The Outnumbered Poet: Critical Prose and Autobiographical Essays by Dennis O’Driscoll (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Outnumbered Poet: Critical Prose and Autobiographical Essays by Dennis O’Driscoll Daniel Tobin The Outnumbered Poet: Critical Prose and Autobiographical Essays, by Dennis O’Driscoll, pp. 472. Oldcastle: Gallery Books, €17.50. “I was never a great admirer of death.” So the late Dennis O’Driscoll begins his essay “In the Midst of Life,” one of some twenty-five autobiographical and literary essays and reviews collected in the compendious posthumous volume, The Outnumbered Poet. “In the Midst of Life,” a short meditation on O’Driscoll’s move with his wife the poet Julie O’Callaghan to a house backing a suburban Protestant cemetery ends with the figure of an admittedly portentous thrush perched on the boundary wall. More than vaguely salutary to Thomas Hardy, O’Driscoll’s thrush encountered in “the last darkness of the year” prompts the poet to question “Might this be a favourable omen or an ominous one?” “In the Midst of Life,” with its title’s implicit nod to Dante,” is dated February 3, 2001, which only underscores how inevitably even potentially favorable omens turn ominous in relief of any life’s premature curtailment: O’Driscoll died suddenly in December 2012 at the relatively young age of fifty-eight. It is hard, to echo Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” not to see this prominent Irish poet’s end in the beginning of this essay written some eleven years before; hard also not to invoke, however allusively, Auden’s famous literary epitaph to Yeats, for though Dennis O’Driscoll confessed he was no admirer of death he, too, now in death has become his admirers. Born and raised in Thurles, County Tipperary, as a young poet from beyond the literary pale O’Driscoll sent greetings to W. H. Auden, a gesture either unaccountably daring or quietly self-assured, and probably both. The great English poet must have heard something decidedly other than sycophancy in O’Driscoll’s letter, for he responded. As Seamus Heaney reflected in his eulogy for his friend and literary collaborator—only a matter of months before his own untimely death—from such beginnings the poet who “struck a new note . . . in a changing Ireland moving from the age of Sunday Mass to the age of the shopping mall . . . grew into the man who was at the center of his own world wide web of poetry.” If [End Page 155] The Outnumbered Poet attests to anything beyond O’Driscoll’s obvious dedication to the art he loved, and what Heaney deemed his characteristic probity, it is to his simultaneously discriminating and wide-ranging appreciation of notable poets from either side of the Atlantic whose work evinces the sadly waning quality of something important to say—that, and the wry edginess of his wit. Where the short essays of the brief first part of The Outnumbered Poet provide a welcome glimpse of “the working bard’s” life as a suburbanite and civil servant in the Revenue Office, the substantially longer second part demonstrates O’Driscoll’s wide-ranging interests in poets as various and globally distributed as Yehuda Amichai, Julia Hartwig, Anna Kamienska, Miroslov Holub, Douglas Dunn, Alisdair Maclean, Phillip Larkin, Louis MacNeice, and Robert Lowell, among many others. Especially welcome throughout these essays is O’Driscoll’s considerable engagement with contemporary American poets, again as broadly distributed aesthetically as John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Kay Ryan, and Billy Collins. The two essays on Ryan and Collins, in particular, reveal O’Driscoll’s preference for poets and poetry that take reality into consideration along with vitality of language and formal expressiveness. O’Driscoll’s watchword in poetry is clarity, and he is not afraid of offering discriminating observations about the work of even strong poets whose poems at times do not measure up to his standards. For example, in his essay on the early poetry of Yehuda Amichai he urges “more layering of emotion and intensification of language . . . could have transformed his poems, not the least the near misses among those early selections.” He holds himself to those same high standards, of course, in his reflections on making his own Selected Poems. Not surprisingly, O’Driscoll is less appreciative of the empty playfulness, or...