The Voyage of St Brendan by A.B. Jackson. Bloodaxe Books, Hexham 2021. Pbk. 80 pages. £10.99.
This ebullient rendering of the story of St Brendan’s voyage may have an Irish protagonist but it is very much part of medieval European tradition; A.B. Jackson’s main source is a modern prose translation of the Middle Dutch Van Sente Brandane written around 1400 AD. This version differs from the early ninth century Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, produced by Irish monks; in the Latin story, the motive for the voyage is to find the Island of Promise, whereas here St Brendan undertakes the journey as a penance for burning a book of wondrous tales. He is told by an angel: ‘Abbot, hear my curse: / you’ll sail abroad, prove wonderstuff on Earth.’
Jackson links the story to other wondrous Polar journeys, particularly the voyage of Tim Severin who in 1976 sailed from the west of Ireland to Newfoundland in a wooden-framed, leather-skinned boat in order to prove that St Brendan could have crossed the Atlantic and might have been, as legend has it, the first European to reach the American continent. A first draft of this poem formed part of the poet’s thesis for his Ph.D in Creative Writing, The Polar Sublime in Contemporary Arctic and Antarctic Exploration.
Perhaps it is the openness to wonder and joyous sublimity which attracted Jackson to this text. A succession of tall tales, including landing on an island that is really a whale, encountering a hairy mermaid and meeting a sea-serpent, it nevertheless conveys the experience of arctic adventure. There is a chilling (in every sense) description in ‘The Coagulated Sea’ of an escape from arctic ice, graveyard of vessels whose hulls have been ‘crushed/ by glittering mouthparts.’ The grotesque metaphor of ice as a jaw continues as the crew steer their boat away:
'They lever the boat loose tooth from gum Eastwards! Turn east! cries trembling Brendan.'
We see here one among many of Jackson’s poetic forms and his liberal, almost Byronic attitude to rhyme. His source text was written in rhyming couplets, which the poet recognised would not work in a contemporary poem. He found his syllabic forms in early Irish poetry and justifies the inclusion of prose passages as also characteristic of early Irish literature. Be that as it may, the disjunctive effect is highly successful. His jump-cut technique allows him to move without too much explanation from one sticky situation to the next; for example, the 5 syllable quatrains with an alternating rhyme scheme of ‘The Great Fish’, where Brendan has inadvertently landed on a whale, shifts to quatrains of rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter in the story of the hairy ‘mermayd’ who ‘gurgles profoundly’. The variety of forms is carried by language showing the poet clearly enjoying himself. He slips easily from high to low register, as in his description of Brendan’s chariot, where epic compound adjectives culminate in the colloquial, jokey Irish ‘shebang’:
'His chariot had an admirable rumble, a high-born squeak, a deer-bolting rattle, the wheels iron-shod, the shafts holly-poles, the whole shebang drawn forth by oxen.'
The description of Quilty, Brendan’s pet fly, comically combines a proverbial-sounding metaphor and bathetic matter-of-factness: ‘some said, [it was] any fly whatsoever that flitted through Brendan’s day, due to the cracked milk pail of memory and the lack of distinguishing features in houseflies.’ With the fluency of a story-teller, Jackson moves easily between horrific highpoints and the continuing narrative. In ‘Devils’ Mountain’ a monk, who has attempted to steal a wondrous bridle, is pursued by demons: ‘the mountain spews forth/ a swarm of demons //Their clouds break/ a rain of arrows/ gobbets of lava/ livid coals’. An energetic resumption of the voyage follows, in prose: ‘The Cog beetled on, under full sail.’ Colloquial and comic, ‘beetled’ conveys the small size and rounded shape of the craft.
The poem begins with the burning of a book of wonders and ends with the completion of a new one, written by Brendan’s scribe, Brother Aidan. Brendan and his crew are allowed to return home only when they have experienced and chronicled adventures as great and unbelievable as anything Brendan had read. Brendan was punished for rejecting the extraordinary and miraculous as ‘figments, folderols’. Jackson’s relish in language and celebration of wonder reasserts the importance of imagination and storytelling. The book is delightful and the text is admirably illustrated by Kathleen Neeley’s linocuts.
Kathleen McPhilemy’s most recent poetry collection is The Lion in the Forest (Katabasis, London 2004). She lives in Oxford.