Review of The Dark Pool by David Rigsbee ( Originally published in A New Ulster )

The Dark Pool by Peter O’Neill

Reviewed by David Rigsbee

I read once that a group of Scottish school children were asked to write down three images that occurred to them when they heard the word “America.”  The most common were a cloud, a butte, and a trailer.  Readers not from Ireland (as I am not) might come away from Peter O’Neill’s The Dark Pool with the impression that Ireland consisted of bars, rain-drenched streets, and urban detritus, the stuff of Eliot, filtered through Joyce, where “frailty, vice, and innocence are all being borne away/ on Anna Livia’s languorous scales.”  I say filtering, but it would be closer to the truth to say that O’Neill channels the Greats, starting with his stern maitre, Baudelaire, with whose work he has been involved for many years, making admirable translations (which he prefers to call “transversions”).  It is a singing school that owes little to Yeats, and yet it courses back to the home territory, by way of Beckett (another Franco-Irish ex-pat), Mahon, and Cavanagh.  The Pantheon doesn’t stop there.  Trained as a classicist, O’Neill also brings on board Homer, Virgil, Horace, and company, giving his poems a rich sense of culture and the presence of the past.  As a result, he is keenly aware that the community of letters provides shape and context to what would otherwise be a narrow world of monads.  So what is it about the lonely crowd with which his poems are peopled? 

Every night you’ll find them in the many bars,

drinking themselves silly

in a futile attempt to clear the smoldering stacks

unbidden from their minds.  (“The View from Salthill”)

Is it not a paradox that self-medicating pub patrons, in their regrets and ennui, find themselves on that “fucking rock in the Atlantic,” which is to say at the end of the world, and yet at the same time are made somehow central to all that it means to be, er, human?  “I have come to love my Hellenic learning,” he says in “Nike of Samotrace.” It’s not just an aside.

Brodsky asserted that time is greater than space.  He meant to suggest that poetry gives us the keys to time, ushering in meanings vastly more significant than the keys to space have done.  For time is related to the metaphysical, and so it is that present and past not only coexist, but carry on that “conversation of mankind” that stands to imbue even the smallest moment with diversity, as Blake knew.  This is O’Neill’s via negativa, to find fullness in emptiness, victory in loss.  While there is at first glance the specter of death in life, there is also, on reflection, life in death.  The past, as Faulkner yelled, “is not even past!”  As O’Neill says in “Nostalgia, for Andrei Tarkovsky,” “All have hidden significance.// All are underlined with meaning.”

In “The Book of Being,” he likewise notes,

   The self is nothing without first the total acceptance

Of another, first act to being oneself is already

   To be found in the acceptance of another,

One’s other Other, call this union love.

What this comes down to in another, perhaps more familiar way, is the capital credo, “Poetry, poetry, poetry all.”  Now lest the reader recoil at this burst of special pleading, it should be followed by the equivalent claim that poetry consists not just words only, but what lies beyond their notational reality (“The words are not symbols or signs/ but rather the things themselves.”)  Rather.  And this, move, this gambit, assigns language to a place in the world of facts and phenomena.  The poetry (which means, of course, a making) is, you might say, the mindfulness that results from that making:

Lose yourself in sheer being,

The momentous gravitational pull of sheer presence!

Now, you see you are no longer reading—

At least as far as you used to understand the term.

However, there is a price to this game

Expect more now, from all things!  (‘Rimbaud’s Illuminations, or the Death of Books”)

This accepting more from things comes to us courtesy of old-school Symbolism, the legacy of (again) Baudelaire and “correspondences.”  In the wrong hands, such claims (this visible thing corresponds to that invisible one) lead straight to twaddle (see:  Madame Blavatsky, et al.)  But O’Neill knows this and sidesteps the trembling veil:

You look to each phenomenon as if trying to decipher a code.

Like a woman they resist you.

You can only press against the grill like a shark. (“Nostalgia, by Andrei Tarkovsky”)

In “The Masochist,” he likewise writes, “I picked you out of the crowd like choosing a good knife.” 

As Brigette Le Juez points out in her introduction, the title refers to the Gaelic name for Dublin (Dubh Linn = dark pool).  A version of that pool becomes emblematic straightaway in “The Drinker,” where a glass of wine does stand-in for a crystal ball.  But far from hinting at a bright future, it more boringly suggests repetition, which I note in passing, is the basis of Dante’s take on hell.  It’s, in other words, the same old, same old, and I quote it in full:

A glass of wine

rests on the counter

in which a miniature world

is being reflected by to the viewer,

all of his contained.

It comprises a roof,

a window and the bartender,

who appears and disappears,

floating in and out,

like a goldfish,

trapped, in this liquid cell.

In “The Barman,” the bartender speaks of “ the enormity of their [customers’] self-imposed exile.”  Meanwhile, in “Leo,”

There is an old man sitting alone inside an empty bar.

His thoughts are spinning inside his mind

like pennies upon the counter.

But in spite of the darkness baked into the title, the poet doesn’t spend all of his time gazing at the horror vacui.  “The Ninnies,” he observes,

In public bars old men cling to their spirits,

god’s tears of laughter, like children with toys.

The clocks on the shelves announce tedium with a tick

and all manner of danger with a tock.

We are always, despite ourselves, in the realm of the divine.

It is precisely in locating that realm in such dreary moments that O’Neill finds his matter, and in doing so he enacts an old feat of ancient ambition, which is to marry earth with heaven.  This is a fancy way of putting it, when distrust of language these days edges so much of discourse.  But the cycles of violence and song, of drunken self-immersion, and clinging spirit comprise, you might say, the Matter of Ireland, and that is, all by itself, a version of the matter of the North.  O’Neill’s poems provides ample evidence that this is the case.  The Dark Pool is the first volume of a triptych, but it is also, massively learned, hopeful, but clear-eyed, an integrated volume by a poet who has returned from years abroad to offer his presentation piece, which is also a powerful reunion of familiarity to exile, of man to native speech.  The energy is palpable, the urge to get it down, fervent.  In America, we have often looked to the Irish to find accents richer than our own demotic flattening, and Peter O’Neill is a poet who works the mythical city of Modernism in ways we do not often see enough.  As he writes in “Homage to James Douglas Morrison,”  “More than twenty years on, just exiting the dark pool,/ and I have finally made my peace with the Northern School.”  Here’s hoping that school is likewise welcoming.

 

David Rigsbee is the author of the forthcoming Not Alone in My Dancing:  Essays and Reviews (New York:  Black Lawrence Press).  In addition to his ten volumes of poetry, he has written critical works on Carolyn Kizer and Joseph Brodsky.  This fall he will be an external examiner for the M.A. program in creative writing at NUI-Galway. He lives in Hudson, New York.