Title: Henry Street Arcade
Author: Peter O’Neill
Bilingual version with translations into French by Yan
Kouton.
Publisher: Éditions du Pont de l’Europe, 2021
Review by Anamaría Crowe Serrano
O’Neill is not a poet given to trends or
“profiteering”, as he says in the Preface of Henry Street Arcade. His engagement
with poetry goes beyond Irish borders, to what could be called a Joycean
preoccupation with Shakespeare, Vico, Dante, Homer, Yeats, and of course,
Baudelaire, who is his constant companion in the first section of this book. Henry
Street Arcade is infused with nods to the philosophies and ideas of these
literary giants, but it is Baudelaire’s interest in Parisian arcades that led
O’Neill to think about the Henry Street arcade in the first place, that
charming little thoroughfare linking Prince’s Street to Henry Street in Dublin.
The French poet is everywhere in the poems of the
first section, to the extent that sometimes they read like a parallel
Baudelairean universe, from the sensuous languor of “The Big Apple” – the whole
collection is strong on the sensuous – to thoughts about decay and the passing
of time. Ideals of beauty, whether female or of the city, receive much
attention. Yan Kouton must have had fun translating these. His work reads
beautifully in French, which of course comprises half of the collection.
There are several dualities running through the poems:
male v female, good v evil, mythology v reality, beauty v banality, philosophy
v literature. O’Neill’s focus on women – his wife and daughter, as well as
random female commuters – is also double-edged in theme and style. Sometimes he
is lyrical, imitative of Baudelaire, but there are poems that rely less on
artifice and come from a place that speaks more directly to the reader. In
defence of feminism, “The Patriarch” is a complaint about the sender of a card
to a woman because on the envelope, There was no trace of her family name, /
Which she had kept… And in a stunning love poem to his wife, Laura, he churns
up personal humility and deference with sexual need, exalting her in the vulgar
yet rapturous phrase “bitch from hell”.
The streets of Dublin open up in the second section, Henry
Street Arcade, on the poet’s walk to work. Structural and
architectural metaphors abound, but the character of the
city is more philosophical, conscious that Beauty must always be contrasted
with banality. The Molly Malone song leads into the first poem of this
section, a clear nod to Joyce’s “Chamber Music”, replete with Yeats, semen and
urine. Streets adjacent to the arcade explode with colour and cacophony. Vendors
become mythological at their stalls, with a distinct air of seduction: All
the flourishing Venus Fly Traps / Straight from The Odyssey they appear, Circe,
Calypso / The Sirens, and then the goddess Athena with her Spear! While back
down on earth, “Capitalism” gives us coffee prices and calculations regarding
the financial viability of tables per café, arriving at the depressing scenario
that so many coffee shop owners are faced with.
Throughout the many literary associations that make up
an intriguing mosaic of images and ideas for the reader, what comes through in these
poems is a love of Dublin, encapsulated in the poem “Motherland”:
Suddenly I am pulled into your archaeology,
Excavating artefacts at every turn,
Each particular piece so exacting,
Like pieces of a sumbolon.
Giving me a greater possible understanding of Self,
Compounding primitivism and all
Such prehistory, allowing me to finally
Put together the latest piece in the puzzle.
These physiological or genetic traces
Of you in me; frail feminine shoulders,
The soft feminine skin, like a woman’s!
These, for a man, ridiculously slim feet,
Which all this time I seem to have used to run
From the one whom, only now, I would fully embrace.
Swinging in style from the archaic to the
contemporary, the sensuous tone of some of the poems in the first section takes
a distinctly fetishistic turn as the collection progresses, with erotic
references to hosiery and women’s bodies. The setting is apt, arcades being
places where lingerie shops were often found, and in the 19th
century some of these cavernous structures also housed brothels. They still do
in some European cities.
The six sonnets of the final section consists of a
dialogue between two cross-dressers, Horatio and Orlando. The metaphor for the
female anatomy in the title, The Cave or The Passageway of Desire, is obvious, yet
instantly subverted by the sexual ambiguity of the subtitle, Sweet Hosiery,
That Never Swell: A Short Comely Comedie in the Manner of Shakespeare. While
indeed being bawdy, at a deeper level the sonnets bring together the key
concerns of the collection: trade (in hosiery here) and its concomitant evils,
coupled with sexual desire, which has also been traded over the millennia as
well as having been morally problematic.
There is much to like about Henry Street Arcade.
O’Neill is bold in his exploration of everything the arcade represents on a
personal and a societal level, unafraid to bare his intimate thoughts. He roots
the present deeply in the past, something that adds texture to the poems. For
all the literary subtext and references, which at times does seem heavy handed,
it is a satisfying read even without any in-depth knowledge of the writers the
collection calls into service.
Review by Anamaría Crowe Serrano
