Flowing, Still: Irish Poets on Irish Poetry (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Flowing, Still: Irish Poets on Irish Poetry Tracy Youngblom Flowing, Still: Irish Poets on Irish Poetry, ed. Pat Boran, pp. 196. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2009; distributed by Syracuse University Press. $22.95 (paper). The synergy suggested by the title, Flowing, Still: Irish Poets on Irish Poetry, works as a force in the collection itself, both driving it forward and holding it together. Flowing and still: opposites, yet, two sides of the same coin, or river, as it were. Water may not be simultaneously flowing and still; sometimes it appears to be, as eddies curl underneath the jutting chins of riverbanks under which water collects itself, moody. Resonant and redolent, the collection both suggests and enacts movement. At the same time, it enacts a series of pauses to consider not only Irish writers but the history and flow of Irish poetry today. Neatly divided into two parts, the first part is itself a kind of “flow” of essays moving forward, literally, from an earlier time. These pieces are reprinted from a 1999 anthology, Watching the River Flow: A Century of Irish Poetry, in which each writer (all of them poets) was assigned a decade of the twentieth century and directed to choose ten poems that embody the decade’s character. Here, the essays appear without their accompanying poems; the volume would have been far more useful in classrooms had it at least listed the ten poems discussed in each chapter in an appendix. But happily, these are not the only essays in the volume. And cumulatively, the essays do provide a directory of Irish poets through the twentieth century, no small feat. In addition, they are linked in a chain-stitch kind of way. For instance, Patrick Kavanagh makes the list in each of the three decades from the 1930s to the 1950s; the writers of those essays, Thomas Kinsella, Ciaran Carson, and John Montague respectively, find their places on later poets’ lists. Seamus Heaney, chronicling the 1970s, chooses Kinsella and Montague, and Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, focusing on the 1990s, recognizes Carson. The weave of the names and snippets of poetry in and among these essays makes a tapestry that depicts the richness of Irish poetry, and some its most distinctive threads. The interplay of writers—named and naming—describes a flow of admiration and influence, while the essays linger on specified times, places, and disruptions. [End Page 155] Any look at the twentieth century has to deal with Modernism, a duty to which the essays in the second half of the collection do their part. Organized in a loosely progressive way, each contributes an idea that fills out a picture of Irish poetry that comprises part of the flow of all nations’ poetry and yet stands apart, separate and still. The first essay, by Theo Dorgan, explores the genesis of poetry in the Irish language. The disruptions of Modernism are evident: a turning away from tradition and toward novelty. Yet, Dorgan concludes that “when poets now living make their poems in Irish, they are making poems, not obeisances.” Following this, Eamon Grennan explores American poets’ influence on Irish poets. Again, the disruptions of Modernism seem important. Grennan insists that while custom would dictate loyalty to one tradition, many poets, including Yeats, were influenced stylistically by Americans. Grennan notes that “Whitman . . . was one of Yeats’s important teachers in the establishment of his first poetic self, [and] Pound taught him to re-make himself and move towards the style of his maturity.” The third essay is David Wheatley’s “‘That Blank Mouth’: Secrecy, Shibboleths, and Silence in Northern Irish Poetry.” The title alone suggests this essay will continue to follow the stream of Irish literary history, yet stop to meditate on one of its facets—specifically, a geographic area. Coming in the perfect middle of the essays in the second half, it is well placed. Wheatley’s essay marks a literal divide, between explorations of Modernist influence on one side, and the future of Irish poetry on the other. It acts as a fulcrum. Wheatley’s examinations of Ciaran Carson, for instance, are particularly postmodern; he describes Carson’s “defamiliarizing technique” and his “verbal self-weaving.” Yet, his analysis...