Think global, write local

POETRY: BERNARD O'DONOGHUEreviews The Last Geraldine Officerby Thomas McCarthy, Anvil Press Poetry, 172pp, £10.95

IT IS A long time now since Thomas McCarthy broke spectacularly on the poetry scene in his early 20s with his prize-winning elegiac first volume, The Sorrow Garden. He has covered a lot of impressive ground in the intervening 30 years, in fiction as well as poetry, despite remaining firmly rooted in the local in Cork city where he works in the city library. He is a classic instance – with his London publisher – of the writer's virtue that Auden compared to a valley cheese: produced locally but prized elsewhere. His multi-tasking is not confined to his own writing; he is a supporter of the admirable Cork-based Munster Literature Centre (this new book is dedicated to some of his colleagues there; several of them featured in disguise in his brilliantly coded last book, Merchant Prince). Perhaps the best word for him is broad-minded; his writing range is wide because his sympathies and amused understanding are so capacious.

Brendan Kennelly's summary on the back of The Last Geraldine Officermakes exactly the right point in praising McCarthy's ability "to write so tenderly about private affections and so acutely about public figures and events". He is, maybe predominantly, the writer for Fianna Fáil, treated in his great novel Out of Power, and elsewhere, with an insider's knowledge and affection as well as a knowing wit (still evident here in the brilliant Dissident Poetand in the advice of Condolences Dineento "Learn the bit of Irish" and "Don't forget to join the GAA"). The writing often favours – as Kennelly's astute summary suggests – a kind of multiple perspective: as the narratologists put it, in its breadth of vision it is focalised from several points of view. Merchant Princeset its coded story of present-day Munster poets in an Italian novella set around 1800. The range in the new book is even wider, and it makes considerable demands intellectually and linguistically. McCarthy's writing was well described by Peter Porter as "satires of circumstance"; in this important political book the emphasis is on the circumstance rather than the satire. Certainly there are wonderful personal poems here too, especially the lovely sequence Well, Look at You. But the weight of the volume has swung back towards the public (to my taste, McCarthy's most indispensable and unusual strength).

The book is divided into two parts: the first is headed The Fiction, The Sea(named after one of the beautiful personal poems in Part One), and the second is the title-poem, over 100 pages long. The latter is a very ambitious literary-historical piece (bearing out precisely Terry Eagleton's characterisation of McCarthy also quoted here: it is written "out of a sense of history and community and memory"). It is a kind of fantasia that corrects defective public memory, describing the involvement of a Waterford Fitzgerald family in the period between the two 20th-century World Wars, dealing principally with the Irish-speaking soldier-poet Sir Gerald Fitzgerald. This exemplary figure could have been made a bit too exemplary in a pious way, but this danger is entirely avoided by a typical McCarthy broadening of the canvas. Molly Keane features in the background as a Waterford "Big House" writer; Sir Gerald is accompanied by a kind of Sancho Panza figure, Paax Foley, who represents honest and homely virtue. The social representation is effectively complicated by a series of switches of register: not just the Irish poems of the Anglo-Irish officer, but the sustained centrality of local recipes, assigned to Mrs Norah Foley. What this breadth of vocabulary effects remarkably is a kind of redistribution of power through language and vocabulary. The technically impressive Irish poems (sometimes translated in the surrounding prose diary, sometimes not) are the power centre in a way; but the recipes, which might seem a limited, domestic literary form, also provide a centre of stability and even authority.

Auden comes to mind again – especially his poem The Novelist– in a striking line in one of the lyric poems which make up Part One:

Dear poet, middle age has made novelists of us all.

Not just middle age, this book makes you feel, but the modern age. It is hard to treat public issues in short poems without sounding sententious. McCarthy avoids this trap by the dazzling range of languages and registers he brings into his poetry: a kind of variety that the novel's demand of consistency perhaps handles less well. The two parts of McCarthy's book are linked effectively by intertwined references in the first part: Mrs Norah Foley serves the same stabilising function in both parts. Paax Foley's Pub is the setting for the crucial Muldonian poem On Becoming a Person, with its witty application of the force of the Latin Mass to the multiplicity of languages here:

God be good to those who spoke words we couldn’t understand.

This line contains in miniature all McCarthy’s skills and insights. And this book represents him at his best and most impressive. He is an indispensable and unique ventriloquist of voices in modern Irish poetry, whose locality-powered centrality should be paid even more attention than it is..

Bernard O'Donoghue's Selected Poemswas published by Faber in 2008