Ain't that a Shame

Abstract

Ain't that a Shame Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) Herod's Dispensations Harry Clifton Wake Forest University Press www.wfupress.wfu.edu 68 Pages; Print, $13.95 Shame: A Brief History Peter N. Stearns University of Illinois Press www.press.uillinois.edu 186 Pages; Print, $ 24.95 Harry Clifton is a contemporary Irish poet (b. 1952) and was the official Poet of Ireland from 2010-2013. Born in Dublin, he began writing over forty years ago and left Ireland in the mid-1970s for aid work in Africa and then Asia, followed by living in France and Paris, before returning to Ireland in the mid-1990s. He is married to the Irish novelist Deirdre Madden. Several of his previous volumes of poetry have been critically acclaimed, including The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012, shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award) and Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks, 1994-2004 (2007, winner of the Irish Times Poetry Now Award). His other books include a memoir of his and his wife's year-long stay in the Abruzzo region of Italy, On the Spine of Italy (1999), and Berkeley's Telephone (2007), a collection of short fiction. The memoir is my particular favorite, as the cosmopolitan poet's modern sensibility grows to appreciate deeply the joys and rigors of traditional life without any sentimentality or condescension. Clifton's name may be familiar to some readers from the dedication to Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli" (1938). That Harry Clifton was his father, who gave the large stone to the Nobel Laureate. In the famous poem inspired by the gift, Yeats stares into the carved scene depicting Eastern monks on their way to a mountain temple, with their servant playing silent music as they ascend. That poem represents the Western and Eastern attitudes to war, violent change, and chaos. The former involves the assumption of tragic masks, rather than breaking down into hysterics; the latter attitude being, to the accompaniment of accomplished music, Yeats's own privileged assumption of the monks' timeless contemplative posture: "Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, / Their ancient, glittering eyes, their eyes, are gay." In this latest volume, Herod's Dispensations (meaning system of rule and rare exception alike), Clifton does not take on this Yeats poem, but instead another similar-themed late poem. The agonistic Clifton poem is the title poem of the "Red Earth" sequence in this volume. Like many of the poems in this new collection, it deals with recent and past experiences in Asia, particularly in China. Even the poems here addressing other poets, such as Auden, do so via their experiences of the Far East. The following poem sounds many of the themes running throughout the new volume. "3. Red Earth" Huge as China, tiny as a doorTo a higher incarnation … No one thereTo meet me, no one to say goodbye.Such is the infinite courteousness, I could dieOn the wrong side of language. Where I goThere is only silence. Everywhere, crowded floorsOf airports, Himalayan airIn the distance, or the nearness of gingko trees—Mongolian space, the nomad's empty stareIn total externality. Two currencies,Origin, destination, burn a holeIn my pocket, whatever each is worth.Meanwhile, the body in transit. And the soulEternally foreign, vaster than red earth The key line is: "Mongolian space, the nomad's empty stare / In total externality." On first look, this line would appear to be the exact opposite of the final two lines of "Lapis Lazuli," which suggest the divine madness of the inward mystical gaze. But this is because Clifton's "Red Earth" actually plays off another Yeats poem, "Meru," which, as originally published in Poetry Magazine (December 1934), is also a Petrarchan sonnet, like Clifton's "Red Earth," and it also deals with the external perspective upon reality until the final lines. Here is "Meru" in its first published version, which stresses its Petrarchan form: Civilization is hooped together, broughtUnder a rule, under the semblance of peaceBy manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,And he, despite his terror, cannot ceaseRavening through century after centuryRavening, raging...