Poetic injustice

He has been pummelled by critics in the past. Now it is time for a reconsideration of the Belfast poet Padraic Fiacc, writes Gerald Dawe.

In the mid-1970s Padraic Fiacc's reputation took a critical pummelling, first with negative reaction to Odour Of Blood (1973) and then with the controversial anthology The Wearing Of The Black, which he edited the following year. It is just over 30 years since that anthology was published. It was launched in December 1974 with a party at Fiacc's Glengormley home attended by many of the younger writers included in the anthology, for several of whom it was their first publication.

Excitement was high, an expectation and uncertainty given voice by the youngest poet in the group, Gerry McLoughlin. There was a feeling, naive as it may have been, that some artistic marker had been laid down, some local response in the teeth of the madness. While the anthology became ensnared in controversy about the ethics of writing "about" violence and victims, in a matter of months McLoughlin was murdered, one April morning in Belfast, in a sectarian assassination. He was 20 years old.

Fiacc never recovered from the loss of his friend, such a promising and eager young man, reminiscent perhaps of himself when he had started to write poems in New York, during the late 1930s. Fiacc's poems from the mid-1970s can be read as an in memoriam to the death of that young spirit and as the symbolic loss of hope Fiacc felt as increasingly more vicious acts of violence took place throughout the province.

Fiacc survived. The work he would publish during the next quarter of a century is testament to that fact. Indeed, his poetry can be read as an interior monologue, with different parts of his self involved, being addressed, sifting through the damage, or as an inner history of the cutting edge of the Troubles. The books he published tell this story in a shocking way, offending many with their often barbarous utterance but lit through with black irony and gallows humour.

Odour Of Blood had preceded The Wearing Of The Black by barely a year. Read together, Fiacc's seemingly dramatic change of tone, and shift away from the Gaelic mythologies of By The Black Stream (1969), outraged critics. Nights In The Bad Place (1977), the retrospective Selected Padraic Fiacc (1979) and Missa Terribilis (1986) were barely noticed, or discounted as the work of a poet who had become unhinged by events in his native city.

Unlike most other contemporary writers, Fiacc had experienced life as a vulnerable emigrant, uprooted from his family home and all its familiar securities. He embodied the diaspora condition in an intense and clearly unreconciled form. In Belfast his work was often viewed with suspicion - not the "republican" voice that the moment or movement required - and, with equal measure, as an unfathomable, unpredictable presence in the wider community. Those close to him knew the difference and the extent to which Fiacc was fulfilling a self-lacerating role as a kind of anti-hero.

Some forms of recognition began to emerge: Arts Council awards, the Poetry Ireland Award (1981) and his election to Aosdána. Paul Muldoon produced for BBC Northern Ireland two important radio programmes scripted by Fiacc in the early 1980s, and somewhat later a documentary devoted to Fiacc's Belfast life was produced for German television.

Fiacc gave occasional readings in Ireland and elsewhere, enthralling audiences with his mid-Atlantic accent and ironic self-deprecation. By the mid-1990s Fiacc was reclaiming some recognition. He was acknowledged as a significant Irish poet even though his work remained critically in the shadows.

In 1994, to mark his 70th birthday, Ruined Pages, a new and completely revised selected poems, was published in Belfast. That volume is now out of print, although plans are at an advanced stage to reissue it. Further volumes appeared: a pamphlet of the 1957 prize-winning collection Woe To The Boy (1994), Red Earth (1996) and Semper Vacare (1999). A Fiacc miscellany, My Twentieth Century Night Life (from 'Der Bomben Poet', his poem of 1941 commemorating the Belfast blitz and the horror of war) is forthcoming.

I think of his poetry today in terms very close to those used by James Liddy when he writes of Fiacc as "the first of a European species to appear in Irish writing: a Holocaust child, whose mental cast is formed by the milieu of violence". Passing his days in the stable surroundings of a nursing home in south Belfast, the 80-year-old has produced work that poses awkward questions about, for instance, cultural and artistic influence beyond the anglophone priorities of much criticism of Irish writing.

Fiacc's relationship with US and European modernism is a case study that opens up challenging critical and historical perspectives on the Irish tradition. Whatever we as readers may ultimately make of it all, his achievement is much more diverse than it is currently credited. It may also be the case that Fiacc's artistic and existential experience is itself "historical", that a significant part of the history of modern Ireland is encoded in the broken bits and pieces of his writing life. The violence, the emigration, the shock of the new world, the loss of the old, the struggle to pursue the American dream, the life found vulnerable, the return home, the brief "possibility of a possible life" in 1960s Belfast: all these and more are caught in Fiacc's unforgettable poetry.

This is an extract from a lecture given by Gerald Dawe at Boston College, where he is Burns visiting professor for 2005. He also lectures at Trinity College in Dublin