“If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there,” once confessed Michael Longley after emerging from a period of writer’s block. He was thus acknowledging that a poet’s talent to assemble words and images successfully, their out-of-the-ordinary, at times magical and usually respected, perception of the world is not enough to make a poem work.
The craft draws its seeds from inexplicable sources indeed, but it is also a full time job not without its barren seasons. Or, as Pablo Picasso declared, “inspiration exists, but it has to find you working”.
The publication of The Poems of Dorothy Molloy is to be celebrated. And not only because this beautiful hard-back edition brings back to life all of Molloy’s previously published poetry but also because it includes 40 unpublished and four in-progress poems, thereby shedding light on the poet’s creative process or, to use Longley’s imagery, allowing us to glimpse that mysterious place where poems take shape.
Technically speaking, Dorothy Molloy’s books are all posthumous. Hare Soup, her wondrous debut collection, was published, poignantly enough, a few days after her death, in January 2004. But the poet had left behind a substantial body of finished work so a second collection was published in 2006, Gethsemane Day, and a third in 2009, Long-distance Swimmer. In all three volumes Molloy touches upon a wide variety of topics, the demonisation of romantic love, the representation of human and nonhuman illness and death, patterns of abusive behaviour against women, and Barcelona, the city where she spent 15 years of her life, being among the most pervasive. Since the three books appeared after the untimely death of the poet, we cannot establish any rigorous parallelism between the date of composition and the date of publication, that is, we cannot trace her evolution as a poet with accuracy. However, by putting together her entire oeuvre along with the previously unpublished material, this new Faber & Faber volume not only maps Molloy’s main thematic interests, but also confirms that the poet maintained them throughout her writing life.
Unpublished poems
The attention devoted to the Mediterranean coast of Spain in “Near Sagunto”, “Tramontana” (Hare Soup), or “Christmas in the Pyrenees” (Long-distance Swimmer) is also evident in the 40 hitherto unpublished poems. For instance, the village of Alcossebre, in the province of Castellón, gives its title to a five-poem sequence that is preceded by a prose section. The latter is an example of the “free writing” Molloy practised on a daily basis, a training of sorts from where she often rescued images or entire phrases she later developed in her poems. In this particular case, she records a typical customs-and-manners scene: the seascape, the almond-trees, the “deep blue of the Valencian sky” and the intensity of its sun: “Sun. Sol. El sol”, she writes, as if aware that English words alone cannot account for the unequivocal nuances of the Mediterranean light. These images then unfold in the five poems that follow: the Alcossebre shoreline and the detailed description of its beach life – “Bikini-lines and rhyming breasts”, “babies sitting in hollows; “in water-filled holes” – are reminiscent of Joaquín Sorolla’s impressionist paintings of the Valencian coastline. The insertion of words like xafago (heat in the variety of Valencian spoken in the north of the province), her reference to the northerly Spanish winds – “the Tramontana, the Mistral, the Cierzo” – and the Catalan folktale of the patufet demonstrate her involvement with and deep knowledge of Spain’s cultural diversity. In the new poems, Spain is sometimes a mere setting for the painful passions of unrequited love, as in “I lived in Spain”. And sometimes the intense personal and artistic experiences of her Catalan years are mirrored in an equally intense sense of place, as in “Damaged at Birth”, where Molloy evokes the flavours of Sugus and Chupa Chups (typical Spanish sweets), recalls the sounds of Spanish guitars at fiestas, and also recreates the strictures that Franco’s educational system imposed on the Catalan children of the time, obliging them to give the “Viva Franco” and “Arriba España” salutes and hoist the national flag while their “dead relatives turned in their graves”. More than 15 years after Molloy’s death, these poems once again resonate with full force and acquire new layers of meaning when read in the context of the current political crisis over independence in Catalonia, and the recent exhumation of dictator Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen near Madrid.
Passing of pets
But Dorothy Molloy is also a poet of the nonhuman world. Her profound love of animals transpired in “Passage” (Hare Soup), “Curette” (Gethsemane Day), “Peregrino” and “Dog-kite” (Long-distance Swimmer), and is also explored in the unpublished texts included in this new volume. In “Animal Rights”, for instance, pets “don’t know they are old”, they “don’t know they are dying”. The irrationality of animals, often used to argue in support of human superiority in the species divide, becomes irrelevant in the face of their almost transcendental connection with the planet; hence the impending passing away of the pets leaves its mark on the natural world: “the nights are darker now. The days are cold. The very orbit / of the earth has slowed”, notices the poetic persona. “For Bracken (3 months’ mind)” is Molloy’s elegy to her eponymous golden retriever. The offerings placed on the dog’s grave – “A little boat, a bell, a bowl of water, / A single candle to light up your way” – present animals as mournable and worthy of the funeral rites often exclusively reserved to honour human death. A more reciprocal relationship with animals is also demanded in poems that connect human and nonhuman illness beyond the hierarchies that favour the former to the detriment of the latter. In “Spayed” the vet that puts the uterus and ovaries of a she-dog in a jar mirrors the gynaecologist who, peering through his speculum, announces to the protagonist in a quipping tone:
“It’s all gotta come out, OK?
ASAP.
Of course, it will depend
on how attached you are . . .”
The behaviour of the doctor, who pays insufficient attention to the physical and psychological consequences of this invasive procedure, thus replicates the emotional detachment of the vet after performing the same surgery on the pet, a dynamic the protagonist utterly rejects by averting her gaze.
Cosmic choir
The Poems of Dorothy Molloy makes clear from the outset the poet’s interpretation of the human self as only a contributing element of a wider existence and opens with “Credo”, a small text that reads as Molloy’s poetry manifesto. In it, her spiritual and artistic commitment to the universe – namely to participate with her voice in the harmonies of a cosmic choir of voices – is laid out, as is her desire for a strong physical connection with our planet: her feet on the ground, her lungs working effortlessly. This same sensorial and emotional union with the natural world is cherished in her poetry, which abounds in images of the ocean and its waves, fruits and winds that merge with the body of the poetic persona, as in “Keeping the warm animal”, where we are reminded to trust “the body that roots us / here, in this world, our home / country; our feet walking its / earth; the heart beating its / beat, even when I forget who I am”. In our current age of environmental degradation and extinction, with reactions against climate change escalating worldwide to halt the damage to our ecosystems, Molloy’s nourishing of this primal link between body and nature is as current now as it is urgent.
This new Faber & Faber volume unearths a good number of Molloy's poems that had been discarded for publication before. The decision to bring into the light work left behind is never an easy one. At some level, when we leave material traces of our work we may be, somehow, hoping that somebody, sometime, will hear its sounds and its silences, and will rescue it from oblivion. On the other hand, the question of whether or not all of these poems would have been considered finished were the poet still alive will always loom, probably more so in the case of Molloy, whose creative process was so strongly based on revision, as the four in-progress poems included in this volume show. Inspiration, in Picasso's words, always caught her working, trying, erring and then trying again until the words took on the right form. Until the lines became the poem she wanted. Whatever the answer to this impossible dilemma, The Poems of Dorothy Molloy rescues jewels that would otherwise be lost and complements the wonderful – as in full-of-wonder – work included in the first three volumes. Ultimately, this new book brings her back to us. Her voice still audible. Her vision still relevant.
Luz Mar González-Arias is senior lecturer in English and Irish studies at the University of Oviedo (Spain) and is completing a monograph on the life and poetry of Dorothy Molloy
