Charles Fort, Kinsale, County Cork. Photo: Simon Grieg
Farmers Cross by Bernard O’Donoghue (Faber, £8.99)
Farmers Cross is O’Donoghue’s seventh full-length collection and his first since the highly praised Outliving, in 2003. Despite winning the Whitbread Prize for Poetry with his 1995 collection, Gunpowder, he has sometimes been regarded as a poet’s poet, a quiet, meditative writer of what he calls “small-scale moral stories” with a passion for the Anglo-Saxon elegies that are his “model for the perfectly formed lyric poem.” But his work found a wider audience with the publication of a Selected Poems, in 2008.
With each new volume of O’Donoghue’s verse, the reader is plunged into territory as vivid as William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire. Yet as familiar as O’Donoghue’s re-imagined corner of rural Ireland may be to those who know it well, its inhabitants remain unknowable, and though the landscape may resemble his native Cork, it is also a universal place, as representative of our own home as it is of the poet’s.
“Of all the many places mentioned in poetry, the exact location of most is not known for certain,” wrote the seventeenth century Japanese poet Basho, an observation that is used by O’Donoghue as his epigraph for Farmers Cross. As we move through the collection, the uncertain nature of place and of home resound strongly. In the opening poem, for example, following a wry recollection of the old licensing law that said only “bona-fide travellers” could get a drink on the Sabbath, the speaker continues:
In the real world, of course, there’s no such person as a Bona-Fide traveller. They will pull the glass out of your hand and order you to go back to the place you came from, whatever you might have called that at the start
O’Donoghue evokes the mixed emotions that the notion of home can bring. In this case a sense of being stifled, of being far from “the world’s wonders,” is mingled with the sense of belonging that binds us to a place, even unto death. This love of home is also illuminated in a poem that uses the imagery and characters of the old Icelandic Njáls Saga and combines these with the commonplace experiences of our own time:
Gunnar too would have fled Iceland, never to return, but that his horse tripped in a hole and threw him to the ground from where he gazed in all directions at the shining meadowsand exclaimed aloud ‘How beautiful it is!’He could never leave it then; but it also meanthe’d chosen to remain where death closed in.
It comes as no surprise, of course, that O’Donoghue, whose body of work includes a modern version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, should draw upon Old English and medieval traditions. Still, it is hard not to be astonished by his version of “The Wanderer,” an Old English poem about a journeying outcast. O’Donoghue draws parallels between the exiled narrator of the original and a contemporary depressive, afflicted even when he is in his own bed:
How often have I woken upto feel the weight still unliftedby the dawn chorus. And I don’t darechange the medicine, or go backto the doctor in case he tells me‘pull yourself together’. Oh I knowit’s the thing to do, to pretendthere’s nothing wrong, however badyou feel.
Taking on one of the great elegiac poems of English literature is a risky project, but O’Donoghue carries it off effortlessly, reminding us that one of his many gifts is an ability to reconnect the reader, emotionally as well as intellectually, with the past. He makes a reader feel at home there. It is a gift he has developed carefully over the years, never making too much of it, and sometimes undermining it with self-deprecation, or the kind of canny humour that leavens a poem like “Educated Flanagan,” whose autodidact protagonist moves from one building site to the next with his box of dog-eared books, his love of learning inexplicable:
Where did it start?A Christian Brother, or a spoilt priestwho realised he had no vocation?Or just a man who by some electric pulsetuned in across the centuries to findthe wavelength for Homer and the Golden Legend.
O’Donoghue’s sympathies are as much with a wanderer like Flanagan, who carries his home in a tattered box, as with the good people who remain, till death closes in. This tension informs his best work. It infuses the poems with urgency and a longing for a culture in which home is always negotiable: a debatable land whose exact location we never quite know for sure.
Farmers Cross by Bernard O’Donoghue (Faber, £8.99)
Farmers Cross is O’Donoghue’s seventh full-length collection and his first since the highly praised Outliving, in 2003. Despite winning the Whitbread Prize for Poetry with his 1995 collection, Gunpowder, he has sometimes been regarded as a poet’s poet, a quiet, meditative writer of what he calls “small-scale moral stories” with a passion for the Anglo-Saxon elegies that are his “model for the perfectly formed lyric poem.” But his work found a wider audience with the publication of a Selected Poems, in 2008.
With each new volume of O’Donoghue’s verse, the reader is plunged into territory as vivid as William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire. Yet as familiar as O’Donoghue’s re-imagined corner of rural Ireland may be to those who know it well, its inhabitants remain unknowable, and though the landscape may resemble his native Cork, it is also a universal place, as representative of our own home as it is of the poet’s.
“Of all the many places mentioned in poetry, the exact location of most is not known for certain,” wrote the seventeenth century Japanese poet Basho, an observation that is used by O’Donoghue as his epigraph for Farmers Cross. As we move through the collection, the uncertain nature of place and of home resound strongly. In the opening poem, for example, following a wry recollection of the old licensing law that said only “bona-fide travellers” could get a drink on the Sabbath, the speaker continues:
In the real world, of course, there’s no such person as a Bona-Fide traveller. They will pull the glass out of your hand and order you to go back to the place you came from, whatever you might have called that at the start
O’Donoghue evokes the mixed emotions that the notion of home can bring. In this case a sense of being stifled, of being far from “the world’s wonders,” is mingled with the sense of belonging that binds us to a place, even unto death. This love of home is also illuminated in a poem that uses the imagery and characters of the old Icelandic Njáls Saga and combines these with the commonplace experiences of our own time:
Gunnar too would have fled Iceland, never to return, but that his horse tripped in a hole and threw him to the ground from where he gazed in all directions at the shining meadowsand exclaimed aloud ‘How beautiful it is!’He could never leave it then; but it also meanthe’d chosen to remain where death closed in.
It comes as no surprise, of course, that O’Donoghue, whose body of work includes a modern version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, should draw upon Old English and medieval traditions. Still, it is hard not to be astonished by his version of “The Wanderer,” an Old English poem about a journeying outcast. O’Donoghue draws parallels between the exiled narrator of the original and a contemporary depressive, afflicted even when he is in his own bed:
How often have I woken upto feel the weight still unliftedby the dawn chorus. And I don’t darechange the medicine, or go backto the doctor in case he tells me‘pull yourself together’. Oh I knowit’s the thing to do, to pretendthere’s nothing wrong, however badyou feel.
Taking on one of the great elegiac poems of English literature is a risky project, but O’Donoghue carries it off effortlessly, reminding us that one of his many gifts is an ability to reconnect the reader, emotionally as well as intellectually, with the past. He makes a reader feel at home there. It is a gift he has developed carefully over the years, never making too much of it, and sometimes undermining it with self-deprecation, or the kind of canny humour that leavens a poem like “Educated Flanagan,” whose autodidact protagonist moves from one building site to the next with his box of dog-eared books, his love of learning inexplicable:
Where did it start?A Christian Brother, or a spoilt priestwho realised he had no vocation?Or just a man who by some electric pulsetuned in across the centuries to findthe wavelength for Homer and the Golden Legend.
O’Donoghue’s sympathies are as much with a wanderer like Flanagan, who carries his home in a tattered box, as with the good people who remain, till death closes in. This tension informs his best work. It infuses the poems with urgency and a longing for a culture in which home is always negotiable: a debatable land whose exact location we never quite know for sure.
