IN 1955 Austin Clarke, in his 59th year, published is own imprint of the Bridge Press a collection of poems and satires called Ancient Lights. It was a pamphlet of 24 pages, and 200 copies were printed. It was a reviewed by the young English poet, Donald Davie, who, after listing four kinds of difficulty that might present themselves to the reader, quoted the end of the title poem and wrote: "There are few poets now writing in English who are capable of such a stanza, so continually inventive in detail yet so sure of the total effect, so strenuous and surprising in diction yet running so free, so much at ease yet so tightly organised".
This review impressed the reading public so much that, in the words of the late Gus Martin, who contributes to this centenary volume a double essay on Clarke's life and legacy, "soon the country was awake to the merits of a long taken for granted poet". Speaking of the early Sixties, when both Clarke and Kavanagh had published important collections, Martin writes: "So Yeats's two great successors had resurfaced simultaneously. The town was alive with the sound of poetry."
Such enthusiasm is infectious, but Thomas Kinsella in his essay shows more caution: "Clarke had suddenly a discerning, if tiny, public." Kinsella states that Clarke's Collected Poems (1974) is an "important document in modern poetry" but goes on to say that "outside of Ireland, Clarke's poetry is scarcely heard of. He gives reasons: "Verbalidiosyncrasy . . . taken with the narrowness of reference or the private focus, and the absence of ordinary communication, sets a problem for the casual reader. It is the energetic reader, meeting the poetry's demands in the way of modern art, who finds that it meets his. And who finds by way of consolation poems of total lucidity and naturalness scattered here and there in early books and late."
The sense of a tiny public is confirmed by Thomas McCarthy's account of an American student who had been to an Irish university and had been told that Clarke could be ignored. McCarthy persuaded the student otherwise. He is the poet who embodies most courageously the struggle between the Catholic idea of public good and the fight for the autonomy of one's personal life."
In his introduction to Austin Clarke Remembered, Seamus Heaney concentrates on Clarke's poetic importance. The poet "at his best mined richly and successfully in the shafts of the linguistic underground". This is another way of saying that Clarke's quirky style was the only tool that could have brought to light the dark coals of his imagination, that could turn his personal anguish into a symbol of the mental and religious problems that to some extent beset us all.
Mary Thompson's essay on the early epic poems shows how they too were an expression of personal problems and might even have had a political subtext, but the weight of her learning only emphasises their failure as poems. The proof reading of her essay has been particularly remiss, as three of her quotations have serious errors - "joy" becomes "job", for instance.
Geoffrey Schirmer's essay on Clarke as critic illustrates the poet's conscious effort to create a specifically Irish literature in the English language; and Lucy Collins explores the development of female representation throughout Clarke's work, relating it to that struggle between reason and faith that was central to the poet's mind.
In addition to the critical essays there are four personal memoirs, one by the present writer. Patricia Boylan writes of the Dublin verse speaking society she helped Clarke to found in 1939 and of how he led his cast across the street to the pub after the Monday night poetry programmes. She also pays a well deserved tribute to his wife, Nora, and causes me to hear again that husky voice saying: "Oh, shut up, Austin, you know you're talking nonsense!" Clarke's niece Aileen Dempsey recalls how she used to take him for drives around Ireland "not the famous poet, but a kind, courteous, compassionate man." Michael Hartnett remembers visiting "Mr Clarke" in the company of John Jordan and James Liddy and listening in awe to the literary conversation.
This collection of essays will be gratefully received by the "tiny public" - It reawakens sympathy and enlarges our understanding. As a bonus, there are poems by Heaney, Mahon, Montague and Kennelly. Kennelly describes meeting Clarke and glimpses the man behind the clerk: