Irish Studies can be a desperately po-faced business, especially the obsessive versions which pick up on our Troubled history. It's almost as if no other country in contemporary Europe had a colonial past to think about, one way or the other. Gobbling up the literature in the process, Irish Studies has become big cultural business. It is refreshing to read this tricksy collection of four lectures delivered by the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Paul Muldoon, because he is way offside, bouncing around with every kind of hunch, suggestion, allusion, illusion, might-have-been, might-be, entertaining some relation or guess, conjuring up whatever association or downright dodgy possibility that is imaginable. When all fruits fail, try the subliminal. What about this for size:
"While the word beich means `bees' in this context, it is cognate with a number of sharp-ended or pointed things, including boc, a `he-goat' and bac, a word Dinneen in his great dictionary, published in 1927, gives as meaning, in Modern Irish, `a quirk; an angular space, hollow or object; a river turn; a crozier; a mattock; a billhook; a prop; a pin; a crook; a peg; a thole-pin; a joint; a hook; a shackle, a hindrance, a stop; a fire-hop, a fire-prop; corner of hob; act of supporting, holding back, hindering'. The word becc means `little, small, tiny or few'. In other words, Beich becc is a version of the `diminuitive beaked thing' of Beckett's own name".
It really doesn't matter that Beckett is descended from emigre Huguenot - Muldoon's kind of word-weaving is a joy to behold and there are many passages of same throughout To Ireland, I. There are occasions, however, when the weave goes a bit warped. This is Muldoon on The Dead:
"A second ghostly presence here is Alfred Nutt (1856-1910) who appears as `nutmeg' on the table of the banquet. His Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail, published in 1888, emphasized the Irish element in the Arthurian legends. I'm not going to try here to crack Nutt, or Arthurian motifs in The Dead, except perhaps to mention the standing army of Fenian bottles, `black with brown and red labels', dedicated to Arthur Guinness, because I know you already think I'm totally nuts".
For the point, if there actually is one, which accumulates throughout the four chapters, is powerful: that Irish writing finds a fulcrum in Gaelic, not as a shadow but as the very spring of the living literature. Gaelic also prevails upon the inherited, or disinherited, sense of what being an Irish writer means. In this regard Muldoon reasserts with self-delighting wisdom the only basis of literature as language - echoes, whispers, possibilities, rhythms and sounds of words and the various homes we make for them in writing and in speech.
The wider reaches of To Ireland, I verge towards self-parody and caricature, with notes doing for argument and only the snatchiest of glimpses at poets it would have been really interesting to know what Muldoon actually thought of, such as Brian Coffey and Thomas MacGreevy. The reading of Joyce's The Dead, which Muldoon can't quite leave alone, is a teaser in itself. But I leave you with this one, a cracker, from Muldoon's discussion of Kavanagh's `Epic' and the line, `Here is the march along these iron stones': ". . . the `iron' in `these iron stones' is a near version of `Erin', so we're dealing with a national dispute as well". Or Knott, as the case may be.
Gerald Dawe's new collection of poems, The Morning Train, was published recently. His selected essays, Stray Dogs and Dark Horses, will appear later this year.