When the Soldier/ Poet Michael J. Whelan invited me to help him launch his debut collection Peacekeeper, I was very touched, and proud. Along with Christine Murray, Michael is one of my favourite contemporary Irish writers. Here is my launch speech ( below ) which was published in an Irish historical magazine, I can't remember which one - as I do not have a copy, never having received one!....
Michael's second collection, also to be published by Doire Press, is to be launched in Tallaght during the Red Line Book Festival on 8th October, later in the year.
Arma virumque
cano!
Peacekeeper by Michael Whelan,
Doire Press, 2016.
War is the father and king of
all (
Heraclitus ).
Every
age has its wars.
Since
the first existing literary text, believed to date from Babylon in 1300-1000
BC,
The Epic of Gilgamesh and onto Homer
in 750 BC, till the arrival of Virgil,
whose
opening line to The Aenied forms the
title of this text, in and around 40
BC,
to our own Táin , or Cattle Raid of
Cooley, in the first century AD; war
and
war poetry have been with us.
Look
around at events going on in the world today… Syria, Georgia, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine these are just some of the areas currently
Embroiled
in Conflict.
Not
very long ago, you only had to pick up a newspaper to read about the latest
victims to terror of one kind or another up in
Northern Ireland. We read the
headlines
year after year, down in the south, and simply thought to ourselves
there,
but for the grace of god go I.
The
poet whose work we are gathered to hear reading to us today was
involved
in two major conflicts, those in the Lebanon and in Kosovo. Michael
served
as a Peacekeeper with the United
Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (
UNIFL
) and with the Peace Enforcement mission in Kosovo ( K.FOR) and it
from
his experiences of both these conflicts that the majority of Michael’s
poems
in his debut collection of poetry Peacekeeper
come.
It
is a very great honour for me to be here, at Michael’s request, to help launch
the
book with him today. I first became aware of Michael’s poetry while editing
an
anthology of contemporary Irish poetry called And Agamemnon Dead for the
French
writer and publisher Walter Ruhlmann for mgv2>publishing.
Walter and
I
were attempting to put together an anthology of Irish poets and writers who we
both
felt were not getting a chance to present their work on a suitable platform,
and
which we hoped to be able to offer them with the anthology.
When
we hear the term ‘war poetry’, most of us would immediately think of
WW1,
the names of poets like Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke,
Siegfried
Sassoon and our own Francis Ledwidge. Why is this?
There
are, I am sure, many reasons. One, surely, is as it was the first fully
mechanised
and so modern war, in which millions of men were so
systematically
massacered, and on an industrial scale. We are all familiar with
the
horror of life for soldiers in the trenches, and it is mainly due to some of
the
poets listed above. WWII is less associated with poets, perhaps, than the
‘Great’
war, but from it also came a formidable body of work. Poets such a
Dylan
Thomas, for example, described life during the Blitz, for war had a new
side
to it now, as civilians as well as soldiers were also among the casualties.
There
was Rene Char in France, a voice from
the resistance. Aresny
Tarkovsky,
father of the famous film maker, who reported back from the
Russian
front, and Karl Krolow writing from the German side. But the majority
of
writing which came from WWII was written in prose; one thinks
immediately
of the American writers Joseph Heller ( Catch
22 ), Norman
Mailer
( The Naked and the Dead ) and Kurt
Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse 5 ),
which
all recount the horrors and the absurdities that the soldiers had to endure.
Again,
the impact of civilian literature is also considerable, considering the
apocalyptic
and all encompassing nature of the war; Primo Levi’s Is This Is A
Man, and the Diaries of Anne
Frank being two of the most known books to
come
out of the war.
Yet,
when I spoke to Michael about his influences,
he spoke to me of the
American
soldiers who had just returned from tours of Iraq and Afghanistan,
such
as Brian Turner ( Here, Bullet ).
And
this is the thing which struck me immediately about Michael, as an Irish
soldier-
‘poet’ he was alone. I couldn’t think of any other contemporary Irish
poet,
at least, who were writing in the country with a similar kind of
background
or experience, as Michael’s. To the best of my knowledge there are
none.
So, in this, Michael is truly an original and authentic voice in
contemporary
Irish poetry, reaching back to a
tradition that is as long as
memory
itself. And Michael is very much part of that tradition, that poets like
Brian
Turner too belong too. For Michael is writing as both a survivor, and as a
witness.
The
first thing which strikes you, when reading the poems of Michael Whelan,
is
the very natural poetic ability Michael has, particularly when treating highly
sensitive
material, such as the impact of warfare upon children.
His
poem Chocolate in which he describes
an encounter with a couple of
children,
sheltering in a bombed out house perfectly illustrates Whelan’s
capacity,
in the space of three short sentences, to completely encompass a
particular
microcosm of the atrocious events which happened in Kosovo in the
last
decade of the previous century. Events which we said in Europe which were
‘never
to happen again!’
Michael’s
style of writing is unencumbered with artifice. It is minimal,
essential….
And yes, it is brutal.
In
the Poetics, Aristotle famously
speaks of the cathartic element when
he
is attempting to analyse and define the nature of tragedy, which tragic
writing
has; ‘ …effecting through pity and fear ( what we call ) the catharsis
Listening
to the poet reading his own work, about his experiences in Lebanon
and
Kosovo, makes us dearly realise the price that one pays for human freedom.
Peter
O’ Neill
