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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781943666232 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wake Forest University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
from POISONED LANDS AND OTHER POEMS (1961)
The Water Carrier
Twice daily I carried water from the spring,
Morning before leaving for school, and evening;
Balanced as a fulcrum between two buckets.
A bramble-rough path ran to the river Where you stepped carefully across slime-topped stones,
With corners abraded as bleakly white as bones.
At the widening pool (for washing and cattle)
Minute fish flickered as you dipped,
Circling to fill, with rust-tinged water.
The second or enamel bucket was for spring water Which, after racing through a rushy meadow,
Came bubbling in a broken drain-pipe,
Corroded wafer thin with rust.
It ran so pure and cold it fell Like manacles of ice on the wrists.
You stood until the bucket brimmed,
Inhaling the musty smell of unpicked berries,
That heavy greenness fostered by water.
Recovering the scene, I had hoped to stylize it,
Like the portrait of an Egyptian water carrier:
But halt, entranced by slight but memoried life.
I sometimes come to take the water there,
Not as return or refuge, but some pure thing,
Some living source, half-imagined and half-real,
Pulses in the fictive water that I feel.
A Drink of Milk
In the girdered dark of the byre cattle move;
warm engines hushed to a siding groove
before the switch flicks down for milking.
In concrete partitions they rattle their chains
while the farmhand eases rubber tentacles to tug lightly but rhythmically on their swollen dugs
and up the slim cylinders of the milking machine mounts an untouched steadily pulsing stream.
Only the tabby steals to dip its radar whiskers with old-fashioned relish in a chipped saucer
and before Seán lurches to kick his boots off in the night-silent kitchen he draws a mug of froth
to settle on the sideboard under the hoard of delph.
A pounding transistor shakes the Virgin on her shelf
as he dreams towards bed.
A last glance at a magazine,
he puts the mug to his head,
grunts, and drains it clean.
Old Mythologies
And now, at last, all proud deeds done,
Mouths dust-stopped, dark they embrace,
Suitably disposed, as urns, underground.
Cattle munching soft spring grass —
Epicures of shamrock and the four-leaved clover —
Hear a whimper of ancient weapons As a whole dormitory of heroes turn over,
Regretting their butchers' days.
This valley cradles their archaic madness As once, on an impossibly epic morning,
It upheld their savage stride:
To bagpiped battle marching,
Wolfhounds, lean as models,
At their urgent heels.
Soliloquy on a Southern Strand
A priest, holidaying on the coast outside Sydney, thinks of his boyhood in Ireland.
When I was young it was much simpler;
I saw God standing on a local hill,
His eyes were gentle and soft birds Sang in chorus to his voice until My body trembled, ardent in submission.
The friar came to preach the yearly sermon For Retreat and cried among the flaring candles:
'O children, children, if you but knew,
Each hair is counted, everything you do Offends or sweetens His five wounds!'
A priest with a harsh and tuneless voice Raising his brown-robed arms to cry:
'Like this candle-end the body gutters out to die!'
Calling us all to do penance and rejoice.
Hearing the preacher speak, I knew my mind And wished to serve, leaving the friendly farm For years of college. At first I found it strange And feared the boys with smoother hands and voices:
I lay awake at night, longed for home.
I heard the town boys laughing in the dark At things that made me burn with shame,
And where the votive candles whispered into wax Hesitantly I spoke my treasured doubts,
Conquering all my passions in Your name.
I weathered years of sameness Until I stood before the Cathedral altar,
A burly country boy but new-made priest;
My mother watched in happiness and peace.
The young people crowd the shore now,
Rushing from Sydney, like lemmings, to the sea.
Heat plays upon the glaring cluttered beach,
Casts as in a mould my beaten head and knees.
New cars come swooping in like birds To churn and chop the dust. A wireless,
Stuck in the sand, crackles lovesick static As girls are roughed and raced With whirling beach-balls in the sun.
What here avails my separate cloth,
My sober self, whose meaning contradicts The sensual drama they enact in play?
'Hot Lips, Hot Lips', the throaty singer sighs:
A young man preens aloft and dives.
Is this the proper ending for a man?
The Pacific waves crash in upon the beach,
Roll and rise and inward stretch upon the beach.
It is December now and warm,
And yet my blood is cold, my shoulders slack;
In slow submission I turn my body Up to the sun, as on a rack,
Enduring comfort. In a dream I hear the cuckoo dance his double notes Among the harvest stooks like golden chessmen;
Each call an age, a continent between.
No martyrdom, no wonder, no patent loss:
Is it for this mild ending that I Have carried, all this way, my cross?
California, 1956
FROM Rhetorical Meditations in Time of Peace
1. Speech for an Ideal Irish Election
Then the visionary lady Walked like a magician's daughter Across green acres of Ireland;
The broad bright sword Of the politician's word Summoned the applause in every square.
The unseen inhabited A well, a corner of a field;
Houses assumed magic light From patriots' memory;
Assemblies knelt in awe before The supernatural in a shaking tree.
The light that never was Enlarged profile, gun and phrase:
Green of the grass worn On shoulder as catalytic token;
Acrid speech of rifle and gun Easing neurosis into definite action.
The house subsides into stillness,
Buried bombs ignore the spade.
The evening light, suitably grave,
Challenges renewed activity.
The transfigured heroes assume Grey proportions of statuary.
Now the extraordinary hour of calm And day of limitation.
The soft grasses stir Where unfinished dreams Are buried with the Fianna In that remote rock cave.
Who today asks for more —
Smoke of battle blown aside —
Than the struggle with casual Graceless unheroic things,
The greater task of swimming Against a slackening tide?
Wild Sports of the West
The landlord's coat is tulip red,
A beacon on the wine-dark moor;
He turns his well-bred foreign devil's face,
While his bailiff trots before.
His furious hooves drum fire from stone,
A beautiful sight when gone;
Contemplation holds the noble horseman In his high mould of bone.
Not so beautiful the bandy bailiff,
Churlish servant of an alien will:
Behind the hedge a maddened peasant Poises his shotgun for the kill.
Evening brings the huntsman home,
Blood of pheasants in a bag:
Beside a turf-rick the cackling peasant Cleanses his ancient weapon with a rag.
The fox, evicted from the thicket,
Evades with grace the snuffling hounds:
But a transplanted bailiff, in a feudal paradise,
Patrols for God His private grounds.
Poisoned Lands
'Four good dogs dead in one night And a rooster, scaly legs in the air,
Beak in the dust, a terrible sight!'
Behind high weathered walls, his share Of local lands, the owner skulks Or leaves in dismal guttering gaps A trail of broken branches, roots,
Bruised by his mournful rubber boots.
Neighbours sight him as a high hat Dancing down hedges, a skeletal shape Night-haloed with whistling bats,
Or silhouetted against cloudy skies,
Coat turned briskly to the nape,
Sou'westered in harsh surmise.
'Children dawdling home from Mass Chased a bouncing ball and found,
Where he had stood, scorched tufts of grass,
Blighted leaves'— and here the sound Of rodent gossip sank —'worse by far,
Dark radiance as though a star Had disintegrated, a clinging stench Gutting the substances of earth and air.'
At night, like baleful shadowed eyes,
His windows show the way to cars Igniting the dark like fireflies.
Gusts of song and broken glass Prelude wild triumphal feasts Climaxed by sacrifice of beasts.
Privileged, I met him on an evening walk,
Inveigled him into casual weather-talk.
'I don't like country people,' he said, with a grin.
The winter sunlight halved his mottled chin And, behind, a white notice seemed to swing and say:
'If you too licked grass, you'd be dead today.'
The Mummer Speaks
'God save our shadowed lands Stalked by this night beast of the dead —
Turnip roundness of the skull,
Sockets smouldering in the head —
Will no St George or Patrick come,
Restore to us our once blessed And blossoming, now barren, home?'
He paused on the threshold,
Clashed his sword of wood,
His swinging lantern on the snow Threw blood-red circles where he stood;
Herded listeners gaped Like goslings, as if they understood.
Bold as brass, a battering knight Came roaring through the door,
Bussed the ladies on his right,
Smashed the devil to the floor.
Simple justice triumphs on the spot,
With straw, like guts, strewn everywhere:
False Satan struts no more.
A scene in farmhouse darkness,
Two wearing decades ago,
From which I best recall Their faces like listening animals,
A storm lamp swinging to and fro,
And from those creaking rustic rhymes That purging lament of bad times.
Irish Street Scene, with Lovers
A rainy quiet evening, with leaves that hang Like squares of silk from dripping branches.
An avenue of laurel, and the guttering cry Of a robin that balances a moment,
Starts and is gone Upon some furtive errand of its own.
A quiet evening, with skies washed and grey;
A tiredness as though the day Swayed towards sleep,
Except for the reserved statement Of rain on the stone-grey pavement —
Dripping, they move through this marine light,
Seeming to swim more than walk,
Linked under the black arch of an umbrella With its assembly of spokes like points of stars,
A globule of water slowly forming on each.
The world shrinks to the soaked, worn Shield of cloth they parade beneath.
Woodtown Manor
for Morris Graves
1.
Here the delicate dance of silence,
The quick step of the robin,
The sudden skittering rush of the wren:
Minute essences move in and out of creation Until the skin of soundlessness forms again.
Part order, part wilderness,
Water creates its cadenced illusion Of glaucous, fluent growth;
Fins raised, as in a waking dream,
Bright fish probe their painted stream.
Imaginary animals harbour here:
The young fox coiled in its covert,
Bright-eyed and mean, the baby bird:
The heron, like a radiant italic,
Illuminating the gospel of the absurd.
And all the menagerie of the living marvellous:
Stone shape of toad,
Flicker of insect life,
Shift of wind-touched grass As though a beneficent spirit stirred.
2.
Twin deities hover in Irish air Reconciling poles of east and west;
The detached and sensual Indian God,
Franciscan dream of gentleness:
Gravity of Georgian manor Approves, with classic stare,
Their dual disciplines of tenderness.
Tim
Not those slim-flanked fillies slender-ankled as models glimpsed across the rails through sun-long afternoons as with fluent fetlocks they devoured the miles
Nor at some Spring Show a concourse of Clydesdales waiting, huge as mammoths,
as enormous hirsute dolls,
for an incongruous rose to blossom behind their ears
Nor that legendary Pegasus leaping towards heaven:
only those hold my affection who, stolid as weights,
rested in the rushy meadows of my childhood
Or rumbled down lanes,
lumbering before carts.
Tim, the first horse I rode,
seasick on his barrel back; the first to lip bread from my hand.
I saw the end of your road.
You stood, with gouged eyeball while our farmhand swabbed the hurt socket out with water and Jeyes Fluid:
as warm an object of
loving memory as any who have followed me to this day, denying rhetoric with your patience,
forcing me to drink from the trough of reality.
from A CHOSEN LIGHT (1967)
FROM All Legendary Obstacles
In Dedication
My love, while we talked They removed the roof. Then They started on the walls,
Panes of glass uprooting From timber, like teeth.
But you spoke calmly on,
Your example of courtesy Compelling me to reply.
When we reached the last Syllable, nearly accepting Our positions, I saw that The floorboards were gone:
It was clay we stood upon.
2. The Trout
for Barrie Cooke
Flat on the bank I parted Rushes to ease my hands In the water without a ripple And tilt them slowly downstream To where he lay, tendril-light,
In his fluid sensual dream.
Bodiless lord of creation,
I hung briefly above him Savouring my own absence,
Senses expanding in the slow Motion, the photographic calm That grows before action.
As the curve of my hands Swung under his body He surged with visible pleasure.
I was so preternaturally close I could count every stipple But still cast no shadow, until
The two palms crossed in a cage Under the lightly pulsing gills.
Then (entering my own enlarged Shape, which rode on the water)
I gripped. To this day I can Taste his terror on my hands.
3. Country Matters
1.
They talk of rural innocence but most marriages Here (or wherever the great middle-
Class morality does not prevail) are arranged
Post factum, products of a warm night,
A scuffle in a ditch, boredom spiced By curiosity, by casual desire —
That ancient game ...
Rarely That ancient sweetness.
In school Her hair was unstinted as harvest Inundating her thin shoulderblades Almost to her waist. As she ran The boys called and raced after her Across the schoolyard, repeating her name Like something they meant. Until she stopped:
Then they dwindled away, in flight From a silence.
But after dark The farmhands came flocking to her door Like vagrant starlings, to sit by the fireside Pretending indifference, or hang around outside Waiting for a chance to call her away Down the slope, into darkness.
Finally,
Of course, she gave in. Flattered,
Lacking shrewdness, lacking a language?
2.
By the time she was fourteen she was known As a 'good thing'. By the time she was sixteen She had to go to England 'to get rid of it'.
By the time she was eighteen no one 'decent'
Or 'self-respecting' would touch her:
With her tangle of hair and nervously Darkened eyes, she looked and spoke like
'A backstreets whure'.
Condemnation Never lacks a language!
3.
She married, eventually, some casual Labourer from the same class as herself For in the countryside even beauty Cannot climb stairs. But my eye Still follows an early vision when Grace inhabited her slight form;
Though my hesitant need to praise Has had to wait a sanction Greater than sour morality's To see the light of day:
For lack of courage
Often equals lack of a language
And the word of love is
Hardest to say.
5. All Legendary Obstacles
All legendary obstacles lay between Us, the long imaginary plain,
The monstrous ruck of mountains And, swinging across the night,
Flooding the Sacramento, San Joaquin,
The hissing drift of winter rain.
All day I waited, shifting Nervously from station to bar As I saw another train sail By, the San Francisco Chief or Golden Gate, water dripping From great flanged wheels.
At midnight you came, pale Above the negro porter's lamp.
I was too blind with rain And doubt to speak, but Reached from the platform Until our chilled hands met.
You had been travelling for days With an old lady who marked A neat circle on the glass With her glove to watch us Move into the wet darkness Kissing, still unable to speak.
8. That Room
Side by side on the narrow bed We lay, like chained giants,
Tasting each other's tears, in terror Of the news which left little to hide But our two faces that stared To ritual masks, absurd and flayed.
Rarely in a lifetime comes such news Shafting knowledge straight to the heart Making shameless sorrow start —
Not childish tears, querulously vain —
But adult tears that hurt and harm,
Searing like acid to the bone.
Sound of hooves on the midnight road Raised a romantic image to mind:
The Dean riding late to Marley?
But we must suffer the facts of self;
No one endures another's fate And no one will ever know
What happened in that room But when we came to leave We scrubbed each other's tears,
Prepared the usual show. That day Love's claims made chains of time and place To bind us together more: equal in adversity.
10. A Charm
When you step near I feel the dark hood Descend, a shadow Upon my mind.
One thing to do,
Describe a circle Around, about me,
Over, against you:
The hood is still there But my pupils burn Through the harsh folds.
You may return
Only as I wish.
But how my talons Ache for the knob Of your wrist!
11. A Private Reason
As I walked out at Merval with my wife,
Both of us sad, for a private reason,
We found the perfect silence for it,
A beech leaf severed, like the last Living thing in the world, to crease The terraced snow, as we Walked out by Merval.
And the long staged melancholy of allées,
Tree succeeding tree, each glazed trunk Not a single heaven-invoking nakedness But a clause, a cold commentary Of branches, gathering to the stripped Dignity of a sentence, as we Walked out by Merval.
There is a sad formality in the Gallic dance,
Linking a clumsy calligraphy of footsteps With imagined princes, absorbing sorrow In a larger ritual, a lengthening avenue Of perspectives, the ice-gripped pond Our only Hall of Mirrors, as we Walk back from Merval.
Excerpted from "A Spell to Bless the Silence"
by .
Copyright © 2018 The Estate of John Montague.
Excerpted by permission of Wake Forest University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
from POISONED LANDS AND OTHER POEMS (1961),
The Water Carrier,
A Drink of Milk,
Old Mythologies,
Soliloquy on a Southern Strand,
from "Rhetorical Meditations in Time of Peace",
1. Speech for an Ideal Irish Election,
Wild Sports of the West,
Poisoned Lands,
The Mummer Speaks,
Irish Street Scene, with Lovers,
Woodtown Manor,
Tim,
from A CHOSEN LIGHT (1967),
from "All Legendary Obstacles",
In Dedication,
2. The Trout,
3. Country Matters,
5. All Legendary Obstacles,
8. That Room,
10. A Charm,
11. A Private Reason,
12. Return,
A Bright Day,
Witness,
Hill Field,
Clear the Way,
Forge,
Time Out,
from "A Chosen Light",
1. 11 rue Daguerre,
2. Salute, in Passing, for Sam,
The Broken Shape,
The Split Lyre,
Beyond the Liss,
from TIDES (1970),
Summer Storm,
Coming Events,
Special Delivery,
Life Class,
To Cease,
from "Sea Changes",
4. Wine Dark Sea,
from THE ROUGH FIELD (1972),
from "I. Home Again",
1. "Catching a bus at Victoria Station",
5. Like Dolmens Round my Childhood,
II. The Leaping Fire,
"Each morning, from the corner",
1. The Little Flower's Disciple,
2. The Living & the Dead,
3. Omagh Hospital,
4. A Hollow Note,
from "III. The Bread God",
Penal Rock: Altamuskin,
from "IV. A Severed Head",
2. A Lost Tradition,
5. A Grafted Tongue,
from "V. The Fault",
2. The Same Fault,
3. Sound of a Wound,
4. The Cage,
from "VI. A Good Night",
2. The Fight,
4. The Source,
from "VII. Hymn to the New Omagh Road",
1. Balance Sheet,
from "VIII. Patriotic Suite",
9. The Siege of Mullingar,
X. The Wild Dog Rose,
Epilogue,
from A SLOW DANCE (1975),
1. Sweeney,
2. The Dance,
3. Message,
4. Seskilgreen,
5. For the Hillmother,
Courtyard in Winter,
Dowager,
The Errigal Road,
Windharp,
from "The Cave of Night",
3. Cave,
5. Falls Funeral,
6. Ratonnade,
Killing the Pig,
The Massacre,
A Graveyard in Queens,
from THE GREAT CLOAK (1978),
from "I. Search",
Tracks,
Caught,
Closed Circuit,
Talisman,
Don Juan's Farewell,
from "II. Separation",
Tearing,
She Walks Alone,
No Music,
The Blue Room,
Herbert Street Revisited,
from "III. Anchor",
A Meeting,
The Same Gesture,
Blessing,
Sunset,
Child,
The Point,
Edge,
from THE DEAD KINGDOM (1984),
from "I. Upstream",
Process,
from "II. This Neutral Realm",
The Music Box,
The Well Dreams,
from "III. The Black Pig",
Red Branch (A Blessing),
from "IV. The Silver Flask",
At Last,
The Silver Flask,
Last Journey,
from "V. A Flowering Absence",
A Flowering Absence,
The Locket,
from MOUNT EAGLE (1989),
Semiotics,
Cassandra's Answer,
Turnhole,
Matins,
Crossing,
Harvest,
Discords,
She Cries,
Sibyl's Morning,
Tea Ceremony,
A Small Death,
Nest,
The Black Lake,
Luggala,
Mount Eagle,
The Hill of Silence,
from TIME IN ARMAGH (1993),
6. Time in Armagh,
7. Waiting,
9. History Walk,
10. Absence,
13. Stone,
Border Sick Call (1995),
from SMASHING THE PIANO (1999),
Paths,
Still Life, with Aunt Brigid,
from "Kindertotenlieder",
1. Time Off,
Between,
The Current,
from "Dark Rooms",
1. Wrath,
There Are Days,
from "Flower, Stone, Sea",
1. The Smell of the Earth,
The Family Piano,
from "Civil Wars",
7. A Response to Omagh,
Landing,
from DRUNKEN SAILOR (2004),
White Water,
The Hag's Cove,
Hermit,
Letter Valley,
Head or Harp,
The Deer Trap,
West Cork Annunciation,
Prodigal Son,
A Fertile Balance,
A Holy Show,
Demolition Ireland,
Last of the House,
Family Rosary,
Wreaths,
Last Court,
First Landscape, First Death,
Slievemore,
from SPEECH LESSONS (2011),
Speech Lesson,
Baldung's Vision,
Silences,
Vendange,
In My Grandfather's Mansion,
Many Mansions,
Patience and Time,
from SECOND CHILDHOOD (2017),
Summer Snow,
The Afterlife of Dogs,
Star Song,
Ferret,
Alight,
Scotia,
Ritual of Grief,
Children's Sorrows,
Cry,
Sonnet for Berryman,
Hopkins in Dublin,
The Leap,