I first met Anamaria Crowe Serrano at Donkey Shots, Skerries First Avant Garde Poetry Festival in 2015. She had come to the launch of Dublin Gothic which was held in Ardgillan Castle on a Spring morning. The book was handmade in Dunedin in New Zealand by Dean Havard who now runs The Dead Souls Bookshop in Dunedin. The book was beautifully crafted and remains one of my prized collections thanks to Dean and his beautiful craftmanship.
Anamaria was the only person to review the collection, but oh my what a review she wrote. It remains one of my favourites. It was originally published on Dave Lordan's Bogman's Canon, and I reproduce it in its entirety.
Anamaria is a wonderful poet, we bump into one another at times in Dublin. It is always a pleasure. She has a new e-novel out, which I believe is wonderful, so I am going to leave her website details in the links below. If you don't know her work, do check her out.
EXPLORING IRISHNESS IN
PETER O’NEILL’S DUBLIN GOTHIC, BY ANAMARÍA CROWE SERRANO
Dublin
Gothic is one of those increasingly
rare artefacts: a handmade book. It was published in 2015 and comes to us via
New Zealand, courtesy of Kilmog
Press, with just forty copies in
existence. It’s beautifully bound and the pages are charmingly uneven in
dimension. The hardback cover is handwoven with overlapping wavy strips of
paper in earthy tones that make it gorgeously tactile. It is one of a trilogy
of books about Dublin, the others being The Dark Pool and Fingal (unpublished).
Despite
having five collections behind him and having edited the anthology of Irish
poetryAnd Agamemnon Dead, Peter O’Neill’s work is not particularly well-known in Ireland.
Granted, one of those publications was with Lapwing
Publications, and O’Neill lived for many years
abroad, but it does seem odd that his work hasn’t found a little crack to slip
through before now in the national poetic consciousness.
Not only
is he a poet, he is also a translator from French, notably of Baudelaire’s
forebodingFleurs du Mal, in which he has been immersed for
several years. I can only imagine that living and breathing the father of
modernism for an extended period might play havoc with your sanity if you
didn’t have an outlet. For O’Neill, one outlet is his own poetry, where somespleen has definitely filtered through, creating
the gothic ambience of this Dublin collection.
The
title, Dublin Gothic, comes from one of the poems, dedicated
to the memory of the poet’s father. It’s a significant poem because it sets the
scene for many others, in that it struggles with clichéd concepts of Irish
identity. Apart from the ‘diddle de aye / Dee Doo’ that O’Neill rails against, ‘With
its ‘Oh, so happy I’m ‘Irish’ manure’, he also addresses small-minded ignorance
that is born of fear. Scathingly, though also with regret, he alludes to this
darker side of Irishness that lurks behind closed doors:
But it was what went on inside that
really struck me.
My grandfather threatening to throw
my father’s copy
Of Ulysses out the window, that strikes me as being
Very Irish. How many more that are like he was still?
My grandfather the great patriot…
[Dublin Gothic]
O’Neill’s identity
is of a more universal kind, his citizenship being of the world. Following in
Beckett’s footsteps – another significant figure in his work – he even gives us
two poems in French, a language he sometimes uses to write poetry (there are
several French poems inThe Dark Pool). One of these,
Baudelaire, ou L’architexte, contains the kind of spunky sexuality and
philosophical punch that I suspect Rimbaud, or even the great man himself,
might have been quite pleased with.
Pendant
vingt ans j’étais ce Bateau Ivre.
Finalement, rejeté par la mer, je me
suis retrouvé
Par terre devant les pieds d’une
déesse impitoyable,
Et sans remords qui s’est transformé
en pute.
…
Parfois en gode miche et armée avec
son fouet
Et ses bottes, elle me gronde. Je me
laisse diriger par eux,
Avec leurs signes obscurs, et leurs
ordres sévères.
Je me suis battu une veritable cité
construite qu’avec
Des paroles. Et parfois, marchant
avec eux
On s’arrête devant le Temple
d’Heraclyte l’obscur.
The breadth of O’Neill’s engagement
with cultures outside of Ireland comes through in the many references he makes
to European history, Greek mythology, philosophy, translated literature, and
other languages, all of which create a lavish convergence of images and
temporal fusions. The result is that he highlights a common humanity between
himself and the rest of the world, which runs like a metaphor through many of
the poems. Metaphor, in fact, is a very strong concept in the collection,
mentioned explicitly on several occasions. It is a redeeming device for
O’Neill, in that it allows him to redefine himself as a person and an Irishman.
He can allow simple things like a house fly or the landscape to speak in a
language that resonates below surface observations, a language that draws on
foreignness in order to sharpen his focus on the local.
The Master
Populate the mind, an obscure
terrain,
With contemporaneous geographical
Matter, such as the common ordinance
Of sheep, house flies and a solitary
tree.
All of which are imbued with
mythological
Status, evoking Cain, Cyclops and
Aeneas.
That’s three civilizations in one
implant,
Causing temporal resonance in the
hippocamp.
Because of metaphor our worldly hurt
is shared;
We all equate with the great salty
wounds
Of Ulysses, laugh at the dicks in
Euripides.
Because of metaphor, when I look
Northward, in place of the blue
arteries
Of the Mourne, I see the Argo.
In the wonderful poem, Giordano,
alluding to Giordano Bruno who was burnt at the stake for heretical beliefs
that expanded on Copernicus’ findings, O’Neill is keenly aware that we are
composite beings; that we cannot know ourselves properly if we don’t recognise
our complex sources, and engage with what is beyond constrained notions of self
and of the world. The weight of this realisation can be a burden, of course,
‘When tucked away behind the Cornflakes box / The monstrous tomb of history
rocks.’ Yet O’Neill voyages onwards undaunted, occasionally defending himself
with that most unique of Irish defences: humour.
I marvel anew at the design inherent
In the intestinal walls, as the
earliest patrons
Of MOMA must have when they first
Caught sight of Frank Lloyd Wright’s
stairwell.
Of course, the exhibits mounted on
those walls
Also share a common currency with the
Gentle motions of stool which cascade
along
Ever so gently to the eternal gateway
of Armitage Shanks.
[Malebolge]
Another
interesting feature of these poems is their structure. Most of them are
sonnets, often with rhyming schemes. Many readers will admire O’Neill’s
effortless adaptation to the form, which never imposes itself on the flow of
the lines. I, for one, am always suspicious of contemporary poetry trying to
drape itself around forms I consider to be quite worn, and am tempted to think this
might be another defence mechanism, as if O’Neill is hoping by association with
respected antecedents to lend gravitas to his own poems. But I admit it is a
personal bias. In the case of Dublin Gothic, there
is certainly an argument to be made for the form fitting the tone of these
poems, using it as a way to connect with and acknowledge the important legacy
of the past while simultaneously accommodating a more modern idiom.
These are pithy poems. There is hours
and hours of material here if you want to delve into some of the many
references. I can’t say I know who General Wenck is, for example, and I’m not
well up on Heidegger or Deleuze either. No doubt my reading of the poems would
be enhanced if I were, but this does nothing to detract from the pleasure of
encountering the multiple worlds that O’Neill explodes for us, and the
possibility of pursuing some of their inhabitants and myths that have probably
touched all our lives without us even realising.
Dublin
Gothic is available from Kilmog
Press. It is part of the Dublin trilogy,
which also comprises The Dark Pool and Fingal (unpublished).
Peter
O’Neill’s second trilogy, The Muse, includes Antiope, The Enemy and The Muse is a Dominatrix (unpublished).
He is also the author of The Elm Tree.
