Nine Bright Shiners by Theo Dorgan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nine Bright Shiners by Theo Dorgan Kelly Matthews Nine Bright Shiners, by Theo Dorgan, 142 pp. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2014. Distributed in the United States by Syracuse University Press. $17.50 (paper). Theo Dorgan has shown his willingness, time and again, to take on a range of perspectives, not only as a poet but also as a screenwriter, librettist, memoirist, translator, and editor. Dorgan has been publishing poetry since 1975, served as director of Poetry Ireland from 1989 to 2000, and won the O’Shaughnessy Prize in 2010. In a sense, his newest work, Nine Bright Shiners, is five books in one: each of its subtitled sections has a distinct focus and governing aesthetic. “The Sea, The Sea,” for example, contains poems about Dorgan’s grandfather, who was born aboard ship off the coast of Cape Horn, a topic to which Dorgan returns after exploring it in his books Time on the Ocean (2010) and Sailing for Home (2004), prose memoirs of his own long-distance voyages on the Atlantic. Poetry, however, allows Dorgan imaginatively to close the gap between himself and his ancestors, as he writes of his newborn grandfather: “I hold that child up, first sight of his homeland, / I hold his beloved son, my father, suddenly as close. / There, up ahead, my mother to welcome us home—/ all blazed in light, confident, beautiful, young.” Perspective taking is a recurring exercise for Dorgan. He frequently chooses translation as a way of approaching unfamiliar territory, and the section “Chorus” includes translated poems from French, Slovenian, Italian, and Irish. Sometimes the effect is to estrange Dorgan from his home landscape; at other times, it is through translation that he pays homage to his own childhood in Cork, as, for example, in “The Child I Was Regards the Infinite,” modeled after Giacomo Leopardi’s “L’Infinito” and recalling “Water Lane and the great valley below” as well as how “the silence over the Bishop’s Field went all the way / up forever into the blank vault of fear.” The most striking section of Nine Bright Shiners is “The Dead Stand All Around Us,” a group of elegies for departed friends and family members. Significantly, the dead do not lie at rest, they stand—as if continuing to witness the friends they have left behind and for their continuing work. In an elegy for the artist Deirdre Meaney the poet asks, “be proud of me as I have been proud of you.” There is a true sense of the poet in context, taking his place in the greater community of artists, writers, and performers. An especially beautiful poem in this section is “A Light was Burning,” which describes in simple detail the poet’s “shock” upon routinely seeking a light in a friend’s window after his death: “a sense of nothing under your feet. / We walk in such peril of small things.” This poem commemorates Lar Cassidy, a fellow administrator for the Arts Council in Ireland. Other elegies are written in memory of Michael Hartnett, John McGahern, and Eugene Lambert. [End Page 155] Dorgan writes in a variety of forms, mostly eschewing regular rhyme or meter, and often playing with form itself, as in “Three Heterodox Sonnets for John Shinnors,” which include one Shakespearean sonnet and two with irregular patterns: two tercets and two quatrains, or fourteen sentence-long single lines. Irregular sonnets reappear in the later section “House of Echoes,” numbered as “Nine Instances of Grace,” in which Dorgan celebrates a working retreat in Greece with his partner and fellow poet, Paula Meehan. Throughout, Dorgan’s use of repetition and refrains, sometimes in Irish, creates patterns that draw attention to connections between past and present and from the opening of a poem to its closing. Like a Buddhist sutra, these patterns call the reader to meditate on contradictions within human existence. Dorgan writes, for example, of visiting Loop Head in west Clare: “We are strangers here and at home where we are most lonely, / most lonely where we are most at home.” Buddhism, in fact, provides stability to Dorgan’s poetic stance. He refers to himself as a “zen-influenced devotee,” and his poems carry titles like “The...