June has shot by...

Paul Muldoon at Charleston Literary Festival

I should correct that heading by saying that May has also shot by, and the flurry of events has not been recorded in this little venture.  Tut.  The fact is that the old creative juices (and they're feeling rather old at the moment) have been entirely devoted to producing poems for the end of my MA's first year.  People say to me "How's the course going?" and I say "Fine", because I'm enjoying it but I haven't got the faintest idea whether I'm writing any better than I was at the beginning.  Perhaps, though, I've got a slightly better idea of what I'm meant to be doing, which is a start.  But, like all subjects, the more you get into it the more difficult it is, and at the moment I'm running the risk of feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all.

Something must be going right somewhere, though, since the rate of acceptance by the wee poetry mags has improved.  It's not like our dog Balzac with the postman, exactly - grabbing my submissions as they come through the letterbox - but the percentage take has I think got a little better than it was.  But we're talking in modest terms here, and I don't think a Nobel Prize is in the offing for a while.

Continuing the poetry theme, I can say that one of the high spots of May was hearing the poet Paul Muldoon give a reading at Charleston Festival.  He read both his own poems and some by his old friend Seamus Heaney, and did it with such wit and charm the whole audience was captivated.  It wasn't just Middle England, either, though there was more than a fair smattering of the well-heeled pensioner set.  It taught me a lot about how to give a reading, though in my case I'm usually limited to eight minutes rather than Muldoon's hour.  

Earlier this month we were in Mallorca, where I was able to continue the theme of Dead Poets (see earlier postings about our trip to Ireland) by visiting Deia, a beautiful and remote village on the west coast of the island where Robert Graves is buried.  We had some difficulty finding his modest grave, but it's nice to add it to the collection. Graves was part of a group of painters and writers who lived in Deia in the second half of the last century.  Their graves, or plaques in their memory, are mostly huddled together at one side - reflecting, I imagine, the way in which they were perceived by the local community.  Graves, however, has a simple stone with an inscription that appears to have been done in freehand while clay was still wet.  There was a group of pebbles on the gravestone, some with messages attached, left by admirers.  It's always interesting to see how far poetry can reach in touching the hearts and minds of others.

The academic term is now over, though we have the joy of a summer school coming up on campus in Lancaster at the end of the month.  A rather intensive week of talks and conferences and hopefully some writing.  Gulp.

Antony Mair   

Honouring Louis MacNeice

The grave of Louis MacNeice, Carrowdore, Co. Down

In his introduction to Faber's 2001 selection of Louis MacNeice's poems, the Irish poet Michael Longley tells the story of how, in 1964, he visited Louis MacNeice's graveyard in Carrowdore together with fellow-poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.  MacNeice had died the year before, prematurely at the age of 55.  Mahon was the only one of the three who had met him personally, but all three were shocked by the death.  

Fifty years later, I found myself in the same spot, on our recent trip round the northern part of Ireland.  MacNeice enjoys a special place in my affections.  Not only do I admire him as a poet, but I realised comparatively recently that this admiration is something I inherited from my father - who also died prematurely, at the same age as MacNeice, though seven years later.  Among my books are three slim collections - The Earth Compels (1938), Autumn Journal (1939) and Plant and Phantom (1941), with my father's neat handwriting on the first inside page - the first having been bought in his last year at Oxford, the last during the war, in Edinburgh, when he was working for MI5.

MacNeice's reputation has lasted well, but he is gradually fading into obscurity - the 1988 Selected Poems  is half as long again as its 2001 successor, and there has been no Four Weddings and a Funeral to resuscitate his popularity as there was for his contemporary, Auden.  However, he was a great influence not only on Heaney, Mahon and Longley, but also on the younger poet Paul Muldoon, and consequently he is part of a continuity of influence that began before Yeats and will continue after Muldoon and his Irish successors.  Reading his poems now, I find them uneven, some snared in their time, but others beautiful and hopefully surviving for a long time in anthologies that will encourage people to read more of him.  One I am greatly fond of is Soap Suds:

   This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big

   House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open

   To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop

   To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

   And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;

   Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;

   A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;

   A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

   To which he has now returned.  The day of course is fine

   And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,

   Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball

   Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

   Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn

   And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!

   But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands

   Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.  

Antony Mair