Poetry in motion with a unique vision

Epic

by Desmond Egan

(Goldsmith Press, Newbridge, Co. Kildare, €15.00pb)

Desmond Egan is one of Ireland’s most distinguished poets. This collection of poems, a full five years since his last volume, will not be his last, as he seems to intimate, for in Egan’s verse there are no full stops.

Like life, poetry goes on happening, “anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life”, as Auden once suggested. There is a great deal of doggy life, so to speak in these poems, the ordinary daily round, and they are all the better for it.

Though he now lives on the plains of Kildare, with the Liffey at the end of his garden, Des Egan was born in Athlone on the River Shannon, and that town and the life he saw around there has marked his outlook.

His private press takes its namefrom Oliver Goldsmith, the major literary name associated with the Athlone region. Both poets share an eye for the necessity of daily life and its little events (all of which fell into place in The Vicar of Wakefield). Egan has also a sense of the classical civilisation which lies behind all that European artists of any kind ever attempt to do. (Egan taught classics and English for many years, and is a former president of the Classical Association of Ireland).  

Des Egan has been the prime mover in a truly creative sense of the Gerard Manley Hopkins Festival for the last 28 years, an astonishing achievement. It is widely regarded as one of the very best of these events, one with an international following.

His championing of Patrick Kavanagh comes from the same sensibility – even if keeping that poet’s poems in print was a more fraught activity, given the abrasive nature of the poet’s brother Peter. Admirers of Kavanagh will find much to hearten them in these poems.

The overall title is taken from the last section of the collection, a long single poem. But it is epic in a non-Homeric sense. Here again the eternal verities are found, not in the conflicts of a Hector and an Achilles, but the minor triumphs and tragedies of life, with all its failures and frustrations.

Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom Egan greatly admires, Egan has an eye for the details of things and people. He is an artist with a quick eye, a talent to express an emotion or a scene in a few succinct words:  

a woman sat over to ask

how can you prove there is a God

and what is faith

the priest in the nursing home

smiled his only answer

This is not always the waywith poets, who are at times so intellectual as to be blind. Other people the poet observes are blind for other reasons, largely the vacuous white noise of modern culture:

wired to her earphones

a dogged jogger bobs by

rejecting the

outdoors of belief.

These lines remind us that there also runs through Egan’s poetry a deep sense of the religious, not in the over-elaborate manner found in some poets, but in the religious sense that so many share, but are not able to articulate so well.

There are images of everyday people and experiences all through these poems, for the poet sees dignity and value in all things, a feeling Hopkins had too.

Reading the poems one is constantly reminded of the monastic poems of Early Christian Ireland, or the poems of Japan, especially those of Basho, poems filled with what the Japanese call ‘kokoro’, the inner sense of the beauty of things  as expressed in both painting and poetry.

Yet in our violent, crisis-ridden world the way of a poet is not always easy:

another cartridge slots

straight into the barrel

but

is the pen mightier

than the sword of indifference

But poetry is difficult to review: all a critic can really do is to recommend to readers that here is a poet with a unique vision whose work should not be missed.