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Dog Colars Cartoon StripSource: Fortnight, No. 222 (Jun. 24 - Jul. 7, 1985), pp. 14-15Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25550497 .

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^^ i BOOKS SERMONS IN BRICKS AND MORTAR

James Simmons Richard Murphy

The Price of Stone Faber and Faber, ?4.00

RICHARD MURPHY is a cool, deter mined technician. He is most at home cel

ebrating skills of sailing and house

building. Handsome and apparently well

heeled, he has been able to indulge a taste for the company of Irish peasants and gyp sies. He has built and sailed boats and built houses and written about them knowingly. Some saw an epic quality in The Last Gal way Hooker. It was an attractive, well

crafted poem, objective and a pleasure to

read; but perhaps a little thin on feeling and character for an epic.

The Battle of Aughrim was an interest

ing sort of documentary drama in which

Murphy presented his ancestors and a key moment in Irish history. It is eleven years since his last book, High Island, which had at least one very striking poem, 'Seals

Mating'. The new book is if anything more

low-key than his previous books, although there is an uneasy playfulness:

Alone I love

To think of us together:

Together I think I'd love to be alone.

('Moonshine')

These seem to be more personal poems and he has a constant subject of a life

wasted on ambitious enterprises:

Loves I've lost are sleeping in the house I've

left

To live alone in a cave with two glass entrances...

('Niches') How much it hurts me to have neglected all

this summer the friends whom I might have

seen, But for my mad obsession of building more

rooms to entertain them in time to come...

('Stone Mania')

But his cool style prevents this subject properly emerging. It is stated but not fleshed out, except perhaps in 'Arsonist':

James Simmons

.. .Each random stone made integral Has bonded him with debt. All he can feel

Is a dying to get rid of it.

With craft to burn, how could he use

Control to lose control, To spark a blaze

Spontaneous and elemental?

Fire would transmute his home in hours To a foetiferous void, A mould that flowers

Gravid with fronds of gutter lead.

Tt is a beautifully crafted poem, as many of

these are, and craft is of the essence of our

art; but something is wrong when one al

ways comes back to the craft. Even his

love and admiration for Tony White does not inspire him with vivid words, the risks he takes don't work:

His dark face opened like a long love-letter

and

He hauled in shoals of riffled sun to please

Only a few friends like us

Because it Was his style To play as well

Carrying a creel on his back or Coriolanus.

(Tony White at Inishbofin')

The hero sounds like a poseur. The body of this book is a series of son

nets in which various buildings, connected with Murphy's life, speak. It is an odd

enterprise that gives full rein to Murphy's

ingenuity and workmanship and obsess

ions, and seems to permit his coldness and

reticence, because although we can imag ine buildings remembering events that oc

cur inside them, we cannot expect them to

feel. 'Wellington Testimonial' (the obelisk in Phoenix Park) seems to sum up the

whole enterprise:"

My whole point in this evergreen oak aisle

Is to maintain a clean laconic style.

The only points at which his work really quickens for me is when he confesses to an

element of evil in his life, which colours many of these poems and is spelt out in

'Little Hunger' (see the Faber Book of Irish Verse). In it he describes buying the ruined homes of exiled Irishmen:

whose gradual fall my purchase would

complete, clearing them off the land,

the seven cabins needed to crate the granite house I planned...

There is a double question here. Is he to be

given total credit for writing that self

accusatory poem? Yes! Has he any other subject? I do not know. It depends how

unsatisfactory you find the final poem in the book, on the birth of a son, 'Natural

Son':

Before the spectacled professor snipped The cord, I heard your birth-cry flood the

ward, And lowered your mother's tortured head,

and wept. The house you'd left would need to be

restored.

No worse pain could be borne, to bear the

joy Of seeing you come in a slow dive from the

womb, Pushed from your fluid home, pronounced

'a boy'. You'll never find so well equipped a room.

No house we build could hope to satisfy

Every small need, now that you've made this move

To share our loneliness, much as we try Our vocal skill to wall you round with love.

This day you crave so little, we so much For you to live, who need our merest touch.

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14 Fortnight 24th June 1985

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University of Ulster at Coleraine._

HIDING OUT IN THE TRIANGLE Gerald Dawe

IT WAS a choice between Art History in

England or English in Northern Ireland. Queen's was too much like home and

when a friend said he was going to NUU, that was it. We headed off from Belfast one September morning in 1971 and moved into the same B&B for the first

term. The house was run by a businesslike

woman who took good care of us and her

house. Everything was in its place, put there with a kind of brisk love.

Going to university was not the logical thing to do. Most of my friends either hadn't bothered or didn't get the chance.

We were, after all, children of the 1960s, full of grace, and it took some time to settle into the failed world that the 1970s

brought. For some it meant a struggle; for

others it felt like a defeat. Anyway, Coler aine in 1971 was a compromise. The cam

pus looked like an airport, but behind it the Bann curved its way towards the coast

and the magnificent sea along whose

shoreline holiday resorts clung, full of three- and four-storied guest houses with

great bay windows like puffed-out bellies, and a wind that would cut right through you.

It wasn't long before a few of us had banded together

- mostly from Glasgow

and Belfast - and joined the Labour Club. NUU's political birth had been uppermost in many minds but accepting the fact that it

was there to stay, we sat in seminar rooms

and discussed the 'Law of the Diminishing Returns of Profit' and held a radical stall outside the 'Refectory' every week. When

things were looking bad, some of us formed the 'James Larkin Defence Com

mittee' and planned to get threatened Catholics out of isolated places into safety. And we went on marches, to meetings and

watched steadfastly as everything went

from bad to worse. But we lived in a tri

angle that was symbolic in a way -

between

Coleraine, Portstewart and Portrush, the

lines of experience were open and you could live freely, if experimentally, across the divides. Politics grew into Irish culture and back again into literature. We mixed

into traditional music and some of the tra

ditional musicians mixed into politics. I started to play in a band called Fir

Uladh and we performed at various venues

from anti-internment rallies to folk con

certs. It was blissful. And because I had

written some poems that were published and broadcast, the Irish Dramatic Society asked me for a play. I wrote one, a short

incoherent thing, the idea of which I'd

lifted from Robin Flower's The Irish Trad ition, and called it The Skull. It was duly translated into Irish, and travelling with it and being proudly introduced once as 'Our Belfast Protestant' to a smiling group

of anxious Dublin Gaelgoirs, I met and fell for a.girl from Donegal. She was a native

Irish speaker and we shared a year or two

of confusion, mostly of my making, living within that strange triangle. The people who lived there were mostly hospitableto these students in their midst. Even though

our lifestyle was, on the face of it, a chall

enge to their own, I never heard a bad word said agsinst us and only ever in Col eraine did I hear the bigot come out in a

person. He was drunk and on his way out

of the bar. The group of us, from all oyer the North, Scotland and England, and from every 'side', gazed at his ignorance and smiled sagely that this was the ugly old world shuffling off its mortal coil.

The three years did not last long. They were intense though. Everything was - sit

ting in the campus listening to the news about the Abercorn blast, watching the slow dismantling of Belfast and the places

where we used to meet back home. We

threw darts in the university bar. while Walter Allen held court, sipping pink gins and smoking his endless untipped cigar ettes, or ensconced in the Anchor Bar, nestled beneath the convent in Portstew

art, there was an air of unreality about the

whole time and place. The people of the triangle, however,

lived their lives with a keen knowledge we did not have. They were wise before the event and had an almost stoical single

mindedness about what was happening a

round them as if it were a bad season they just had to thole. And us? The lectures

went on as usual for those who cared to

attend.

I remember, for instance, in one lin

guistics class, the distinguished lecturer, noted for his abstract convoluted manner

and celestial gaze, talked us through the derivation of Cornish placenames while three ex-Oxfordians sat midway up the

lecture hall regaled as Red Indians, war

continued on page 18

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Fortnight 24th June 1985 15

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