Cicely Herbert reviews Die Walküre from Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden reviews Richard Wagner Acollection which begins with a poem entitled ‘Home’ might seem to promise a comfortable, perhaps comforting, read. This is not what is on offer here.
Kathleen McPhilemy knows that home is not necessarily ‘a place of safety,’ simply by virtue of her own origins in Northern Ireland. She also knows that ‘home’ in the sense of a country or culture, is something one can grow out of, or be thrown out of.
The child excited by the Orange Order march becomes the adult who recognises in the intransigence of Unionist politics the same mechanisms that created Apartheid (‘The Twelfth of July 1996’, p.42). Linked by a metaphorical umbilical cord to Ulster, in spite of being settled in England, she is able to see how various other segments of the British population are for ever prevented from ‘being at home’; the asylum seekers imprisoned at Campsfield House (‘Paying for Christmas’ p.31); the students whose Middle Eastern parentage earns them the ironic – but not totally ironic - term ‘terrorist’ (‘GNVQ Student’, p.30); the boys who grow up seeing ‘father with no job ... mother with two’ (‘Redundancies’, p.28). All sympathetically reflected on, among poems that also look into the writer’s relationship with houses, animals, family and womanhood.
In the second section, which begins with ‘Talking Politics’, the focus is exclusively on Ireland; the Ireland in which the assassinations of a civil rights lawyer and an investigative journalist remain, over years, unsolved; the Ireland in which entrenched positions are held through lifetimes and discussion is used simply as a means of digging oneself in more deeply.
But also an Ireland remembered from childhood summer holidays; the beauty of a shore-line looking out towards the mist-shrouded Isle of Man. Abeauty inevitably tainted by adult knowledge of ‘the headlands – where drunken boys chase and beat up strangers /whose skin or voice is wrong’ (‘In the Clutch of Manannan’, p56). The poems in these first two sections have the flow and immediacy which is the gift to the poet of immediate, personal experience.
In the third section of the book she sets herself the challenge of dealing with events experienced only through television and newspapers. For these she looks to other texts to forge an appropriate language.
In the Suite for Palestine, she takes as a starting point the poetry of Paul Celan, and uses images from various of his poems to ponder on three paradigmatic existential dilemmas; that of the German-speaking Jew; of the person who is both Irish and British; and of the Palestinian. Whether the pinning down of Celan’s gnomic and allusive phrases to these specific situations can be entirely justified remains an open question, but there is no doubt that the inspiration of his language lends wings to this poet’s own. There are some remarkably strong short lyrical poems in this section; ‘The Sandbed’ (p.65) - inspired by Celan’s ‘Coagula’ – being a particular example:
What else coagulates?... like that line of tanks in the desert war filled with wasted, molten conscripts staining the sand in their red-hot finality.
In the Sequence for Iraq it is Biblical language, via Christian liturgy, which provides both imagery and form. This series of ten poems is structured around lines from the Latin text of the Tenebrae Responsories, the Catholic ‘service of shadows’ which is performed over the three days preceding Easter Sunday, with the candles in the church being progressively extinguished until all is dark. Atelling metaphor in itself for Iraq, but made more poignant by the poem’s reminder that, ‘After twenty-five years of darkness..../ the light when it came was blinding’ (p72). The Biblical references skilfully weave into the scenario of the recent invasion; ‘there is a multiplication of Marys/ weeping at the doors of the morgues’ (p75), resulting in something that has the overall feel of a Psalmic lament.
The Lion in the Forest is a profoundly felt and thoughtthrough book, which attempts to do justice to complexities (political and personal) and avoids the simple answer, excuse or accusation. The writing has an admirable clarity and economy. It is a moving example of the capacity of poetry to cast light on shadowy places.
Mary Michaels reviews The Lion in the Forest by Kathleen McPhilemy, Katabasis 2004, 85 pages, £7.95, ISBN 0904872408.