A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles - edited by Frank Ormsby[Key_Events] Key_Issues] [Conflict_Background] [Literature and the Conflict] The following extract has been contributed by the author, Frank Ormsby, with the permission of the publishers, The Blackstaff Press. The views expressed in this chapter do not necessarily reflect the views of the members of the CAIN Project. The CAIN Project would welcome other material which meets our guidelines for contributions. 
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From the front inside cover: Murderous, entrenched, complex - the Northern Ireland conflict seems to defy rational discourse. But from the contradictions and tensions has sprung some remarkable art, not least the poetry of the Troubles, now widely recognised as among the most vibrant contemporary writing in the English language. This comprehensive new anthology from the distinguished poet and editor Frank Ormsby presents over 250 poems by writers who have their deepest roots in the region - MacNeice, Rodgers, Heaney, Longley, Fiacc, Paulin, Muldoon, Carson - and by outsiders like Larkin, Rumens, Raine, Adcock and even Yevtushenko who have responded to the violence from their more distant perspectives. Together their work faces up to the passionate intensities of the North, making this collection compulsory reading for anyone with a serious interest in modern Ireland.
CONTENTS
Somewhere beyond the scorched gable end and the burnt-out buses This anthology celebrates what the speaker in Derek Mahon's poem at first dismisses or underestimates but later concedes -the values of art in times of violence. In particular, though not exclusively, it celebrates the poetry written during the phase of Northern Ireland's Troubles which began in 1968. The current poetry revival in the North had its immediate origins some years before that date, in the early and mid-1960s. Many of the emerging poets were 'scholarship' children, beneficiaries of the Education Act of 1947 (an act which also, by making further education more widely available to the Catholic minority, paved the way for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, the People's Democracy movement and the Social Democratic and Labour Party), beginning to find their voices at Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin and elsewhere at a time of intense cultural activity in the North. At the start of the decade the English poet Philip Hobsbaum, then a lecturer at Queen's, founded a writers' group at which young poets such as Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Seamus Deane and James Simmons read their work and which continued to meet for several years after Hobsbaum's departure from Belfast. The Belfast Telegraph and magazines such as Hany Chambers's Phoenix, Threshold and the Northern Review provided early outlets for these poets, until, in 1965, the Queen's University Festival (later the Belfast Festival at Queen's) promoted a series of Festival Publications, the first pamphlet collections of, among others, Heaney, Longley, Simmons, Deane and Mahon. The process of consolidation continued when, in 1966, Heaney's Death of a Naturalist was published to immediate acclaim, followed by Simmons's Late but in Earnest and John Montague's A Chosen Light (both in 1967), Mahon's Night-Crossing (1968), Longley's No Continuing City, Heaney's Door into the Dark, Simmons's In the Wilderness and Other Poems and Padraic Fiacc's By the Black Stream (all in 1969). By the end of the decade, yet another generation of Northern Irish poets, those whose first collections appeared in the 1970s, had begun to publish in the Honest Ulsterman magazine, founded by James Simmons in 1968. A number of other poetic milestones of the I 960s should be mentioned here. The appearance of Louis MacNeice's Collected Poems (1966) and John Hewitt's Collected Poems 1932-1967 (1968) confirmed these poets as exemplars and influences. Hewitt's book also prefigured the re-emergence in the 1 970s of poets such as Roy McFadden and Robert Greacen, whose first collections had been published in the 1940s. The work of all four serves as a reminder that Troubles poetry (like the Troubles themselves) did not originate in 1968. The sixteenth section of MacNeice's 'Autumn journal' (1939), for example, which makes direct reference to earlier Troubles incidents in the York Street district of Belfast, has a remarkably contemporary ring: its themes of sectarian division and intransigence, the fear, suspicion and violence that Irish children are heir to, the complex, turbulent relationship between Ireland and Britain, the Irishman's love-hate engagement with his country, the artist's (in this case ironic) 'envy' of the man of 'action'; its depiction of a society where free speech is 'nipped in the bud' and the 'minority always guilty'; its imagery of drums, bombs, banners, sectarian graffiti and of Belfast as a 'city built upon mud', make it a source poem for much of this anthology. John Hewitt, too, in poems such as Freehold, 'The colony' and 'Once alien here' (all written in the 1940s) and in many of his Glens of Antrim poems, had focused on the descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who had colonised Ulster in the early seventeenth century and he attempted to express their dilemmas. Indeed, his use of historical perspective and parallel in 'The colony', in which the speaker is a Roman colonist, may have served as a model for younger poets of how to address the Troubles obliquely with a dynamic balance of involvement and restraint; and the reservation he himself expresses about this approach, in a poem called 'Parallels never meet' (1969), his fear that the 'coarser texture' of reality in the north of Ireland may be sanitised or lost among the classical associations and resonances, anticipate a recurrent concern among Northern Irish poets generally. So, when the most recent phase of Troubles erupted in 1968-9, it was inevitable that an already vigorous poetic community should reflect the crisis. Initially, the response was cautious. Although there was some journalistic pressure to produce a kind of war poetry, and although a number of poets engaged in the poetry of the latest atrocity (to adapt Conor Cruise O'Brien's phrase about instant politics), the majority, while recognising the need for response, were more circumspect. Seamus Heaney writes that for Northern Irish poets at that time 'the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament' and described the urgent necessity 'to discover a field of force in which, without abandoning fidelity to the processes and experience of poetry ... it would be possible to encompass the perspectives of a humane reason and at the same time to grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity' ('Feeling into words', from Preoccupations: Selected Prose 196& 1978, 1980). Michael Longley records how Northern Irish writers in the late I 960s and early 1 970s were sometimes accused of exploitation if they wrote about the Troubles and evasion if they did not, concedes that the poet 'would be inhuman if he did not respond to tragic events in his own community and a poor artist if he did not seek to endorse that response imaginatively', but also states his conviction that 'the artist needs time in which to allow the raw material of experience to settle to an imaginative depth' ('Preview', Radio Times, 20-6 October 1979). The northern poets have continued, in reviews and criticism as well as poetry, to weigh and scrutinise the relationship between art and politics and the nature of artistic responsibility. Far from being cripplingly self-conscious -Seamus Deane has noted that artists 'can often be more troubled by the idea that they should be troubled by a crisis than they are by the crisis itself' ('The artist and the Troubles', Ireland and the Arts, 1983) -this preoccupation has proved enabling, underpinning and balancing the rich body of Troubles poetry of the last twenty-five years. It has neither stifled the cry of protest nor frozen the springs of compassion and in itself constitutes a valuable, challenging examination of the whole nature of 'response'. This is, perhaps, a suitable point to raise the question of what makes a Troubles poem. There is no simple answer and I have tried not to be prescriptive. It would, after all, be possible to compile a 'relevant anthology of great political poems and elegies from world literature of all ages, and it is with the timelessness and universal application of such Poetry (and painting) in mind, as the poets themselves had, that I have included, fully or in extract, Heaney's The Cure at Troy (after Sophocles), Longley's 'The butchers' (after Homer) and 'Peace' (after Tibullus), Mahon's 'Courtyards in DeIft' (after Pieter de Hooch) and Tom Paulin's 'A nation, yet again' (after Pushkin), to mention some obvious examples. More problematically for the anthologist, it is arguable that any poem by a Northern Irish poet since 1968, on whatever subject, could be termed a Troubles poem, in that it may, consciously or unconsciously, reflect the context in which it was written. The unconscious element can only be matter for speculation, but there is interesting evidence of poets' awareness of how the Troubles shadow their poems on other subjects. Montague's highly personal collection The Great Cloak (1978), about the disintegration of a marriage and the growth of a new relationship, has the epigraph, As my Province burns Montague has described the book as 'a political statement.. . for love poetry is a form of political poetry' ('Beyond the Planter and the Gael', Crane Bag, vol. 4 no. 2, 1980-1). The domestic and love poems of Michael Longley have a similar conscious dimension, as do his poems about the flora and fauna of County Mayo; these, as Peter McDonald remarks, 'are not simply idyllic retreats from "the nightmare ground", but oblique ways of understanding it'. Given also the extent to which the Troubles permeate entire book-length collections by Northern Irish poets -among them The Rough Field (1972) by John Montague, An Exploded View (1973) by Michael Longley, North (1975) by Seamus Heaney, Liberty Tree (1983) by Tom Paulin, Missa Terribilis (1986) by Padraic Fiacc, Meeting the British (1987) by Paul Muldoon, The Irish for No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1989) by Ciaran Carson - it has proved difficult to select adequately from work that has radiated so widely and profoundly from its central concern. The Troubles poems reprinted here are chosen from some twelve hundred I have read on the subject. Many of those omitted were worthy, heartfelt and sincere, but had little else to recommend them as poems. Many more were propagandist exercises -depressingly instructive but more likely (in Mahon's words) to 'perpetuate/The barbarous cycle' than help (in Montague's) to 'give that fiery/Wheel a shove'. The poets represented are predominantly from the north of Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and England, but there is also work by a Scot, a New Zealander, two Americans and two Russians. Three contributors - Arthur McVeigh, Keny Carson and Conor Carson -were still schoolchildren when their poems were written. I have taken the opportunity to reprint in full a number of relevant longer poems, among them Hewitt's 'The colony', already mentioned; Simmons's 'Lament for a dead policeman', modelled on Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill's eighteenth-century Gaelic poem 'The lament for Art Ó Laoghaire'; Longley's sequence 'Letters' (to three Irish poets); and Muldoon's elusive, fractured narrative 'The more a man has the more a man wants'. The content, which includes some fifty poems already anthologised in the precursor to this volume, Padraic Fiacc's The Wearing of the Black: An Anthology of Contemporary Ulster Poetry (1974), is organised in six sections. The first ranges over the historical origins of the Troubles, the clash and blend of different traditions in the North, the endless interaction, for better or worse, of past and present. The second focuses on the dangerous undercurrents of injustice and resentment, complacency and discontent, particularly in the period between the establishment of the Northern Ireland state in 1921 and the turmoil of 1968. The third is a sustained elegy for the casualties and victims: civilians, policemen, soldiers, hunger strikers, internees. In section four the predominant subjects are art and politics, the ways in which men of 'action' and, more especially, men of 'words', make, or fail to make, or might make 'things happen', artistic obligation, the centrality and/or marginality of the artist in times of violence, the search for artistic models, and the problems of reaction and response. Section five returns, in a more concentrated way, to the relationship between Northern Ireland and Britain, mainly as experienced by a number of writers who have lived in, or visited, the North; I have broadened the section to include poems by Northern Irish writers that depict the role and plight of the British soldier in the North and a number that portray Northern Ireland as a casualty of colonialism, abandoned or manipulated from outside by unscrupulous politicians and civil servants. The final grouping of poems begins with a reacknowledgement of the 'odi atque ami' impulses recorded in MacNeice's 'Autumn journal XVI' (section one) and the perpetually unfinished business of learning 'what is meant by home' (Mahon); its images of healing, peace, normality, have an appropriately vulnerable ring; potential and aspiration are constantly affirmed, their fragility constantly recognised. Poetry is not, of course, so easily categorised, and while I am confident that individual sections of the anthology are coherent, I recognise that many of the poems included would fit comfortably into more than one section. It seems to me that imaginative relocations and permutations are among a reader's creative pleasures in a collection of this nature. Seamus Deane has written of the work of Heaney and Mahon that in their efforts 'to come to grips with destructive energies, they attempt to demonstrate a way of turning them towards creativity. Their sponsorship is not simply for the sake of art; it is for the energies embodied in art which have been diminished or destroyed elsewhere.' Deane's comment sums up the affirmative thrust of the poetry collected here. The vitalities and humane perspectives of that poetry, its cumulative counterblasts to the reductive, lethal simplicities of the propagandist, its embodiment of 'semantic scruples' in a province where language is often a dangerous, sometimes a fatal, weapon, give it its own powerful 'field of force'. Its underlying 'rage for order', as the multiple ironies of Mahon's poem intimate, is much more than the wretched last throe of 'a dying art'. Somewhere close to the 'scorched gable end and the burnt-out buses' it is sturdily and enhancingly alive.
FRANK ORMSBY
From the back cover: A Rage for Order A comprehensive new anthology of over 250 poems from nearly 70 leading poets confronting all the passionate intensities of the Northern Ireland Troubles F E A T U R I N G FLEUR ADCOCK EAVAN BOLAND CIARAN CARSON SEAMUS DEANE PAUL DURCAN PADRAIC FIACC TONY HARRISON SEAMUS HEANEY JOHN HEWITT BRENDAN KENNELLY PHILIP LARKIN MICHAEL LONGLEY ROGER MCGOUGH LOUIS MACNEICE DEREK MAHON PAUL MULDOON TOM PAULIN YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO and many others
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