The Anchorage
Bernard O’Donoghue
Faber and Faber, £12.99 / €16.99
One of the few photographs of Bernard O’Donoghue before he left Cork for England, in an era when only returned Yanks had cameras, was taken in 1960 at the ordination of Daniel O’ Leary, my first cousin (later to become a celebrated author and theologian).
It recorded a poignant moment: Brendan is leaning on the shoulders of my older brother Danny Joe, who passed away at the age of thirty eight.
I was not to meet Bernard again for thirty five years, when his first full collection, The Weakness was published in London (Chatto & Windus, 1992). This book would later win the Whitbread Poetry award.
Opportunity
Seeing that the Cork Examiner wasn’t carrying a review, as the books page editor Sean Dunne had just died, I submitted an article on what is now regarded as a landmark debut, though O’Donoghue had published poetry pamphlets and a collection called Poaching Rights with Gallery Press. By this time O’Donoghue was well established in Oxford as a leading medievalist scholar.
This visit was a unique opportunity, for me as a poet, to engage with one of the recognised masters of the craft”
So seeking out the “great man”, I literally drove down the long boreen to his house in Umeraboy (‘Yellow Ridge’), just a townland away from Kiskeam where I grew up in North West Cork. As an aside, neither of us knew of the existence of the photo, or remembered that we had met, for I was then nine and Bernard fifteen.
This visit was a unique opportunity, for me as a poet, to engage with one of the recognised masters of the craft. O’Donoghue has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot award. By chance I also had an “an insider view” on his work: we have actually written poems about the same character and that intimate knowledge of the terrain. “Territory that makes him sing” has been a major plus in the many articles and reviews I’ve written on him since.
When we meet our memories turn to particular places and people, to our own part of the world. Our talk invariably centres on local gossip, the backdrop to the poems that form the corpus of O’Donoghue’s work.
Work
One of the few pieces of advice he has offered is that of the poet Yeats himself, “to write the poem as narrative and then work it up”. The poem September 1913, for instance, originated as a speech Yeats gave to the Lord Mayor of Dublin on the Labour Lockout of that year.
O’Donoghue will be eighty this December. Hence The Anchorage, his eighth book, has the feel of a swan song. It is “feather- light”, a term Martina Evans used in a recent Irish Times review, yet “brimming” with poems that matter.
A book that begins in silence, the “frightful” story of Jerh and Katie Mac. O’Donoghue bought their house after the death of the couple in the 80’s, a pair who never spoke to each other for their entire lives – a grudge to do with a dowry that didn’t materialise, a farm she was due to inherit having gone elsewhere in the family.
The sense of “A lost Eden” permeates his work. The home-place of his childhood, the Big House and farm, were sold and the family moved to England to live in Manchester, his mother’s “own place” after his father’s sudden death from a heart attack at a Munster Final in 1962, just two years after that photograph was taken.
One of the elements that Heaney noted in a comment on The Weakness was a certain ‘sweetness’”
Bernard is now editing the collected poems of Seamus Heaney, a large tome due out in October.
One of the elements that Heaney noted in a comment on The Weakness was a certain “sweetness”; a term from Dante, a poet who is an abiding presence in this book which has an epigraph in one of the poems from Paradiso 33: 58-63:
Qual è colüi che sognando vede,
che dopo ‘l sogno la passione impressa
rimane, e l’altro a la mente non riede,
cotal son io, ché quasi tutta cessa
mia visïone, e ancor mi distilla
nel core il dolce che nacque da essa…
“Like a man dreaming and after the dream, the passion of it remains, and other previous thoughts do not resurface.
“So I am that – where the vision almost faded, yet the sweetness which is borne from it still remains in my art.”
Eugene O’Connell is a poet and co-editor of Deep Heart’s Core: Irish Poets Revisit a Touchstone Poem (Dedalus Press)