Poets and musicians were giving their services free, to contribute
money to the Irish Press hardship fund. The Press group closed
last month after a long battle by its journalists to keep its three papers
open.
The Press had a long tradition of employing writers, especially
on the sub-editing desks, and Hugh McFadden, Irish Press news sub
and poet, was the one who gathered together this group to read. He had asked
Seamus Heaney last month, before the poet was awarded the Nobel, and it is a
measure of Heaney's worth that he came along calmly to read, without any
kerfuffle surrounding him - and that every poet and musician had some affectionate
story to tell about time spent with him.
Theo Dorgan, who runs the poets' organisation Poetry Ireland,
introduced the reading, noting that it was entirely appropriate
that when the Nobel committee was tearing its collective hair out looking
for Seamus Heaney, who was on holidays in Greece, he was "somewhere
half-way between the Hotel Aphrodite and Sparta".
When Heaney stood up to read, at the end of this night of
celebration, he himself remembered the scene from Beckett's Waiting
for Godot where Vladimir and Estragon ask each other about the night
before - beaten up? who was it? the usual crowd. ah, isn't life wonderful.
"It's great to be here with the usual crowd tonight," joked Heaney,
to warm and loving laughter.
He read the old favourites, this night with old friends - the
poem about his childhood fascination with wells, when he'd peer down
into the depths to see his reflection: "As a child they couldn't keep
me from wells...now I rhyme to see myself"; the poem about St Kevin,
who, deep in meditation, found that a blackbird had laid her eggs in his hand,
so stayed with his arms outstretched in prayer for the weeks until the eggs
hatched:
"alone, in love's deep river".
He read the beautiful poem written on the death of an Ibo friend
from Nigeria, and based on an Ibo legend of the coming of death
to the world, the story of the dog who delayed to bark so that the toad
got to God first and told him humans wanted death to be forever; that poem
with its shattering final line: "The dog crying out all night behind
the corpse-house".
The poem about the Dublin sculpture of a bronze chair, its feet
variously animal, human and demonic, its back sprouting upwards
into leaves; a poem that remembers him sitting as a child with his back to
a thorn-tree, so that now: "I am all foreknowledge, of the peom as a ploughshare
that turns time under".
And last, he remembered his childhood neighbour Rosie Keenan,
the blind musician who listened to see, and how when he read her the
first poem he had written, about the neighbouring Keenans' Well, she said
"I can see the sky at the bottom of it now".
It was a night of music, and very much a night of Derry people
celebrating their fellow-Derryman Heaney's happiness, with Davy
Hammond's plangent, soaring voice singing against Donal Lunny's bouzouki
and Neil Martin's cello, or with Lunny and Martin playing synthesizer and
uileann pipes in a strange but weirdly suitable sean-nos.
Hammond sang Derry favourites of Heaney's and his own - the song
about the cabin boy who swam to a Spanish ship and bored holes
with an auger to sink it, for the promise of marriage to the captain's daughter,
only to be left to die in the seas of the Lowlands low.
And he sang Master McGrath, the song about the tiny greyhound
like a streak of speed that won every race before him in Edwardian days.
Seamus Heaney and he went on a "sentimental pilgrimage", he
said, tongue-in-cheek, to the statue of Master McGrath in Kilmacthomas in Waterford.
"It was the time the statues were moving down there in
Ballinspittle," he said, remembering an outbreak of religious
fervour some years ago when crowds gathered to see statues of the Virgin Mary
reputedly moving miraculously.
"They were terrified Master McGrath would start moving, and
running around killing sheep," he said.
Davy Hammond said his own dog was a descendant of Master McGrath,
with the same markings: a lithe brown dog with a shower of hail
down his back. He'd wanted to call him after the famous racer - not his
racing name, but the name he was called in the stable, his pet name, which
was Tucker.
"But my wife said no, we have too many coarse friends, so
to this day he comes to the table and answers to 'McGrath'," he said.
Paula Meehan was meant to read, but had come down with a ferocious
dose of the flu, so Theo Dorgan read her poem Dervogilla, which
she wrote in memory of a Dublin character the Diceman, who enlivened the city
streets posing as everything from the Laughing Cavalier to Dracula in
drag until he died of Aids, to the country's great loss and mourning, last year.
It was a night of mourning as well as rejoicing, with many of
the readers speaking of the recently dead: of Professor Gus Martin,
of poet Tony Curtis's father, and of poet Sean Deane.
Rober Greacen, who has just won the Irish Times Literary Award
at the age of seventy for a book of poems, read to warm applause.
Many of his poems were on the theme of the cultural dissonance
of being a Presbyterian at sea in Catholic Ireland. The first poem
he read alerted the audience: "On this October day of mists and mystery...there
is an area ribboned off", he read, in a description of one of
the city's bomb alerts.
He remembered living in the same house as Patrick Kavanagh -
"there's a plaque there now - to Kavanagh, not to me!"
- and later sharing a house with Brendan Behan's widow, Beatrice, and shockingly knocking
on her door one morning to find her dead: but most, his poems remembered
what the newspapers call the Northern Ireland conflict, of which, in the
end, a poem pleads: "Teach us to care. And not to care".
Medbh McGuckian's difficult and wonderful poems stunned the audience
into silence, followed by a roar of applause. The Feast Day of
Peace, with its haunting image, "too familiar to be seen, the long, long
dead" opened a series that continued with Filming the Famine, about the films
that are being made everywhere this year to commemorate the Potato Famine
which cut by two thirds the population of Ireland 100 years ago this year.
The poem talks about the ships that carried the survivors in their millions
to the Americas, in that "Spring that has carried the steely dusk
into my heart", and about the "soldiers impersonating soldiers" in the
films (the FCA, the volunteer army corps that teenage boys and girls join in Ieland,
is often drafted in to "serve" in films - Braveheart's Scottish
army were the lads of the FCA).
Her sensual love-poems - "I have kissed the door behind which
he is sleeping," says one, "his inbreathed air was my drug
of choice" another - were received with joy by an audience familiar with the body of
work of allthese poets.
Michael Longley talked of the anger and despair he and others
felt at the death of Sean Dunne at 39; he read two of Dunne's superb
translations from Anna Akhmatova's Russian; talking about the Irish Press,
he said that it seemed to him that journalists and poets had it in common that
their vocation was to share information, and to tell people in authority
the truth.
"It was about 1977 that Seamus Heaney met me off the Enterprise
and we went for a drink, and it became obvious to me that he had a
poem he wanted to recite," he confided, to a ripple of laughter,
"and I had one too.
"He went first, and read a poem called The Harvest Bowl,"
said Longley, smiling back at Heaney where he sat behind him on a straight-backed
chair - the poets were reading in the oddly appropriate set of
Pentecost, the play showing at the Project at the moment, so they stood amid
the furniture of a stuffy bourgeois house of the 1950s.
Longley read his own Bleach Green, a love-poem to Ulster, "where
fields are compacted into windowboxes, and a tender and erotic
verse. Then he read The Quilt, about a visit to Amherst and a loved friend
- as he described the white quilts for weddings and asked how would you
choose the colour for a funeral quilt, for "The quilts for funerals?
How do you sew the night?" someone in the audience gave the quiet little "wew"
yip that in Ireland is the traditional salute to a musician who makes a particularly
graceful play.
He finished with his tragic peace poem based on the story of the
aged Priam, who begged Achilles to allow him to bury Hector, his
son whom Achilles had killed and mutilated; the hero, shamed, went himself
and washed and wrapped the body for burial, then the two sat down decently
together to eat, the young thug and the old man whose son he had killed -
that poem that finishes with the horrifying and yet proper image of the old man
killing the killer's blood-covered hand.
Nuala Ni Dhomnaill sang a child's song for Heaney: "An Bhfaca
Tu Mo Sheamuisin?" - "have you seen my little Seamus?"
- then read in English and Irish from the series of poems she's working in at the moment:
these are poems about a race of merfolk, an image for the lost language
of Ireland, as hidden for us as water for the landbound mermaids and mermen.
Her sea people have denied the existence of water, denied their
need for it; yet they dream about water - "agus ag an seisiun
psychoteirpeach seachtaniuil, abair 'silteach...ruc fliuch?' "
Her merpeople are, as she said, a little at sea on dry land, but
they refuse to capitalise by publishing books like "Submarine
Cookery" or "A Mermaid Bares All".
Last of all she read the beautiful Mo Mhaistir Dorcha - My Dark
Master, about the hiring fair where we hire our spirit out to
Death, by tithing him a portion of our lives, those black days of depression
and fear.
"When I was young," she said, "I knew people who
had gone to hiring fairs when they were young; and what they bargained for most of
all was "pa phliuic no cead aighnis" - the pay of well-rounded cheeks
and the right to say your say."
I lead his blue-black cows
with their fabulously long horns
to water. They lie down in pastures of clover and fescue
and lucerne. I follow them over hills faraway and green -
Is tugaim a thainte dubha chun abhann,
Buaibh ud na n-adharca fada.
Luionn siad sios i moneir.
Bim a n-aoireacht ar chnoic san imigein
ata glas agus fearach.
Dublin audiences are the kind poets prefer - they know their poetry,
they take no nonsense and they appreciate a well-made poem more
than any crowd outside of Russia. But this audience was the Platonic ideal of all
poetry hearers. They stood and stamped and cheered for poets,
and for the cause for which they read; and they went home to read, and write,
some more.
