The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry: Irish poet Desmond O’Grady

A Limerick man, born in 1935. When Desmond O’Grady died in 2014, Irish President Michael D. Higgins said, “From wherever he was writing, be it Cairo or Kinsale, his work invoked a sense of what was Irish in both heritage and contemporary life.” O’Grady lived for many years in Kinsale, but he was also a globe-trotter. He said once, “James Joyce left. So I too had to.”

There are a lot of clips of him reading his poetry on Youtube, look him up, he’s wonderful live. He also had a bit part in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita!!

He went to Harvard. Like Pearse Hutchinson, O’Grady devoted much of his life to translations.

Desmond O’Grady wrote about personal experiences: walking with his professor along the Charles River, he reports what he sees (“The spring air, still / Lean from winter, thaws.”) and then in the next stanza he goes deeper, and higher:

West, to our left, past some trees, over the ivy walls,
The clock towers, pinnacles, the pillared university yard,
The Protestant past of Cambridge New England selfconsciously dead
In the thawing clay of the Old Burying Ground. Miles
east, over the godless Atlantic, our common brother,
Ploughing his myth-muddy fields, embodies our order.

You can see his power here. “Myth-muddy fields” is evocative of the mindset of an entire culture. Desmond O’Grady is wonderful with such phrases. He wants to “unravel the past”. One of his most famous moments as a poet was the publication of a long poem about the Battle of Kinsale in 2002, on the battle’s 400th anniversary; it was set to music. He was encyclopedic in his vision. When he looked at “Europe”, he saw its history, its long long past, and what it might mean to him, to all Irishmen and women. The past is always with us. The Irish are the outsiders of Europe, huddled along the edge of it in “the godless Atlantic”. He incorporated all of that into his work.

I wanted to post a poem today I really like, because it has to do with Kinsale, a sweet and awesome town in County Cork, where I spent a magical three-day respite a couple years back. My friend Allison and I, on our wild jaunt across Ireland, veered south for Kinsale, hell-bent on getting there before 7 p.m., because the B&B owner had told us to get there before 7. The streets were winding and narrow. We got lost in Cork itself. We pulled over to a gas station and received what are, possibly, the best set of directions ever given, including a hand-drawn map to accompany us, with a giant diagram of the famous “hairy roundabout” in between Cork and Kinsale where many people die every year due to its dangerous and insane nature. (It lived up to its reputation, although Allison and I did survive the experience. We were old hands at the roundabout situation by the time we got to Kinsale, although they always required a bit of emotional support on the part of the passenger, but the “hairy roundabout” was shrieking and utter CHAOS.) Allison and I did make it to Kinsale (I think we were 5 minutes after 7 p.m. and our B&B owner was standing on the front stoop waiting for us in the chilly night). A local man had died and the funeral procession was that night. Our arrival happened to coincide with the funeral procession, a sight I will never forget as long as I live.

I had been to Kinsale before, as a kid, when my family was in Ireland, but I had no real memory of it. Allison and I had been planning to move on, only stay there for a night before heading West to the Burren and Galway, but we ended up staying for three days. We met a bunch of people. We hung out with them. We stayed up late, hanging out in a big bar after-hours with our new friends. We made out with Irish boys. (As I told a friend of mine who went to Ireland recently, “If you go to Ireland, and you do NOT make out with an Irishman, then you really need to look within to find the problem.”) We just hung out, slept late, I had good talks with Jimmy, the owner of the B&B, we walked around the enchanting beautiful town, with the hills rising behind it, and I sat on the harbor shore, with a cup of coffee, watching the fishing boats travel out to sea. I never wanted to leave. Most of the people we met were transients to the town, bartenders and waitresses who come to Kinsale seasonally to work, due to the giant tourist influx in the spring and summer. Allison and I were there in November, however, when things had quieted down. The life of the city settled into a quiet rhythm. I have rarely been in a more beautiful and peaceful place. And it all started with that funeral procession, the entire town showing up, winding through the dark narrow streets, quietly, their breaths showing in the night air.

That, to me, is my memory of Kinsale.

I love this poem of Desmond O’Grady’s because its description of Kinsale Harbor calls to mind exactly the place as I remember it. I can see it. He is right. It does not look like “an Irish harbour at all, but some other – / the kind you might find along the Iberian coast, only greener.” A magical place, but, like all Irish places, full of a history of pain and war. Here, he sits in the harbor, and reads the “unpublished manuscripts of Louis MacNeice”, another Irish poet (I wrote about him here), Belfast-born, of the generation before. You can really see that “micro to macro” thing here, something O’Grady does with great ease. It is how he experiences the world. Everything he sees is a launch-pad for something else. You also sense sadness that he had never met MacNeice, a lost opportunity. Looking for “polar kindred you”s in the past, hoping that if you had met, those “polar kindred you”s would have liked you and approved of what you were doing. Notice how he speaks directly to MacNeice, referring to him as “You”.

Reading the Unpublished Manuscripts of Louis MacNeice at Kinsale Harbour

One surely tires eventually of the frequent references – the gossip,
praise, the blame, the intimate anecdote – to those
who, for one unpredictable reason or other (living
abroad, difference of age, chance, the friends one chose,
being detained too long at the most opportune moment) one
never, face to tactile face, has met; but who
had the way things fall fallen favourably, once met, for some
right physic force, would have been polar, kindred you –
though time, space, human nature, sometimes contract
to force the action done that makes abstraction fact.

Here in this mock of a room which might have been yours, might
have been
the place of our eventual meeting, I find a berth temporarily
(so long too late) among your possessions. Alone,
except for your face in the framed photos,
I sit with your manuscripts spread over my knees,
reliving the unpublished truths of your autobiography.
On the shelves and table, desk, floor, your books
and papers, your bundles of letters – as if you were just moving in
or out, or had been already for years –
like a poem in the making you’ll never now finish.
Through the windows I see down to the hook of Old Kinsale
Harbour.
Mid-summer. Under the sun the sea as smooth as a dish.
Below on the quays the fishermen wind up the morning’s business:
stacking the fishboxes, scraping the scales from their tackle and
hands.
Behind this house the hills shovel down on the town’s slate roofs
the mysterious green mounds of their history.
Flaming fir, clouted holly,
Not an Irish harbour at all, but some other –
the kind you might find along the Iberian coast, only greener.
Down to here, down to this clay of contact between us, Hugh
O’Neill once marched
from way up your part of the country, the North, the winter of
sixteen
hundred and one, to connect with the long-needed Spaniards three
months
under siege in the Harbour. Having played the English of their own
game and watched
all his life for his moment, he lost our right lot in one bungled night
and with it the thousands of years of our past and our future. He
began
what divides the North they brought your ash back to, from the
South I have left
for Rome – where O’Neill’s buried exiled. And here, then, this
moment, late
as the day is (what matter your physical absence) I grow towards
your knowing,
towards the reassurance of life in mortality, the importance, the
value of dying.