Culture Shock:Harry Clifton's first full book since 1994 is a dazzlingly accomplished collection of poetry
One of the best-known Irish poems of recent decades is Derek Mahon's Antarctica, which makes brilliant use of the imagery of polar exploration. So brilliant that it seems almost impossible for any other Irish poet to inhabit this territory. Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon and Paul Durcan have been so productive for so long that it is hard for other Irish poets to occupy anything other than a second tier, or not to feel that anything they touch is slightly shop-soiled.
In Harry Clifton's superb new collection Secular Eden: Paris Notebook 1994-2004, there is a stunning poem, The Whaling Station, about Antarctica. It doesn't relate itself directly to Mahon's poem, but it is imbued from the start with the sense of being second-hand. He begins with the metaphor of ice falling from the Antarctic shelf and reconfigures it as "One by one, the second-hand images/ Break away . . ." He twice interrupts his recitation of received images with "And that is all I know about Antarctica", as if in despair at the impossibility of imagining what has not been imagined before. He trudges mentally on towards "the pole of unknowing" but finds that "I have not moved an inch". He ends with a ringing declaration of negative intent: "I will not be planting flags/ Or laying claim to anything not my own." In an irony that he quietly relishes, Clifton has made a great poem out of the very difficulty of achieving what is supposed to be the core of great poetry - originality. His dazzlingly accomplished book is arguably the first great work of Irish poetic post-modernism. That awful term refers, in its only useful sense, to the contemporary condition in which nature has become culture, and in which nothing can be comprehended in an unknowing way. The romantic gaze, in which both natural objects and childhood memories can be approached from the outside is no longer possible. The world has been humanised, appropriated, mediated, turned into a set of images. Instead of moaning about this condition, Clifton embraces it. He makes second-handedness his metier.
SECULAR EDEN EMERGES, if not quite from a long silence, then certainly from relative obscurity. Clifton is now 55 and this is first full book since 1994. While many of the poems here have been appearing in magazines and anthologies, he did not publish a major collection throughout most of his 40s and early 50s - often the most productive period for writers. It is probably fair to say that he has been an admired and respected figure, but one seen as a satellite revolving around the great figures of Irish poetry. For most of us (including me), the emergence of Secular Edeninto its very own firmament is a source of some amazement.
A major writer is one who has escaped the anxiety of influence. Few achieve this by being completely original, and poets in particular are in a constant dialogue with the past. But Clifton achieves it in a paradoxically original way, by capturing with masterful fluency the sense of a world in which everything has happened before and been written before. His is a universe of aftermaths, hauntings and returns, in which even God (in the delightful poem God in France) dreams of becoming flesh again, as he did once before.
Much of what Clifton intuits is an atheist's afterlife - the vestiges and traces of what has gone before that linger in the air of the present day. The word "afterlife" pops up a lot. He speaks through the wife of a baker who "lived,/ Invisibly for the most part,/ At the back of his own creations." She asks this hidden man "Whose hours were strange/ And whose cakes were his afterlife" be remembered. In a poem in the voice of the Romanian poet Benjamin Fondane, who was murdered in the Holocaust in 1944, he imagines the discovery of his hidden works decades later: "And that my friends will be my afterlife." The old Scottish poets Dunbar and Henryson, in a witty disquisition on their eternal bonding in critical histories, are doomed to "an afterlife in each other's shadows". This afterlife is decrepit in some poems, like the rented car in Breaker's Yard: "the mileages, the clapped-out leatherette,/ The whiff of sex and scorch-marked cigarette,/ Are someone else's." In others, it is imbued with a sense of historic repetition, as in the endlessness of war so poignantly captured in Drole de Guerre. In others still, it takes the form of annotations on other writers - Stendhal, Pierre Loti, Saul Bellow, Montaigne, Saint Augustine - as if the only space left in which to write is the small blanks between the words of others.
Yet remarkably, none of this ever feels tired. There is instead a tremendous energy of relief and release. Like the Irish settlers in Namibia whom he recalls in Windhoek, Clifton seems "no longer afraid/ Of words like alien, rootless, void." He is happy in his status as a wanderer outside the confines of Irishness (he has lived in Africa, Asia, France, Italy and the US) and at home both in Old Europe and in middle-age. Second-hand becomes, in his deft and supremely confident technique, a second wind.
He turns the middle-aged ennui of having seen it all before into a celebration of the richness of things that happen again.
