Miscellany: The past meets the present in this miscellany reflecting the author's passionate love of nature.
Mary Shine Thompson, the editor of this remarkable work, and Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, who contributes an insightful foreword that is both scholarly and personal, agree that the best word to describe the book is "miscellany", because the stories, poems and essays are presented to the reader in a pattern that follows the rhythms of Michael Kirby's life. So the poems and stories dealing with childhood are placed at the beginning; they are followed by writings dealing with the days and nights of a maturing young man; and the final section gives us Kirby's last years and his coming to terms with approaching death, "under the shadow of the gravestone", as he himself put it. Michael Kirby lived for 99 years; he was born in 1906 and died in 2005. The amazing thing is that he didn't begin to write until he was 70. Then he wrote eight acclaimed books in Irish and two impressive books in English, Skelligside (1990) and Skelligs Calling (2003). Skelligs Sunset, edited with inspired sensitivity by Mary Shine Thompson, is his final work.
Mary Shine Thompson has created not just a miscellany, but a book of echoes in which stories are echoed by poems which in turn are echoed in essays. It's as if the fact that Kirby didn't begin to write until he was 70 enabled him to see clearly what interested him most in life and to write in different genres, with altering rhythms and varying subtleties of tone and emphasis. There is a beautiful ease, a joyous relaxation in his style, no matter what he's writing about, that suggests a mind and an imagination completely at home in the world they are confronting and creating in a spirit of wonder. I think this is due, in some degree at least, to the fact that his English is enriched by his Irish and his Irish makes space for his Skelligs English. Equally important is the fact that he is a born storyteller, a seanchaidhe, and a contemplative, lucid, musical poet, for the most part, who draws his images from the world about him. Reading and re-reading Skelligs Sunset, I kept on thinking of Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy, two writers at home in their worlds of nature. Michael Kirby's love of nature is passionate and convincing. He writes: "I am thankful for the simple gifts: the ability to see, hear and observe the things of nature, the rocks, bogs, meadows, sand and seashore of my native place, including birds and animals . . . Nature is beautiful, bountiful, fearfully awe-inspiring and mysteriously enigmatic. One part of nature's scene has held a special fascination for me: the ever-changing sequence of cloud formation. During my years as a fisherman, I developed an admiration for the arch of the sky during sunrise and sundown.
"I believe, in my heart and soul, that no human artist can ever emulate patterns that become visible in the embryo of pristine nature."
This was written in 2004, the year before Michael Kirby died. He was then deeply involved in painting, and this involvement emphasised the Skelligs Sunset nature of his final years. The poet, storyteller, essayist, artist and brilliant conversationalist looked at nature and was fascinated and humbled. It is this fascinated humility that helps to make his stories, poems and essays such a pleasure to read. Kirby doesn't judge, he presents his own vision, a vision that is both limited and enchanting. He writes of the sea, fishing, mountains, travellers, fortune-tellers, farmers, boats and ships, weddings, money, magic, courts of law, ancestors, emigration, loneliness, sex, marriage, God, knowledge, ignorance, cruelty, puritanism, education, pleasure and peace. What comes across is a humane blend of wisdom and humour, perplexity and determination to learn, trouble and the quest for tranquillity, the words of a man who lived long enough to witness and chronicle old Ireland and modern Ireland in two languages happily dancing with each other in his own mind, his own place. Also, the oral tradition of storytelling joins hands with the literary tradition in a way that gives Kirby's stories a unique tonality, as if Eamon Kelly and Frank O'Connor were somehow both telling the same story in their individual ways. Kirby brings the past with him and introduces it to the present as if to say, "Please get to know each other. You need each other. If you look and listen patiently, you will educate each other". That is a crucial aspect of the book's humane intelligence. Those who read it will remain surprised and happily haunted.
Brendan Kennelly's long poem-sequence, Now, and his Three Greek Plays: When Then Is Now are due to be published in October by Bloodaxe Books. He is Professor Emeritus in Trinity College Dublin
Skelligs Sunset By Michael Kirby The Lilliput Press, 218pp. €12.99