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(Review by
James Keery, Poetry Review, London)
Barbed
Wine
Trevor
Joyce
With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold: A Body of Work 1966-2000
[New Writers Press & Shearsman Books 2001 £12.95 E16.45 ISBN 0-907562-29-9]
Verses with
a Refrain from a Solicitor's Letter
As when a faded lock of woman's hair shall cause a man to
cut his throat in a bedroom at five o'clock in the morning . . .
Dear Sir, I was this morning straight
after the news and forecast
hanging from an old appletree in my garden
a small Japanese bell
when I received through the post your importunate
and quite misguided threats
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
An injunction, you say. An obstruction,
you say. You've a lot of chat for someone
that's not even clear who he's talking to.
Does this help: not only have I
not erected any obstruction
in the form of a barbed wire fence or otherwise
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
but I'm attempting today to rest and recover
from the effects of an obstruction in my own passages?
I have, it pains me to have to spit it out, a strangury,
and you've got the wrong man, chief,
I've better blockages to worry about
than the one at the back of some godforsaken hotel in Midleton
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence . . .
[See
full text of poem on the Alsop Review site]
I
like the way the double-take - the poet hanging from an old apple-tree
one moment, but hanging a Japanese bell on it the next - is cued by
the epigraph; I like the way the mordant courtesy, through teeth gritted
in pain, is sustained through eleven stanzas; but most of all I like
the way this extraordinary poem has revealed a new meaning at every
reading so far. It's a draft suicide note, an ironic Immortality Ode,
a Harrowing of the Hell of Writer's Block, a smack at Ulster sectarianism,
a parody of everything from legalese to Celtic myth and a transmutation
of intimate anguish into a brilliant work of art.
'Verses . . .' appeared in stone floods, published in 1995 by
New Writer's Press, which Trevor Joyce co-founded with Michael Smith
in 1967. Joyce published four books in his twenties, culminating in
The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976), a memorable version of
the Gaelic text, Suibhne Gealt. Then nothing for nearly twenty years.
Since stone floods, however, he has been prolific - and it's
almost all in this amazing 'Body of Work', which opens with 'The Poems
of Sweeny, Peregrine: A Working of the Corrupt Irish Text'. Subject
to centuries of pious emendation, this strange 'Text' is itself a delirious
and corrupt 'Body' - a point made, with Celtic nicety, by the interpolation
of a comma in the title. Joyce extends the conspiracy 'to make corruption
of the word outpace that of the flesh', yet his work is Pauline also
in its concern with (im)mortality ('this corruptible shall put on incorruption')
and strewn with tropes from Revelation, including both 'the white horse'
and 'the white stone' ('Owning')
For the record, Joyce's rendition preceded Heaney's (Sweeney Astray,
1983), though Flann O'Brien's preceded both (in At-Swim-Two-Birds,
1939). I prefer to explore its interrelationship with 'Verses . . .',
for between the texts extends a field of force within which all of Joyce's
writing gives intriguing readings. Heaney admits to a sense of identification,
but, despite Joyce's misgivings, it is he who shares - or has come to
share - the pain and alienation of the deranged Celtic 'chief'. That
cunning colloquialism is one of many direct links, including one as
intricate as the Book of Kells:
At this last,
Sweeny tumbled from the tree and fell to the gyves and shackles
of his pursuer.
Locks and fetters were fitted on him and remained, until at last,
through manacle and spancel, sense returned.
Compare
the satirical invocation of Christ in 'Verses . . .':
. . . scattering
from his feet a fine debris
of locks, bolts, spancels, cuffs, gyves, fetters, stocks,
and other miscellaneous hindrances . . .
The
grisly disease of 'strangury', in which 'urine is passed painfully and
in drops', is an allegory of strangulation by another of those 'blockages',
preventing even painful drops of poetry! Deliverance is assured, as
the impedimenta of bourgeois property ('stocks' and shares) and restraint
(medieval 'stocks') are scattered in a glorious cattle-raid on the thesaurus.
I was delighted to learn that a 'spancel' is 'a short, noosed rope used
for fettering the hind legs of a cow during milking'; OED cites the
Irish Hudibras (1669): 'That ugly Monaghan Spanci-all,/ The worst of
all the Devils', appropriate to the image of the Redeemer 'striding
across . . . from some new-harrowed hell'. Retrospectively, Joyce identifies
with the inspired outcast and with his adversary, the scholarly St Ronan.
At the beginning of 'Verses . . .', 'my bell is mute', in ironic contrast
to the objectionable 'racket' of Ronan's 'handbell', but, by the end,
'The bell's transformed' by 'a laurel leaf' in poetic victory. Sweeny
has 'a clenched arse', as if suffering a 'strangury', describes himself
as 'a cave of pain' and drinks the 'barbed-wine' of sloes. 'Verses .
. .' closes with a cutting cliché - 'I trust this terminates
our correspondence, Sir' - but the 'correspondence' with 'Sweeny' is
inexhaustible.
The 'calculus that stopped my flow' is one of the uric acid 'stones'
caused by 'strangury' and the mathematics by which Joyce must earn his
living as a business analyst. Yet it also crystallises a powerful modernist
image of immortality - 'the white stone' itself, 'calculus Minervae'
(as in The White Stones by Prynne), and the stone rolled away
from the tomb of Christ, who will also, in a mythopoeic fantasy, 'allow
Eurydice ascend' and 'remove North/ from the needle'. This pointed phrase
gives a political twist to Joyce's repudiation of 'our friend the illicit/
erector of barbed wire barricades', just as Sweeny rants at those who
have 'thrown up palisades against me' - he was, after all, 'A madman
of Ulster'! In Orphic rage, Joyce ranges an unholy alliance of terrorists
and bourgeois villains - 'our Neighbourhood Watch', 'the polis' and
'this damned notary' - against 'The Christ of Revolution and of Poetry'
(© the late great David Gascoyne).
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