A review of Micheal O'Siadhail's 'Tongues'

What most defines O’Siadhail’s substantial new collection is his preoccupation with the roots and intersecting branches of languages. This volume never abandons its origins in Ireland for long, but restlessly crosses and re-crosses national and linguistic boundaries, bringing back thought-provoking congruences:

[…] In the Italian tempo

Or Gaelic aimsir together

In one word the sense of ‘time’ and ‘weather’.

                                                          (‘Time and Tide’, p. 41)

Why did ‘time’ become conjoined with ‘weather’ in these languages? At first blush, the random, freakish changes in atmospheric conditions seem antithetical to the predictable motions of time’s passage. But a second thought recalls that these words pre-date clocks and wristwatches, and speak from and connect us to an epoch in which time was measured and apportioned by looking at the sky’s colour, and the movement of heavenly bodies across it. Perhaps, too, the congruence of time and weather in Irish and Italian challenges the notion that time is a divisible, measurable quantity, and reminds us that, as it is experienced, it has its own changeful weather. By delving into the strange pairings that languages throw up, O’Siadhail makes us see the world anew; what seems inevitable, familiar and constant takes on strangeness and, perhaps, greater truth.

The results of O’Siadhail’s erudition are that languages with origins as diverse as Icelandic, Japanese and Irish are shown to contain fascinating consonances. Out of the link between the words ‘colour’ and ‘handsome’ that exists in these three come the arresting lines:

Our desire’s rouge and chrism

The glows and glories of a face.

                                            (‘Hues’, p. 42)

The collection contains hundreds of similar moments when meanings cluster, cross over, and collide with each other. With beautiful irony ‘chiseller’, an Irish dialect word for a child and a slang word for a thief, are combined in an inadvertent moment of truth-telling:

‘Adult and a chiseller,’ father said

And I made myself as small as I could

When he pushed me ahead through the turnstile

                                                          (‘Turnstile’, p. 31)

Like in his last volume, O’Siadhail looks carefully at the oddities of words which might themselves be shoved, unnoticed, through the turnstile of everyday speech. Reading this book, I gained a renewed sense of how language is forever shifting and flowing, bearing the impress of who is around us, our origins and what we have read, heard and seen. I started to wonder what I would discover if I could have a day’s-worth of a person’s speech laid out in front of me. Which words would they fall back on most often? What currencies would get them through the day’s turnstiles? And where would these words have come from? That a book of poetry has provoked curiosity about these kinds of questions could be a mark of its success.

The Irish dialect ‘I’m just after eating’ might ordinarily be passed over unconsidered (or, if considered at all, chalked up as an idiomatic oddity resulting from the intersection of English and Gaelic which, among other influences, has fed into today’s Irish English). To O’Siadhail, however, the reality in experience that underlies this grammatical formulation is brought flashing to the surface through a description of eating a mango:

I’ve just eaten a mango zipped with lime

So recent and perfect my lips still twang.

[…]

On Celtic fringes a like idiom

Conscious of time ‘we’re after eating’

Reflects an Irish th’eis or Welsh wedi

Prepositions that qualify fleeting

Verbal nouns with their temporal aplomb

And hold in suspense the passing heady

Moment to invoke stings of pleasure fresh

In the mouth while still the corrosive lime

Bites slivers of a phantom mango’s flesh.

Around my tongue juices whirl and eddy.

                                              (‘Recent Perfect’, p. 86)

These lines convey the strengths and weaknesses of this collection well. What is best about it is worth dwelling on, and is exemplified in his description of the mango and its effect on O’Siadhail’s ‘tongue’. O’Siadhail is both knowledgeable of language's secret connections and able to communicate these links with a vigour and originality that grabs the ear. The way in which I have structured this paragraph suggests that there is an ‘at its worst’ coming too which, admittedly, there is. It occurs when his desire to explain gets in the way of his ability to convey experience. Like sleep, or love, or enjoyment, wonder is best brought about when the aim is some other result. O’Siadhail is most a poet when he disencumbers his voice of its explanatory impulses.