Sunday, December 11, 2005
David Lordan's Reflections on Shannon
Patrick Kavanagh award winner, David Lordan's Reflections on Shannon, stands out as one of the finer Irish protest poems of recent times. It roars like an angry staccato of poemfire, reminiscent of old Ginsberg. Some passages I particularly like:
I ask you again
What the fuck is silence;
And who has ever heard
The dead requesting it?
....
and historically
the wild plots hatched by super-activists
saintly types
with a cold fire in their bellies
and a stone in their hearts
and pure in their dedication
detaching themselves
from the wider movement
have backfired rather badly
have blown up in their face
literally
ask the Baader Meinhof
ask the Brigada Rosa
ask the INLA
....
that sets off the hell
which is all that I owe
all that I own
and all that is mine
for unloosing
....
Of course in such a lengthly poem you could quibble with parts; The important metaphor of a creator qua suicide bomber is never quite convincing. In a poem where so much else is vivid, real and stern, it intrudes like pop theology. Perhaps such a metaphor is an accurate reflection of the average philosophical thinking in our culture, and it does convey the sense of violence birthing something new, but to me it seems too light to carry the weight of fury and despair in the rest of the work. Personally I would have ended the narrator's detonation with the earlier lines whose, ending stirs in my consciousness an echo of Akhmatova:
There is no Guernica
No-one has ever heard of the Swastika
Somewhere else all the smashed eggs are being put back together again
all the broken children are being remade
The drunks have stopped drinking and taken up yoga
The boys have stopped crashing their cars
foxes escape unhurt from their traps
and the snow is no longer spotted with blood
You can read the entire poem here, and decide for yourself, but in theory there is no reason why we can't remix any poem to suit ourselves. Splicing, chopping, changing, reversing -there is nothing new or offensive in readers allowing themselves such a privilege.
I ask you again
What the fuck is silence;
And who has ever heard
The dead requesting it?
....
and historically
the wild plots hatched by super-activists
saintly types
with a cold fire in their bellies
and a stone in their hearts
and pure in their dedication
detaching themselves
from the wider movement
have backfired rather badly
have blown up in their face
literally
ask the Baader Meinhof
ask the Brigada Rosa
ask the INLA
....
that sets off the hell
which is all that I owe
all that I own
and all that is mine
for unloosing
....
Of course in such a lengthly poem you could quibble with parts; The important metaphor of a creator qua suicide bomber is never quite convincing. In a poem where so much else is vivid, real and stern, it intrudes like pop theology. Perhaps such a metaphor is an accurate reflection of the average philosophical thinking in our culture, and it does convey the sense of violence birthing something new, but to me it seems too light to carry the weight of fury and despair in the rest of the work. Personally I would have ended the narrator's detonation with the earlier lines whose, ending stirs in my consciousness an echo of Akhmatova:
There is no Guernica
No-one has ever heard of the Swastika
Somewhere else all the smashed eggs are being put back together again
all the broken children are being remade
The drunks have stopped drinking and taken up yoga
The boys have stopped crashing their cars
foxes escape unhurt from their traps
and the snow is no longer spotted with blood
You can read the entire poem here, and decide for yourself, but in theory there is no reason why we can't remix any poem to suit ourselves. Splicing, chopping, changing, reversing -there is nothing new or offensive in readers allowing themselves such a privilege.
