Out of the sluggish, clogged-up city

Coming to the end of the year, I find myself thinking about this blog.  Whilst I still enjoy writing here, I think I will keep posts short and less frequent in future.  This is partly because I've noticed (if Blogger 'stats' are to be believed) that readership has declined, which is hardly surprising given how much is now out there on the Internet.  I started Some Landscapes before Twitter and Instagram. People clearly like rapidly flicking through photos and pithy messages, rather than reading whole paragraphs.  This is a pity because I have found it is hard to say anything useful on Twitter without recourse to a whole thread.  Whether or not people read 'Some Landscapes', it remains useful to me as a kind of notebook.  And if I worried about readers, I  would not write anything spontaneous and unresearched. Here for example, I want to say something about Rainer Maria Rilke, aware as I do so that the world is full of German literature experts who know far more about his poetry than me...

The Poetry Foundation website refers to the turn towards realism in Rilke's New Poems (1907).

'The major influence behind this work was Rilke’s association with the famous French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. Working as Rodin’s secretary from 1905 to 1906, Rilke gained a greater appreciation of his work ethic. More importantly, however, the poet’s verses became objective, evolving from an impressionistic, personal vision to the representation of this vision with impersonal symbolism. He referred to this type of poetry as Dinggedichte (thing poems).'

There are many 'things' in these poems - in the second part of the book, for example, he writes about a bed, a sundial, a dog, an alchemist, a stylite, a blind man, a prophet and an archaic torso of Apollo (a famous poem that I've referred to here before).  How, though, to write about the 'thingness' of a whole landscape?  His poem 'Landschaft', which Stephen Cohn translates as 'Townscape' consists of three stanzas, each like a painting. In the first, the 'orange flames of sunset' turn the city into a scene of destruction; in the second, there is a healing and quenching as the sky turns blue; and in the third it is night and the buildings are silent and pale, suddenly illuminated by a shaft of moonlight that resembles the sword of an archangel.  The poem that follows 'Townscape' relates to another scene in Italy, but takes a more surprising approach.  When you first read 'Roman Campagna', you expect it to describe the emotions of the poet looking at the view or the feelings of somebody present in the landscape.  Instead, Rilke take the point of view of the road itself that leads from Rome up into the hills.

Here, to avoid the copyright problem of quoting a whole poem, I've cut the poem in three and provided three different translators' words: 

Out of the sluggish, clogged-up city, which
Would rather sleep on, undisturbed, and dream
Of its soaring baths, the road to the fever marsh –
The Appian tomb-road – heads past each last farm
And farmhouse, out under the malign
Gaze of windows that fasten on its back, [...]                           - Seamus Heaney

[...]  as on it goes, wrecking things left and right,
till it is panting, pleading, out of sight,
then quickly lifts its blankness to the vast,
clear sky.  [...]                                                                            - Len Krisack

[...] While it beckons

the aqueducts approaching in the distance,
heaven rewards it with an emptiness
which will outlast it, which will never end.                               - Stephen Cohn

What interests me here is the way this road actually moves over the course of the poem and is therefore able to convey a sense of landscape.  This is obviously quite an extreme form of personification, as the road pants, pleads and glances around itself.  But there are often touches of personification in Rilke's poetry - that archaic torso of Apollo, for example, appears to see you and in doing so radiates its stern warning: 'you must change your life'.  Years later, in the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke wrote a lovely poem about a fountain, which speaks through water brought from the Apennines, into the ear of marble basin.  'Just with herself alone / does she talk this way. And if a jug slips in, / she feels that you are interrupting her.'

Sweeney's Bothy

Sweeney's Bothy

(photo: Hannah Devereux)

One of Alec Finlay recent projects, Sweeney's Bothy, was built last year on the Isle of Eigg as part of The Bothy Project.  'The bothy belongs within a new contemporary movement – identified by Finlay as ‘hutopian’ – in which artists create huts and viewing platforms in the Scottish wilderness, proposing them as ecological, technological, architectural, and social models.'  Some interesting artists and writers have already stayed there, as you can see from the Bothy blog: Kathleen Jamie, Hannah Devereux, Oran Wishart.

'The bothy is based on Finlay’s design, inspired by the 7th Century Gaelic King Sweeney (Shuibhne). Cursed, Sweeney fled into a wilderness, surviving for a decade among the trees and birds, living on sorrel, berries, sloes and acorns, and enduring ‘the pain of his bed there on the top of a tall ivy-grown hawthorn in the glen, every twist that he would turn sending showers of hawy thorns into his flesh’ (Flann O’Brien, At Swim, Two Birds). Sweeney’s poetry from that period describes the austere beauty of the remote glen where he lived naked, communed with animals, and existed beyond convention. The myth of Sweeney conceals remnants of shamanic animism within pre-Christian culture. Like Han Shan, Basho, and Thoreau, Sweeney is a visionary hermit rejecting ‘feather beds and painted rooms,’ engaging with nature, the irrational, overturning accepted knowledge.'

View from Sweeney's Bothy with thorn bowl

Residents at Sweeney's Bothy can enjoy 'sorrel, berries, sloes and acorn' from bowls with a scratched thorn decoration, made by my wife.  The original poem Buile Shuibhne gives a vivid sense of the way Sweeney was able to live off the land.  I have written here before about the wonderful English version by Seamus Heaney, which was inspired by Kenneth Jackson's earlier translations.  Jackson's first book, Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry (1935), has recently been reprinted and it contains this marvellous description of natural foods in Irish poetry (the numbers refer to poems translated in the first part of the book).

'The variety of the plants and animals found in the countryside and eaten by the early Irish on the testimony of the poems is quite astonishing to a twentieth-century town-dweller, to whom "living on berries and nuts" seems such an improbable kind of existence.  No. V mentions apples, yew-berries, rowan-berries, sloes, whortleberries, crowberries, strawberries, haws, hazel-nuts, mast, acorns, pignuts, water-cress, herbs, wild marjoram, onions, leeks, eggs, honey, salmon, trout, water, milk and beer.  No. XVI speaks of deer, swine, mast, hazel-nuts, blaeberries, blackberries, sloes, trout.  No. XV has cress, brooklime, mast, trout, fish, wild swine, stags, fawns.  In no. XIX are blaeberries, blackberries, apples, sloes, strawberries, acorns, nuts, pig fat, porpoise steak, birds, venison, badger fat, fawns, salmon, fish.  No. XVII mentions blackberries, haws, hazel-nuts, bramble shoots, "smooth shoots", garlic, cress, meadhbhán, dilisk, birds, martens, woodcocks, otters, salmon, eels, fish.  Suibhne Geilt gives his "nightly sustenance" as blaeberries, apples, berries, blackberries, raspberries, haws, cress, watercress, brooklime, saxifrage, seaweed, herbs, sorrel, wood-sorrel, garlic, wild onions and acorns ... The diet is then one of flesh of animals and birds, fruit, berries, nuts, herbs, shoots, and waterplants, eggs, honey and fish, an impressive and intriguing menu.'

Earlier this year the Corbel Stone Press published Alec's Sweeney on Eigg which 'leaps off' from Seamus Heaney's version of  Buile Shuibhne.  It imagines the outcast Suibhne wandering as far as the island of Eigg.  Fleeing over crags and burns, sheltering among sheep, passing over moss and moorgrass, through birch and tares, blackthorn and brambles, he comes at last to a stop. 

I will sing
with peewits, cuckoos, & throstles
making the moor ring
from Druim na Croise.

I will hide Rum
with my hand
and stroke the fine down
on my arms.

Then, when the sunsets
drive me mad
with their beauty,
Suibhne will be gone.

The Burren

Seamus Heaney has died and, if I may borrow some links from Arts & Letters Daily, you can read tributes everywhere: NY Times, Irish Times, Boston Globe, Telegraph, Dan Chiasson, Chronicle of Higher Ed, Poetry, Sean Brady, Daily Beast, Guardian, LA Times, Henri Cole, Boston Review...  Back in January I wrote here about the treatment of landscape in some of his poems.  One of these was  'Postscript', which describes a drive to the Flaggy Shore: 'the ocean on one side is wild / With foam and glitter, / and inland among stones / The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit / By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans.'  A fortnight ago we were on this very road, led by Heaney's poem in the hope of experiencing a landscape epiphany, although when we stopped the car (ignoring the poet's advice) it was spitting with rain and the swans looked forlorn under dark clouds, floating around on the muddy brown water.  But our few days in the Burren also yielded moments of joyous surprise, like the realisation that we had a sunlit limestone pavement all to ourselves, stretching away to the sea, a moment to 'catch the heart off guard and blow it open.'

The Burren, as Robert Macfarlane says in The Wild Places, 'rises, silver, in the north of County Clare, on the mid-west coast of Ireland.  Its name comes from the Gaelic boireann, meaning 'rocky place', and the region is so called because most of its surface is made up of smoothed limestone, intercut with bands of clay and shale.'  I think one of the reasons we went there this summer was that it has featured so often on this blog, as the subject of film, art, music and literature.  I thought therefore I would return here to those old posts, beginning with the most recent, Field Notes, on the writings of Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson.  There I mentioned The Flowering Rock, 'a new collection of poems describing the landscape of the Burren: madder and thrift, eyebright and hart's tongue living in the seams between the shattered rocks; beneath them, arterial passages where the 'wailing notes / of water and wind' create 'hollow songs / of hollow hills.''  As I write this I'm listening to 'Of the Sea' from Verse of Birds, the album that was composed in response to this landscape.

Last October, in Wild Track, I talked about Pat Collins' film Silence in which the protagonist, a field recordist, sets up his microphone at Mullaghmore (above) before moving on to locations further north.  The film recently came out on general release and has received muted praised, although Philip French, in one of his last reviews for the Observer, saw nothing in it that that would stick in his memory.  The most fatuous comment I've seen was the FT''s suggestion that you 'think of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, then imagine it refilmed by a team of Trappist monks.'  Look instead at the BFI site, which has a Sight and Sound review by Mark Sinker and an appreciative article by Geoff Andrew. 
 

In a post about Jeremy Deller's inflatable Stonehenge last summer I mentioned that there had been some controversy over its resemblance to 'a 2010 work by Jim Ricks, the Poulnabrone Bouncy Dolmen, a twice-scale replica of the megalithic portal tomb in the Burren; but it all got sorted out amicably.  Perhaps we need more of these structures, hyperreal bouncy simulacra at every prehistoric site, leaving the actual stones to become poetic, overgrown ruins again.'  As you can see (below) we got to see the real Dolmen, albeit roped off.  Running round it proved almost as much fun as the bouncy Stonehenge, although it is easy to lose your footing among the clints and grykes (there were tears before we left).

 
There is another passing reference to this part of the world in my post Theoryscapes, describing a seminar on landscape theory that was held in 2006 at the Burren College of Art.  The focus of discussion was on culture and geography generally, rather than the specific qualities of the Burren.  However, it is relevant to distinctions between land and landscape: the participants recognised that there has been a long history of habitation here - it is not simply a starkly beautiful wilderness - and that this part of Ireland has been important in resisting British rule and preserving the language. Nevertheless the seminar leader, art writer James Elkins, detected in his colleagues an intoxication in their experience of the Burren that he ascribed to 'our not-so-secret addiction' to 'ideas of landscape articulated by the romantics, and more directly to second-, third-generation, regional, local and belated romantic Western landscape painters, filmmakers and photographers.'

Rebecca Solnit was one of the participants in that seminar, but she had visited the area previously, as described in A Book of Migrations.  On that earlier trip she couldn't fail to be struck by the Burren's strange hills, resembling topographical maps, 'eroded into ledges or sills as regular as elevation lines'.  However, she obviously had miserable weather and felt that the influence of tourism and the efforts of environmental campaigners was turning an old 'local' place into something 'almost exclusively exotic'.  In my post I quoted what she had to say about the Cliffs of Moher, just to the south of the Burren, seeing there, 'a deeper blue than my own churning gray Pacific, blue as though different dreams had been dumped into it, blue as ink.  I imagined filling a fountain pen with it and wondered what one would write with that ocean.'  This passage had slipped my mind when we visited the cliffs, but I was so struck by the colour of the Atlantic there that I took a photograph of it...

Finally, back in 2007, in The Wildness of the Gryke, I quoted a review of Robert Macfarlane's Wild Places and made a connection with Auden and his poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’ (1948).  In his chapter on the Burren, Macfarlane talks about the special qualities of its rock.  'Limestone's solubility in water means that any fault-lines in the original rock get slowly deepened by a process of soft liquid wear.  In this way, the form into which limestone grows over time is determined by its first flaws. For Auden, this was a human as well as a geological quality: he found in limestone an honesty - an acknowledgement that we are as defined by our faults as by our substance.'

All photographs from our holiday, August 2013

A banked-up, soothing, wooded haze

Seamus Heaney's first foray into translation, Sweeney Astray, published thirty years ago, was a version of Buile Shuibhne, which survives in seventeenth century manuscripts but probably written five hundred years earlier.  It tells the story of an early seventh century Irish king driven mad by the curse of a priest after the battle of Mag Rath (Moira), who wanders for years in the wilderness, lamenting his fate and composing poems in celebration of nature.  I find it tempting to read this not just as a version of the Wild Man legend, but as a distant memory of a real poet of landscape; there is a ninth century law tract mentioning stories and poems composed by Suibhne Geilt and another fragment that may be older which includes a nature poem attributed to him.  Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson’s wonderful anthology A Celtic Miscellany features several extracts from Buile Shuibhne alongside other early Irish nature poetry, remarkable for its freshness. He says that 'comparing these poems with the medieval European lyric is like comparing the emotions of an imaginative adolescent who has just grown up to realise the beauty of nature, with those of an old man who has been familiar with it for a lifetime and is no longer able to think of it except in literary terms.'  It was reading Jackson's book that first got Seamus Heaney interested in the Sweeney story.

When Heaney began work on Sweeney Astray his instinct was 'to snatch certain moments of definition and intensity out of their place in the story and to present them as lyric poems in their own right.'  I am glad he didn't, because it is good to read the vivid descriptions of nature in their context: the stanzas praising 'all the trees in Ireland', for example, are prompted by Sweeney's feelings of homesickness, brought on by the bellow of a stag, and they give way to memories of his flight from the battlefield, overtaking a startled fawn and riding him from mountain to mountain on 'a high demented spree.'  Nevertheless, for Heaney 'the hankering to skim off certain favourite lines persisted' and when he saw the photographs Rachel Giese had taken around Sweeney's old kingdom of Dal-Arie, he finally felt 'emboldened to snip lyric leaves off the old narrative boughs.'  The result was a collaboration, Sweeney's Flight (1993) that intersperses their photographs and poetry, as well as including a full and revised version of Sweeney Astray.  My copy above is turned to a page with a few words uttered by Sweeney when he is about to leave Ailsa Grag, a bleak island in the outer Firth of Clyde, and is longing for the consolation of woodlands.  'I imagine treelines / far away, / a banked-up, soothing / wooded haze.'

Stepping Stones

I've been reading the late Dennis O'Driscoll's Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney.  Among the interesting things I learnt was that Heaney's poem 'The Mud Vision', in which a strange religious apparition briefly visits modern secular Ireland, was partly inspired by Richard Long.  As Heaney explains in another interview, 'the actual mud-vision idea came from seeing a work by the English artist Richard Long, a big flower-face on a wall, made up entirely of muddy handprints. It began as a set of six or eight petals of mud and then moved out and out concentrically until it became this huge sullied rose window.'  Another strange image - a tree-clock made of tin cans - appears in the poem 'Fosterling', although this was not inspired by a piece of land art.  In Stepping Stones, Heaney recalls that it came from an old story about a Faustian pact: a band of tinkers built a fantastic clock in a tree and set it to the wrong time to fool the devil when he returned for the local people's souls.  Such marvels took Heaney many years to work into his poetry.  Growing up he inhabited a 'lowlands of the mind', a silted place where poetry was 'sluggish in the doldrums of what happens'. It took a long time 'for air to brighten, / Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.' 

 

I've embedded above a brief YouTube clip showing Dennis O'Driscoll interviewing Seamus Heaney and below I've set down a few observations on five landscape-related Heaney poems, with comments derived from Stepping Stones:

• 'The Peninsula'   Heaney mentions in Stepping Stones that this poem (in his second collection, Door into the Dark) was written after a drive to the Ards peninsula in County Down. In it he writes about the way landscape can restore the ability to really see the world when it seems there is 'nothing more to say.'  Heaney imagines driving all day around the peninsula, a 'land without marks', until dusk arrives, when 'horizons drink down sea and hill.'  Then, heading home, details begin to emerge in memory - 'a glazed foreshore and silhouetted log' for example.  Such an experience makes it possible to 'uncode all landscapes / by this: things founded clean on their own shapes, / water and ground in their extremity.'

• 'Bogland'  "I was putting my right leg into the trousers when I got the first line," says Heaney in Stepping Stones.  We have this pair of trousers to thank for some of Heaney's most famous poems.  "From the moment I wrote it, I felt promise in 'Bogland'  Without having any clear notion of where it would lead or even whether I would go back to the subject, I realised that new co-ordinates had been established."  This last poem in Door into the Dark would open the door to others in which the bog and its Iron Age victims serve partly as metaphor for events in Northern Ireland: 'Tollund Man' in Wintering Out and then the poems of North: 'Kinship', 'Punishment', 'Strange Fruit'... The drowned bodies are inseparable from their landscape: the Bog Queen preserved on the gravel bottom, 'between heathery levels / and glass-toothed stone'; the Grauballe Man, who 'lies / on a pillow of turf / and seems to weep / the black river of himself'.

• 'Gifts of Rain'   In Stepping Stones Heaney is asked about a new interest in the semantic and phonetic in his fourth collection, Wintering Out, where poems take the sound of words as their subject.  I've described one of these, 'Anahorish', before, but there is also 'Toome' and 'Broagh', in which the rain beating on 'windy boortrees / and rhubarb-blades' ends suddenly like the word itself, with that gh that strangers find 'difficult to manage.' 'Gifts of Rain' describes a flooded landscape and the swollen river Moyola 'harping on / its gravel beds.'  This too is a phonetic place poem: 'The tawny guttural water / spells itself: Moyola / is its own score and consort, / bedding the locale in the utterance...'  

• 'Höfn'   Heaney is periodically drawn into politics by O'Driscoll's questions and this poem, with its aerial view of a melting glacier in Iceland, is the pretext for a question on the environment (Heaney says he inclines more to lament than protest).  'Höfn' focuses on Heaney's primal fear of the glacier as it looked that day, an 'undead grey-gristed earth-pelt', so cold that it would 'deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth'.  Heaney is of course 'a man of the soil' and tells O'Driscoll that he has rarely felt as exposed as he did that day over the "stony grey scar of ice."

• 'Postscript'   This is the last poem in The Spirit Level and is similar to 'The Peninsula', but much more specific: the drive is 'out west / into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, / in September or October, when the wind / and the light are working off each other.'  The poet observes swans on the surface of a lake but is content to drive on rather than park and try to 'capture' the moment.  The 'known and strange things' will, he realises, pass by and through him like the wind, catching 'the heart off guard' and blowing it open. Asked about this poem in Stepping Stones, Heaney says that it came to him quickly, as he recollected a windy day on Galway Bay: "we drove on into this glorious exultation of air and sea and swans."  You can hear him read the poem in the clip below.

The Woods of Raasay

Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn have now reached Raasay on the Road North.  Their most recent post pays tribute to Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain), the great poet of Raasay, and his poem 'Hallaig'.  They include a map, a Borgesian signpost and three hokku labels pinned to trees - 'she is birch', 'she is rowan', 'she is hazel'.  These  refer to the lines 'tha i 'na beithe, 'na calltuinn, / 'na caorunn dhìreach sheang ùir'.  Maclean translated these lines into English as 'she is a birch, a hazel, / a straight slender young rowan' and Seamus Heaney's version has 'A flickering birch, a hazel, / A trim, straight sapling rowan'.

In a 2002 lecture Heaney wrote about how impressed he had been by 'Hallaig', a poem that arose 'out of MacLean's sense of belonging to a culture that is doomed but that he will never deny. It's as local as anything in Thomas Hardy and as lambent as Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus'. 'Hallaig' is a landscape emptied by the Highland clearances.  The poem is 'set at twilight, in the Celtic twilight, in effect, at that time of day when the land of the living and the land of the dead become pervious to each other, when the deserted present becomes populous with past lives, when the modern conifers make way for the native birch and rowan, and when the birch and rowan in their turn metamorphose into a procession of girls walking together out of the 19th-century hills. The poem tells us that in Hallaig there is something to protect, and goes on to show that it is indeed being protected, which is the reason for the uncanny joy a reader feels at the end.'

'Hallaig' is this month's featured poem on the Sorley MacLean Trust website.  They quote John MacInnes, who says that in 'Hallaig' 'both the Gaelic sense of landscape, idealised in terms of society, and the Romantic sense of communion with Nature, merge in a single vision, a unified sensibility.’  The same could be said of another Sorley MacLean poem, 'Coilltean Ratharsair' ('The Woods of Raasay'), which begins like a Gaelic version of The Prelude  (as Terry Gifford says in Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry).  In its early verses the poem recalls the woods in motion, in blossom, in sunlight and shade, many-coloured, many-winded, serene and humming with song.  But the imagery becomes darker ('O the wood! / How much there is in her dark depths!') and there is a growing recognition that idealised woods are as unattainable as perfect love.  'What is the meaning of worshipping Nature / because the wood is part of it?'  In the end, wood itself is simple - 'the way of sap is known' - but 'there is no knowledge of the course of the crooked veering of the heart' or 'of the final end of each pursuit.'

Anahorish

I've talked before about the way the names of certain landscapes have particular resonance for poets and artists (e.g. Edward Thomas). In his poem 'Anahorish', Seamus Heaney says that this place name evokes the past - 'after-image of lamps / swung through the yards / on winter evenings'. In describing its physical characteristics, he refers to the meaning of Anahorish in Irish, a "place of clear water". But interestingly he goes further still, likening the structure of the word itself to the landscape it describes: 'Anahorish, soft gradient / of consonant, vowel-meadow...' There's an interesting post by Thomas O'Grady which discusses Heaney's use of place names. He mentions 'Anahorish' and highlights the poem 'Broagh' (riverbank), in which 'the shower / gathering in your heelmark / was the black O / in Broagh.'

The writer I most associate with place names is Proust. In Swanns Way his narrator remembers that 'I did not then represent to myself towns, landscapes, historic buildings, as pictures more or less attractive, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different from all the rest, a thing for which my soul was athirst, by the knowledge of which it would benefit. How much more individual still was the character that they assumed from being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper names such as people have... The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most longed to visit, after reading the Chartreuse, seeming to me compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, if anyone were to speak of such or such a house in Parma, in which I should be lodged, he would give me the pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, and that bore no relation to the houses in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the aid of that heavy syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air stirred, and of all that I had made it assume of Stendhalian sweetness and the reflected hue of violets.'