Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey Nathaniel Myers Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey, ed. Benjamin Keatinge and Aengus Woods, pp. 288. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, $69.95. Distributed by International Specialized Booksellers, Portland, OR. As with many critical works that focus on a relatively obscure literary figure, one of the primary goals of Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey is to reclaim his reputation in the face of a literary history that, for various reasons, has privileged some writers over others. Undoubtedly, the poet Brian Coffey (1904–1995), who was Irish-born but who spent considerable time in Paris, Missouri, and London—an itinerancy that already defies literary history’s basic categories of nation-based identity—is much less well-known than his peer Samuel Beckett, or even Thomas Mac Greevy, each of whom receive frequent mention in the essays and anecdotes that comprise this collection. In some acts of literary reclamation, the need to prove the author’s—and thus, the critic’s own—value can leave readers with an unpleasant aftertaste. Not so with Other Edens, a collection of erudite essays and biographical sketches that both develop the critical paths of inquiry into Brian Coffey’s work and pay warm homage to the poet, philosopher, teacher, and family man. Of course, many of the included essays do attempt to revise literary history in the hopes of figuring Coffey more prominently. J.C.C. Mays’s essay “Brian Coffey’s Review of Beckett’s Murphy: ‘Take warning while you praise,’” is one such essay. Mays is arguably the poet’s most significant critic, and his analysis of Coffey’s previously unpublished review of Murphy—which is, to the reader’s delight, included in the essay itself—enumerates the reasons for the poet’s particular insight into Beckett’s otherwise misunderstood and poorly reviewed first published novel. Had the review appeared concurrently with the book’s 1938 release, Mays asserts, it would have been both a boon to the poet who was intellectually capable of handling the material and a necessary corrective to Beckett studies, which, he argues, has been led astray by Hugh Kenner’s Cartesian reading for too long. Equally, other essays argue the poet’s literary significance by examining his work on its own terms. These essays can, at times, feel almost like line-by-line readings of the poetry itself. But the density of Coffey’s poetry is such that many of the erudite arguments made by these critics demand a narrative-like [End Page 154] explication tracing the development of themes and ideas. At the literal center of the book are three such essays, one each from editors Keatinge and Woods, and one from James Matthew Wilson. Keatinge’s “‘Missouri Sequence’ and the Search for a Habitat” examines what many consider Coffey’s most accessible work in order to parse the different forms and definitions of “habitat”—from the topographical to the linguistic—that the poet probes in the piece. Wilson, too, focuses on this particular work to trace the influence of French philosopher Jacques Maritain (with whom Coffey corresponded) to lay bare the metaphysical, ontological and eschatological underpinnings of the poem. Woods locates in Coffey’s seldom-considered love poetry a metaphysics at work that, while influenced by Hegel and Levinas, is original to the poet; the result is a poetic that does not so much articulate a concept of love but which, much more interestingly, attempts to enact analogously the experience of love. In its way, Woods’s essay offers readers a guide with which to approach Coffey’s aesthetic. If many of these essays at times also read like explications of the poetry, some of the pieces do unabashedly provide keys for appreciating the poet: Coffey’s highly allusive, fractured, syntactically experimental modernist techniques can turn off the casual reader. Geoffrey Squires’s “Eight Lines of Coffey: A Note on Prosody” is a welcome addition. Extracting eight lines of poetry from their original contexts, Squires analyzes each for its stylistic qualities, noting such aspects as line length, register, syntax and grammar, as well as offering some bold qualitative assessments. In...