On Trevor Joyce

Abstract

The Irish poet Trevor Joyce is distant cousin of his novelist namesake, as I learned when glazier repairing window of Joyce's house, broken in fit of rage by poetry critic at party that concluded an poetry festival held in Cork, said that if he'd known of relationship he'd have done work for half-price. That's work reputation can do in Ireland, and, though tensions that led to that incident of broken window were not exclusively literary, it does provide fitting image for knockabout absurdities of distinctions between mainstream and avant-garde that readers expect to hear when one reviews poet like Trevor Joyce. Yes, they take these matters seriously in Ireland, as elsewhere--which is pity, as such divisions are surely as slippery and unhelpful in Irish context as they are, to my mind, in North America or U.K. By rights there ought to be community of interest between readers of challenging mainstream poets like Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson, and readers of challenging avant-garde poets such as Joyce, Maurice Scully, Catherine Walsh, and Randolph Healy. The obstacles in way of bridging such audiences are persistent but (I think in my more optimistic moments) not likely to be permanent in long run, despite resistance from various quarters. (1) But I'm moving too fast, or letting my hopes distract me from text at hand, collected poems of an author who has now been writing for almost four decades but can still expect response Who's Trevor Joyce? from even that sliver of public that follows contemporary poetry. Trevor Joyce was born in Dublin in 1947. While still in his teens he met poet Michael Smith, who, five years his senior, became an important friend and mentor. In 1967 they cofounded New Writers' Press in order to do something about what they pugnaciously diagnosed as the stagnancy of Irish poetry scene relative to what had happened in U.S. and Europe, with its emphasis on a provincial literature, unambitious in its concerns, formally conservative, and rural in its outlook. (2) It was an auspicious time for such venture: NWP and its associated journal The Lace Curtain formed part of remarkable wave of little presses and journals that changed English-language poetry in 1960s and 1970s. NWP published wide variety of contemporary Irish poets, including Thomas Kinsella, Pearse Hutchinson, Anthony Cronin, Paul Durcan, and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, and major program of international authors--Borges, Vallejo, Spicer, Neruda. The sheer diversity and ambition of NWP's activities should not be forgotten, even though it is now most closely identified with its most significant achievement: rediscovery and republication of 1930s generation of Irish modernists (Brian Coffey, Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin, et al), of whom only Samuel Beckett was visible on canonical literary maps. NWP's period of greatest activity ended with 1970s (by which point it had produced over forty titles), though imprint continues to exist, revived on an occasional basis for special projects such as 1990 edition of Brian Coffey's Mallarme translations or present edition of Joyce's collected poems. Joyce's first phase as writer climaxed with full-length collection (NWP 1972). In his early poetry (presented in generous selection under tide Pentahedron & others in with first dream), Joyce demonstrates strikingly complete absorption of nineteenth-century and modernist influences. The poems' city- or townscapes are registered through sensibilities of late-modernist skeptical observer, as series of objects, part-objects, and living creatures at once oppressively plentiful and yet failing to add up to anything like full and living world. The poems' fragmented observations are bounded on all sides by streets, walls, cobblestones, public monuments, bridges, canals, and churches, an environment neither natural nor sufficiently human. …