The Sheila Variations

Poet Michael Longley was born on this day in Belfast in 1935. He died in January of this year.

He went to Trinity where he studied classics. Much of his poetry shows a classical influence, with references to the ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Much of his inspiration (as is true for many Irish writers) comes from the wild west of Ireland. But history looms large in that landscape, and Longley’s perspective is always panoramic, gigantic. His poems can easily be read as metaphors of current-day Irish issues; this was especially true in the 70s when Northern Ireland was exploding in violence.

Longley was a teacher for many years, and was married to critic Edna Longley. He won numerous prizes, published many volumes of poetry (including a “Collected Poems”), and also published a memoir. From 2007 to 2010 he was “Professor of Poetry for Ireland”, a relatively new post, sort of like a Poet Laureate but with more of an academic slant. The post was held before him by John Montague (my post about him here), the wonderful Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (post on her here) and Paul Durcan (post on him here).

My friend – Therese Cox (we met at a Bloomsday celebration 20 years ago and have gone every year ever since) left a fantastic comment on an old post I wrote about Longley, and I will re-post it here:

There is a poem by Michael Longley called “The Dome” that’s inscribed in the glass ceiling of a new building in Belfast in Victoria Square. It’s this massive glass dome, segmented almost like a clear soccer ball, and you climb a tall winding staircase in this shopping centre to get to the top and see the poem. What I love about it is how subtle it is — if you weren’t looking for the poem, you might miss it. My cousin and I climbed up there last April “to see the Michael Longley poem” — one of many fun geeky pilgrimages I’ve enjoyed over the years.

Of course the poem itself is great, a nod to Belfast’s industrial past. I find it all the more fragile and beautiful to contemplate when you consider that 10, 15 years ago, a glass-encased building called Victoria Square would NEVER have gotten built in Belfast. (It was unveiled in 2007, and Longley was there to read “The Dome.”) And then there is this poem up there, as if to say, “Go on. You bomb me, you bomb this poem.” And no one touches it. Kind of majestic, really.

When I was in Belfast in the mid-2000s, I went out for drinks with my friend Carrie, and she pointed out the glass windows of the bar, a whole wall of glass. She told me they weren’t bullet-proof. The fact that she even had to mention it shows what a huge deal it was.

Here’s Longley’s poem in the dome:

The Dome

Raise high the roof-beam, engineers, make room

For tradesmen who come crowding in from yesterday –

Greengrocers, haberdashers, tobacconists,

old Dears in home bakeries and sweetie shops – ice-cream

Pokes, sherbet suckers, liquorice sticks, Paris buns – Butchers, costermongers – yes, beneath the dome

Make room for all to stargaze through the ceiling. Near the fountain a horse through that’s no longer there

Reflects the dome, and the dome reflects in turn

The shoppers’ upturned faces for years to come

Taking in this fantastical construction’s

Bridges, walkways, viewing-platforms like lily-pads

Afloat in the atmosphere. Raise high the roof-beam.

The dome has been here always. Or so it seems. Pegasus, winged horse of our imagination,

Has drunk from the fountain in Victoria Square.

The history of Belfast, its decades of explosions, underlines the significance of a gigantic glass domes. A new hope and belief in political stability. This glass will not shatter.

Longley’s poem below is dedicated to Irish poet Eavan Boland (I love her). While much of this poem basically describes a walk he took along the beach, watch what he does with the language. Every other phrase has some startling and perceptive image. I read the last four lines over and over, thinking about what they mean. The “privilege of vertigo”. What a fascinating phrase. Why the “privilege”? It is a perfect term rhythmically, but it’s also unexpected. You aren’t ready for it. The line itself has vertigo in it, the whole poem is vertigo. He writes that his eyes “slowly accept panorama”. Again: perfect. Unfortunately, I cannot replicate here the staggered nature of his lines, and what they look like on the page. It makes a difference, what a poem looks like, the indentations and step-ladder line-length. If you Google the poem, you’ll be able to see it elsewhere, where it at least looks right.

In the meantime, let us “slowly accept panorama”. Longley knows it’s difficult. But we are given the “privilege of vertigo”.

The Hebrides
for Eavan Boland

I.

The winds’ enclosure, Atlantic’s premises,
Last balconies
Above the waves, The Hebrides –
Too long did I postpone
Presbyterian granite and the lack of trees,
This orphaned stone,
Day in, day out colliding with the sea.
Weather forecast,
Compass nor ordinance survey
Arranges my welcome
For, on my own, I have lost my way at last,
So far from home.
In whom the city is continuing,
I stop to look,
To find my feet among the ling
And bracken – over me
The bright continuum of gulls, a rook
Occasionally.

II.

My eyes, slowly accepting panorama,
Try to include
In my original idea
The total effect
Of air and ocean – waterlogged all wood –
All harbours wrecked –
My dead-lights latched by whelk and barnacle
Till I abide
By the sea wall of the time I kill –
My each nostalgic scheme
Jettisoned, as crises are, the further side
Of sleep and dream.
Between wind and wave this holiday
The cormorant,
The oyster-catcher and osprey
Proceed and keep in line,
While I, hands in my pockets, hesitant,
Am in two minds.

III.

Old neighbours, though shipwreck’s my decision,
People my brain –
Like breakwaters against the sun,
Command in silhouette
My island circumstance – my cells retain,
Perpetuate
Their crumpled deportment through bad weather,
And I feel them
Put on their raincoats for ever
And walk out in the sea.
I am, though each one waves a phantom limb,
The amputee,
For these are my sailors, these my drowned –
In their heart of hearts,
In their city, I ran aground.
Along my arteries
Sluice those homewaters petroleum hurts.
Dry dock, gantries,
Dykes of apparatus, educate my bones
To track the buoys
Up sea lanes love emblazons
To streets where shall conclude
My journey back from flux to poise, from poise
To attitude.
Here, at the edge of my experience,
Another tide
Along the broken shore extends
A lifetime’s wrack and ruin –
No flotsam I may beachcomb now can hide
That water-line.

IV.

Beyond the lobster pots, where plankton spreads,
Porpoises turn.
Seals slip over the cockle beds.
Undertow dishevels
Seaweed in the shallows – and I discern
My sea levels.
To right and left of me there intervene
The tumbled burns –
And these, on turf and boulder weaned,
Confuse my calendar –
Their tilt is suicidal, their great return
Curricular.
No matter what repose holds shore and sky
In harmony,
From this place in the long run I,
Though here I might have been
Content with rivers where they meet the sea,
Remove upstream,
Where the salmon, risking fastest waters –
Waterfall and rock
And the effervescent otters –
On bridal pools insist
As with fin and generation they unlock
The mountain’s fist.

V.

Now, buttoned up, with water in my shoes,
Clouds around me,
I can, through mist that misconstrues,
Read like a palimpsest
My past – those landmarks and that scenery
I dare resist.
Into my mind’s unsympathetic through
They fade away –
And, to alter my perspective,
I feel in the sharp cold
Of my vantage point too high above the bay,
The sea grow old.
Granting the trawlers far below their stance,
Their anchorage,
I fight all the way for balance –
In the mountain’s shadow
Losing foothold, covet the privilege
Of vertigo.

 
 
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