dublinka

I first came across Soundings by James Mc Cabe, in issue 60 of Poetry Ireland. It's a moving lament for a dead emperor (Augustine Martin) - and by inference, an empire: poetry. It opens and closes with a common enough idea, which nevertheless always gets me; that of sculpting and giving extension to words on a blank page, embossing them into something more than their semantic essence, giving them added dimension - a kind of proto-concrete poetry, without the fuss. Elsewhere in the poem, Mc Cabe also skillfully plays with sound and silence, and this I like too, but this solemn and weighty poem, has more to offer that mere device. It invokes Rome, and its decline and fall, and in doing so, the glory of the old poetry, that unsustainable empire, which could not prevent its own death, nor understand why that death was necessary and inevitable. As I interpret it, the narrator, looks out on the monsters, the cold, and the barbarians, not yet realising that it is in fact, a new poetry, not a hostile world, which is massing on the battlefield against him. It is sure to defeat him, and of course it too, in its turn, will be defeated by imaginary monsters, and imaginary silences. And so to me, the poem reveals this truth: Poetry has no right to hegemony nor should it have.

Beginning:

The little battalions of words march out
Onto the white battlefield of silence

Close:

For years like legionnaires
We fought along its cold northern borders.
October like a funeral of leaves
Took you on its shield, our dead emperor,
The wind blowing through our heavy armour,
And the horses of sound on a white field.

Also: Gerald Fiebig has translated it into German. You can find the complete poem there also.