I first came across Theo Dorgan’s work in a charming anthology of art writing from the National Gallery of Ireland, Lines of Vision (Thames & Hudson, 2014). A group of acclaimed Irish novelists and poets wrote about which paintings had most affected them as artists. Dorgan chose an evocative little history painting by Ernest Messionier, Group of Cavalry in the Snow: Moreau and Dessoles before Hohenlinden (1875), depicting two of Napoleon’s generals contemplating their chances on the eve of the wintry battle of Hohenlinden in December of 1800. It’s an intimate scene, and its effect, as described in rapturous detail by Dorgan, especially its effect on the imagination of a young boy, is enchanting:
There’s a self riding down out of the picture, no two selves. One of them
stolid and wary, wondering what these damn officers are about to get
us into…my mind is full of the coming battle, my sympathies with men
breathing this cold air tonight who will not be breathing it tomorrow…
All this and so much more, so very much more, out of one small
painting—and I close my eyes for one brief instant, leaving the gallery,
not sure when I open them where I shall find myself, on a Dublin street,
so long familiar, or on a wooded slope with a sky fill of lead-heavy snow
above my head, hearing the creak of leather beneath me, feeling the
solid heat of the animal bearing me down off that crest towards some
tomorrow at once unknown, unknowable and absurdly unfamiliar.
Dancing with the child I was, cheating the monoworld.
This sense of wonder and quiet devotion to sensual pleasures and the mysteries of the creative experience is what one finds so absorbing in Theo Dorgan’s poetry. The adventure of Dorgan’s career, his pursuit of poetry, which captures the varied transactions of life and death, circumstance and self-determination, gives us something that is, to paraphrase Emerson, new as foam and as old as the rock.
His newest collection, Nine Bright Shiners (Dedalus Press, 2014) is a dazzling tour-de-force. It is one of those rare things in contemporary poetry today, especially among poets from the haloed glow of the academies: a book of poems that is as direct and unpretentious as it is lyrical and cerebral, and a collection which has something for everyone. It comes as no surprise that it won the 2014 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. A dedicated enthusiast of poetry turns to a poet like Theo Dorgan for what Robert Frost called, “a clarification of life.” Yet, there is usually a tinge of sadness and ambiguity lingering amidst the occasionally jaunty verse.
The collection takes its title from a popular nineteenth-century folk song “Green Grow the Rushes O!”: “I’ll sing you twelve, O!/Green grow the rushes, O!/Ten for the ten commandments,/Nine for the nine bright shiners,/Clothèd all in green O!/One is one and all alone/And evermore shall be so.” “Shiners” is also Irish slang for stars. It sets tone of enchantment, whimsy, and rueful temperance that runs throughout the poems of the book. As a cosmopolitan Irish poet, who often travels between his home in Dublin, his native Cork, and his home in Greece, and often to London and New York, Dorgan is very much a twenty-first century global poet, and his poems reflect his eclecticism.
One of them, the charming “The Lost Gaeltacht of Lower Manhattan” (a Gaeltacht, pronounced sort of like “gwail-takt,” is an Irish-speaking community) exemplifies this dynamism. Dedicated to the Irish poet and translator, Peter Sirr, the poem is a distilled glimpse into how an oppressed language and its associated cultural legacy can take root in a completely foreign country from its point of origin. This is a poem about New York City and its rich history of Irish immigration and culture, Dorgan’s interweaving of English and Irish (he is one of those poets who is a sharp native-speaker) highlights the sparkling comedy and thrill of what crosses over, through folk songs and old turns of phrases, and of what gets lost in translation:
The yellow cabs tick downtown in the rain,
sparked electrons in the bright-lit veins.
Siúl a rún ó. Ná siúl. Siúl.
Like grace notes the elevators rise and fall,
staff notation on the sheet-glass walls.
Fuaim ag an macalla. Mo chúl le balla.
On the ferry to Station Island the turnstile clicks.
Silence, a brooding absence above the Styx.
Ar bhruach linne ‘sea do lonnaigh mo chlann.
Badged, whitehaired, the ticket-collector comes around
‘Murphy’, I read—“Murchú”, I say, sea hound.
“Cad as duit féin?” fiafraíonn sé. “Corcaigh?”
There’s nothing but money here, I’d sooner go home.”
But I know he won’t, he sees it in my eyes.
Tóraíocht , deoraíocht, toradh luí beirte.
We turn to the Statue, her torch of empty air.
“Tell me,” he asks, “do they still speak Irish over there?”
This short poem, with its snippets of ballads and dialogue, is a self-contained one-act play in verse. The immigrant experience, the networks of assimilation and displacement, are the electrifying polarities within this poem. Charlemagne had once said that to speak and to think in another language is to possess another soul. The ripe possibilities of America and its vision of a dream of reinvention comes at price when the immigrant is present with the necessity of having to abandon a language and its own world of experience. Worst of all, the promise of prosperity and something larger becomes illusory, as Lady Liberty tauntingly raises “her torch of empty air.”
Dorgan has a keen ear and eye for the nuanced experiences people face. Whether it is the Irish cab driver in “The Lost Gaeltacht”, the wayward, passionate American teenagers site-seeing in Greece in “Young Love” (from his previous collection, Greek), his elegy for his recently deceased friend, “Traveling Soul Sutra for Dave Caffrey,” or the extraordinary imaginings of the Victorian sea funeral for his grandmother, who died in childbirth off of Cape Horn in “Walls of Green Water,” Dorgan skillfully brings together a mosaic of lost loved ones within these poems.
Like his fellow Irish poet Ciarán Carson, Dorgan is adroit at weaving together Irish language and culture within the larger framework of global artistic traditions. This comes through vividly in his haikus. In “Lá Fhéile Bhríde,” the holiday that calls for the celebration of the arrival of spring and fecundity, Dorgan’s haiku has a remarkable Ted Hughes-like terseness and muscularity:
She spread her green dress
on frosted glass. Blackbird sing.
Crocus, yellow spears.
This self-contained world falls together within an unfolding ripple of experience—the body of a woman, the cry of a bird, the ripening of a bright flower. In some ways, like Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” this is a poem about sexual promise that’s at once curiously energizing and disturbing.
Many of the poems reflect Dorgan’s skill as a formalist, though fortunately without seeming forced or tiresome. The verse is highly self-reflexive, yet unlike the work of some academic poets, not belabored or aggressive in its attempts at showing-off. Here, in “The Buddha in Connemara,” we have a tribute to an old teacher back in Ireland:
I stood in Clifden, watching the tide come in,
Thinking about the teacher Brendan Flynn.
Dust hung on the wind, I watched it sway
in a glinting curtain out across the bay.
There are in that Buddha country swans, curlews and peacocks.
Three times every night, and three times every day,
They come together and perform a concert,
each uttering his own note.
How much we learn from those who are truly good,
the thought struck me unbidden where I stood.
There is something of the mysticism and atavistic beauty of Yeats’s peacock here, though the ties of memory, gratitude, and longing merge in a distilled experience of nostalgia, part fantasy and partly rooted in the solidity of the landscape of the west of Ireland. One of the more stunning, carefully crafted poems in the collection, is “A “A Woman in Winter”:
She walks the ditch, contented and alone,
sends up a flight of crows with every stone.
Beyond the ridge, beyond the frost-gripped fence
the light pours down on lands of innocence.
A tree stands out against the winter snow,
a tree her mother planted years ago.
The sun flares up, and shines through bitter cold
on sudden flashing ornaments of gold.
There is a marvelous sense of the line looping back in on itself, with the feeling that the verse is closing in to generate a new rhythm. In another poet’s hands, the couplets could come across as trite and wearying, but here they have their own airy buoyancy and vitality.
Elegies, memories of friends and family who have passed away are scattered across the volume: John McGahern (“Wild Orchids, Windflowers”) Lar Cassidy (“A Light Was Burning”), Eugene Lambert (“The Angel of Days to Eugene Lambert”). A poem dedicated to his father, “Learning My Father’s Memories,” is particularly moving in its wistfulness and candor. An echo of a poem from an earlier collection, “Speaking to My Father” (from What This Earth Cost Us, 2008), this poem again builds upon the ache for the irrevocable—the need for the physical tactility and warmth of the person who is lost to us. Dorgan recounts the days of his father as a young man on the hurling field in Cork:
I saw Cúchulainn in his latter years,
great knots of muscle in his shoulders,
the gleaming dome of his skull in the afternoon.
I saw him drive younger warriors from the field
by the fierce power of his eye on the frozen ball,
his gift for gathering and unleashing force.
Christ, he was younger than I am now!
My father’s age, who seemed so old to me then,
and now so young. So it goes on, the old parade
through sweat and mud and memory, the hero,
his followers and his fellow warriors…
And back there on the grass-banked terrace
a round-eyed child in his own fog of doubt,
testing the fix in a spin of words and meanings:
“That’s him, I’m looking at him, Christy Ring.”
The significance of hurling within Irish culture is difficult to convey to those who aren’t familiar with it, except to say that it’s similar to what cricket is in India and Australia and what soccer/football is all across Latin and South America and Western Europe. Dorgan’s father is compared to Cúchulainn, the young warrior-hero of Ireland’s Ulster Cycle, a sort of Achilles, Aeneas, and Ram in the Irish mythic imagination whose almost supernatural prowess on the hurling field was the stuff of legend. The comparison at the end to the mid-twentieth-century Irish hurler Christy Ring, also a native of Cork, is fitting in that the heroes of the poet’s boyhood pantheon, both fiction and fact, come together in the collective memory of the father.
The triumph of Nine Bright Shiners, in building upon the success of his previous collection Greek (Dedalus Press, 2010), a book that’s perhaps warmer and more mellow in its collective tone, are the poems’ heightened sense of awareness to the fragilities of life, their wakefulness and their inspired consciousness. Physical landscapes merge into the familiar and unknown of inner psychological spaces.
Since Dorgan often divides his time between Ireland and Greece, the poems in both Greek and Nine Bright Shiners reflect the equivalences of experiences from both countries: the vagaries of displacement and immigration, the reliance upon farming and fishing, and the sensuality of their respective climates. Greek is filled with charming poems of local color like “Taverna on the Beach,” “Honey Yoghurt,” and “Bread Dipped in Olive Oil and Salt, “ though the overall tone of Nine Bright Shiners is more sober and meditative. Dorgan, like other accomplished Irish poets, Eamon Grennan, Ciarán Carson, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, has remarkable insight into what it means to be Irish in the twenty-first century and what it means to be an Irish speaker in the twenty-first century. The bilingual English-Irish poems in Nine Bright Shiners offer a glimpse into the legacy of a language that, though it’s been occasionally marginalized, it still remains resilient and robust and can convey something more of a way of looking at the world than “an Béarla.” In “Crossing the Border,” we’re taken on a journey of displacement, where the rupture between time and space, both physical and psychological, unfolds across an icy landscape of absence and tentative possibility:
Bells break on the winter air
the trees are cased in ice.
The wind blows
through the blinding snow
and day is near.
Blue on the winter air,
the flaring border lights.
The wind blows
through driving snow
and help is near
The road from the frontier post goes
beside a lake that’s frozen hard.
They make us stand here in the cold
and look upon the promised land.
Ní fada uainn anois an lá
Má mhairimid, má fhannan beo
Home is where they broke our hearts
and burned our houses, laid us low;
beyond the lake that’s frozen hard
the city where we hope to go…
Ní fada uainn anois an lá
Má mhairimid, má fhannan beo
The world of winter here is a tenuous space of dark gaps and hollows, one that can be filled with the hopes of human passions. It’s perhaps why John Hollander once said that out of all the seasons, winter is the most fascinating in terms what it offers in terms of striving and possibilities (think of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97: “How like a winter hath my absence been…”).
Nine Bright Shiners is certainly one of the best new collections of poetry to have come out in the 2014-2015 literary year. Its lyricism and its intellectual vitality and expansiveness reminds us of why we might enjoy reading contemporary poetry in the first place, the rich potential of verse, and what poetry enables us to express.
In closing, I’d like to turn to a poem from Greek, “Begin, Begin Again,” one dovetails memories of Greece and Ireland to describe the ebb and flow of experience, the pull of certain hopes and frustrations, that make up the trajectory of life:
We come and go.
To live your life is not so simple as to cross the sea.
The voice you turn from will sometimes find you out.
Making out from Aghios Kirikos, what, two days ago?
Wave-tossed and sober, an old song in my head.
Torann na dtonn le sleasibh na long
ag tarraingt go teann ‘n ár gceann fé sheol.
That schoolroom again, a long perspective opening back—
hills of West Cork, that deep indented coastline
and ships on the sea, from the south and west,
from the east; the blue inrush of history, outrush of trade.
Dousing sail this morning in the roads off Piraeus,
somebody old moving through me, coiling the lines…
You locked onto the tune in my head, murmured
Measaim gur súbach don Mhumhain an fhuaim…
your fingers tightened in mine; something became clear:
What is my nation is not the same thing as what is my place.
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For a video of Theo Dorgan reading these poems, click here!
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