Patrick MacDonogh is dead 40 years this year, so it is fitting that his reputation - firmly based in his lifetime, though never considerable - should have newly emerged from the limbo which swallowed various other Irish poets of his generation. Born in 1902, he had much the same upper-middle-class, suburban, Dublin Protestant upbringing as Samuel Beckett (a friend) and like Beckett went to TCD and was a good sportsman, playing hockey for Ireland many times. He also made a successful career at Guinness's, where he became marketing manager (it was in this capacity, presumably, that he had a hand in founding the Galway Oyster Festival).
MacDonogh married a singer, Maisie Connell, with whom he had two daughters, and at the peak of his career lived in a Georgian house in north Dublin, where he fished, shot, and walked the fields and estuary lands. His late years, however, were dogged by poor health and attacks of depression; and when the collection One Landscape Still appeared in 1958, he was apparently undergoing a nervous and emotional crisis. That rather slim volume, incidentally, included virtually all of his poetry which he wanted preserved - MacDonogh was fastidious and self-critical and wrote a good deal which he later discarded.
The present collection is based largely on it, though with a number of poems dropped and some others added, a few of them hitherto unpublished. Derek Mahon's introduction is a model of its kind, both in terms of essential biographical details and of critical weighing-up.
MacDonogh was a close friend of my parents, and I remember him well from meetings in literary hostelries. He was a courteous, sensitive, though sociable man with many friends, well able to charm women as well as men - certainly, among the dour ranks of the Irish poets I have known, he stands out in my memory as being that rare thing, a thorough gentleman. The same qualities inform his poetry, which is often highly personal and at times impassioned, yet retains a private reticence as well as a formal elegance. Above all, perhaps, he was a man of the neo-Romantic 1940s, but with a kind of Augustan clarity and style which set him apart from that era's kitschy, technicolour aspect.
As a poet he hit his full stride rather late, when he was 40 or so. He did not belong in the folkish, quasi-ballad tradition represented by F.R. Higgins, but neither did he join the ranks of the Eliot-and-Auden followers who challenged and eventually supplanted it. MacDonogh has his own voice, recognisably modern but not consciously Modernist. Like other sensitive, impressionable men, he was keenly aware of his contemporaries and sometimes echoes them, though without pastiche. Inevitably there are some Yeatsian lines and even whole stanzas, though the sensibility itself is never Yeatsian. There are also hints of MacNeice, with whom he had a good deal in common including a cultured Latinity and an Irish Protestant sense of displacement:
He told the barmaid he had things to do,
Such as to find out what we are, and why.
And rather surprisingly, there is an occasional echo of Walter de la Mare:
Stir not, whisper not,
Trouble not the giver
Of quiet who gives
This calm-flowing river.
Even more surprisingly, certain lines and images show an awareness of Dylan Thomas, whom apparently he admired. But MacDonogh, in his maturity, pursued his own line and his own path, often dealing almost obsessively with romantic (though also sexual) love, usually against a background of the sights and sounds of nature.
He was a considerable love poet, without the Jansenist torments of the Irish Catholic conscience, but harried by his own conflicts which at best achieve a balance of almost ecstatic longing with wry, hard-won self-knowledge. 'Be Still As You Are Beautiful' was for years a fixture in Irish anthologies, a lyric of almost Elizabethan songfulness which has in fact been set to music. 'The Widow of Drynam', another familiar piece, stands up well to re-reading, while 'Feltrim Hill', chronicling the steady erosion of a local landmark by modern quarrying, anticipates our alarm at the way in which the Irish landscape is being destroyed by legalised greed and stupidity.
'Escape to Love' is an ambitious poem in seven sections, very impressive in parts though marred by an almost melodramatic ending. However, 'From Fields of Sorrow' is a masterpiece of sustained, impassioned contemplation, sensing the long shadows and ghosts from Ireland's history still haunting her landscape. 'O, Come to the Land' is a deeply dualistic poem in which Irish "spirituality" is contrasted antiphonally with the shabby realities of censorship, sterile repression and private envy. 'The Frozen Garden' movingly compares a private garden under heavy end-of-winter frost with the misery of ravaged, disillusioned Europe just after the second World War; and in each case there is the promise of renewal and resurrection.
This is a slim book but does justice to an essential Irish poet who has been half-neglected for too long. The Nano Reid painting reproduced on its cover adds to the period ambience, and it even reproduces (inside) a black-and-white illustration by MacDonogh himself, which comes close to the genre once described by Dylan Thomas as "woodcunts". Recent revivals of Irish poets have focused overmuch on figures who could be brought inside the pen of official Anglo-American Modernism, such as Denis Devlin. MacDonogh, however, is more of a native-born poet than Devlin ever was, and he also possessed a much better melodic ear. Writers such as he need, and deserve, to be judged and appreciated on their own terms, not by those ready-made criteria which unimaginative critics still insist on applying to independent figures who don't fit easily into standard textbooks of modern literature.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic