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.

      

A little post in which I make an odd analogy...

I'm about to compare a poet's changing style to different styles of theatre lighting. If there was  a category of blog post entitled 'It's my blog, I can write about whatever the hell I like', this would most certainly be filed under it....

Seamus Heaney said that, like Yeats, he became well known for the style of work that he developed when he was young, only to develop a very different style in his early thirties. He said this shift took place between, on the one side, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969) and, on the other, Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975). 

I was sleepily reading Opened Ground in a train station recently when I realised that I was imagining the these two styles in terms of the two different lighting states I had set up for a play at the Alma Tavern recently. So, the descriptive, explicatory amplitude of Heaney’s first two volumes is, in lighting terms, a warm wash with straw and orange gels (albeit a wash with some dark shadows). Under these lights, Heaney plays the young hero in front of a backdrop of Derry countryside. In Wintering Out and North, the world is seen under a new, picked-out, sharp-edged, lunar light. Under the cold spot, Heaney is a shadowy visitant to his museum exhibits. 

No Channel to the Station: Why I Can’t Write

        I've been trying (and failing) to write a poem for an anthology about Bristol artworks. The fact that I've been unhappy with everything I've written has made me think very hard about what I think poems are and where I think they come from.


          The stronger the impulse behind the poem, the more form is necessary, because it corrects excess. A welter of subconscious associations, a jumble of unbidden imagery, what is whim-driven and obscure, is overblown - and despite it seeming a pure expression of individualism is actually too commonplace to be communicated. Still, this jumble is necessary, because it's made of images, colours and sounds in the form of words or whole phrases. For me, these are the primal soup or raw data of poetry; the channel’s waves and its tumult, and Leander lost in the middle. Channel seems right, as it also describes something visual, all encompassing, surround-sound, widescreen, perhaps overwhelming. And if I wrote these associatons out as they came, it would reek of insanity. Whatever it had in force would be enervated by flounder. Plus I don’t like seeming mad.

         The importance of a form to a poem is analogous to the importance of not saying to people everything you could possibly say to them. Decorum, politeness and plain social conventions actually act with the power of sleep or death or gravity or a strait-jacket, and they make life tolerable. So an important corrective for me is the stanza. It’s a place to stand – Leander’s feet finding a station, a shifting sandback, a momentary stay against the waves’ confusion. I should clarify that it’s not the shape itself that is useful, it’s the process of putting things into shape. ‘Station’, connected in its meaning to stand and stanza, seems right too. Station suggests the less obtrusive, mannerly quality that I like in radio. It requires the winnowing processes of thought, logic and reason. It also needs humour, whereas the original impulse has nothing humorous about it. Alternatives must be considered and their suitability weighed, and all the cunning and guile that a tricksy selection of words requires actually takes you from the personal into the communal. This is the exact opposite to the force from which the poem originally arose.

        But, of course, you cannot live entirely in the logical, the communal, the light. There would be nothing underneath. The obscure and unrhymed impulse needs to be there, but to refine your language is to reach out; it is sanity and communication. The poem that results still contains the impulse that lay behind it, but that impulse has been leavened and sweetened. I would give the negotiation between these two feelings a name but I’m prevented from doing so by the fact that I don’t want to be anything like a young Harold Bloom (‘This access point to literary creation I shall call neologorrea…’, etc.)

            So trying to write with a prescribed theme, I am finding what I put down is all shape and no force; all compulsion and no impulsion. I am trying to write to order, and I have been struck dumb. I very much the definition of poetry given by Tommaso Ceva, a Jesuit priest: ‘A dream dreamed in the presence of reason’. I have too much reason to write and I can’t dream.

On making an odd hobby socially useful

Sometimes people ask me how much I disliked my old job and I tell them I disliked it very much. I tell them how, to make myself feel better about hating my job so much, I would get home and read something aloud to myself. Maybe a Samuel Beckett play, or some Wilde, or some Yeats. My housemate would hear me in my room and think I was insane. Still, as Richard Ellmann said, maturity is finding justification for what, in immaturity, you felt embarrassed about, so I thought I could enlist the blind as an excuse to read books aloud again. I could record the results, and upload them to iTunes.  A bit of googling didn’t reveal any blind people in need of my services, but I did find Librivox, which accepts recordings people make at home.

There’s so much advice for beginners out there you actually need a beginner's guide to beginning, which is what I’ve created. They recommend you start by recording and getting feedback on their weekly poem, which is what I did.

1. Go here http://forum.librivox.org/viewforum.php?f=19
2. Go to the thread that begins [Weekly Poetry]
3. Open your recording software. If you, like me, don’t have any, you can download some for free for the Mac here: www.versiontracker.com (search for ‘Audacity’)
4. This will only save files as .auds, which are no good to anyone, so download the unpromising-sounding ‘Lame’ from here http://lame.sourceforge.net/ to turn these files into MP3s.
5. Go over the poem of the week two or three times, then record it, beginning with ‘[poem name] by [poet], read for Librivox.org by [your name]. Then end it with ‘End of poem. This recording is in the public domain’.
6. Rather than saving the file as a .aud, go to File -> Export and save it as an mp3.
7. Register as a user of Librivox. Because they have such problems with spammers, they need a personal email on why you’ve joined. I submitted mine and am waiting on a response…

8. Here's the result

My ultimate aim is to do a recording of all of Oscar Wilde’s ‘De Profundis’. I’ll keep you posted…
***UPDATE*** You can now download my recording of 'De Profundis' for free from the iTunes shop!

On why I think writing poetry makes you a better reader of poetry

Until recently, late at night after I had finished work, I would cycle around north Bristol. Usually into Clifton, across the fairy-lit wrought iron of the suspension bridge and back then, skirting the southern edge of the Downs, down into the steep Victorian streets of Redland. As well as getting some necessary movement for my limbs after spending all day at a desk, it meant I could see the tall Georgian and early Victorian houses in ashlar sandstone around Clifton, and the pointed greyer stone of the later Victorian and Edwardian houses around Redland. The moon would appear at unexpected intervals at the ends of some roads and the icing on the cake was to listen to something tweedy on my iPod – the memoirs of David Niven or Stephen Fry, or a Sherlock Holmes story.

This audiobooking led to my painfully literal downfall, as I went over the handlebars and broke my wrist. So I started walking around after work instead. During one of these walks, the unstoppable bit of my brain which makes schemes for self-improvement was at its unpleasant work and, as it was coming to a moralizing conclusion which I have happily forgotten, I glanced up at the moon over a roof. For reasons that I can’t quite explain, I was certain that I would see an impassive, imperious animal staring down at me from the chimney-pot: a cat or an owl. I came home and covered a page in words in a way that I often do (Question from Michael Longley: Adam, do you write poetry? Adam: Um, I cover pages in words. ML: *nods sagely*). The result was this:

Nature

Walking home, making resolution

After resolution, and looking at

The moon over chimney-pots,

I half-expect to see

An owl, or perhaps a cat,

Who got there who-knows-why,

Looking at me curiously.

(I mention Michael Longley as making a short poem of a single sentence with clauses angled to leave spaces for new meanings is one of Longley's traits that I try to emulate.) I now think that this poem was a message, in the dream-language of symbols, that my sadly irresolute and forgetful nature would not be swayed by any resolutions that I could make. There, unmoved, immovable and clearly ruling the roost, my nature was looking down on my forlorn promises.

But coming to this conclusion started me thinking of other nature poems. Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondences’:

Nature is a temple in which living pillars 


Sometimes give voice to confused words; 


Man passes there through forests of symbols 


Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Perhaps the forest is man’s own nature, and the sonnet is not about the world outside of man, but the multiple worlds inside. Or what about 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'?

And I had done a hellish thing,


And it would work 'em woe:


For all averred, I had killed the bird


That made the breeze to blow.


Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,


That made the breeze to blow!

Was the Mariner being punished for attempting to destroy his own nature? For all I know, these readings are unoriginal, but the poems have been revivified for me because I have been able to connect them to my own experience. I now have a strong suspicion of what a silent, indifferent and knowledgable animal can represent, and can now read that understanding into other poems that contain similar creatures. It’s like the difference between proving Pythagoras by drawing right-angled triangles all day, and understanding the formula.

What I do when I open a book of poems for the first time

When I was in the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre recently I read an excellent account by Michael Laskey of how he reads poems. He reads quickly at first, to see if anything grabs him, and doesn’t get too hung up on getting everything, as he’ll go over it again. While reading, he says he needs:

‘some rewards along the way, some encouragement: a striking phrase, an exact description that excites instant recognition, a mysteriously powerful image, a flash of wit.’

Quite. Then, weirdly, I came upon a book of his poems on the shelf. This little coincidence made me decide to emulate his example by writing a brief description of what I do when I pick up a book of poems for the first time.

I go straight to the titles page. My eyes flip down the titles and back up, as I’m keen to find something like me. Because poem titles are so small and specific, and there are so many, chances are I will find something that will match with my own experiences or interests.

If I were to find a poem called ‘Being A Toddler in Howth’ or ‘On Having Gone to School in Guildford’, or ‘The Truth About Being Thirty’, I’d turn to it first. I’d read it fairly quickly the first time, as Laskey describes. What I’d be looking for are lines that hit the ear like a depth-charge (the best example of one of these I can think of at the moment is Derek Mahon’s ‘Magi, moonmen, / Powdery prisoners of the old regime, / Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought / And insomnia […]’). I think training my ear on Yeats years ago has given me an incurable weakness for the resonant and plangent.

If I don’t find lines like these, what I’ll look for next is something that strikes me as true. Imagine I found a poem called ‘The Truth About Being Thirty’. Imagine it went something like this:

With the increasing desire to jog

comes increasing pain in the calves

and photos confirm that I look horrifying

when I’m trying to look happy.

I’d be looking at these for social reasons. Knowing them would mean that the next time I was talking about being thirty, instead of saying ‘I find I look horrifying when I look happy’, I could say ‘it’s like Michael Laskey (or whoever) says: ‘photos confirm that I look horrifying / when I’m trying to look happy’. It’s become ratified by publication, it connects you and your interlocuter to a wider world, and it makes something depressing into something fun, or at very least something rueful, through the fact that it is communal.

And if I don’t find something I like the sound of, or something I can quote within three or four poems, I put the book down…

Poetry and the Everyday

A very short post. In a recent interview in The Guardian, the songwriter Kirsten Hersch spoke about how her songs came into being. In particular, she talked about how the incidental sounds in her home can pass by completely unnoticed until she is, without conscious effort, ready to hear them and cohere them:

If a whirring fan is in the room, I will continue to hear the whirring fan as I move around, and overlaid with that is the sound of a car driving by that then drives by again and again and again. [… ]If a song is in the air it will grab this vocabulary and eventually become a cohesive song-body.

It sounds a little like the creation of a nest: a mood of heightened receptivity in which suddenly the scattered pieces of the everyday suggest themselves as twigs. It also suggests that domestic life isn't the antithesis of art but its generator.