Les Kay

Two Contemporary Irish Poets:

A Review of Seamus Heaney's DISTRICT AND CIRCLE and Paul Perry's THE ORCHID KEEPER

When you hear the term Irish poetry, what do you think of?

I'd wager that for most of our readers, Yeats springs immediately to mind, followed perhaps by the work of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and maybe Eavan Boland—all of whom manage to blend a deep knowledge of the English tradition through the subtle use form to posit a poetics of both personal and political import.

Yet, contemporary Irish poetry, like that we see in the States, is far more varied and vibrant than a cursory reading of a handful of iconic poets would suggest. Indeed, imagine trying to make sense of American poetry by reading only the work of T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Billy Collins, and Carl Dennis.

What beauty we would miss!

Of course, a thorough survey of contemporary Irish poetry is far beyond the pale of this little review. Instead, I'll focus on two recent volumes that seem to me indicative of the breadth of work that many of us are missing: District and Circle by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) and The Orchid Keeper by Paul Perry (The Dedalus Press, 2006).

The Laureate

In District and Circle, Heaney charts familiar ground with enviable dexterity. Occasional free verse poems mingle with sonnets and found prose, demonstrating Heaney's willingness to experiment within the tradition that he has helped define.

In terms of content, the poems meander from the Ireland of his youth to the contemporary—recording details as though the poet is engaged in a near desperate effort to archive details as ballast against the inevitability of change (and death). Take for example, "Helmet" which carefully describes a Boston fireman’s helmet, a 20-year-old gift to the speaker that, in the poem, serves as a sort of talismanic symbol of both ". . . 'the headgear/Of the tribe,' as O’Grady called it" and of loss in the final stanza:

And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof
Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man there
Till the hard-reared shield wall broke.

More, the character O'Grady suggests an interesting conflation of "fireman" and "poet" in the poem, suggesting, perhaps, that like a fireman, the poet's task may be to face the fire, the rubble and save what can be saved, recover what can be recovered. Doubtless, such a simile is a marvelous stretch of the imagination, but Heaney, by expressing the speaker's doubt ("As if I were up to it . . . ") allows the comparison to stand and suggest much of what seems to be the poet's task in this volume, without stumbling into the kind of solipsism that the comparison—at first blush—brings to mind.

To me, this attempt to salvage what might be salvaged falls short of the masterful work Heaney did in 1997's The Spirit Level—in which the slightest personal details seem set to explode with historical significance. Here, in many instances, the personal remains, by comparison, personal. Yet if I find myself unmoved by some of the poems, I also stand in awe of Mr. Heaney's undeniable technical skill. Indeed, the title poem, “District and Circle" is a sequence of sonnet-like poems with rhymes so deft and subtle that you might miss them with a quick read. For this poem, alone, the book is well worth its cover price ($20 here).

In terms of craft, Heaney, I believe, still has much to teach us—particularly given the veritable deluge of relatively lazy free verse all of us see nowadays. If, however, you are new to Seamus Heaney, read The Spirit Level or Open Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, both of which are superior introductions to the work of this major poet.

The Young Poet

Before I move on to the review of The Orchid Keeper, in the interest of full disclosure, I feel compelled to mention that Mr. Perry attended the same MFA program as I did in the late 90s. Nevertheless, I hope that you'll trust in my relative objectivity, and should you be so inclined, let the poems speak for themselves.

Like Mr. Heaney, Paul Perry's work employs an impressive variety of poetic techniques and devices to achieve its aims. Unlike some contemporary poetry, none of the poems in this, his second collection, seem at all formulaic. Instead, his poems range from the familiar personal lyric, steeped in nostalgia to brief forays into the realm of "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" to an intriguing long persona poem that inhabits the voice of William Gladstone, the late 19th-century Prime Minister of the UK to a handful of prose poems.

More, many of the poems, like "The Surfers at Portstewart," bring to mind W.S. Merwin in the way that they strive toward absolutes as if the indecision, anxiety, and doubt that characterizes postmodernism were little more than a moot point. Indeed, in this poem, the speaker's thoughts meander from a lyrical moment "before the sun sets its great crimson eye", watching "the surfers of Portstewart take flight like some/mythical fleet . . . " across continents to "monkey business in an R&B bar" to an "Akka tribesman" whose pronunciation of the word "beautiful" becomes somehow emblematic of the "I/you" relationship that serves as the impetus of the poem. Yet rather than slipping into overly trite sentimentality, the speaker's refrain of solitude is punctuated, and perhaps absolved, by the final three stanzas where he returns to those surfers:

with their devotional patience
sitting on their boards waiting

waiting for the right wave
the wave that will take them there

where they were going
where they were always going

Like Merwin, Mr. Perry seems to have a unique talent for closing lines that open numerous possibilities of meaning while suggesting something absolute, such as fate in this case.

Perhaps the finest example of this facility is in the poem "Wintering" from which the collection takes its title. The poem, which incidentally is my favorite in the collection, is a personal narrative, in which the speaker, reflecting upon his "last year in Florida" describes his work at a "cash job" on an orchid farm whilst reflecting on a troubled domestic relationship. In lesser hands, such subject matter could easily dissolve into clichê, or worse a Hallmark special. Yet here, Perry deftly focuses on the work itself and the ". . . . Long hours/in the sun/poor in paradise, the heat/on my back, drilling for a living" before summoning the notion of "wintering": are "wintering”:

What we were doing I was told
was wintering. Getting ready
for the cold, its indiscretion, its disregard.
Nailing sheets of plastic onto a wooden

frame, hammering, drilling
to protect the fragile flowers
and their steel interiors, their
engineered hearts and worth.

Here, the term takes on further weight, eschewing the expected connotations of leisurely travel that we'd associate with the orchid farm's clientele rather than its workers. From this, the orchids emerge, in the speaker's words, as "emblematic" of the conflicts of the past and the way in which we all "batten down the hatches and wait/for whatever storm is coming . . . . " And in the final stanza, those conflicts are resolved, unexpectedly with a description of those emblematic orchids:

I suppose, waiting through winter
to emerge with budding, fantastical
insistence, to wake and remind us:
be nothing less than amazed.

And, as a reviewer, with many of the poems in this collection, I am nothing less than amazed. Throughout the collection, there are multiple examples of dazzling, sonorous lines that demonstrate an impressive understanding of the contours and rhythms of the language, which make the book well worth owning.

Doubtless, this isn't a flawless book. At times, Mr. Perry's breadth of compositional techniques is distracting. I occasionally found myself wishing for a little more coherence thematically and structurally. After all, the majority of the poems in this collection, taken on an individual basis, are remarkably good. There is simply not the cumulative effect that you would see in a truly great volume of verse.

Yet, as a whole, I'd highly recommend The Orchid Keeper. Perry is, after all, a relatively young poet—this is only his second collection—and already an impressive display of his talents is available to us. Hopefully, we'll have ample opportunity, as time marches on, to watch the development of a poet who clearly has the potential to be a very important.

The Orchid Keeper is available in paperback online at The Dedalus Press for 10 Euros. Seamus Heaney's collection District and Circle is available at most major bookstores in hardcover for $20.00.

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