MAGAN'S WORLD:Manchan Magan's tales of a travel addict
HAVING JUST stumbled upon a new volume called Dublin: Poetry of Place, I need to return to the idea I discussed a few weeks ago of using poetry as a travel guide.
The book, published by Eland, is part of series of poetry travel guides featuring works on Rome, Istanbul and Venice. It claims to offer the "perfect doorway into the city's heart and soul".
So let's try it out. We are all familiar enough with Dublin to be able to judge whether the concept works, whether a few lines of verse can really enrich one's experience of a place in a way no guidebook can.
The first extract is from Mnemosyne Lay in Dustby Austin Clarke. "Cabs ranked at Kingsbridge Station, Guinness / Tugs moored at their wooden quay, glinting / Of Liffey mudbank; hidden vats Brewing intoxication, potstill, / Laddering of distilleries /
Ready to sell their jollities, / Delirium tremens. Dublin swayed, / Drenching, drowning the shamrock: unsaintly Mirth."
It's hard to be objective about one's city, but I'd be far happier for a foreign friend to spend a morning wandering the cobblestone lanes of St James's Gate reading this than to spend €15 to ride the escalator at the anodyne Guinness Storehouse.
Or how about Samuel Beckett's Enueg I, his description of a walk out of the city on the Grand Canal towpath and back along the River Liffey? "I trundle along rapidly now on my ruined feet / flush with the livid canal; / at Parnell Bridge a dying barge . . . rocks itself softly in the foaming cloister of the lock; / on the far bank a gang of down and outs would seem to be mending a beam . . . and the world opening up to the south / across a travesty of champaign to the mountains / and the stillborn evening turning a filthy green / manuring the night fungus."
My hope would be that the poem focuses the tourist's attention on those stretches of wilderness that still exist within the city, the buddleia-and- thistle-strewn patches along the canals, and the glimpses of the Dodder in Donnybrook and Ballsbridge, and of course the view south to the mountains that will be with us at least until the next economic boom.
Wyse Jackson in his selection manages to avoid the cliched poems one might find upholstered on the back of an Aer Lingus seat.
There are fresh offerings from Seamus Heaney, reflecting on Sandymount Strand, and Stevie Smith, on bag-snatching in Dublin: "She walked upon the street. / Down where the Liffey waters' turgid flood / Churns up to greet the ocean-driven mud, / A bruiser in a fix / Murdered her for 6/6."
For me the poem that proves the strength of poetry at evoking a sense of place and enriching one's experience of it is Louis MacNeice's Dublin.
"Grey brick upon brick, Declamatory bronze On sombre pedestals . . . And the brewery tugs and the swans / On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight / Over a hungry door And the air soft on the cheek / And porter running from the taps With a head of yellow cream . . . With her seedy elegance, / With her gentle veils of rain And all her ghosts that walk / And all that hide behind Her Georgian facades . . . The glamour of her squalor, / The bravado of her talk."
All of us owe it to our city to slip a copy of this slim volume into the backpack of the next visitor we send wandering the streets of our nation's capital.
Dublin: Poetry of Place, edited by John Wyse Jackson, is published by Eland, £6.99
manchan@ireland.com