Laugh at Gilded Butterflies: A Selection of Favourite Poems Chosen by Ulick O'Connor The Liffey Press, €19.95
A precursor to this selection from Ulick O'Connor's Evening Herald "Rhyme and Reason" column was published over two years ago, and sold out. He hopes, in his introduction to this new selection, that readers "may experience the delight that a true poem can bring before the mind's eye". Indeed, besides those who appreciate this kind of "anthology with an attitude", readers of his column should appreciate having this more permanent volume: a selection of 94 poems with his anecdotes and commentaries, bound in stout, gold-coloured, hard covers, and the motif of the charming dust-jacket taken from a 16th-century watercolour - as befits the book's title, drawn from Shakespeare's King Lear, the context provided as the first offering, though the selection proper begins in the 19th century.
Ulick O'Connor has long been established as a contributor to, and a commentator on, our literary, cultural, and political affairs - not without controversy, betimes. His selections here may seem to be challenging post-modern proponents of so-called "free verse"; but, O'Connor avers, "I choose a poem and explain to the reader why it appeals to me".
His choices remind us of the power and elegance of those formal elements of poetry,rhyme, metre, metaphor, etc that have existed in verse even before Shakespeare. While he wishes we may experience "the delight that a true poem can bring before the mind's eye", he has included more than a dozen poems related to war, perhaps sharing with many of us the sense that in our time, like other periods in history, war and its terrors trouble our thoughts.
He opens his selection with an excerpt from Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach (though he doesn't quote the cogent lines "Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night") and closes with The Second Coming by WB Yeats. Other contributors of poetry on the theme include Thomas Davis's Battle Eve of the Brigade, and a variety of war-related poems from Julian Grenfell, John Philpot Curran, Behan's uncle Peadar Kearney (author of our national anthem), Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke.
Many of his choices are from arcane sources such as JO Wallin, an 18th-century archbishop whose poem he translated from Swedish; Senator WB Stanford of Trinity College, and Alaric Alexander Watts, whose "sheer effrontery" with his overwhelmingly alliterative poem Austrian Army illustrates how certain effects can appeal to the reader's sense of rhythm and form, as well as to our sense of humour.
BUT O'CONNOR ISN'T trying to make the reader toe some kind of poetic straight-and-narrow line: most of the poems are introduced to us by way of a relevant anecdote or moral tale - or corrective riposte. Thus, an excerpt from a poem called The Unwanted Statue may not be especially superior poetry; but at least it gives O'Connor the opportunity to relate the mini-saga of Andrew O'Connor's "spectacular monument of Christ the King" and how it ended up in a solicitor's garden for three decades, and to explain how our selector came to "write and act in a play in Ireland with Winston Churchill's actress daughter" Sarah, who wrote the poem which gave her next book its title.
Some 44 "gilded butterflies" are actually excerpts from poems and hymns, and appear as if they have been transferred a bit hastily from the newspaper column, whereas the book-reader might prefer the complete versions.
But no matter: Ulick O'Connor's witty, feisty anecdotes and commentaries alone are worth having between these well-bound covers, besides the intriguing, and occasionally hilarious, butterflies in his widely spread net.
James J McAuley is a poet. His next collection, Argument and Resolution, is due from Dedalus later this year
Anthology
James J McAuley