTER 4

Journeys to the Past: Identities, Histories, and Myth

Abstract This chapter the issue of identity will be examined. It suggests that many of the poets included in this study engage with the Ulster aesthetic, some on the level of personal myth others on the level of provincial identity. It explores the way in which these poets and their immediate forerunners inscribed the place of the city of Cork into their poetry, highlighting the central inﬂuence of the poet Patrick Galvin on the generation under study.

Keywords Identity · Ulster aesthetic · Myth · Provincial · Patrick Galvin

Any work studying the poetry of a group of contemporary poets through the vector of collective identity on the island of Ireland runs up against an unspoken comparison—the matter of the Ulster poets and the Belfast School. And it is true that in his essay “Five Summer Afternoons” Thomas McCarthy recognises the space occupied by the Ulster poets:

When we began to publish in the mid-1970s, therefore, Ulster poetry was at its zenith. Montague, Heaney, Mahon, Simmons, Muldoon, were names that burned brightly, like ﬁery crosses in the mist of Irish literature. Wandering around the streets of Cork, we couldn’t share their energy. We were softened by the kindlier jurisdiction of the Dáil.1

The emerging Cork poets at that period made no impact, in McCarthy’s own phrase they were “gardening in the rain”. Yet elsewhere, much later, McCarthy meditates on the older, fully realised literary identity of Mun- ster and Cork, highlighting that both the region and the city were a locus for cultural activity during the nineteenth century. McCarthy’s medita- tion occurs in a review of Roy Foster’s Words Alone: Yeats and His Inher- itances.2 McCarthy takes the author to task for his Dublin and Belfast centred view of history:

The painterly myth-making of Daniel Maclise, father of two nationalist iconographies, British and Irish, and the folk gathering of Crofton Croker get a few honourable mentions here, but the worldview of Roy Foster, as of Yeats, is determinedly deﬁned by a line of conversations drawn between cultural Dublin and Belfast. I hate to bring the matter up for fear of being labelled a provincial apologist — the small matter of the absence of Munster from this survey of the early nineteenth century. Foster writes conﬁdently “The tendency to describe Ireland as a devas- tated cultural landscape between the Union and the literary renaissance of the 1890s needs to be countered: the distinct civic cultures of Dublin and Belfast in the pre-Famine era should be given their due.” Fair enough, but what about the bustling cultural spaces further south: Bolster’s Magazine, The Cuverian Society, the Cork Institution, The Canova Casts; William Maginn and Father Prout, who between them produced two spectacular works of the 19th century, The Reliques and John Manesty; as well as the editing and co-writing of Fraser’s Magazine, the great rival to the Edinburgh Review? While he does acknowledge the centrality of Crofton Croker and Daniel Maclise, prompted no doubt by Tom Dunne’s lonely efforts at enlighten- ment, Foster misses that particularly Edinburgh-like luminosity of Cork, andMunsteringeneral.3

McCarthy’s reminder of luminous nineteenth Cork, and the writers and artists associated with it, strikes a convincing note, not least because McCarthy himself devoted many years to crafting an imaginative response to this cultural golden age in his collection entitled Merchant Prince. In the rest of this chapter, I examine the issue of identity as represented by the poets of English Language Poets in University College Cork. I will suggest that many of the poets included in this study engage with the Ulster aesthetic, some on the level of personal myth others on the level of 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 71 provincial identity. I also explore the way in which these poets and their immediate forerunners inscribed the place of the city of Cork into their poetry. At the heart of the problematics of this book is University College Cork, seat of learning of Munster (“Where Finbarr Taught Let Mun- ster Learn”, as the university’s motto goes) and, with Munster is the problem with Cork, as Peter Sirr once said.4 In an earlier chapter, we have seen that the notion of Munster poetry was something that poets thought actively about. Seán Dunne’s publication in 1985 of the anthology of Poets of Munster,5 echoed an earlier nineteenth-century venture, Poets and Poetry of Munster, subtitled “A Selection of Irish Songs of the Eighteenth Century with Poetical Translations by James Clarence Man- gan” was published. Although Seán Dunne underlines in the introduction to his anthology the importance of the locality and the region, making use of Seán Ó Ríordáin’s term “ceol cheanntair”, he refutes any notion of cohesion or school at the end of the introduction:

Taking all these poets together, it can be seen that the differences between them are greater than their similarities. They have only Munster and poetry in common. Their styles are as varied as the province itself and that, in the end is how they must be seen. They are not a school but a group of different voices whose words deserve to be heard.6

Yet, it is very clear from the earlier project for an anthology of Mun- ster poetry, versions of which had been submitted to Gallery and Mercier Presses in the 1970s,7 with in one version five new Munster poets presented, that the notion of Munster poets as a school had been an idea entertained for a while at least. And while common stylistic traits may be a factor in identifying a group, such as the Movement poets or the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, other factors, such as the socio-historical and cultural elements identified earlier in this study, go some way to undermine Seán Dunne’s claims. To return to Mannheim’s concept of a generation, it is the self-identification and commonality of purpose that links them, rather than any dogmatic approach to style and form. Another earlier anthology, Five Irish Poets, edited by Seán Lucy for the Mercier Press in 1970 also supports this notion in its own small way. In his introduction, Lucy underlines what he perceives as the difficulty for a poet outside of Dublin to find a publisher: 72 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

This is very largely a problem of contact, of communication; but one should also say that Dublin has always been more parochial than the rest of Ireland, and that some of this parochialism manifests itself consciously and unconsciously in the literary activities of the capital. It might seem that to give himself a chance the provincial writer should, at the very least, settle in Dublin.8

Lucy also admits that his book might have been called Five Cork Poets given the origins of the poets included (Lucy himself, Anthony Blinco, Donal Murphy, Patrick Galvin and Seán Ó Criadáin); however, in the following paragraph, he immediately disclaims any notion of a school or a group, in terms that would be echoed by Seán Dunne more than twenty years later. He recognises only that they come from the same place and are about the same age. Nonetheless, this very definite affirmation is tempered somewhat by the concluding paragraphs of the introduction that return to the characteristics the poets have in common. His reticence, and that of Seán Dunne, may be laid on the altar of parochialism and its even more bedev- illed companion, provincialism. Yet, the conflicting claims are no doubt also due to the factors raised by Peter Sirr in his rejoinder to the call for papers:

Maybe it’s my sceptical nature but I’ve never understood the case for ‘Munster’ as some kind of autonomous cultural entity, so the argument above, that we should exchange one kind of parochialism for another, doesn’t hold much attraction. Other than the rugby team, does Munster resonate as a distinctive place with a culture or a literary sensibility radically different from Leinster or Connacht? Do any of the old provinces really hold a value for us other than as lines on a historical map? Munster does have a historical resonance, of course, but even that is fragmented. Do you mean Tuadh Mumhan (North Munster), Deas Mumhan (South Munster), Ur Mumhan (East Munster), Iar Mumhan, Ernaibh Muman (the Ernai tribes portion of Munster), or Deisi Mumhan (the Deisi tribe’s portion of Munster), or the kingdoms of Thomond, Desmond and Ormond into which they were eventually subsumed? All of these had their defenders and their competing voices but few would have pledged loyalty to the larger entity.9

I believe those claims can be addressed through the notion of the historical weight of the Munster identity as an artistic and cultural entity in 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 73 its own right. Two works by Thomas McCarthy, Merchant Prince and the “Last Geraldine Officer”, referred to in the previous chapter, do much to offer a counterpart to both Sirr and Dunne’s arguments. In the breadth of their engagement with the past and in their acknowledgement of the complexities of the evolution of Irish poetic identity, I feel they go some way to teasing out the position of Munster within Irish poetry, evoking its rich history and strong links to the Gaelic world. McCarthy, through these poems, also addresses the history and narrative of identity from the perspective of the periphery, and more specifically from his vantage point in Munster. He is the only one of the poets under study to undertake this exploration in a sustained manner, and because of the exceptional nature of his approach, I feel that his process and the arguments he elaborates are central to the ideas underlying my study. In constructing these worlds, McCarthy is offering a corrective to the centralising discourse of many literary critics, a centre located in Dublin, London, or for Irish poetry for many decades since the 1970s, in Belfast. McCarthy, I will argue, through his aesthetic and historical propositions attempts to tilt the axis away in the direction of the periphery, and his work also wishes to highlight the complexities of Irish identity. In his most recent complex and multi-layered collections, McCarthy attempts to come to terms with the whole relationship between history and memory, history and fiction. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, Thomas McCarthy’s Merchant Prince constructs a complex structure intermingling history and imagined characters, poetry and prose. Published in 2005, the collection spans the historical period of 1769–1831. It traces the story of Nathanael Murphy, a runaway seminarian, who becomes the merchant prince at the centre of the book. The time span in question covers the age of revolutions in Europe, the moment when Grattan’s parliament disappeared and the time when Ireland, through the Act of Union in 1801, was subsumed into the United Kingdom. Irish identity itself was in mutation at the time the country was convulsed by uprisings. McCarthy’s formal experimentation, in a book that unites both poetry and prose in a single volume, reflects on the changing nature of Irish identity. The prose section, entitled “Memory”, provides an accompaniment to the two sections in verse, “Blood” and “Trade”, which bookend the work. Nathanael Murphy as a fictional historical character is fully realised. The prose narrative in “Memory”, the central section of the work, outlines his interactions with historical figures, such as the painters 74 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

James Barry and Daniel Maclise. He reminds the reader of the place Cork and Munster occupied in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The poems in the sections of the books entitled “Blood” and “Trade” are dotted with references to the thriving trade that had Cork as its locus. The poems refer to tea chests10 and fabrics, silversmiths (Bil- lon and La Touche)11 and bacon,12 food and firkins13 testaments to the rich trading place that was Cork at that time. McCarthy also refers to the Cork poet J. J. Callanan and the journals he figured in, Bolster’s Mag- azine (founded in Cork in 1826), and Fraser’s, its London equivalent. McCarthy thus creates a space in his work where history and fiction are intertwined in a venture that asserts Munster and Cork’s place at the heart of trading and cultural life not just archipelagically, within the British and Irish Isles, but it also within Europe during the period covered by the book. McCarthy highlights too the value of cultural exchange: “Poetry, also, is a kind of ocean upon which we trade abundantly”.14 Merchant Prince was composed during the period when McCarthy occupied the role of Cultural Commissar for the City of Culture activities (including the Cork Translation Project), and the book can also be seen as a commentary on the events of the contemporary period. Cork, and by extension Munster, is the focus for Merchant Prince but, in a recent collection, The Last Geraldine Officer, McCarthy engages in a similar undertaking with regard to Waterford and the Déise, one of the tribes Sirr refers to in his refutation of the possibility of Munster poetry. Here too, as he did for Merchant Prince, McCarthy creates a persona, “the Last Geraldine Officer”, Sir Gerald FitzGerald. McCarthy uses him to explore the issues of history and identity at another period in Ire- land’s history when the world is in flux and Irish identity itself is again being challenged because of the onslaught of events. Yet again, McCarthy uses a heterogeneous text (combining poems in English, poems in Irish, recipes and journal entries) to explore the interrelationship between place and identity. Historical figures are constantly referenced; for example, the poem refers to Hitler (84), Mussolini (82), Churchill (91), de Valera (96), Anthony Eden (96), Seán Lemass (168), Secretary Marshall (168); as are verifiable events the Eucharistic Congress (77), the sinking of the Cho- bry (142), the liberation of the camp of Sandboken (113/4), the Paris Conference (168); McCarthy includes extracts from reviews of the time Illustrated War News (67) and Illustrated Almanack (87). The hybrid identity15 of the Anglo-Irish central character is fully fleshed out too by references and detailed descriptions of the Ascendancy 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 75 world occupied by Sir John Keane, his wife Molly Keane and the recipes for Lismore Castle Cumberland Sauce,16 and also through the recipes for the Countess of Desmond’s Cherry Jam17 or Lady Elizabeth FitzGerald’s Rhubarb Purée18 that suggest a world of privilege. The recipes are also a means of inscribing history into the book in an anecdotal way. This is the case for example with the note preceding the following recipe, a note that also gives us the origin of the twenty-four poems:

Lady FitzGerald’s Salmon with Spinach Stufﬁng

This was the last meal that Lady FitzGerald made for her husband when he came home on leave in 1917. He was unhappy with the turmoil of the land, the agitation against conscription and the increasing decline of the Redmondite perspective in County Waterford, so she made him this, one of his favourite meals, to comfort him and send him on his last journey. Under a perpetual licence that derived from an agreement between the Great earl of Cork and a Templemaurice Geraldine, and continuously honoured by the Duke of Devonshire, the family was allowed to take thirty-two salmon from the river Blackwater between Cappoquin and Molana Abbey provided that one member of the family produced twenty-four poems in each generation. Even in the worst years, the 32 salmon were always taken; and in the worst of times the twenty-four Geraldine poems of the Déise have been written and presented to the Duke, the true inheritor of the patrimony of Lismore and its rivers and keeper of the Book of McCarthy Riabhach.19

What McCarthy does in elaborating this complex historical world is to suggest metaphorically, through his use of the recipes embedded in the text, that identity too is constantly unstable. For the reader who fails to understand the connection, a diary entry spells it out plainly:

6. August 17th 1948. In the summer in the afternoon, Ireland like a molten liquid, in a free state, years of re-invention, words transformed like personal names, land where a man is born not to his mother but to his nom de guerre./ And we taste, yet again, that Cappoquin liver cooked in cream, the small effort at crutons, the taste of Cappoquin ﬁelds./ Think on this, Mrs. Keane said. What does it mean to be melted down and re-made.20 76 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

Through the introduction of the line-break symbol, which is a constant in the journal entries, McCarthy also hints at the unreliability of history. Once more, he suggests that poetry is the most appropriate means for remembering past events. This underlined in the following quotation from Merchant Prince: “It is poetry that constitutes our deepest memoir; and my sojourn in Rome—kept by me when I was hardly formed as an Irishman—is best remembered as an act of translation”.21 Poetry and translation form the centre of McCarthy’s dialogue with history, geographical place and identity. In his construction of two alterative worlds, he also evokes a period in history when Irish nationality, as a vector of identity, could be replaced by that associated with a city (Cork), a province (Munster), a caste (Anglo-Irish) or indeed a tribe (Déise). Of all of the poets under study in this volume, Thomas McCarthy has developed the most detailed dialogue with historical identity, and in doing so, his poetry can be viewed as negotiating from its peripheral space with the space of other regional or indeed metropolitan groupings. The other poets do not seem to share this preoccupation; while they do not undertake the head-on dialogue that McCarthy institutes, many of them do nonetheless establish a relationship with the poetry of the Ulster poets. Some do so overtly, as we will see in the case of Seán Dunne, others in a more personal and dialogic way. Like McCarthy, Seán Dunne too was a memoirist22; he also addresses the interface between public and private history in a long poem entitled “Letter from Ireland”, only to reject public history and nationality entirely. Stylistically, Dunne’s poem draws its inspiration from the verse missives of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. Dunne uses his poem to address to the Australian poet Vincent Buckley and it makes no secret of its literary genealogy:

And as you see, I’ve been reading Auden whose voice insists on fun in the house. His reindeer haunt me night and morning and Brodsky loves him. I feel a louse Saying it, but that’s part of my excuse. I’ll steal a cadence from the factory siren blaring out to you, my Australian Byron.23

The poem reviews the state of contemporary Ireland and holds it up against the mirror of history. Time and time again, the contemporary 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 77 world is found wanting. Dunne refutes the view, peddled by Daniel Cork- ery, that the essence of Ireland could be resumed by the Munster Final: “I have no time for the view that Ireland’s/ the sum of the scenes of the Munster Final”.24 Dunne rejects all the standard clichés of revival- ists: “My Ireland has no dark clichéd hag/toothless in the turfsmoke as she cackles”. Instead, in lines that foreshadow Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Dunne evokes the martyred women of Ireland in the 1980s:

I have seen the face of a woman dragged through bedrooms screaming, battered and bruised until her body blackened. Deirdre of the Sorrows thrives daily in the home for battered wives25

The dream of the Republic “proclaimed at the GPO (General Post Ofﬁce, Dublin)”26 has proved vain:

With Ireland, I feel I’ve bought a fake in a huckster’s shop. It passed as true value at the time and accrued worth as decades rolled while ﬁelds gave way to factories making chalk and cheese.27

Through the letter-format, Dunne underlines his personal approach to history. His insistence on the ﬁrst-person singular throughout the analysis ensures that his relationship to history is also seen as the interaction between an individual and the monolith that is History. The impulse is similar to McCarthy’s in his creation of personae, allowing him to elabo- rate an interface between the individual and the historical moment. Seán Dunne, however, has no faith in the capacity of art to change anything, again echoing positions associated with W. H. Auden:

I fear the face of the man who screams for poems to work like bayonets and pierce the veins of power. Nothing I write will mean one jot of change in the broken streets of Belfast or Dublin. No words can meet bullets and no poem I know can aid the ﬁrm dismantling of a barricade.28 78 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

Although Dunne does not address the issue of a Munster identity in this poem, despite its veiled jibe at Daniel Corkery, the poem does establish a dialogue with the poetry of the Ulster poets and with Seamus Heaney in particular:

I write from our commonwealth of art as Heaney called it, of makaris our. There, with trampled petals of the heart, I place words in ridges and tend each poor stray syllable.29

Dunne’s poem thus refutes a notion of an identity other than that of the artist. Ireland, the country in which he was brought up, is a place whose nationalist mythology he now rejects, contrary to those who hang black ﬂags for the Hunger Strikers. This is obvious in a stanza where the word “black” beats like a drum on every other word:

Black border on photographs, black dresses for grief, black berets on cofﬁns, black bowlers and bands, black bullet holes in hallways, black words of command, black taxis, black jackets, black bruise and contusion, black crêpe on a letter bow, the Royal Black Institution.30

Interestingly, although the poem dialogues with the poetry of Heaney, notably the poem “The Harvest Bow”,31 it anticipates another Heaney poem, “Flight Path”.32 This was published in the collection The Spirit Level in 1996, the year after Dunne’s death. In the poem, the angry traveller demands of the poet when he is going to write a poem for the cause; in Stepping Stones, Heaney would reveal that the angry voyager was none other than Sinn Féin activist, Danny Morrison. Both Maurice Riordan and Greg Delanty also establish a dialogue with the poetry of Seamus Heaney. Maurice Riordan in his collection The Holy Land mythologises the townlands of his birth, and more particularly his father’s fields in the same fashion that Seamus Heaney inscribed the land around Anahorish, Toner’s Bog and the pump in the farmyard. For a rural Irish poet writing in the wake of Heaney, the anxiety of influence is almost inevitable. The fields evoked in an earlier collection Floods,ina poem in memory of his mother’s dinner call: 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 79

My mother comes to the doorstep, her head back, one hand shading her slant eyes, and issues her dinner call: a sound I can hear but cannot quite repeat—not a shout, nor yet song, but carrying to the summery-silent ﬁelds, to the Glens, to the Big Bog, and the Little Bog.33

In the later collection, the silent fields are animated by the talk of the men who worked in them. The title “The Idylls” stretches back to Ten- nyson’s “Idylls of the King” and beyond those to the elegiac sadness of the Idylls of Theocritus. The “Once upon a time” of the Calvino epigraph highlights the nostalgic and narrative tone of the prose poems. There are 18 in total, one for each of his father’s fields. In the same way as Heaney creates a poetic texture from life lived between barn and byre, Riordan creates a repetitive layering effect, lulling us with familiar old-fashioned names, Dan-Joe, Moss, Paddy, a roll-call to the forgotten heroes of his childhood. The prose poems remind us of Heaney’s Stations but Rior- dan is far more interested in recording the orality of the bygone days, of capturing the voices, just as he attempted to record his mother’s dinner call. Like McCarthy, but in a more low-key, less deliberate fashion, Riordan also writes History into the rural space. Idyll number 13 revolves around the memory of “The Big Fellow” and the procession of the gunboat carrying his body to Dublin. Michael Collins’ name is never mentioned; instead, the poem is a roll-call to the harbours and inlets of the Cork coast: Blackrock, Rushbrooke, Ringaskiddy, Cobh. Riordan, as ever, is concerned with names and etymology, and as soon as the name is uttered, the speaker is corrected “Queenstown, as it was called”.34 Riordan bal- ances a nationalist historiography on the facing page with a poem devoted to a list of “boys who couldn’t do a sum or write their name”, and who died: “‘They died, Moss, on the Somme and on the Marne.’/‘They died for the same wet and muck, Martin’”.35 Riordan is particularly attentive to family names associated with the area; in the poem about the dead boys, the names are written into the poem like the engraving on a headstone: Driscolls, Connells, Corcorans, Shea… He is attentive also to the names of fields and to the recitation of the names of types of apples, echoing in this a poem by Seán Dunne, also a prose poem, “Eldress Bertha and the Apples”.36 He creates a network 80 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN between those poems and earlier poems; in the eponymous poem “The Holy Land”, the greyhound “Goldfinger” is at the heart of the poem:

Father Burns has given us Basil, his greyhound pup, While he’s away himself to the Holy Land. Basil’s track name is Goldﬁnger. We believe he’s the fastest hound in Christendom.37

The same dog reappears in Idyll no. 5, chasing hares in the field. Con- nections are also made to the poems of other poets under consideration in this volume. This is the case with “The Ten Commandments”. The poet’s family are heading to Youghal, with his father behind the wheel of their “frigate-grey second-hand Ford Anglia”. The final poem of Greg Delanty’s Collected Poems, “Aceldama”38 also has his family in an Anglia heading for Youghal. Riordan is determined to bring history back to the private individual narrative of uneducated boys who fought for land that is just “wet and muck” but the poems, however, do have the power to mythologise the East Cork landscape around Lisgoold, to create an enabling personal pantheon in which his father, Martin Riordan, to whose memory the book is dedicated, will live on. Greg Delanty also is adept at creating a personal mythological space. It is most clearly articulated in his collection The Hellbox.39 In this too, the reader of Irish poetry can see a dialogue with the poetry of Heaney. Just as Heaney had a pen and dug with it, engaging with the pen as his father engaged with the spade, in the perfect enabling myth, Delanty digs deep into the hellbox, the bin into which the printers threw broken or worn type. The cover of the collection establishes his lineage: “Greg Delanty grew up in a family of printers, and as a youth he worked in the compos- ing room”.40 Readers of Delanty’s early work will remember his production of The Quarryman as a joint venture with his father. Delanty’s use of the printing trope allows him to create a vibrant, ludic collection, where the central conceit of printing is developed to its full. So it is that we have poems based on typographical features like *.41 Others include ding- bats.42 One poem, “The Printer’s Devil”,43 is printed entirely in reverse. The hellbox itself is also used as a metaphor for an identity that is being melted down, modified and altered through his new American incarnation. The final poem dismisses the whole notion of American wake that was the central conceit of his previous collection: 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 81

But to hell with all that American waking, that bull, That myth-making crap that I also probably rigged Like the Veronica caper and mostly for the sake Of venturing to discover some new way of saying The same old rigamarole: […]44

And although Delanty dismisses the American wake as “myth-making crap”, it also enabled him to explore his identity and to define himself as a poet in relation to the new American poetic space, experimenting also with poetic form directly inspired by American poets. It was in American Wake that Delanty, in his guise of the emigrant- poet, devoted most space to the city of Cork. I have explored this in relation to his use of language in an earlier chapter. The same collection also enabled Delanty to record, much as Riordan did in The Holy Land, the space of his childhood, the lanes and alleyways of Cork city. In the final section of this chapter, I will explore the means used by the poets under review to inscribe Cork into the poetic heritage of Ireland, in a final examination of their engagement with history and myth, as I read their work against the background of their literary forerunners. One of the major shifts in Irish poetry in the second half of the twentieth century is the movement from the constant edification of the rural to the increasing attention paid to the urban. The poets under consideration draw their inspiration from many sources but are for the most part city born and thus their relationship with Cork city should be examined. Has it become a natural focus for some of their poems? Does their poetry of the city mark a new contribution to the vision of Cork in verse? Although the city has been well served by prose writers in its immor- talisation in print, Cork’s most emblematic poem for over a century and a half has been Fr. Prout’s “The Bells of Shandon”:

With deep affection and recollection I often think of the Shandon bells, Whose sounds so wild would, in days of childhood, Fling round my cradle their magic spells. On this I ponder, where’er I wander, And thus grow fonder, sweet Cork, of thee, With thy bells of Shandon, That sound so grand on The pleasant waters of the river Lee.45 82 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

This much-anthologised poem reaches back to Cork in its heyday during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Its author, Fr. Prout, Francis Sylvester Mahony46 (who was mentioned as an influence on the present generation in the introductory chapter) was one of the poets associated with writers such as J. J. Callanan47 and Thomas Crofton Cro- ker,48 and painters like Daniel Maclise,49 referred to earlier in McCarthy’s exchange with Roy Foster. Bathed in the light of nostalgia, the poem, while ostensibly about the city, turns its attention to the perceived pastoral qualities of Cork, and “the pleasant waters” of the river that bisects it; compared to Notre Dame, Saint Sophia and the churches of the Vat- ican, “memory swelling” ennobles the belfry of the city’s most famous church. It can be seen as celebrating the European qualities of the city, referred to by Elizabeth Bowen century later, in the passage quoted earlier in the opening chapter of this volume. Of the city itself, with its dark lanes and allies that surround St Anne’s Shandon, the Butter Exchange and the Firkin Crane that shelter in its shadow, we hear nothing. The details are drowned out by the bells, and swept away by the echoing final line of each stanza, “the pleasant waters of the river Lee”. For the dark intimacies of the city, for its shawlies and sweetshops, its cacophonous sounds and pungent smell, we have to wait for the prose works of Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin or indeed for Elizabeth Bowen who underlines the sweet rotting smell of the city, as quoted earlier in this volume. Fr. Prout’s Cork is, with the spires, caught in the clouds of memory; the urban is absent, and the notion of the city as a vision of hell, so common in nineteenth-century literature, has no place in the evocation of the sweet Cork of Francis Sylvester Mahony. In this section, I examine the extent to which the mapping of the city territory has been carried out by the present generation of poets and trace their immediate forerunners. I illustrate the fact that the city appearing before our eyes is anything but a sweet pastoral lieu de mémoire. All of the younger generation of poets have evoked the work of Patrick Galvin, who, while best remembered today for his memoirs, also portrayed the city in poems like “Statement on the Burning of Cork” or “The Madwoman of Cork”. Galvin’s city is inhabited by the dead, the mad and the murderous. His madwoman stalks the streets and sees ghosts; she is a cypher for the social divide and for the stigma of mental illness:

Today Is the feast day of Saint Anne 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 83

Pray for me I am the madwoman of Cork

Yesterday In Castle Street I saw two goblins at my feet I saw a horse without a head Carrying the dead To the graveyard Near Turner’s Cross.

I am the madwoman of Cork No one talks to me.

When I walk in the rain The children throw stones at me Old men persecute me And women close their doors When I die Believe me They’ll set me on ﬁre.

I am the madwoman of Cork Ihavenosense.50

If Fr. Prout’s Cork is one of spires and pleasant water, Galvin’s is that of the streets and alleys, and of townspeople who are both intolerant and inhospitable. His refrain with the modiﬁed second line provides a gloomy counterpoint to Prout’s bells. “Statement on the Burning of Cork” is more experimental. It mixes historical fact with architectural detail, blends folk tale and mythical Cork locales like Katie Barry’s, and, with an echo of his dramatic skills, includes an italicised voice which takes the statement from the ﬁrst-person narrator of the poem. It moves between prose poems, which relate tales connected with key locations in Cork (St Patrick’s bridge, The Coal Quay, the mili- tary barracks), and verse:

Please continue.

St Patrick’s bridge was opened in 1895. It has three arches and is made of limestone. The old bridge was swept away in the great ﬂood of 1853. Near 84 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

the site of the old bridge there was a field known as Maggie’s Dump. On the night of the flood, two brothers having engaged each other in a fight, were both killed in this field. Some say, the brothers had taken different sides in a recent rebellion. Others say that they fought over a worthless woman. But where these two men fell no grass has ever grown. And the impression of their feet remains to this day.

Continue.51

The refrain in this poem is the alternating tenses of denial “I was not involved”, “I am not involved”. They come together in the ﬁnal verse section:

Three soldiers Of the British Crown Marched past The Cork Opera House. And this man In his condition Denounced them And the British occupation. Saw ﬂames then Rising over Cork And the City Hall Falling to the ground. And these three Without contrition Took this man And stoned him to death.

I was not involved I am not involved I have no wish To be called to witness.52

Cork was burned by British forces during the War of Independence on the night of 11/12 December 1920.53 The form of Galvin’s poem allows the event to be subsumed into a surrealistic landscape of imagined terrors and half-remembered legends. Yet the geography of the city is not forgotten. Cork, in Galvin’s hands, is a deadly place of non-commitment and conformity, where exclusion is second nature to the citizens. The 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 85 experimental nature of Galvin’s work, heavily influenced by his experience in the theatre but redolent also of his roots in the ballad tradition, creates a psychogeography of Cork, a background with which later writers can interact. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Brian Lalor have also made a significant contribution to the record of the city. Their collaborative work, Cork, was published by Gallery Press in 1977. It provides a record of the city, fixed through the line drawings of Brian Lalor, who provides panoramic views of the quays and the skylines of the city from vantage points like Patrick’s Hill, but also delves down the passages and narrow laneways: Paradise Alley, Christchurch Lane, Gray’s Lane. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s opening poem, in the section entitled “The Marsh”, however, contains no geographic locale, no pointers to place, running counterpoint to the extreme precision of Lalor’s delicate artwork. The poem ends in anonymity, can- celling the sense of exception that Cork people like to feel is characteristic of their city:

Outside the window it is Sunday But the neighbours’ washing hangs on the line And between the stiff squares of white cloth Just visible, a glass window, Blackness beyond Half veiled by a net curtain, A lined curtain, a lampshade The wooden back of a looking-glass, then blackness.

We could be in any city.54

With its echoes of Brinsley McNamara’s Valley of the Squinting Windows in the half-veiled windows, the opprobrium of the citizenry can be felt behind the void of the net curtain. The black and white view of the world is suggested by the chromatic colour scheme of the stanza, reduc- ing Cork to the petty parochialism of an imaginary village. In an article he contributed to a special number of the Irish University Review about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Thomas McCarthy suggests that this volume and another by Ní Chuilleanáin, Site of Ambush, were important texts for him and his coevals:

Her Corkness was declared early, and completely, resolutely in two major publications, Site of Ambush in 1975 and Cork, with Brian Lalor in 1977. 86 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

For those of us who attended University College Cork in the mid-seventies they are among the High Books of our youth, along with Michael Hart- nett’s Farewell to English, Seamus Heaney’s North, and John Montague’s Great Cloak.55

To the conservationist instincts of Brian Lalor and Eiléan Ní Chuil- leanáin in Cork can be added the individual impulses of the younger poets. In each case, their poems add a sediment of perception, and the multiple layers, laid down like tracing paper, allow us to see the contours of Cork emerge, Blackpool, Patrick’s Street, the Shaky Bridge. Their Cork- ness too emerges. Yet, the relationship with the city and the writer is always ambiguous. Paul Durcan has written of it as being as “intimate and homicidal as a little Marseilles”. Seán Dunne produced an anthology of Cork (both city and county) at a time when his relationship with the place had changed. In the beginning, he stresses “I was wary of provincialism and saw myself as a semi-detached uneasy inhabitant”.56 Each of the poets negotiates their relationship with the city in a different way, some, like Fr. Prout, view it through the rosy spectacles of nostalgia, for others it is a locus of historical interest, and for others still it is merely a backdrop to everyday life. Peter Barry, in Contemporary British Poetry and the City, has developed a classification for the way in which poets think the city. He starts with “urban double visioning”, where the fields of the countryside remain buried under the city streets; in the second category, he describes the choice made by poets between setting (generic) and geography (loco- specific); while the final division refers to a chronotopic approach, where, after Bakhtin, space and time are inseparable. This taxonomy is helpful in considering the way in which the poets inscribe the city in their poetry. Gerry Murphy’s Cork, as I suggested in a previous chapter, is for the most part a generic setting, a backdrop for his love poems, a state necessary for his achievement of universality. In a poem like “Sweet Spring Rain”, the litany of place names that occur in the poem take on a fantas- tical dimension:

If you have seen me Little of late It is because I have been impersonating MacCurtain Street And the entire length of Summerhill 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 87

To discreetly observe you passing, Relishing every step. If am enthralled If I am enraptured If I am entranced by your loveliness, Then I am not entirely disarmed: Ikeepasmallautomaticinmyhippocket And a grenade under each lapel, Just in case.57

Murphy, with his wry surrealistic humour, does not choose to impersonate one of Cork’s heroes, Lord Mayor Tomás MacCurtain shot in Blackpool on the 20 March 1920 during the War of Independence, but rather the thoroughfare named after him, and all with a view to pursuing Murphy’s passion. The juxtaposition of armaments and the name of the celebrated republican are not innocuous. However, it is clear that in this instance the poet wants to make love, not war. The conﬂation of the two is pursued in other poems like “For Peace comes dropping slow”:

(after W.B. Yeats) A girl passes On the footpath, A girl With a lovely brown speck In one of her blue blue eyes And you think The World will probably end Sweetly after all, Or, at least That the Bomb Will drop softly Like a Cathedral…58

Murphy’s irreverence extends to the High Priest of Irish poetry and to institutionalised religion itself. In “Warm-Air Front”, divided into three separate sections, named for the three locations where he sees his love, the setting is contained in the subtitles (i) Stopping the Planet in St Luke’s, (ii) Breathless in the Hibernian Bar and (iii) Drowning on Wellington Road. However, the poems themselves concentrate on the encounter with the loved one, on 88 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN the effect of her passage, “The Earth is momentarily still;/then resumes its slow majestic spin”. Murphy’s Cork is surrealistic, malleable, a dream city, transportable to other locales:

I can’t tell you Where this is happening. I know it’s a dream Because the left bank of the Seine Has just appeared directly opposite The right bank of the Lee.59

In “Long Valley Revisited”, Cork is a place where the moon speaks to a middle-aged poet:

Middle age is whispering on Winthrop street: “a taxi, a cup of cocoa and then to bed.” A full moon over Marlboro Street Is exhorting me to stay out, Perk up, think nineteen, get a life!60

Yet, in this poem, as in many others, the names of the streets themselves could be found anywhere in the Anglophone world. These are not poems of dinnseannachas, and there is no etymological excavation going on in Murphy’s poems. In this example, only the title, with its reference to Cork poets’ favourite watering hole, anchors the poem to the city. Theo Dorgan also has a poem containing the Long Valley in its title: “I Remember A Night in the Long Valley”. While the Long Valley is just a reference point for Murphy, Dorgan pays homage to it as the headquarters of poetry in Cork. He summons up the round table, where so many poetic discussions and controversies have raged, and has the legendary barman Humphrey Moynihan ofﬁciate:

There we were with the light Pouring out of us Onto the round and famous table. Even Humphrey was laughing,

Calling Time! Time! Like a barman in a fable.61 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 89

Dorgan’s poems of Cork are on the whole poems of memory, medita- tions on childhood; they can be seen as the mixture of the marvellous and the ordinary that animates many of Dorgan’s poems. We ﬁnd the same trope in this poem, hinted at in the mention of the fable. It is expanded upon in the following verses: “The bells boomed//in my head, the familiar/sliding slow into the strange”.62 We have an inkling that these are the twelve strokes of midnight in a fairy tale, and not simply the end of a night’s banter in a Cork pub. A similar effect is to be found in “A Noc- turne for Blackpool”, which is introduced by summoning a dolphin and a unicorn:

Dolphins are coursing in the blue air outside the window And the sparking stars are oxygen bubbling up to the moon. At the end of the terrace, unicorns scuff the asphalt, One with her neck stretched on the cool roof of a car.63

Dorgan mingles scenes from ordinary life in this working-class quarter of Cork, tales of unemployment and love. Unlike Murphy, who has no truck with the history of place, Dorgan inscribes the history of the area in the poem, recording lists of heroes Jack Lynch,64 Frank O’Connor, Che Guevara, providing an image of the instants before Tomás MacCurtain’s death:

The ghost of Inspector Swanzy creeps down Hardwick Street, MacCurtain turns down the counterpane of a bed he’ll never sleep in, Unquiet murmurs scold from the blue-slate rooftops The Death Squad no one had thought to guard against.65

Dorgan also engages with the Cork of Fr. Prout, but his bells of Shan- don wake young lovers in a ﬂat in one of the alleys, full as he says of “submarine life”. His Cork is an industrial one, buzzing to the noise of the breweries and the roars of trucks. At the close of the poem realism returns: “The unicorns of legend are the donkeys of childhood” but it is the gift of the extraordinary that permits the people “to keep the skill to make legend of the ordinary”. In a later volume, Nine Bright Shiners (2014), the title sequence allows Dorgan to engage with the sombre past of a Cork marked by poverty, illness and death. The sequence of nine poems, each 13 lines long (as 90 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN if death curtailed the possibility of completing the song of a sonnet sequence), is predominantly set in Cork, although the city is never named. The contrast between the living older poet and his dead friends is established in the opening line of the ﬁrst poem:

A dead boy stands under a falling ball, gathering the future in its downward rush, a blank sputnik plunging to earth, and the wind buffeting his face is the wind of the world without him, January wind of the world when he has gone.66

The tone of the sequence is set from that ﬁrst epithet. The subject matter ranges from the guilt on the death of a parent: “Did you die believing I knew but would not come?”,67 to the suicide of a friend. The Cork locale is alluded to in the reference to Lavitt’s Quay, and to the fate that awaited him: “Somebody told me, by the river. Just walked in”.68 In number 8 of the sequence, the poet records the death of his sister. There are echoes here of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Out of The Bag”,69 where the children came in Dr. Kerlin’s bag. However, the social differences between the two poets emerge in what the persona of the poet believes the bag will contain:

Somehow it is in my head he will take her away in his leather bag, our small dead sister; I think this even though she’s already away with the doctor and his leather bag in his shiny, shiny car. My mother lies in a dark bedroom, staring up at nothing.70

Again, as with Orpheus, it is in his mature poetry that Dorgan seeks to plumb the depths of the memories of his city, and his youth. Seán Dunne and Thomas McCarthy came to the city as students and stayed to pursue their careers. While Thomas McCarthy’s exploration of the city’s history will be examined elsewhere, the city is a locus for the domestic in the work of Seán Dunne. In a series of short poems grouped under the title “Sydney Place”, Seán Dunne provides us with a series of snapshots of domestic life in Cork. Snapshot is perhaps not an accurate term because the central image in this sequence of six-line stanzas is that of the pictures taken in the passport photo booth in Cork’s bus ofﬁce, each poem stanza is an identity photo of the poet’s life: 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 91

The Bus Station

The passport photo booth ﬂashes in the bus station near the river. I watch it from my high window: a message sent with a mirror from desperate souls in a valley, frantic for answers from the far hills.71

Dunne’s perch in Sydney Place, situated on Wellington Road high above the Cork allowed him a vista of the city, yet as the mirror at the centre of this section indicates, his sequence also reflects on domestic inte- riors, sending us flashes of his own life. The combination of the desperate souls and the Larkinesque high window cast a dark shadow over the poem; this is confirmed by the forbidding still life of another poem in the sequence “Dried Flowers”. These are indeed a “nature morte”, fossilised and fragile, “crisp hopes weathered and worn”. The shadow of death and decay haunt the sequence. Like Larkin in “High Windows”, Dunne is suspended between past and present:

Railings

My son swings from black railings where once a horse was tethered. Snow settles on his woollen hat, crystals dissolve in strands. In a photograph he squints ahead to a future from which we’ve gone.72

Life is as ﬂeeting as the dissolving snow crystals, we sense that the poet has slipped his tether and is hovering above the city. He sees other ghosts, those of the children in the deserted school in Belgrave Place.73 He wit- nesses the funeral of a dead pianist. Although not mentioned by name, this is Charles Lynch, a celebrated concert pianist who ended his life in poverty in a boarding house on Wellington Road. He is the subject of an affectionate poem by Paul Durcan, “The Late Mr Charles Lynch Digress- es”.74 In Dunne’s stanza entitled “The Dead Pianist”, it is the pianist’s funeral cortège that forms the central image, 92 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

The pianist’s funeral passes terraces at evening, his long ﬁngers joined on a still stomach. I think of John Field dead in Moscow and hear a nocturne settling in leaves from trees on Wellington Road.75

The rhythm of the procession is stilted and irregular, halted by the com- binations of liquid ls and rs and the obstructed stops of the /t/ and /d/ phonemes. Through the nocturne, the poet provides a soundscape and a grey gloom, but he also pushes us to think of the better-known exponent of the nocturne form, Chopin, and his “Marche funèbre”. More death follows that of an unnamed poet’s wife, her absence lies at the heart of the stanza, the poet “holds a ring up to the light/ and frames the space where she has been”.76 Thecitymirrorsthepoet’ssoul.Wesensethat this is a poem for the death of a marriage. Conﬂict and strife are alluded to in the section entitled “The Poet Upstairs”

The poet is working upstairs. I can hear his typewriter clattering between our arguments, poems made among shouts and accusations: our ﬁerce anger a dust that clogs the bright needle of his work.77

In the ﬁnal section, the moon appears and the poet alludes to homes “rife with offerings/ to appease it before it disappears”. It is difﬁcult to decide whether these poems can be categorised as generic or geographic in terms of their setting. They deal with the generic problem of domestic strife yet the poems are nourished by the geographical details, and the history associated with the locality helps to create the heavy, melancholy atmosphere of the sequence. Thomas McCarthy, the typing poet in the previous sequence, also has written a poem located in Sydney Place, entitled “The Musician’s Love- Nest”; it was published after the death of Seán Dunne. While the poem itself is about desire and domestic happiness, in a sense it is also an attempt to recover the space of Sydney Place for love, to furnish it with happier memories. Memories that echo an earlier evocation of this district 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 93 of Cork, “the Latin quarter of St Luke’s”, in McCarthy’s poem “Toast”, are taken from his earlier collection The Non-aligned Story-Teller (1984). This intent is apparent in the second stanza of the poem:

Each night, just for a laugh, we lit the ﬁre Or cooked a cautious meal for Sara and Seán. Two of us were reading Douglas D. on ratatouille. St Kilda’s Parliament was our skinny cookbook. We lived in a neighbourhood that loved Seán Dunne. Each day he brought love in spoonfuls To keep and cook. His laughter like butterscotch Grew hard, sweet, brittle with little time to write. His clothes were a theatre under jet-black hair. His voice like Joyce, a shade of early death.78

Key to our understanding of the poem is the allusion to Douglas D. on line 3 of this stanza. It refers to Douglas Dunn; his poem “Ratatouille” contains both a recipe and a musing on political engagement and love. Dunn’s poetry negotiates the terrain between the political and the personal, much as McCarthy’s does. The elegies for his first wife aside, it is an optimistic poetry, with a collection entitled The Happier Life.Itis this happier life that McCarthy recreates here in his memories of Sydney Place. McCarthy’s inscription of Seán Dunne in the neighbourhood, “a neighbourhood that loved Seán Dunne”, reaffirms the positive memories of the locale. His Dunn, homophone for the other Dunne, affirms the vitality of life and love, a corrective to the gloomy Larkin who hovers over Seán Dunne’s poem. McCarthy’s evocation of cooking as a central conceit in the poem is also a reminder of Seán Dunne’s own poems like “The Smell of Cake”, or “Baking Bread”, or the later “Bean Feast”, each of them joyous evoca- tions of love, and food prepared and shared together, a corrective to the thrown away abandoned beans in the opening poem in Dunne’s “Sydney Place” sequence. Where Dunne evokes the dead pianist and the mourn- ful nocturnes, McCarthy has the live pianist, Jan Cap, play the spirited music of Martin˚u and Janaˇcek. McCarthy’s poem closes with his tribute to the redemptive force of poetry: “Sure, time plays tricks and edits everything,/but I believe in the space controlled by love,/ charism of memory, redemptive dust of poems”. 94 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

In the same collection, McCarthy also moves away from the intersec- tion between the personal domestic space and the city to a purely geographic response to Cork. Taking their names from a series of streets and well-known sites, McCarthy’s poems explore the etymology and cartog- raphy of the city. He makes use of the Irish place names “Sráid an Cha- paill Bhuí” in “Grand Parade” and traces the Huguenot presence in the city in “French Church Street”. The poems are animated by a flicker- ing light, which changes in each poem giving us a palette of the city under different lights, “Today, the passionate light of a city in the South, red light/ of October and its various shades”. There is the red sunlight on Patrick’s Street, the orange and green of the traffic lights, the yellow lights of a distant suburb, the half-light of the undergrowth, the new flood-lighting on a emblematic monument. He is determined to revise the clichéd images of the city. “Blackrock Castle” is recognised as being “Kitsch”. The attempted renewal with new flood-lighting leaves it “dread drunk now in a new suit”. Two chic suburbs, the Montenotte of the old money and the Rochestown of the nouveau riche, are blighted, one with leaking roofs and exhausted walls, and the other a locus for the disillusioned bour- geoisie: “Their adult lives, like ragwort, yellow in the rain”. The double visioning of McCarthy’s Cork poems here exposes no bucolic fields lying under the Mac-mansions of the Rochestown Road, but through the reference to the “yellow peril” suggests that the toxic infestation was already present in the farmland they built on. Even the swans on the river Lee are not signs of nature and fidelity; rather, they are seen as cyphers for modernity, and the poem’s title is “Swans at the NMRC” (National Microelec- tronics Research Centre). The poems end with “the smoky blue haze” of a traffic pile-up at a roundabout. McCarthy’s Cork is a modern city. There is no nostalgia in these lines for times past. Thomas McCarthy’s ten poems which take contemporary Cork as their central concern are perhaps the most systematic engagement with the matter of modern Cork written by any of the poets under consideration. I would argue that his summoning of nineteenth-century Cork, in Mer- chant Prince examined elsewhere in this volume, is far more compelling and comprehensive in its approach. Delanty, Murphy and Dorgan con- struct their own relationships with the urban space, inflected with their own concerns, but the city itself is not a factor that generates their poetic oeuvre. 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 95

Notes

1. Thomas McCarthy, Gardens of Remembrance, Dublin, New Island Books, 1998. 2. Roy Foster, Yeats and His Inheritances, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011. 3. Thomas McCarthy, “Music to the Ears of Yeats but Unfortunate Neglect of Munster”, The Irish Examiner, 4 June 2011, http://www. irishexaminer.com/opinion/books/music-to-the-ears-of-yeats-fans-but- an-unfortunate-neglect-of-munster-1567, consulted 12 July 2012. 4. In response to a call to papers issued by the Munster Literature Centre for essays on Munster Poetry, Peter Sirr outlined his objections to the very notion of Munster poetry in the following terms in an entry on his blog entitled “The Munster Republic”: “Perhaps the case for Munster would be less strenuously articulated if it didn’t have Cork in it. It’s certainly hard not to feel that in the argument above Munster is essentially another name for Cork.” Peter Sirr, Cat Flap Blog, 18 March 2008, http://petersirr. blogspot.fr/2008/03/munster-republic.html, consulted 8 May 2012. 5. Seán Dunne (ed.), Poets of Munster,op.cit. 6. Ibid., p. 26. 7. Interviews with Thomas McCarthy and Peter Fallon, June 2011. 8. Seán Lucy, “Introduction”, Five Irish Poets, Seán Lucy (ed.), Cork, Mercier, 1970, pp. 11–13. 9. Peter Sirr, op. cit. 10. Thomas McCarthy, Merchant Prince,op.cit.,p.31. 11. Ibid., p. 23. 12. Ibid., p. 30. 13. Ibid., p. 164. 14. Ibid., p. 154. 15. The notion of a hybrid identity is one developed in essays by David Lloyd in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment, Dublin, Lilliput Press, 1993. 16. Thomas McCarthy, The Last Geraldine Ofﬁcer,op.cit.,p.98. 17. Ibid., p. 134. 18. Ibid., p. 133. 19. Ibid., p. 134. The Book of McCarthy Riabhach is also known as the Book of Lismore. The text of the book can be found at http://www.ucc. ie/celt/book_lismore.html. “The brief history given by the CELT sources has the following to say about the book. The Codex was kept at Kilbrittain and came into the possession of Richard Boyle, ﬁrst earl of Cork during the Irish civil war in June 1642, before it disappeared from view. It was rediscovered in Lismore Castle in 1814 in the course of building works and transferred from Lismore to Chatsworth in 1930.” Chatsworth House is the seat of the Duke of Devonshire. 96 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

20. Thomas McCarthy, ibid., p. 130. 21. Thomas McCarthy, Merchant Prince, op.cit., p. 49. 22. Seán Dunne, In My Father’s House, Oldcastle, Gallery, 1991. 23. Seán Dunne, Collected,op.cit.,p.67. 24. Idem. 25. Idem. 26. Ibid., p. 61. 27. Ibid., p. 60. 28. Ibid., p. 64. 29. Ibid., p. 63. 30. Ibid., p. 65. 31. Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground, London, Faber, 1998, pp. 183–184. 32. Ibid., pp. 412–413. 33. Maurice Riordan, Floods, London, Faber, 2000. 34. Maurice Riordan, TheHolyLand,op.cit.,p.30. 35. Ibid., p. 31. 36. Seán Dunne, Collected, op. cit., p. 96. None of the types of apples are the same. 37. Maurice Riordan, TheHolyLand,op.cit.,p.5. 38. Greg Delanty, Collected Poems, p. 234. 39. Greg Delanty, The Hellbox, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. 40. Ibid., Backmatter. 41. Ibid., p. 10. 42. Ibid., p. 11. 43. Ibid., p. 20. 44. Ibid., p. 41. 45. Francis Sylvester Mahony, The Relics of Father Prout, http://www.archive. org/stream/ﬁnalreliquesfa01mahogoog/ﬁnalreliquesfa01mahogoog_ djvu.txt, consulted 6 June 2012. 46. Francis Sylvester Mahony (1804–1866), poet and journalist born in Cork. Educated at Clongowes Wood College and on the continent. Ordained a priest in Lucca, appointed to the diocese of Cork. Went to London in 1834 and there contributed to Fraser’s Magazine through the Cork connection of William Maginn. He published The Reliques of Father Prout in 1837, the imaginary translations of an imaginary parish priest, with line drawings by Daniel Maclise. He settled in Paris in 1848. He is buried in the vault in Shandon. 47. Jeremiah Joseph Callanan (1795–1829), born in Cork, died in Lisbon. Studied in Maynooth and TCD. Contributed to Blackwoods Magazine. Translator of note. 48. Thomas Crofton Croker (1798–1854). Born in Cork. Irish antiquary, collected songs and legends and was an inspiration to the Irish Revival. 4 JOURNEYS TO THE PAST: IDENTITIES, HISTORIES, AND MYTH 97

49. Daniel Maclise (1806–1870). Born in Cork. Painter. Attended Royal Academy Schools. Celebrated for his illustrations and portraits and his murals in the House of Lords. His “Aoife and Strongbow” (1854) in the National Gallery in Dublin is also vital in its contribution to the icono- graphic mythology of Ireland. 50. Patrick Galvin, “The Madwoman of Cork”, Patrick Galvin Selected Poems, G. Delanty & Robert Welch (ed.), Cork, Cork University Press, 1996, p. 67. 51. Ibid., p 74. 52. Ibid., p. 75. 53. See John Borgonovo, The Dynamics of War and Revolution: Cork City, 1916–1918, Cork, Cork University Press, 2013. 54. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Cork, Oldcastle, Gallery, 1977, p. 10. 55. Thomas McCarthy, “We Could Be in Any City: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Cork”, The Irish University Review, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2007, pp. 230– 243, p. 235. 56. Seán Dunne, “Introduction”, The Cork Anthology, Cork, Cork University Press, 1993, pp. 1–13, p. 3. 57. Gerry Murphy, RiodelaPlataandAllThat, Dublin, Dedalus 1993, p. 16. 58. Ibid., p. 62. 59. Gerry Murphy, Torso of an Ex-girlfriend,Dublin,Dedalus,p.28. 60. Gerry Murphy, ibid., p. 29. 61. Theo Dorgan, What This Earth Cost Us, Dublin, Dedalus, 2008, p. 124. 62. Idem., p. 124. 63. Ibid., p. 20. 64. Jack Lynch (1917–1999) was a North Mon pupil, like Theo Dorgan. He was a legendary Cork hurler (Glen Rovers) and went into politics for Fianna Fáil. He was Taoiseach from 1966 to 1973 and from 1976 to 1979. 65. Theo Dorgan, What This Earth,op.cit.,p.20. 66. Theo Dorgan, Nine Bright Shiners, Dublin, Dedalus, 2014, p. 58. 67. Ibid., p. 59. 68. Ibid., p. 61. 69. Seamus Heaney, Electric Light, London, Faber, 2001, pp. 6–10. 70. Theo Dorgan, Nine Bright Shiners,op.cit.,p.65. 71. Seán Dunne, Collected,op.cit.,p.81. 72. Ibid., p. 80. 73. The school is Scoil Íte founded in 1916 by Annie and Mary MacSwiney, sisters of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike on 25 October 1920. The school closed in 1954. 74. Paul Durcan, Life Is a Dream, London, Harvill & Secker, p. 155. 75. Seán Dunne, Collected,op.cit.,p.81. 98 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

76. Ibid., p. 82. 77. Ibid., p. 81. 78. Thomas McCarthy, Mr Dineen’s Careful Parade New and Selected Poems, London, Anvil, 1999, p. 23. CHAPTER 5

The Grumbling Questioning Poet: Politics and Social Engagement

Abstract In this chapter, the poetry that emerged from the impulse of what Seán Lucy has called “a witness to the anxiety of our times” is examined, highlighting the inﬂuence of poets like Patrick Galvin, John Mon- tague, W. B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice but also W. H. Auden, in poems that offer a ﬁerce social criticism of issues on the global and national stage. It illustrates how Thomas McCarthy offers a combative, daring engagement with politics on the national stage in making poems about a political party and its processes. The chapter also highlights the engagement of the some of the poets with what is called ecopoetry.

Keywords Engagement · Politics · Political parties · Social criticism · Ecopoetry

When the poet Patrick Galvin, a committed social activist, died on 9 May 2011 he lay in repose in Cork’s Trade Union Headquarters, Connolly Hall,1 an honour previously unheard of in the history of the state for a singular man. Patrick Galvin is best remembered today for his autobiographical trilogy Song for a Poor Boy, Song for a Raggy Boy, Song for a Fly Boy, and the ﬁlm adaptation of that work2 but he was also a dramatist,3 a writer of political ballads (notably one written in memory of James Connolly) and poems that outlined his position as a committed socialist.4

His form of committed poetry can be seen as descending from the ballad and the verse poems that appeared in the pages of the Nation. Popular forms like the ballad dedicated to the memory of his parents bear witness to the resistance of the song tradition within working-class communities in Ireland. Galvin’s interest in that tradition also pushed him to produce an annotated booklet of Irish Songs of Resistance published under the imprint of the Workers’ Music Association in London in 1957.5 Seán Lucy acknowledged this connection, recognising the links in Galvin’s poetry to the oral tradition which underpin the power of a poem like “The Prisoners on the Tower”: “Such poetry, visionary, rhetorical, full of dramatized emotion, belongs very much to the Irish satirical tradition, while also drawing tone and technique from international twentieth- century verse. The native imagination which produced ‘Johnny I hardly knew you’, blends with Lorca and Brecht”.6 Galvin was remarkable also for his activism and his engagement with cultural life. He was one of the founder members of the Poetry Now Fes- tival7 and the Munster Literature Centre and directed the centre’s activities for many years. The poets who came after Galvin have displayed similar forms of civic consciousness and public engagement, traces of which are apparent in their poetry. Many of the students who came to UCC in the 1970s emerged from families with little or no connection to formal higher education, in Bour- dieusian terms they did not belong to the class he refers to as “les héri- tiers” [the inheriters]. Like many of their cohort, they were grateful ben- eficiaries of the O’Malley education act, (the poet Paula Meehan has referred to them as O’Malley’s children), many of them remained deeply committed to the social change embarked upon by Donogh O’Malley in his education policy. Far from forgetting their roots, they wrote out of them and out of a rich working-class political tradition that can be traced back to Patrick Galvin. Significantly, Galvin’s New and Selected Poems, as I have underlined elsewhere, was edited by Robert Welch and Greg Delanty, under the imprint of the Cork University Press.8 The movement to rediscover the poet’s work had been given impetus by the re-issue of “The Madwoman of Cork” as a pamphlet by Three Spires Press in 1993.9 The university was later to engage him as its writer in residence in 1996.10 Most of the poets of the generation studied in this volume have displayed both Galvin’s engagement and his social conscience. Their poetry too is marked by what Niall Kiely refers to in his interview with Patrick Galvin as “internationalism”, a determined search for outside influences 5 THE GRUMBLING QUESTIONING POET: POLITICS … 101 and cultures. In this chapter, I will examine the poetry that emerged from the impulse of what Seán Lucy has called “a witness to the anxiety of our times”,11 highlighting the influence of poets like Patrick Galvin, John Montague, W. B. Yeats, and Louis MacNeice but also W. H. Auden, in poems that offer a fierce social criticism of issues on the global and national stage. I will argue that, yet again, Thomas McCarthy is the poet who chooses to offer a combative, daring (some critics have deemed it foolhardy) engagement with politics on the national stage in making poems about a political party and its processes. I will also highlight the engagement of some of the poets with what is called ecopoetry. Theo Dorgan’s long poem “Rosa Mundi” is a sequence dedicated to the spirit of his mother. It records in detail her presence, foreshadows the absence of her death. In the mundane observations, “laden with shopping bags”, the description of her mounting the steps slowly, “Slowly, backwards up the steps, her scraps of thought and talk as she fought. For breath”,12 we feel the sharp eye of the child who signals for help to Collins Barracks and for whom disillusion sets in early in the absence of a relief detail to answer the call “Help, I am being held prisoner…”13 The image is metaphoric of a poor child in a state which offers little support to the downtrodden or the working class. The images from “Rosa Mundi” are echoed years later in the opening sequence to Greek, but that which was hinted at metaphorically by the small boy narrator of the earlier poem is glossed specifically by the mature poet:

That winter I learned we were poor, Climbing Fair Hill in the slanting rain With leaking shoes, to hurl in the mud and the cold; I saw myself growing old there in a small world And I refused. Some dream of elsewhere took hold.14

In his later work, “Nine Bright Shiners”, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, Dorgan explores the poverty and deprivation of Cork. He inscribes Blackpool and Fairhill into his poetry, as does his fellow North- sider Gerry Murphy. In Murphy’s case, the technique is the short dry epigrammatic poem. The targets are frequently generic, “the priest”, “the yacht-club member”, “Fortune”, “The Archbishop”. It is this genericism that places Murphy close to what Seán Lucy has called the ironic heart of post-modernism. Typical of his style is the poem dedicated to Michael O’Riordan, leader 102 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN of the Communist Party of Ireland; the impact of the poem is heightened by the identity of the dedicatee:

Among Thieves for Michael O’Riordan “There are pickpockets in the Cathedral,” warned the bishop. “They may get to your purses before we do,” muttered the priest.15

Murphy’s political commentary is always slanted, incisive, swift and is often mediated by the personal or the anecdotal:

Headgear of The Tribe with apologies to Desmond O’Grady Brits on the pavement, ice in the wind, my mother is knitting, my ﬁrst balaclava.16

The dry laconic voice is so inoffensive that the reader pauses, stares and rereads. The suggested paronomasia, that hints at a substitution of “Grit” for “Brit”, means that the effect is like that of a delayed reaction to a Marx brothers’ comedy sketch. However, Murphy’s Marx brothers always include Karl, and the warfare hinted at by the presence of the balaclava is always class warfare. The vision is frequently surrealistic, as in the poem entitled “Vision at Knock”. In the poem, Murphy fantasises about the fact that behind the gable wall, where visions of Mary mother of God was seen, there might be a series of openings, like those in Russian dolls. The poem closes with the following lines:

and behind the Cathedral of Minsk: Stalin Laughing.17

In Gerry Murphy’s world, nothing is as it seems and the reader follows him complacently until we reel from the shock of a combination of images, as is the case in one of his early poems: 5 THE GRUMBLING QUESTIONING POET: POLITICS … 103

Twenty-One Words for the Security Council It’s a pity the earth isn’t ﬂat. you could line the poor along the edges and machine-gun them into the abyss.18

The Internationalism, referred to by both Seán Lucy and Niall Kiely, comes up as a speciﬁc reference in Gerry Murphy’s 2010 collection, My Flirtation with International Socialism. The cover in itself is an ironic commentary on the nature of many of Murphy’s poems,19 with its statue of Lenin, its grafﬁti and stray goats, all hinting at the anarchic, humorous heart of the poet’s work. Later, Murphy returns to ideological totems in a pamphlet published by Southword Editions in 2018, entitled My Life as a Stalinist, staging a dinner time discussion between the schoolboy poet and his father:

“Capitalist Lackey!” I shout at my father across the dinner table, during a discussion on the feasibility of the Second Five Year Plan, the return of Fianna Fáil to government, or my dismal school report, probably all three20

The ironic retort of the father (“You’re a great one for the slogans, Gerry boy, /try to read a little more/of the literature underpinning them.”21) underlines both the instinctive sympathy for the left and the cut and thrust of a politicised family life. Where Murphy brings his point across in short sharp shocks, Theo Dorgan frequently adopts a long narrative line, that also functions to lull the reader with what we believe is a love song or a heroic deed. This is the case for instance in the poem “The Geography of Armagh”.22 The allusions to the orchards, “heavy with fruit and dust” and the autumnal scene prepare us for a scene of harvest plenty and lush countryside. The narrative hits a tripwire and the whole pastoral scene is blown away:

Blown slow, skyward into the harvest moon, Apples hung in the ﬂame tree, A winding country road 104 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

Whipcracking aftershock, fountain of earth and ﬁre, And then the meat and apples settling A winding country road.23

The stanzas quoted are typical of Dorgan’s style that frequently makes use of a refrain. (Dorgan’s work is often close to the ballad and he reads accompanied by musicians. His work “Sapho’s Daughter” was set to music by Colm Mac an Iomaire and performed by Olwen Fouéré.24) The ballad is a form closest to the voice of the people and Dorgan’s work seeks to speak for those who are voiceless. In the commemorative poem “Kilmainham Gaol, Easter 1916”, the poem speaks for the ghosts of those would go uncelebrated as a result of the lack of commemoration by the state of the 75th anniversary of the Rising. The allusion in the title is of course to Yeats, but the central ﬁgure in the poem is James Connolly, whose Citizen Army’s banner billows over the poem. And the song that is invoked Patrick Galvin’s ballad James Connolly25:

I do not know that I will ever be the same again. That soft-footed gathering of the dead into their peace Was like something out of a book. In Kilmainham Gaol I saw this. I felt this. I say this as calmly and as lovingly as I can.26

The ﬁnal line, “I say this as calmly and as lovingly as I can”, is repeated at intervals throughout the poem, creating a sense of unity and also, like the original ballad form, enabling memorisation. Murphy and Dorgan write poems that are engaged politically but denounce injustice “as calmly and as lovingly” as they can (or in Murphy’s case as jokingly and as ironically as he can). This is not the case with the poetry of Seán Dunne. Dunne is also disillusioned with the state, as the young boy narrator is in Dorgan’s “Rosa Mundi”. However, the poems Dunne creates in response to a similar background, anchored in urban poverty and the grinding toil of factory work, are angry, raging poems that lampoon the state and, as we saw in an earlier chapter, reject all nationalist constructions. In this tone and fury, Seán Dunne has more in common with Dermot Bolger or Michael O’Loughlin than he does with Murphy or Dorgan. Indeed, Dunne’s ﬁrst publication with a publishing house (after his initial pamphlet publication) was in Raven Introductions 1, published in 1983 by Raven Arts 5 THE GRUMBLING QUESTIONING POET: POLITICS … 105

Press, founded by Dermot Bolger to make space for voices who did not have access to publishers.27 Dunne’s poetry in its Russian inﬂuence also includes the White Rus- sians ﬂeeing the Revolution and articulates a criticism of all political engagement as futile:

History was a hopeless arrogance where postmen became commissars, the summer house an ofﬁce where former serfs ruled over a future blacker than caviar.28

Though Dunne, in his “Letter from Ireland” and his memoir, can be seen to be writing out of the working class, his vision has no space for the political process. He holds the Red and the White Russians in equal disdain. Thomas McCarthy, on the contrary, has inscribed the political process into his poetry. Convinced of the importance of the democratic and Euro- pean basis for contemporary Irish society, he writes these concerns into his poems. His poem “The Waiting Deputies” is typical of this strain in his work:

The unopened boxes will see me right. My Parish sleeps on its pillow of votes. Cappoquin, between river and the tree, Ignores its grumbling questioner, its poet. It sleeps upon favours. In the calm of the night They wait with me, the would-be Deputies.29

The poet narrator places his faith in the vote, but the grumbling questioning poet also manages to make an association between the comfort of the pillow and the favours the parish sleeps on—an implicit criticism of the clientelism associated with politics in Ireland. McCarthy’s ﬁrst collection, with its reference to a party conference in its title, The First Convention,30 is steeped in the Fianna Fáil mythology of the Cumann and the Ard Fheis that would later form the backdrop to his novels,31 Without Power and Asya and Christine. If Eavan Boland wrote of “unpoetic segments of Ireland being hauled into verse”32 in her review of The First Convention, it is surely these mundane forms of local politics anchored in the parish that she is referring to. 106 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

At the time of publication however, the general reader however seems to have focused on a young poet writing about a political party. And indeed, if Thomas McCarthy is mentioned in accounts of Irish Poetry today it is in general to say “ah yes, he is the Fianna Fáil poet”. As recently as 22 January 2011, when the Fianna Fáil vote collapsed, it was to Thomas McCarthy the Irish Times turned for an article entitled: “How in the name of god did it come to this?” In an interview with James Naiden, McCarthy explains that it was Theodore Roethke who enabled him to see that Fianna Fáil could be a metaphor for other experiences:

Roethke was really important to me as a postgraduate student. […] And it was the example of the “greenhouse” theme in Roethke that showed me how I could write about the party, the Fianna Fáil Party. I thought that if Roethke could write about his father as a ﬂorist growing plants and the dangers to the greenhouse and the weed-pulling and the moss- gathering, well then maybe I could write about the Party and voting and electioneering. So, he really gave me the courage to see the Party as a thematic structure for my work.33

McCarthy’s ﬁrst collection also contains the poem “State Funeral”, reminding readers, and the poet himself, of the demise of the founder of Fianna Fáil, Éamon de Valera.

What I remember is one decade of darkness, A mind-stiﬂing boredom; long summers For blackberry picking and churning cream, Winters for saving timber or setting lines And snares: none of the joys of here and now With its instant jam, instant heat and cream: It was a landscape for old men. Today They lowered the tallest one, tidied him Away while his people watched quietly. In the end he had retreated to the ﬁrst dream, Caning truth. I like to think of his austere grandeur; Taut sadness, like old heroes he had imagined.34

John Kerrigan has underlined the fact that “Irish intellectuals can find it hard to tolerate McCarthy’s fascination with Dev”,35 however, McCarthy establishes a distance through the Yeatsian dimension that he adopts in the diction used. McCarthy’s affirmation that it was a landscape 5 THE GRUMBLING QUESTIONING POET: POLITICS … 107 for old men is a young man’s retort to “this is no country for old men”, a response to the stifling years of Fianna Fáil rule, hinting at a loss of ide- alism, contrasting the plenty of the Lemass years with the frugality and self-sustaining containment fostered in de Valera’s vision for Ireland. The tension is highlighted by the verbal nouns of the stifling past (“blackberry picking”,36 “churning butter”, “saving timber”, “setting lines and snares”) and the adjectival instantaneity and simplicity of the present “instant jam, instant heat and cream”. I want to argue here that while Thomas McCarthy is undoubtedly a political poet, to dismiss him as one in thrall to a single political party is to do him a great injustice. As Ray Ryan has written perceptively: “[…] he [McCarthy] recognizes the lingering potency of place within the idea of the polis, and he responds to the challenge of creating a literature founded on this aspect of the Republic’s cultural memory”.37 John Goodby, who has also written at some length about Thomas McCarthy, acknowledges the idealisation of Dev in the de Valera sequence, yet he goes on to acknowledge that McCarthy’s poetry “[…]aligns itself, in its sense of literary and political tradition, with non-masculinist attitudes while attempting to counter the simplifications of revisionism and an overeager embrace of Europe and abandonment of the Irish past”.38 For Goodby, McCarthy is “the most consistently political poet now writing in the Republic”.39 As we shall see later, the political nature of his work became more intense over time. If we return to the poem “State Funeral”, we see McCarthy’s poetic forefathers: Heaney in the darkness and the blackberry picking, Yeats in the landscape for old men, and Lewis Carroll in the reference to “instant jam”.40 Encoded in the Carroll quotation is the reference to a Latin grammar rule: there are two words for now in Latin Nunc and Iam but Nunc can only be used with the present tense, Iam is reserved for the past and the future.41 Here, as evidenced by the quotation from one of his early poems, McCarthy is not just a political poet but he is also a poet who is obsessed with language and grammar. As such, his interest in process and systems, in coding and translation, that we have traced throughout this book is understandable. McCarthy’s early poems are thus on the interface between elements he would develop later in his oeuvre. The First Convention enables him to engage with historical events and figures, in this instance the figure of de Valera founder and giant who towered over the party for a long time. It also allows him to indulge, at first hand, in 108 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN his delight in decoding, which he displays in virtuoso detail in two recent works. In the development of distant imaginary worlds, with composite complex personae, McCarthy allows himself the freedom to comment on movements and political events from behind a historical screen. As I have suggested, Merchant Prince can be seen as a comment on the cultural politics that dominated Europe in general and Cork in particular in the early years of the twenty-first century. The Last Geraldine Officer addresses the issue of the creation of an Irish state/identity that could be vast enough to include a variegated form of Irishness. This debate was sparked by the conversations surrounding the enlargement of the European Union and the arrival of large numbers of migrants on the island of Ireland. So the overt engagement with the political scene displayed in the early collection, and in the novels, has never gone away—it has simply slipped under a hybrid, encoded text that makes the poet’s intentions harder to read. In Pandemonium, the collection McCarthy published in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash, all encoding and encryption has been cast aside. McCarthy addresses the issues of social class in a bitingly acrid three-part poem, “Social Class in West Waterford”. The autobiographical vein connects McCarthy’s life with the unlikely nature of his present craft:

1. Shanbally Terrace When they distributed life chances there were none Left over for you. There were a few days of thinning beet On Looby’s farm, there was a tree fallen in Chearnley’s wood That could be cut and sold, and if the sun shone There was the long walk to Hogan’s orchard. The height Of luxury was a week or two in a Protestant garden. It was difﬁcult to reach poetry in a street like yours, Though the themes were everywhere, so much refuse Of life released from the pub, the overturned bin Of each night; the smear of blood as if, in the dead hours, A poet had been blackberry picking.42

This poem, and the two that follow it in the sequence, examines the poet’s childhood in unsentimental detail. Nature is described in this initial poem only in terms of monetary value. Trees, orchards and plants 5 THE GRUMBLING QUESTIONING POET: POLITICS … 109 are alluded to as means to an end. The reference to “Blackberry Pick- ing”, Seamus Heaney’s bucolic elegy to childhood innocence, is stained in McCarthy’s poem with the foreknowledge of death and violence. The themes for McCarthy’s poems are not like those of the young Heaney, gathered in the natural world, but rather, McCarthy suggests, in the detri- tus and scraps, “so much refuse/ of life” or again “the overturned bin/Of each night”43 of the cold, despairing childhood he endures. In the second poem of the sequence, he describes himself through the eyes of the “Bourgeois Class, 1964” as “both beggar and urchin”.44 McCarthy’s anger is directed at the class warriors who looked down on his family. In “Largesse”, lines written for his mother, McCarthy’s fury is reigned into tight distiches, escaping into a three-line verse only when describing his mother’s largesse. The ﬁnal verses are a damning con- demnation of all that was wrong with Ireland in the years that followed independence:

The sky of Ireland, That bitter, grey, unforgiving Blackwater sky, that bitter, Wind, that wind of snobbery and schadenfreude, that bitter Chill of the bitter with their double stitches of bitterness, With their little shit of bitterness, with their shit that fell Upon the frozen paths where she laid the only warm straw She owned, the only straw laid beneath the Cappoquin shoeless; That bitter little winter called life knew nothing of her plenitude.45

McCarthy’s anger impedes his poetics and freezes it on the one word that seems adequate to his mother’s predicament, “bitter”. And so we ﬁnd “bitter” in all its possible iterations, adjective, noun, expanded noun form. It congeals at the end of the poem, sticking to it like very unpoetic phrase “little shit of bitterness”, indicative of his fury and his inability to move beyond and engagement in favour of the dispossessed. It comes as no surprise then to read the pitiless disquisition on the state of Ireland in the aftermath of the effects of the economic crash. McCarthy is, to my knowledge, the only poet to have engaged head ﬁrst with the issue of the agreement that was made by the Irish government with what is popularly known as the Troïka, i.e. The European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission. The poem, entitled “Grunewald”, is dedicated to the memory of Brian 110 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

Lenihan TD, Ireland’s Minister for Finance at the time of the agreement. McCarthy again uses the short two-line stanzas in an attempt to imprison the metaphoric thrust of his vision, which opens with the majestic image of the sea, “The sea is a wet preacher at Passiontide”.46 From this opening line, metaphor after metaphor attempts to ﬁnd images to describe Ireland’s betrayal and the profound sense of despair that the economic crisis caused.

Here, on this rock, a lamb. Waves rise with the helpless efforts Of an Irish taxpayer. Cormorants carry you. I can see the wreckage of us far out at sea; Our wreckage receding still. The pilot boat, With all its unused life-belts, Has a black stain on the prow where you Were pushed, Brian. Black gulls return To their roosting grounds, Brussels, Berlin.47

The title of the poem “Grunewald” is a reference to the artist Mathias Grunewald and his most emblematic work “The Crucifixion”, also known as the Isenheim altarpiece. The highly charged symbolic language leaves no doubt as to the poet’s feeling of abandonment in the wake of the visit of the Troïka, figured in the poem as black gulls. For a profoundly European poet like McCarthy, the sense of disappointment and disillusion is writ large. The poem was so powerfully political that the Irish Times declined to publish it, for fear it might wound the family of the deceased Minister for Finance. Greg Delanty has also in the recent busied himself with the construction of parallel worlds, using multiple voices and identities, as I have shown in an earlier chapter, he has never felt the need to encode his political commentary. Delanty wears his politics on his sleeve, and, certainly in one case, on the jacket of his books. One volume in particular makes this point, The New Citizen Army,48 published in 2010 was printed on paper made from the recycled uniforms of US Army veterans. The poems were extracted from Delanty’s Collected Poems. Many were engaged in highlighting ecological concerns, a thematic that Delanty has evoked since his earliest collections were published. A poem like “An Oil Spillage” highlights the magnificence of nature while hinting, in the final line at the underlying threat: “None can escape the dark spreading here”.49 5 THE GRUMBLING QUESTIONING POET: POLITICS … 111

The activism portrayed in the poems is mirrored in his social engagement. Greg Delanty is a committed environmentalist. He stood for the Green Party in the Vermont senate elections, has been arrested for his political activism against policies that he considers to be environmentally unsound50 and politically unethical. Delanty’s most recent collection, The Greek Anthology Book XVII, allows him to regroup the poems with similar thematic concerns. As well as the environmental issues, the poet also highlights a paciﬁst’s perspective, notably in the poems voiced for Dani- chorus. Perhaps the most striking is the poem that is couched in terms of a volcanic eruption is easy to see as a reﬂection on the 9/11 attacks and their legislative aftermath in the United States:

[…] Opposition cowed by accusations of being soft, unpatriotic. Special measures called for. A supreme commander set up To combat threats, terrorist legions. How a timorous population can be molded. Powers ceded to our Pompey Magnus And his cronies, lining their already lined pockets.51

The trope of Roman history used here is not a deep code moment, as the politicians are easily identifiable. Delanty’s poetry does not offer the same degree of layering as McCarthy, yet his purpose is not dissimilar. By con- necting present-day political issues with those of the long-dead past, he reminds us of the never-changing nature of political intrigues and historical dilemmas. The overlap with present-day discourse, as represented by terms like “terrorist” legions reveal to us immediately that we are dealing with the present-day state, in a poetic form not unlike the parable poems of Heaney’s Fieldwork. While Delanty has shown by his actions, in his publishing history and in the poems themselves that he can be classified as a poète engagé,he himself eschews categorisation. He refuses the term ecopoetry, feeling that the poetry “needs to stand alone”.52 His concern returns to the preoccupations that haunt all those who write and fear that their poetry may be harnessed to content determined by political concerns, impeding the form, subsuming it to programmatic writing. Again, these concerns are shared by the Ulster poets, and before them by the British poets of the Thirties. At the same time, it is obvious that a tradition of ballad writing and protest poetry goes back deep into the literary history of the nation where 112 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN the poet voiced the concerns of the people. This tradition was admired bySeánLucyandlinkedaswehaveseentothepoetryofLorcawho is obviously one of Gerry Murphy’s poetic sources of inspiration. The constraints of form and obligation to social history are just the sorts of ties that McCarthy has escaped from in writing poetry constructed in his complex, codified world. The question may also be linked to the issue of voice. Theo Dorgan’s poetry readings are very much recitals, not performances, as in the contemporary American sense of the term, but recitals (with that word’s echo of recitation) of works by musicians or perhaps by singer-songwriters. The energy put into the performance also taps into the energia of the waiting public. The ghosts liberated in Dorgan’s Kilmainham poem are also metaphors for the transport that can be felt in the moment of oral rapture when poet and audience are held together by the timbre and the emotion of the voice. The listener can be swayed then by the sonics of the moment, a moment which silent rereading will not achieve.

Notes

1. See article on Galvin’s death in by Louise Roseingrave, “Mourners Pay Tribute to Poet Patrick Galvin”, Irish Times, 13 May 2011, p. 7. 2. Song for a Raggy Boy, directed by Aisling Walsh in 2003, it starred Aidan Quinn. The ﬁlm was based on Galvin’s years in the Daingean Reforma- tory. 3. As a dramatist, his work was linked with Belfast’s Lyric Theatre. Interest- ingly, Galvin is included in a photograph of Belfast poets that illustrates Ciaran Carson’s review of Heather Clarke’s Ulster Renaissance in the Field Day Review, Vol. 3, 2007, p. 274. Thomas McCarthy in a review of James Simmons’ work has highlighted the stylistic connection between Simmons and Galvin. Thomas McCarthy, Fortnight, 251 (May 1987), p. 22. 4. See Obituary in Irish Times, 14 May 2011, p. 11. The RTE Radio 1 programme “Arts Tonight”, presented by Vincent Woods on 30 May 2011, was devoted to Galvin. Among those interviewed were Eiléan Ní Chuil- leanáin, Thomas McCarthy, Michael D. Higgins and the poet’s wife Mary Johnson. For an account of Patrick Galvin’s early life and political commitment, see the interview he gave to Niall Kiely in Irish Times,24July 1976, p. 5. 5. The review of the volume published by the International Folkmusic Journal is rather scathing of the enterprise and takes Galvin to task for quoting Thomas Davis (“National Poetry is the ﬂowering of the 5 THE GRUMBLING QUESTIONING POET: POLITICS … 113

soul”), highlighting that political engagement results in a lack of critical objectivity. (Journal of the International Folk Music Council, Vol. 9, 1957, p. 8.) 6. Seán Lucy contextualises Patrick Galvin’s poetry in an essay entitled “Irish Poetry in English”, Irish University Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1979), pp. 142–162. This quotation is from p. 157. 7. The Poetry Now Festival was based in Dun Laoghaire and was founded in 1996 when Galvin was the ﬁrst writer in residence in Dun Laoghaire. It now forms part of the Writers to the Sea Festival. 8. Patrick Galvin, New & Selected Poems, R. Welch & G. Delanty (ed.), Cork, Cork University Press, 1996. 9. Patrick Cotter founded Three Spires Press in 1990. http://openlibrary. org/publishers/Three_Spires_Press. 10. For an account of Galvin’s residency, see Matthew Gedden, “Patrick Galvin Writer in Residence”, The Cork Review, 1999, pp. 26–27. 11. Seán Lucy, “Irish Poetry in English”, op. cit., p. 156. 12. Ibid., p. 165. 13. Idem. 14. Theo Dorgan, Greek, op. cit. p. 12. 15. Gerry Murphy, End of Part One, op. cit., p. 123. 16. Ibid., p. 53. 17. Ibid., p. 17. 18. Ibid., p. 21. 19. Murphy’s targets are not conﬁned to western capitalists as Pilar Villar- Argaiz makes clear in a reference to Murphy’s daring performance at Fudan University in China when he read the poem “A Note on the Demise of Communism” to an assembly of over 600 students and faculty members. See “Love, Politics and Intertextuality in the Poetry of Gerry Murphy”, http://estudiosirlandeses.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2013/05/P_Villar-Arg%C3%A1iz_8.pdf, accessed 15 May 2013. 20. Gerry Murphy, My Life as a Stalinist, Cork, Southword Editions, 2018, p. 24. 21. Idem. 22. Theo Dorgan, What the Earth, op. cit., p. 102. 23. Ibid., p. 102. 24. http://www.artscouncil.ie/en/wide/traditional-now.aspx?article= ddc0c425-56b3-439b-9755-89756e6f13a0. 25. For a rendition of “James Connolly” by Patrick Galvin, see http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=-lP7m4TuLTQ. 26. Ibid., p. 114. 27. On the subject of Raven Arts Press, see Sylvie Mikowski’s article “Dermot Bolger and the Raven Arts Press: A Loose Coalition for Change” in The Book in Ireland, S. Mikowski, F. Garcier, & J. Genet (ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2008, pp. 112–122. 114 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN

28. Seán Dunne, Collected, op. cit., p. 172. 29. Mr Dineen’s Careful Parade, op. cit., p. 152. 30. Thomas McCarthy, The First Convention, Dublin, Dolmen Press, 1977. 31. McCarthy also attempted to write a play based on the ﬁgure who would later evolve into the central character in his novels. In his diaries, extracts of which were published in Irish Pages, Vol. 6, No. 1. 32. Eavan Boland, Irish Times Review,op.cit. 33. J. Naiden Interview, “Fathers: A Conversation with Thomas McCarthy”, New Hibernian Review, Vol., 3, No. 1, pp. 71–81, pp. 75–76. 34. Thomas McCarthy, The First Convention, Dublin, Dolmen Press, p. 10. 35. John Kerrigan, “Hidden Ireland: Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin and Munster Poetry”, Critical Quarterly, Vol. 40/4, pp. 76–100, p. 81. 36. The reversal of the order in the ﬁrst of the list (“blackberry picking” as opposed to picking blackberries) is generated by the reference to Seamus Heaney’s poem of the same name. 37. Ray Ryan, Ireland and Scotland: Literature and Culture, State and Nation 1966–2000, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2002, p. 208. 38. John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950, pp. 247–248. 39. Ibid., p. 246. 40. “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—But never jam to-day”. “It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day’”, (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass). 41. I am indebted to Máire Uí Ríordáin for a conversation that illuminated this point (June 2014). 42. Thomas McCarthy, Pandemonium, Manchester, Carcanet, 2016, p. 20. 43. Idem. 44. Ibid., p. 21. 45. Ibid., p. 23. 46. Ibid., p. 51. 47. Idem. 48. http://www.combatpaper.org/thenewcitizenarmy.html. 49. Greg Delanty, Collected Poems,op.cit.,p.29. 50. See account of arrest in St Michael’s Students newspaper, http:// journalism.smcvt.edu/defender/8.30.11/DelantyArrested.html, consulted 12 December 2012. 51. Greg Delanty, Greek Anthology, p. 65. 52. Correspondence with the poet by mail June 2013. CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Abstract This chapter highlights the organic analysis of the poets’ work. It underlines the fact that common thematics and preoccupations emerged. It suggests that while each poet has evolved in a different sphere, their points of convergence and their dialogue with each other were the most important focus points of this study.

Keywords Organic · Thematics · Convergence

In conclusion, it is important to address the question of the influence John Montague had on these poets. It is clear from the interviews, tes- timonies and tributes written by the poets themselves that he was an enabling and energising figure. His sense of poetry as a calling confirmed the feelings which the younger poets had when they arrived at UCC. Montague came to Cork with the aura of the much acclaimed The Rough Field (1972), and the equally acclaimed The Great Cloak (1978) was published during the early years of his tenure there. These, I would suggest, are the volumes in Montague’s oeuvre that counted most for the younger generation. The Rough Field’s engagement with the political matter of Ireland, its acknowledgement of the Irish tradition and its innovative verse, all left their mark on his students. While Thomas McCarthy, as I underlined earlier, spoke of the initial formal conservatism of the

© The Author(s) 2020 115 C. Ní Ríordáin, English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38573-6_6 116 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN young Cork poets, their capacity to innovate has become more apparent in later years, pace McCarthy’s own “The Last Geraldine Officer” or Maurice Riordan’s “Idylls”. The Great Cloak is remarkable for its inclusion of material translated from the Irish and the French, notably from the work of André Frénaud, whose Depuis toujours déjà (1970) is the significant intertext for Mon- tague’s collection. Frénaud allowed Montague to amplify his own personal crisis via an act of ventriloquism, a strategy that would be adopted later by the younger generation, for whom translation is a central means of articulating both their political commitment, and allowing them to comment on their inner lives. Just as translation functioned for Mon- tague as a mask, it has been central in allowing the poets under study in this volume to widen their poetic practices and influences, offering them alternatives to American or British models. The UCC poets are not exceptional among contemporary Irish poets in adopting this approach, one thinks for instance of Peter Sirr or Michael O’Loughlin who employ similar techniques; nonetheless the engagement with translation developed by the poets who figure in this volume seems to be a thread that links them together and weaves its way back to the work of Montague. This volume has offered an organic analysis of the poets’ work rather than a chronological book by book study. In doing so I have been able to address issues and notions that I felt enabled my central hypothesis of the generational nature of this group of poets. As a result of the method employed, common thematics and preoccupations have emerged, and, while each poet has evolved in a different sphere, their points of convergence and their dialogue with each other were the most important focus points of this study. The powerful generational habitus which was offered by UCC in their formative years has made of them a cohort whose poetry is marked by a common poetic consciousness. It would, however, have been easy to dwell on their differences, Greg Delanty, the migrant poet who has been active on both the academic and poetic fronts in the United States; Thomas McCarthy whose career is dis- tinguished by two lengthy poetic projects that required him to plunge deep into his librarian’s treasure trove of history and literature; Gerry Murphy and his engagement with the short sharp poetic shock…And yet what has been fascinating is to trace the ways in which these very different poets, who emerged from the same stomping ground, continued to address questions of form and substance that unite them at some 6 CONCLUSION 117 fundamental level. Can this be deemed an underlying poetics? A Cork sensibility? Perhaps it lies in the spirit of an age, the zeitgeist that pre- vailed in Cork when a group of men came to poetry at a time when the place and the art of the poet could be uppermost in their minds. Of course, in alluding to “a group of men”, I am also aware of the gender imbalance that characterises this generation of poets. The greatest silence in this volume is the muted voice of the woman poet. Her voice appeared briefly in the introduction only to disappear again within the pages of the book. In my introduction, I evoked the sociological reasons for the absence of women in these pages. The female contemporaries of these poets interviewed for this volume have suggested also that social practices in the 1970s continued to be very codified. There were sug- gestions in the interviews that I conducted that the girls went to the library, or went home early to attentive, watchful parents, or, if they lived in “digs”, had to respect a curfew. The poets practised their art within the university but outside it also in various social spaces across the city. The presence of their female fellow students in the world of poetry remained liminal, with the exception of the very exceptional Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. These seven poets are of course not the only poets to have emerged from UCC. I have alluded to two important forerunners, Eiléan Ní Chuil- leanáin and Augustus Young. And for a long-time Daniel Corkery’s role as a canon-making force was one of the dominant poetic voices associated with the university. Although Thomas McCarthy wrote his MA thesis on Corkery, it is clear from the preceding chapters that Corkery’s twin fix- ations with nationalism and clericalism were shunned by the poets who figure in this volume. They represent the “more fissile and cosmopolitan contingent”, of the Munster renaissance alluded to by John Kerrigan his article “Hidden Ireland: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Munster Poetry”.1 Today, young poets are emerging again from the halls of the UCC. Sig- nificantly, among the most important voices to emerge to date are those of Leanne O’Sullivan and Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Leanne O’Sullivan’s voice and the strength and power of her poetic vision have matured from an initial autobiographical volume, to work which subsumes myth and history. Doireann Ní Ghríofa writes both in Irish and in English. Her poetry is innovative and compelling and grounded in her bodily experience of what it means to be a woman. The university’s policy towards Creative Writ- ing has been modified with its inclusion on courses now being offered at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Leanne O’Sullivan has herself 118 C. NÍ RÍORDÁIN been appointed to a position as lecturer in creative writing on the new MA in Creative Writing at UCC. The poet Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh has been appointed to a post of lecturer in the Irish department. Thus, there would seem to be a renewal of the practices that UCC pioneered in the 1970s. Poets have also been welcomed within the institutional spaces of Cork city. The Munster Literature Centre, with poet Patrick Cotter at the helm, has been instrumental in fostering poetry as an art form via fellowships, readings, launches and workshops. Other institutions such as the Triskel Arts Centre, the City Library with its room devoted to Cork writers, festivals such as Cork’s International Poetry Festival and International Book Week, are indicators of strong support for poets. The experimental vein of poetry as practised by Augustus Young has also found a home in the city, through the presence of Trevor Joyce, a long-time resident of Cork city. Its most visible incarnation was the SoundEye festival that he curated.2 The festival welcomed a variety of experimental poets to Cork for a week-long event that ran from 1997 until 2017. Poets, like the bards of the past, need such patronage and sponsorship to survive. One can only welcome present developments that see a partnership agreement signed between the university and the Munster Literature Centre—a hopeful time for poets and poetry in the offing. I would also like to use the conclusion to this study to highlight the issues raised by the methodology of this piece of research. I was ham- pered in my work by the lack of archives pertaining to the work of the poets understudy. Greg Delanty’s early archival boxes have languished in the storehouses of the National Library for many years. Insufficient fund- ing has meant that the files have not been analysed, and without classification the Library will not allow researchers’ access to the treasure trove that it represents. Thomas McCarthy has eliminated much of the rich documentation he possessed. Significant future research cannot continue if provision is not made to acquire the archives of these poets. The acquisition of more recent archives of Delanty’s by UCC library in 2016, together with their acquisition of The Great Book of Ireland means that the students’ alma mater is now engaged in a process that will facilitate the work of future generations of scholars. In this respect, the presence of John Fitzgerald, the poet librarian who oversees new acquisitions, must be welcomed as a real boon for future scholarship on the work of Munster poets. 6 CONCLUSION 119

Notes

1. John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1959, pp. 247–248. 2. Billy Ramsell (1977) and Dave Lordan (1975) are signiﬁcant pres- ences in new Irish Poetry. Jimmy Cummins and Rachel Warriner were associated with the SoundEye Poetry Festival and innovative poetry in Ireland, http://fr.scribd.com/doc/45509162/Journal-of-British-and- Irish-Innovative-Poetry-Cork-Launch-Booklet, consulted 7 June 2012. Bibliography

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Dorgan, Theo, Interview with the author, March 2011, and extended email Cor- respondence. Fallon, Peter, Interview with the author, June 2011. McCarthy, Thomas, Interview with the author, July 2011, and extended email Correspondence. McCarthy, Thomas, Interview with James Naiden, New Hibernia Review,Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 71–81. McCarthy, Thomas, “Why I Write”: http://www.laoisedcentre.ie/LENGLISH/ engrwww/tom.html, consulted 4 April 2011. McCarthy, Thomas, Diaries, extracts of which were published in Irish Pages,Vol. 6, No. 1. McCarthy, Thomas, Unpublished Diaries, 1975–1976. (In the possession of Thomas McCarthy). Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, Interview with the author, June 2011. Montague, John, Interview with the author, December 2011. Murphy, Gerry, Interview with the author, February 2011, and extended Corre- spondence. Riordan, Maurice, Interview with the author, April 2011, and extended email Correspondence about G. O’Donoghue in the months that followed. Creative Work of the Poets (I have excluded their journalism, editorial and ﬁlm-scripts from this list, given their activities in these spheres it would be impractical to list them all here.) Delanty, Greg Cast in the Fire, Dublin, Dolmen, 1986. Southward, Louisiana State Press, 1992. American Wake, Belfast, Blackstaff, 1995. The Hellbox, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. The Blind Stitch, Carcanet, 2001. The Ship of Birth, Carcanet, 2003. Collected Poems 1986–2006, Manchester, Carcanet, 2006. The Greek Anthology Book XVII, Manchester, Carcanet, 2012. Selected Delanty (ed. Archie Burnett), Boston, Un-Gyve Press, 2017. Translations Aristophanes, The Suits, Aristophanes 3, (Salvitt and Bovie eds.), Philadelphia, Penn Press, 1999. Euripides, Orestes, Euripedes 4, (Salvitt and Bovie eds.), Philadelphia, Penn Press, 1999. BIBLIOGRAPHY 123

Dorgan, Theo Slow Air (pamphlet), Cork, Pine Tree Press, 1975. A Moscow Quartet, Dublin, Pamphlet, 1989. The Ordinary House of Love, Galway, Salmon Publishing, [1991] 1993. Nine Views of Uzbekhistan (pamphlet), Dublin, The Harkin Press, 1992. Rosa Mundi, Dublin/Galway, Salmon Publishing/Poolbeg, 1995. Sappho’s Daughter, Dublin, Wavetrain Press, 1998. Days Like These, (with Tony Curtis and Paula Meehan), Washington DC, Brood- ing Heron Press, 2008. What This Earth Cost Us, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2008. Greek, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2010. Nine Bright Shiners, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2014. Orpheus, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2018. Fiction Making Way, Dublin, New Island Books, 2013. Non-ﬁction Time on the Ocean, A Voyage from Cape Horn to Cape Town, Dublin, New Island, 2010. Sailing for Home, Penguin Ireland, 2006, Reprinted Dedalus Press 2010. Dunne, Seán Poetry Lady in Stone (pamphlet), Waterford, IS Press, 1975. Raven Introductions 1, Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1983. Against the Storm, Dublin, Dolmen, 1985. The Sheltered Nest, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 1992. Time and the Island, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 1996. Collected, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 2005. Prose In My Father’s House, Gallery Press, [1991], Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 2000. The Road to Silence: An Irish Spiritual Odyssey, Dublin, New Island Books, 1994. McCarthy, Thomas Poetry The First Convention, Dublin, Dolmen Press, 1978. The Sorrow Garden, London, Anvil Press, 1981. The Non-Aligned Storyteller, London, Anvil Press, 1984. 124 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Seven Winters in Paris, London, Anvil Press, 1989. The Lost Province, London, Anvil Press, 1996. Mr Dineen’s Careful Parade—New and Selected Poems, London, Anvil Press, 1999. Merchant Prince, London, Anvil Press, 2005. The Last Geraldine Ofﬁcer, London, Anvil Press, 2010. Pandemonium, Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2016. Prophecy, Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2019. Fiction Without Power, Dublin, Poolbeg Press, 1990. Asya and Christine, Dublin, Poolbeg Press, 1993. Non-ﬁction The Garden of Remembrance, Dublin, New Island Books, 1998. Murphy, Gerry A Small Fat Boy Walking Backwards, Cork, Commons Press, 1988. RiodelaPlataandAllThat, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 1993. The Empty Quarter, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 1995. Extracts from the Lost Log Book of Christopher Columbus, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 1999. Torso of an Ex-Girlfriend, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2002. End of Part One: New and Selected Poems, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2006. My Flirtation With International Socialism, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2010. Muse, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2015. My Life as a Stalinist (pamphlet), Cork, Southword, 2018. Kissing Maura O’Keefe (pamphlet), Cork, Southword, 2019. O’Donoghue, Gregory Kicking, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 1975. The Permanent Way, Cork, Three Spires Press, 1996. Making Tracks, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2001. Ghost Dance, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2007. Riordan, Maurice Faber Introductions 8, London, Faber, 1993. AWordfromtheLoki, London, Faber, 1995. Floods, London, Faber, 2000. TheHolyLand, London, Faber, 2007. The Water Stealer, London, Faber, 2013. BIBLIOGRAPHY 125

Poets’ Translations in the Cork Translation Project 2005 All books published by Southword, Cork. Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska, Pocket Apocalypse,translatedfromthePolishby Gerry Murphy. Kyriakos Charalambides, Selected Poems, translated from the Greek by Greg Delanty. Kristin Dimitrova, A Visit to the Clockmaker, translated from the Bulgarian by Gregory O’Donoghue. Barbara Korun, Songs of Earth and Light, translated from the Slovene by Theo Dorgan. Immanuel Mifsud, Conﬁdential Reports, translated from the Maltese by Maurice Riordan.

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A Ballymakeera, 37 Acropolis, 63 Ballyvourney, 37 Act of Union, 73 Barry, James, 59, 66, 74 Adriatic, 60 Barry, Katie, 83 AG, 30 Barry, Peter, 86 Akhmatova, Anna, 37, 49–51 Barry, Sebastian, 2, 18 Allan Dowling Fellowship, 32 Battersby, Eileen, 39 Allen, Sheyeda, xviii Bax, Arnold, 65 An Clóchomhar, 20 Beasley Street, 41 Anna Livia Press, 24 Beaud, Stéphane, 7 Anahorish, 78 Behan, Brendan, 34 Anglo-Irish, 76 Belfast, xix, 10, 21, 69, 70, 73, 77, Anvil Press, 19, 66, 98 112 APCK, 10 Belgrave Place, 91 ArdBarra,Glanmire,4 Bells of Shandon, The, x, 81 Aristophanes, 62 Bell, The, vii, 3 Armagh, 103 Bensimon, Paul, xix Auden, W.H., 76, 77, 101 Bergen, 16 Berkeley, 17 Berlin, 110 B Bigwig, 63 Baile Mhúirne, 20 Billon, Adam, 74 Bakhtin, 86 Biography, 7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 131 license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Ní Ríordáin, English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970–1980, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38573-6 132 INDEX

Black and Tans, 10 Cap, Jan, 93 Blackstaff Press, 21 Cappoquin, 13, 29, 75, 105, 109 Blackpool, 12, 30, 86, 87, 89, 101 Carcanet, 22, 32, 114 Blackrock, 79 Cardiff University Press, 21 Blackrock Castle, 94 Carey’s Lane, 46 Blackwater, 61, 109 Carmel, Sister, 29 Blackwoods Magazine, 96 Carrignavar, 10 Blinco, Anthony, 72 Carroll, Lewis, 107, 114 Boland, Eavan, 8, 22, 105 Carson, Ciaran, 53, 112 Bolger, Dermot, 104, 113 Caryatids, 63 Bolster’s Magazine, 70, 74 Castle Street, 83 Bonafous-Murat, Carle, xviii Cavafy, Constantin, 54 Boran, Pat, xviii Céitinn, Seathrún, 55 Borgonovo, John, 97 CELT, 95 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 100 Central Statistics Ofﬁce (CSO), 22, 24 Bowen, Elizabeth, 9, 10, 22, 37, 82 Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, xvii Boyle, Elizabeth, 58 Charalambides, Kyriakos, 62 Boyle, Richard, 95 Charleville, xiii Brandon Press, 19, 58 Chatsworth, 95 Breathnach, Colm, xviii, 66 Chatto and Windus, 40 Brecht, Bertolt, 100 Chieftains, The, 15 Bridge Street, 41 China, 113 Brodsky, Isaak, 76 Chobry, 74 Brooklyn, 38 Chopin, Frédéric, 92 Brown, Terence, xvii, 20 Christ Church, 41 Browne, Garech, 15 Christchurch Lane, 85 Brunt, Barry, 22 Christian Brothers, 28 Brussels, 110 Churchill, Winston, 74 Buckley, Vincent, 38, 42, 76 Claddagh Records, 15 Burgerland, 46 Clarendon Press, 114 Bus Station, The, xi Clarke, Austin, 6, 62 Butter Exchange, 82 Clarke, Heather, 112 Byron, Lord, 76 Clongowes Wood College, 19, 96 CNU, xviii Coal Quay, The, 83 C Cobh, xiii, 79 Callanan, Jeremiah Joseph, 74, 82, 96 Cockburn, Alexander, 40 Calvino, 79 Cockburn, Andrew, 40 Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 113 Cockburn, Claud, 29, 40 Cambridge University Press, 20, 40 Cockburn (née Arbuthnot), Patricia Canada, 32 Evangeline Ann, 40 Canova Casts, The, 70 Cockburn, Patricia, 29 INDEX 133

Cockburn, Patrick, 40 Cotter, Patrick, xviii, 39, 48, 65, 113 Coffee House Press, 25 Coughlan, Patricia, xviii, 8, 22 Coláiste Chríost Rí, 32 Cranitch, Peadar, xviii Collins Barracks, x, 101 Crawford School of Art and Design, Collins, Harper, 20 10 Collins, Michael, 28, 79 Critical Quarterly, 114 Collins Press, 25 Cronin, Anthony, 38 Comintern Bloc, 49 Crotty, Patrick, 6, 21, 31, 33, 34 Communist Party of Ireland, 102 Cúil Aodha, 25, 37, 38 Connacht, 72 Cummins, Jimmy, 119 Connolly Hall, 99 Curragh, 11 Connolly, James, 28, 30, 99, 104, 113 Cuverian Society, The, 70 Connolly, Susan, 8 Conrick, Maeve, xviii Coolahan, John, 24 D Cork Arts Society, 16 Dáil, 69 Cork Choral Festival, 14 Daingean Reformatory, 112 Cork City Hall, 84 Daly, John, 34 Cork City Library, xviii, 118 Danichorus, 63, 111 Cork Corporation, 46 Davis, Helen, xviii Croker, Thomas Crofton, 70, 82, 96 Davis, Thomas, 52, 112 Corkery, Daniel, 2, 3, 5, 15, 19–21, Davitt, Máire, 44, 57 77, 78, 117 Davitt, Michael, 1, 30, 38, 57 Cork Examiner, The, xix, 10–12, 22, Deane, John F., xviii 23, 30, 34, 39 Deane, Seamus, 22 Cork Film Festival, 10, 23 Deas Mumhan, 72 Cork, Great earl of, 75 de Barra, Séamus, 25 Cork Historical Perspectives, 24 Dedalus Press, xviii, 21, 30, 32, 40, Cork Institution, The, 70 42, 43, 57, 65, 66, 97 Cork International Book Week, 118 Déise, 74–76 Cork, North, xiv Deisi Mumhan, 72 Corkonian, 46 Delanty, Greg, ix, xvii, xviii, 2, 11, 18, Cork Opera House, 16, 84 21, 23, 28, 32, 34, 36, 39–41, Cork’s International Poetry Festival, 44–47, 57, 58, 62–64, 66, 67, 118 78, 80, 81, 94, 96, 97, 100, 110, Cork Review, The, 19, 23, 32, 39, 113 111, 113, 114, 116, 118 Cork Spring Poetry Festival, 49 Delphi, 63 Cork Symphony Orchestra, 14 de Paor, Louis, 35, 60 Cork Translation Project, 49 Derrynane, 63 Cork University Press, 18, 21–25, 36, Desmond, 72 97, 100, 113 Desmond, Countess of, 75 Corner House, The, xiv de Valera, Éamon, 74, 106, 107 134 INDEX de Vere White, Terence, 29 English Literature Society, UCC, 18, Devonshire, Duke of, 75, 95 66 Dillon Redshaw, Thomas, 21, 25, 39 Ernaibh Muman, 72 Dillon, Eilís, 10, 12, 23, 25 Esteban, Claude, 32 Dillon, Thomas, 23 Eton, 29 Diocesan Seminary, 28 Eucharistic Congress, The, 74 Dolmen Press, 5, 18, 26, 39, 114 Euripedes, 54, 62 Dorgan, Theo, ix, xiv, xvii, 2, 4, 18, Europe, 13 28, 30–33, 38–41, 51–53, 57, European Central Bank, The, 109 64–66, 88, 89, 94, 97, 101, 103, European City of Culture project, 39 104, 112, 113 European Commission, The, 109 Dosse, François, 7 Evening Echo, The, 10 Doyle, Roddy, 77 Exile Quarterly, The, 32 Driver, Ciaran, 34, 41 Dublin, viii, x, xiv, 6, 7, 9–11, 70, 71, 77, 79 F Dun Laoghaire, 113 Faber, 32, 40, 49, 65, 66, 96, 97 Dunlops, 10 Faber Book of Irish Verse, 32, 36, 57 Dunmore East, 30 Fair Hill, 52, 101 Dunn, Douglas, 93 Fallon, Peter, xvii, 38, 49, 65, 95 Dunne, Richie, 30 Farrell, MJ, 29 Dunne, Seán, ix–xi, xvii, 2, 6, 9, Father Prout, x, 3, 70, 81–83, 86, 89 12, 13, 19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 30, Feehan, Seán, 6 33, 36, 38, 39, 45, 49, 50, 64, Ferriter, Diarmaid, 24 65, 71–73, 76–79, 86, 90–93, Fianna Fáil, x, 97, 105–107 95–97, 104, 114 Field, John, 92 Dunne, Tom, 70 Field Day Review, 112 Durcan, Paul, xviii, 2, 12, 19, 24, 32, Fietz, Lothar, 21 35, 65, 66, 86, 91, 97 Firkin Crane, 82 FitzGerald, Brian, 60 FitzGerald, Brigadier Denis, 29, 60 E FitzGerald, Lady Elizabeth, 75 Eagle Printers, 34 FitzGerald, Sir Gerald, 60, 74 East Cork, 80 Fitzgerald, John, 118 Edelstein, Trish, xvii Fitzgibbon, Ger, 34 Eden, Anthony, 74 Five Irish Poets, ix Edinburgh, 70 Fleischmann, Aloys, x, 14, 25 Edinburgh Review, The, 70 Fleischmann, Ruth, 25 EFACIS, xix Fleischmann, Tilly, 23 Ehin, Andres, 49, 65 Follain, Jean, 53 Ehin, Kristiina, 49 Forde, T.J., 34 Emergency, The, 11, 23 Fords, 10 INDEX 135

Fortnight, 112 Green Party, 63, 111 Foster, Roy, 24, 70, 82, 95 Greevy, Bernadette, 15 Fouéré, Olwen, 104 Gregor, 63 Four Courts Press, 23 Gregory of Corkus, 63 Fraser’s Magazine, 19, 70, 74, 96 Grigorographos, 63 Frénaud, André, 18, 26, 48, 116 Grunewald, Mathias, 110 French Church Street, 46, 94 Guevara, Che, 89 Fudan University, 113 Guillevic, Eugène, 32 Gurranabraher, 12

G Gaeltacht, 4 H Galia, 63 Half Moon Street, 46 Gallery Press, xi, 25, 32, 49, 53, Hamilton, 32 64–66, 85, 96, 97 Hannigan, Mick, 41 Galvin, Patrick, viii, ix, 11, 23, 24, 30, Hardwick Street, 89 36, 72, 82–84, 97, 99, 100, 104, 112, 113 Harnett, Michael, 66 Galway, 10 Harris, Mary, 23 Ganges, 47 Hartnett, Michael, 18, 57, 86 Gearagh, 37 Harvill Secker, 65, 97 Gedden, Matthew, 113 Heaney, Seamus, 18, 21, 47, 49, 69, Gill & Macmillan, 25 78–80, 86, 90, 96, 97, 107, 109, Glanmire Station, 16 111, 114 Glendinning, Victoria, 22 Heanius, 63 Gobnait, Saint, 37 Helvick, 62 Golden Ass, The, vii Hesburgh Library, xviii Golden Fleece, The, 29 HibernianBar,The,87 Golden Stone, The, 18, 26, 48 Higgins, Michael D., 112 Goldsmith, Oliver, 11 Hillery, Patrick, 24 Goodby, John, xix, 8, 22, 65, 107, Hindi, 47 114, 119 Hitler, Adolf, 74 GPO (General Post Ofﬁce, Dublin), Hogan, James, 18, 19 77 Honan Hostel, 14 Grand Parade, 94 Hook Head lighthouse, 30 Graph Magazine, 65 Houlihan, Con, 22, 25 Grattan Hill, 36, 38 Hourihan, Kevin, 22 Grattan, Henry, 73 Hughes, Ted, 16 Graves, Robert, 17, 44, 48 Huguenots, 94 Gray, Katherine Martin, 22 Hunger Strikers, 78 Gray’s Lane, 85 Hutchinson, Pearse, viii, 38 Greece, 52 Hutchinson, Wesley, xviii 136 INDEX

I Jeffries, Henry Alan, 12, 23, 24 Iar Mumhan, 72 Johnson, Fred, 54, 65 IDAA, 11 Johnson, Mary, 11, 112 IASIL, xix Johnston, Dillon, 4, 20 Illustrated Almanack, 74 Jones, Mother, 23 Illustrated War News, 74 Journal of HJEAS, 22 India, 15, 47 Joyce, James, 93 INNTI , viii, xviii, 1, 4, 14, 18, 21, Joyce, Trevor, 118 30, 57, 60, 66 International Monetary Fund, The, 109 K International Folkmusic Journal, 112 Kavanagh, Patrick, 32, 41, 62 Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 49 Keane, John B., 34 IPA, 24 Keane, Molly, 75 IRA, 10 Keane, Sir John, 75 Irish Arts Review, 41 Kearney, Colbert, xviii Keohane, Kieran, 21 Irish Ballet Company, 15 Kerlin, Dr., 90 Irish Citizen Army, 104 Kerrigan, John, 18, 106, 114, 117 Irish Education, 24 Kiely, Niall, 100, 103, 112 Irish Examiner, The, xix, 34, 95 Kilbrittain, 95 Irish National Ballet, 14 Kilmainham Gaol, 104, 112 Irish Pages, 114 Kings are out, The, viii Irish Press, The, 25, 34 Kingston, Ontario, 32 Irish Reﬁning Company, 23 Kinsella, Thomas, 5, 15, 32, 38 Irish Review, The, 21 Kirkpatrick, Kathryn, 22 Irish Times, The, 25, 29, 33, 34, 39, Knock, 102 40, 42, 110, 112, 114 Kojak’s Nightclub, 46 Irish Times Weekend Review, 42 Krakatoa, xiii Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), 11 Irish University Review, 21, 85, 97, L 113 La Découverte, 7 Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, Lalor, Brian, 85, 86 9 Laois writer’s scheme, 29 Israel, 54 Larkin, Philip, 91, 93 Italy, 59 La Touche, 74 Ithaki, 63 Lavitt’s Quay, 90 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize, 8 Leaving Cert, 14, 31 J Lee Bookshop, 10, 29, 36 Janaˇcek, Leos, 93 Lee, J.J., 11, 23 Jeffares, Alexander Norman, 17 Lee, River, 16, 47, 64, 81, 82, 88, 94 INDEX 137

Leinster, 72 MacSwiney, Mary, 97 Leinster, Duke of, 29 MacSwiney, Terence, 23, 97 Leland, Mary, 25 Maggie’s Dump, 84 Lemass, Seán, 27, 74, 107 Maginn, William, 19, 70, 96 Lenihan, Brian, 110 Mahon, Derek, 32, 69 Lenin, V.I., 103 Mahony, Francis Sylvester, x, 3, 19, Liam Ruiséal Bookshop, 10 82, 96 Liberties Press, 25 Manchester University Press, 22, 24 Lilliput Press, 22, 95 Manesty, John, 70 Lisbon, 96 Mangan, James Clarence, 71 Lisgoold, 80 Mannheim, Karl, viii, 3, 19, 27, 36, Lismore, 75, 95 71 Lismore Castle, 75 Marcus, David, 14, 25 Lloyd, David, 95 Marina Industrial Estate, 23 Lobby bar, The, 36 Marlboro Street, 88 Lombard, Mary, xviii Marne, 79 London, 62, 96, 100 Marseilles, 86 Long Valley, The, xiv, 88 Marshall, George, 74 Lorca, Frederico Garcia, 54, 100, 112 Martinú, Bohuslav, 93 Lordan, Dave, 119 Marx Brothers, 102 Lucca, 19, 96 Marx, Karl, 102 Lucy, Colonel, 25 Mary, mother of God, 102 Lucy, Seán, viii, ix, 6, 15–17, 21, 25, Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 54, 55 33, 36, 38, 39, 42, 48, 57, 71, Mayﬁeld, 53 72, 95, 100, 101, 103, 112, 113 Maynooth, 96 Ludwig, Hans Werner, 21 McCarthy, Catherine Phil, 40 Lynch, Charles, 15, 50, 65, 91 McCarthy, Nancy, 16 Lynch, Jack, 89, 97 McCarthy Riabhach, 75, 95 Lyric Theatre, 112 McCarthy, Thomas, ix, x, xiv, xvii, 2, 3, 9, 12–16, 20, 24–26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38–42, 44, M 48, 51, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, Macalise, Daniel, 19 69, 70, 73–77, 79, 82, 85, 90, Mac an Iomaire, Colm, 104 92–98, 101, 105–112, 114–118 MacCarthy, Bridget G., xviii, 15, 25 McCrea, Barry, 5, 20 MacCarthy, Catherine Phil, 8, 21, 45 McCrohan, Gemma, xviii MacCurtain Street, 86 McDonald, Robbie, 41 MacCurtain, Tomás, 87, 89 McDonalds, 46 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 17, 44, 48 McLoughlin, Paul, 63 Maclise, Daniel, 70, 74, 82, 96, 97 McMaster University, Hamilton, 32 MacNeice, Louis, 38, 76, 101 McNamara, Brinsley, 85 MacSwiney, Annie, 97 McQuiad, Pat, 41 138 INDEX

Meehan, Paula, 100 N Mercier Press, ix, 6, 10, 21, 25, 71, Na Connerys, 66 95 Naiden, James, 40, 106, 114 Mercier, Vivian, 23 Nanterre, 17 Mercy Sisters, 28 Napoleon, xiii Merriman, Brian, 61 Nation, The, 100 Merton, Thomas, 37 National Gallery, 97 Mikowski, Sylvie, 113 National Library of Ireland, xviii, 7 Miller, Liam, 6 National Microelectronics Research Minsk, 102 Centre, 94 Molana Abbey, 75 Neeson, Geraldine, x, 12, 16, 23 Montague, John, viii, ix, xvii, 6, Neville, Grace, xviii 15–17, 22, 25, 26, 31–33, 35, New Hibernia Review, 40, 42, 114 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 48, 56, 57, New Island Books, 24, 95 63, 66, 69, 86, 101, 115 Newtownshandrum, 66 Montenotte, 12, 94 New York, 53 Moriarty, Joan Denise, 14, 25 Nicaragua, 54 Morrison, Danny, 78 Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, xviii, 2, 18, Moscow, 92 19, 23, 41, 85, 86, 97, 112, 117 Moynihan, Humphrey, xiv, 88 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, ix, 2, 8, 18, Mulcahy, Caitriona, xviii 21, 36, 56–58, 60, 66, 117 Muldoon, Paul, 21, 56, 69 Ní Ghearbhuigh, Ailbhe, 118 Mullins, Tom, 34 Ní Ghríofa, Doireann, 117 Munster, ix, x, 6, 12, 29, 35, 70–72, Ní Ríordáin, Clíona, vii, ix, 65 74, 76–78, 95 Ní Ríordáin, Órla, xix Munster Literature Centre, 11, 34, Ní Ríordáin, Rícheal, xix 39, 95, 100 North Cathedral, 23 Murphy, Gerry, ix, xiv, xvii, 2, 9, Northern Ireland, 7 21, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, North Monastery, 30, 97 41–44, 54, 55, 57, 63, 65, 66, Notre Dame, 82 86, 88, 89, 97, 101–104, 112, Notre Dame Irish Seminar, xix 113, 116 Murphy, John A., 8, 14, 21, 25, 40 Murphy, Liam, 30 O Murphy, Muriel, 23 Ó Bruadair, Dáibhí, 45 Murphy, Nathanael, 59, 73 Ó Canainn, Tomás, 15, 25 Murphy, Seamus, 16 Ó Coileáin, Seán, xviii, 5, 20 Murphy Stout, xiv O’Connor, Frank, 6, 16, 21, 24, 82, Murphy, Tom, xix 89 Murray, Peter, 41 O’Connor, Kieran, 23 Mussolini, Benito, 74 Ó Criadáin, Seán, 72 INDEX 139

Ó Cuilleanáin, Cormac, 10, 19, 23, P 25 Palgrave Macmillan, 20 Ó Direáin, Máirtín, viii Paradise Alley, 85 Ó Doibhlin, Crónán, xviii Paradise Place, 46 O’Donoghue, Gregory, ix, xviii, 2, 24, Paris, xvii, 53 28, 31–38, 40, 42, 57–59, 66 Paris Conference, 74 O’Donoghue, Liz, 8, 21 Parkes, Susan M., 22 O’Donoghue, Robert, x, 12, 16, 24, Pasolini, 5 31 Patrick Kavanagh Prize for Poetry, 41 O’Donovan, Michael Francis, 21 Patrick’s Street, 86, 94 O’Donovan, Patrick, xviii Paulin, Tom, 55, 65 O’Faoláin, Seán, vii, 3, 6, 14, 16, 19, Paul Street, 41 21, 25, 82 Pear is Ripe, The, 15 Pearse, Patrick, 28 Ó Grada, Cormac, 24 Peeters, Benoit, 7 O’Grady, Desmond, 102 Penguin, x Ó h-Airtnéide, Mícheál, 57 Penguin Modern Translations, 51 Ó hEoghusa, Eochaidh, 55 Penrose Quay, 52 O’Leary, Philip, 2, 19 Pléaraca an Riadaigh, 15 O’Lehane, Michael, 11 Plunkett, Joseph Mary, 28 O’Loughlin, Michael, 28, 40, 104, Poetry Now Festival, 100 116 Poetry Ireland, 40, 63 O’Malley, Donogh, ix, 4, 12, 19, 100 Poetry Ireland Review, The, 65 Ó Muirthile, Liam, xviii, 31, 60 Poets of Munster, ix Ó Ríordáin, Seán, viii, 5, 6, 8, 20, 37, Pompey Magnus, 111 38, 45, 55, 57, 71 Poolbeg Press, 66 Ó Ríordáin, Tomás, xix Pound, Ezra, 62 O’Riordan, Michael, x, 11, 101, 102 Powers whiskey, 62 Ó Riada, Ruth, 15 Pratschke, Sheila, xvii Ó Riada, Seán, 15, 25, 37, 38 Presentation Brothers, 28 Ó Searcaigh, Cathal, 60, 66 Prince’s Street, 35 O’Sullivan, Leanne, 117 Proﬁle Books, 24 Ó Tuairsic, Eoghan, 57 Ó Tuama, Seán, 5, 14, 20 Q Old Presbyterian Meeting House, 35 Quarryman, The, x, xviii, 18, 34–36, Oxford, viii 41, 80 Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, 19 Queen’s College Cork, 10 Oxford University Press, 19, 24, 40, Queenstown, xiii, 79 67, 95, 96 Queen’s University, Kingston, Odysseus, 52 Ontario, 32 Omaha, 44 Quinn, Aidan, 112 Ormond, 72 Quinn, Justin, 28, 40 140 INDEX

R Salmon Press, 21 Raguet, Christine, xviii Sandboken, 74 Raleigh, Walter, 45, 58 Sandhurst, 29 Rambert, Marie, 25 San Francisco, 16 Ramsell, Billy, 119 Sardin, Pascale, xix Raven Arts Press, 64, 105, 113 Schwerter, Stephanie, xix, 49, 54, 55 Redemption Road, x Scoil Íte, 97 Rennes, 53 Seine, 88 Ricks, Christopher, 42 Sewell, Frank, 2, 19, 20 Riggs, Pádraigín, xviii Shaky Bridge, The, 86 Rimbaud, Arthur, xiii, xiv, xvii Shanbally Terrace, 108 Ringaskiddy, 79 Shandon, 19, 52, 81, 89, 96 Riordan, Martin, 80 Sheehan McQuaid, Tony, 41 Riordan, Maurice, ix, xvii, 2, 28, Shefﬁeld Hallam University, 32 31–33, 35, 36, 45, 55, 56, 65, Sheltered Nest, The, xi 78, 79, 81, 96 Simmons, James, 112 1916 Rising, 4, 28 Simonedes, 54 Ritchie, Charles, 9, 22 Simon & Schuster, 22 Robinson, Mary, 9 Sinclair Stevenson, 19 Robson, Evelyn, 15, 18 Sinn Féin, 78 Rochestown, 94 Sirr, Peter, 71–74, 95, 116 Roethke, Theodore, 106 SOFEIR, xix Rome, 52, 76 Somme, 79 Roseingrave, Louise, 112 SoundEye Festival, 118, 119 Rosenstock, Gabriel, 49 Southword, 66 Routledge, 19 Southword Editions, 49, 65 Royal Academy, 66 Spanish Civil War, 11, 54 Royal Black Institution, 78 Sparta, 52 Royal Geographical Society, 40 Spenser, Edmund, 16, 45, 58 RTE, xviii, 23, 25, 112 Sráid an Chapaill Bhuí, 94 Rushbrooke, 79 Stalin, Joseph, 102 Russia, 49 Stanford University, 22 Ryan, Ray, 18, 107, 114 The Strand, London, 62 St Colman’s College, Fermoy, 31 St John’s Park, Waterford, 13, 30 S St Luke’s, 87, 93 SAES, xix St Patrick’s bridge, 83 Saint Anne’s Shandon, 82 St. Michael’s College, 32 Saint Helena, xiii Stricken Blackbird, 42 Saint Sophia, 82 Sullivan, Anne, 41 Sairséal & Dill, 20 Sullivan, William Kirby, 23 INDEX 141

Summer Hill, viii, 53, 86 University of Notre Dame, xviii Sunbeam Wolsey, 10 UN Security Council, 103 Sunday’s Well, 12 Ur Mumhan, 72 Swanzy, Inspector, 89 Swertz, Tilly, 25 Sydney Parade, xi V Sydney Place, x, 50, 90–93 Vaizey, John, 24 Vatican, 82 Vatican 2, 20 T Vermont, 32, 111 Taoiseach, 97 Verolme Dockyard, 23 Templemaurice, 75 Vietnam, 29 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 79 Villar-Argaiz, Pilar, 113 Thanatos, 63 Vincennes, 17 Theocritus, 79 von Oranje, Prinz, xiii Thomond, 72 Three Spires Press, 32, 100, 113 Tinley, Bill, 65 W Tobin Street, 41 Wall, William, xvii, 33, 35, 36, 41 Toner’s Bog, 78 Walsh, Aisling, 112 Trauma, 63 Wandering Chief, The, xiii Trinity College Dublin (TCD), viii, War of Independence, 11, 84, 87 xix, 9, 18, 21, 22, 40, 96 Warriner, Rachel, 119 Triskel Arts Centre, 32, 41, 118 Triskel Gallery, The, 36 Waterford, xiv, 13, 28, 30, 37, 74, Troïka, 109, 110 75, 108 Tuadh Mumhan, 72 Watters, Eugene, 57 Tubular Bells Art Gallery, 41 Weber, Florence, 7 Tubular Gallery, 36 Welch, Robert, ix, xviii, 11, 23, 36, Turner’s Cross, 83 42, 46, 58, 97, 100, 113 Well of Loneliness, The, vii Wellington Road, 38, 50, 65, 87, 91, U 92 Ubac, Raoul, 18 Wexford, xiv Uí Ríordáin, Máire, xix, 114 Wheatley, David, 49, 65 Ulster, ix, 33, 51, 69, 70, 76, 78, 111 Whitaker, TK, 12 United States, 32, 116 Winthrop street, 88 Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, xviii Wolfson College, 19 University College Dublin, 38 Woods, Vincent, 23, 112 University of Aberdeen, 21 Wordsworth, William, 17, 38, 54 University of Alabama Press, 22 Workers’ Music Association, 100 University of Bordeaux, xix Writers to the Sea Festival, 113 University of Hawaii, 7 Wyatt, David, 4, 20 142 INDEX

Y Yeats, W.B., 17, 38, 70, 87, 95, 101, 104, 106, 107 Yale University Press, 20 Youghal, 58, 80 Yamaha, 44 Young, Augustus, 2, 18, 19, 117, 118