Poetry:As he celebrates his 60th birthday Micheál O'Siadhail has received much publicity. Few would begrudge him this recognition beyond fearing that it might devalue his reputation. He has, in fact, had a successful career as a lecturer at Trinity College, as a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies, and as the author of books about learning Irish. His reputation as a poet is still being determined, writes Maurice Harmon
Globe is his 12th collection. Not bad for a man born in 1947, a date that places him between the Thomas Kinsella-John Montague generation and the prolific crowd that emerged in the 1950s - Paul Muldoon, Gerard Smyth, Dennis O'Driscoll, Paula Meehan, and others. O'Siadhail does not fit easily into the mainstream of Irish poetry. Although he resembles Louis MacNeice and Austin Clarke in their international concerns, he is essentially an individual with his own subject matter and his own voice.
Perhaps more than anything he may be seen as a European poet, since his subject matter has often been European experience. He is conscious of the modern world with its flux of migration, international commerce, wars, politics, and technological developments. While he has poems that are personal - love poems, laments, and a memorable account of his attraction to the Irish-speaking West, he has increasingly and consciously become a poet of a wider world. In its title, the latest collection affirms that sense of a wider connection. "Born in a land," the epigraph declares, "I woke in a globe".
In the second part there is a poem in memory of Patrick Kavanagh and one in memory of Máirtín Ó Cadhain. The others concern non-Irish figures - the botanist Johann Mendel, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Shakespeare, Jean Vanier, Sigrid Undset, Nelson Mandela, and Mohandas Gandhi.
There is an insistence about this, a willed inclusiveness that also marks the poetry. There is no mistaking the passion with which O'Siadhail writes when he takes on political events, and it is this political conscience that sets him apart. His poem Palestine, for example, is intense. Like a biblical prophet he broods over the rights and wrongs of that most distressful country; the lines rap out rage and grief.
Black and white of slowly simmered
hate,
Another busload blown to kingdom
come.
That Jews again should board a bus to
die?
But now missiles fired to take a suspect
out.
O'Siadhail's intelligence and compassion are never in doubt. There are poems that are sensitive to the indignities and sufferings that flesh is heir to on "our globe of heartache". He is up-to-date, his "digital nerves" alert. "We are the world. The face of the earth is ours." He can celebrate the sense of belonging and its opportunities for communion in a global village. He can lament anonymous deaths from the tsunami, and can grieve over "smothered voices" from the past, remembering Cavafy's remark "Earth is a sanctuary of sorrow". The lines fill with ideas and images, the poems advance in a rhythm of statement and restatement. He may if anything be over-productive and that tends to obscure the particulars of his achievement. His stature may as yet be undefined but his work merits attention.
Musics of Belonging, a book of essays about O'Siadhail's work to which I have contributed, is published in conjunction with Globe.
Maurice Harmon's Selected Essays were published recently by Irish Academic Press
Globe By Micheal O'Siadhail Bloodaxe, 120pp. £8.95