Word: poeme
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Austin Clarke's poetry is divided here into the three major periods of his life. The publication in 1917 of his first long poem, "The Vengeance of Fionn" set the mood for his early narratives based on the saga cycles of ancient Ireland. These include the Fiannaigheacht, a series of stories about Fionn MacChumhall and his young, unmarried, Fenian warriors, 2000-year-old stories that were lost to the mainstream of Irish consciousness but survived and multiplied among the peasantry; and the Ulster cycle, another series whose central epic, the Tain, relates the deeds of the mighty hero, Cuchulain...
...Vengeance of Fionn," is the story of Grainne, the betrothed of Fionn, and how after she elopes with Diarmuid, Flonn wreaks his savage vengeance upon them. The poem begins with the same engulfing lyrical rhythms that were to characterize much of Clarke's earlier poetry; their sense of grace and music--especially when heard on recordings with Clarke's thick brogue--is perhaps the best this century has yet to offer, combining the rhythms of the symbolist tradition with the sharper forms of the imagists. When Fionn first learns that the two lovers have escaped, for instance. Clarke uses swift...
...turned out, Nick did. After a while, the shy girl passed Nick a note. One of the flared sideburns crew asked what it was. Nick deftly covered. "It's a poem," he said. It was her name and address. "That was a challenge," said Nick. "She didn't believe a stranger would go to the trouble to find out where that address was and go there at three o'clock in the morning...
...Love. Enderby's position is too cleverly undermined by irony, too mined with paradox, to prevail. In The Wreck of the Deutschland (the poem, not the flick), one of the nuns at the moment of her death "christens her wild worst Best," just as Hopkins himself struggled a lifetime to confirm precisely in private pain and worldy rebuff some clear sign of God's forgiving love. Enderby attempts to perform the same sort of personal miracle. Desperately he tries to see the cruelty, vulgarity and violence not as correctable aberrations but as signs that man is still free...
Burgess might have risked one more quote from Hopkins. Man, one poem said, "This Jack, joke, poor potsherd/ Patch, matchwood, immortal diamond/ Is immortal diamond." Otherwise, what's so wrong with sun-kissed clockwork oranges? ∙Timothy Foote