HENRY STREET ARCADE - BILINGUAL EDITION WITH TRANSLATIONS BY YAN KOUTON - REVIEW ANAMARIA CROWE SERRANO

 

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 19^th 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