ISBN 1876044063
First published 1996, reprinted 1997
91 pgs
$21.95
Sentences of Earth &
Stone
book
sample
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FABLE
THE ISLE OF THE DEAD
DIDJERIDU
ASSIMILATION
MANNERS
GOODNIGHT
AN CAISIDEACH BÁN
THE NOVICE IN THE TAVERN
PISEOGA
SPECTACLES
BELIEVING
SLIABH LUACHRA
VISITORS
THE CREATOR
THE BED ROOM
DAUGHTER
TREASURE
CHANGELING
FROSTBITE
TELLING TALES
THE CORN FIELD
THE GENEALOGY OF EYES
HOMEWORK
APPLES AND PEARS
HEART BEAT
THE LUCKY CAUL
REGROWTH
SCRIBBLING
Clár
FABHALSCÉAL
OILEÁN NA MARBH
DIDJERIDU
AN DUBH INA GHEAL
BÉASA
OÍCHE MHAITH
AN CAISIDEACH BÁN
AN NÓIBHÍSEACH SA TIGH TÁBHAIRNE
PISEOGA
GLOINÍ
CREIDEAMH
SLIABH LUACHRA
CUARTEOIRÍ
AN CRUTHAITHEOIR
AN SEOMRA CODLATA
INCHEAN
CNUAS
IARLAIS
AN GOMH DEARG
FINSCÉALTA
AN GORT ARBHAIR
GINEALACH NA SÚL
FOGHLAIMEOIRÍ
AONACH NA dTORTHAÍ
CROÍBHUALADH
CAIPÍN AN tSONAIS
ÉIRIC
SEOLADH
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Reviews
A
t
the Margins’ Margins
Gobán
Cré Is Cloch/Sentences of Earth & Stone
Simon Caterson
Metre (Ireland)
2001
The reason why people
abroad tend to
think there are more Australians
than there are is because so many of them are at any given time out of
the country. It is therefore refreshing to find a poet of Louis de
Paor’s calibre travelling in the opposite direction. If not
geographically then linguistically Louis de Paor is as isolated an
exile as perhaps a poet can be nowadays. de Paor refuses to allow the
English translations of his work, or ‘forgeries’ as
he prefers to call
them, anywhere near Ireland. Like his previous bilingual collection,
the new poems, at least in the English, celebrate the newfound
landscape and in particular its big weather, but de Paor also begins to
explore an Irish childhood. His thoughts, it seems, heliotrope towards
home, though he also has some powerful things to say about indigenous
Australians, with whom he as an indigenous Irishman feels an affinity.
It is here that a rich seam is waiting to be worked.
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A Terrible Beauty Is BornPoetry and Community in the work of W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Vincent Buckley and othersJohn McLaren
Tirra Lirra, Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter 1999
Appropriately, an Irish-born and Gaelic-speaking poet, Louis de Paor,
has been able to suggest the link between the oppression of the Irish,
the convict system in Australia, and the dispossession of the
Aborigines. His long poem on Port Arthur, ‘The Isle of the Dead’,
describes first the graves of the English, their headstones facing home
to England as the tourist guide justifies their deeds with ‘mouldering
eyes’. The poet then describes the graves of the Irish where they
Lie as
they did in life on edge
in cramped beds that hurled
them against walls or knocked
them to the floor if they
moved in their sleep,
a devout technology
to teach the thing the body is a jail
to be rent asunder
releasing God’s image
imprisoned within,
The
spare lines allow no sentimentality as they move from the physical
details of incarceration by way of the explicatory and condemnatory
phrase, ‘devout technology’, summing up the twinned aspiration and
process of imperialism, to the ironic message. The gaol that holds the
image of God also denies it, but by confining the prisoners together
creates for them a community that survives in the chronicle of names on
headstones with which the poem concludes. Even those whose names are
not recorded constitute a ‘rollcall unopened’, to be known only in the
future, but with the power in the present to bow the poet’s head and
inflexible knee in supplication to the earth.
This rollcall of
the unknown refers not only to the convicts, but to all the anonymous
labourers whose work has built the settler society. In the following
poem, ‘Didjeridu’, the poet turns to the song of the dispossessed,
which, rather than setting rebel hearts to dance, calls up the sounds
of the land and its creatures, and
Ancient tribes of the air
Speaking a language vour wild
Colonial heart cannot comprehend.
For
those able to listen ‘for a minute or two/ hundred years’ these songs
‘bleed from punctured lung’, while our gentle ancestors can only ‘beat
the skin of the earth’, feeling nothing. In this admission of an
inability penetrate to the meaning of the song, while still being
prepared to listen to it, and to the voices of the convicts, lies the
possibility of community that, by acknowledging responsibility for its
past, will learn to be at home with the land. Louis de Paor, speaking
as a latecomer this land, as well as a speaker of the language of the
oppressed of the old world, is able express a community that will
transcend both the suffering and oppression of the past and the
divisions they breed even as we try redress them.
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The
Necessity of True Speaking
Alison
Croggon
Quadrant November
1997
Only truthful hands can
write
true poetry, said Paul Celan. Celan, the exiled German Jew who perhaps
more than any other twentieth-century poet attempted to make of the
quicksand of language a place where truth could exist, stands as a
beacon of rigour. His standards are harsh, exacting, extreme. He is a
wound in the side of poetry, an admonition, an exhortation to
attention, a conscience. With Osip Mandelstam, another child of
political and social extremity, he has been called a martyr and a
saint. But it would be more respectful and more accurate to say of them
both, as Rene Char said of Rimbaud, that they were poets, and that is
enough.
Such voices are discomforting. They do not protect
themselves,
they do not apologise, and despite their disconcerting humility they
will not budge from an insistence that the heart must be ‘a
place made
fast’, that poetry is ‘a unique instance of
language’ that matters
uniquely. They write from the far reaches of existence, uncertain
whether their poems will ever wash up ‘on the shoreline of a
heart’.
And yet they speak, across the vastness of their silences, in the face
of everything that demonstrates such speaking is impossible, that such
speaking has no value.
That’s the
high standard.
No historical age has been hospitable to poets. Poetry is
always,
as Celan and Mandelstam both said, ‘against the
grain’ of an epoch. It
often appears that, given this general caveat, we have entered a time
when poetry is less possible. The Italian Nobel laureate Eugenio
Montale claimed that we were entering a new ‘dark
age’ driven by the
materialist ideologies of technology, in which the processes of the
spiritual organism that are tracked in the poet will increasingly
retreat from the Zeitgeist of the age. Poetry, that mode of speech
which penetrates the legislative armour of language to remind us of a
possible wholeness of being, a possible freedom, a possible truth, is
now almost wholly ‘against the grain’. But the urge
towards the poetic
is a primitive and stubborn expression of humanity that will never
vanish entirely.
Poetry is not, and never has been, merely a business of
words.
Craft, as Celan said, is of minimal interest: one expects craft as one
expects hygiene. Living speech escapes classifications, proceeding by a
process of constant improvisation, and literature, its cousin, is
without exception connected to the act of human breathing, the rhythm
of a body, and consequently will always present the disruptions of
complexity. The true life of poems.does not exist in their craft,
however formally attentive the language, but in another activity the
craft makes possible: what one might call the living organism of the
poem, a kind of magnetic field around the words that is at once
immediately perceptible and impossible to describe.
The six books under
review
started me thinking again of the question of the poetic… Of
all these
writers, de Paor is the closest to an intuition of human truth, the
least afraid of the deep vein of poetic resistance. Sentences of Earth
and Stone is an extremely readable book, a virtue of the stubborn
clarity of de Paor’s language. The poems are given en face in
English
and the original Gaelic. I can’t really speak about the
Gaelic, but the
English poems are compromised by a refusal of craft that may be, in
part, a political refusal of the heritage of English poetry. de
Paor’s
aim is to give speech to the unvoiced, the dead and the anonymous
living, and he gives weight in the world of his poems to a tangible
domestic world and the clear but incomplete perceptions of childhood,
written with a simplicity that at its best recalls the unadorned voice
of Patrick Kavanagh. ‘Scribbling’, the last poem in
the book, finishes:
I
can just make out,
A trick of
the light
Maybe, a
smeared claw
Tagged
with the ring of
words,
A prop
against the
Jamb of
nothing,
A breath
of air on
The hinge
of everything.
This sense of the
contingency of
language runs through the book, an intuition of immanence within the
everyday that notes ‘this never / ending moment already gone
/ in the
whoosh of an angel’s wing’. But de Paor eschews a
tight lyric control
that might push his metaphors further than one step into meaning. I
can’t help thinking of the grace and intensity that inhabit
the poetry
of the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinksi, whose stringent and pained
insistence on the present, human moment opens into a Buddhist
contemplation of the eternal: de Paor’s poetic impulse is in
similar
territory, but his lack of discipline often slackens the line and
leaves the impulse floundering. His simple language can drop to the
simply prosaic, relying for its emotive weight on unquestioning
political or emotional sympathy. This is clear, for instance, in the
sequence on Port Arthur, ‘The Isle of the Dead’,
which assumes a status
of wronged victimhood for the convicts and generates its energy not
from its language but from its charged subject matter. The truth of the
Port Arthur penal colony is more complex and brutal than de
Paor’s
lament for murdered innocence suggests, and apotheosis for its uneasy
shades calls for a harsher resolution of paradox than de Paor offers in
his rollcall of Irish names, ‘a shower of rain / without
stain that
bows / my head.’
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Gaelic
Breath
Lyn McCredden (academic and essayist)
Arena,
April-May 1997
I don’t read
Gaelic, though I
wish I did, and so am not eminently suitable to review this book.
However, reading Louis de Paor’s
Sentences
of Earth & Stone, his
second bilingual English/Irish book of poetry, I am given some chance
to enter into the words and scenes and character of another culture, by
chance the culture of my ancestors. de Paor is an Irishman from Cork
who has lived and written in Australia for the last nine years. He is
currently back in Ireland for a year, the recipient of the
Seán Ó
Ríordáin Prize.
In performance, Louis reads his poetry in both English
and
Irish.
For the audience, it is a thrilling and a humbling experience. You are
invited to listen to poetry as it makes sense and music in two
languages so very different in sound and history. It’s not
merely the
rich, earthy narratives of these poems, but the musical repertoires of
the two languages which give such pleasure. The mono-lingual reader
like myself must sit humbly with the presence of poems on facing pages
in a language and from a culture so different to the English.
The title’s ‘sentences of earth and
stone’ suggests contact
with a
simple, everyday and peasant-based world - ‘the argot of old
men / on
stone benches ... their gapped mouths / and the sun’ - where
ordinary
objects and time schemes are invoked. However, the first poem,
‘Fable’/
‘Fabhalscéal’, elaborates on these old
men and their argot: ‘When
silence fills their mouths’ with ‘the wooden
language of the dead’. It
is a metaphysical elaboration in the most palpable of language. The
second poem, ‘Isle of the Dead’, is also concerned
with death through
the
things
of death:
headstones, graven letters, worms and cages of bone. But as in
‘Fable’,
it is death as metaphor for living which is a central concern. Death is
registered in all its forms: in the land and the weather -
‘the weight
of a sky / that drove their easygoing bodies / beyond the unhurried
stroke / of their gentle hearts;’ and includes the living
bodies which
know their destinies: ‘a surplice-white light pouring / from
the well
of their gapped mouths.’ In ‘Isle of the
Dead’ ‘the convicts lie as /
they did in life on edge / in cramped beds ... to teach the thing / the
body is a jail’.
This latter lesson is not de Paor’s directly,
but it is one the
poet sees inscribed everywhere in human beings’ treatment of
each
other. Much of the poetic and political energy is found in de
Paor’s
searching out the possible reasons for such barbarity. In rough, blunt,
short lines the poetry spits out its accusations against those who
continue to perpetuate the lies of colonisation and human cruelty:
You must remember
these
were naughty boys
who had
to be shown the
error
of their wicked
ways,’
explained the guide,
ex-army in polished
shoes
and priest-clean
nails, his
sweet talk fouling
the air
with mouldering
lies.
‘The
Isle of the Dead’
It won’t be
the words and
actions of the army or the religious who can honour such dead, but the
poet’s, as his poetry momentarily resurrects the forgotten,
in a
rollcall of the long dead: ‘Thomas Kelly, / carpenter, Edwin
Pinder, /
miner, John Bowden, barber... a rollcall unopened... without stain
that bows / my head and inflexible / knee in supplication / to the
earth’. The rough dignity given to such victims of a past
regime finds
its power from the poet’s words, and their anger at the
brutality which
was their lives and deaths. The religious and political forces which
would leave such a rollcall ‘unopened’ are
repudiated, as the poet
forges an angry ‘supplication’ in his art.
But there’s also lightness of touch, and
humour, in de Paor’s
poetry. Shoes and objects of the household are given life as they sense
the onset of summer, that ‘hooligan / hooning around corners
/
joyriding with the sun’:
At the back of the
wardrobe
behind the broken
clock
my grandmother’s
shoes can feel
forbidden music
touch her dead feet,
click of
fingers
clack of heels
smack of
lips
on powered cheeks
‘Visitors’
Here the dance between
death and
life takes a joyous turn, and the structure of the lines expresses the
verve, part nostalgia, part humour. Generalisations such as
‘the Irish
are musical and nostalgic’ are pretty vapid, so
I’ll just say that
here’s an Irish poet who creates through both registers, but
who also
has a keen sense of the present. The everyday - of children and
parents, of sexual bodies, of things - is created through music and a
contemporary sense of living, upon which the past impinges endlessly.
de Paor likes to tell stories, and many of his longer
poems are
historically placed narratives of childhood, of loss, of longing. What
is most interesting for me is the plangent sense of struggle in many of
the poems between life and death, the past and the present, the
traditional and the individual. The acknowledgements thank, amongst
others, those close to the poet who ‘set me back on course
whenever I
strayed onto the straight and narrow’. The nice irony of this
phrase is
augmented by the tensions, inscribed in many poems, between old
religious beliefs and practices and more earthy, earthly realities. For
instance, in the long narrative poem in five parts. ‘The
Cornfield,’
the brutal death of a small child - ‘...her huddled body /
small as a
wren nesting in a bed’ - is remembered:
As we
said the
rosary that night
the cold floor
hurt our knees,
we made a quilt
from patches
of old prayers to
cover her
perished soul and
lit a candle
at the
Virgin’s
feet to
keep out the night
for a while,
we drugged the
bulk of heavy blankets
on stone cold bones
that would never
again be warm.
‘The Cornfield, Part 4’
de
Paor often writes like
this, abutting religious and bodily needs
agains each other, in a climate (Irish? Melburnian?) which doubts the
efficacy of prayer, but grimly confirms the need of it also. Sentences
of earth and stone are mortal ones in this volume, but the music of de
Paor’s ‘everyday wordbrawl’ continues to
exhilarate.
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Books
Robert Verdon (author of
The
Well-Scrubbed Desert)
Muse,
February 1997
This is exquisite
poetry. When I
opened it I was ‘worded out’ from too much
reviewing, but (perhaps due
to my Celtic soul) it revived me in a flash.
Louis de Paor (pronounced more or less ‘de
pware’) has a
particular talent for striking imagery - ‘a surplice-white
light’;
‘useless as a rope on sand / when curiosity slipped its
lead’; ‘scoops
of wind off the mountain’.
His book is bilingual but sadly I’m not, so
I’ll stick to the
Saxon translations.
‘The Isle of the Dead’, which may
refer to Australia, is a
strongly anti-imperialist work, yet lacks the awkward
self-consciousness or arch didacticism found in the political works of
less accomplished poets. The corner of this foreign field is forever
England, perhaps, but it is an England of convicts and their military
oppressors, an England of master and slave. And though they are dead,
this England, a system of dehumanising brutality driven by greed and
hypocritical Christianity, lives on:
‘You must remember
these
were
naughty boys
who had
to
be shown the
error
of
their wicked
ways’,
explained
the guide
ex-army
in
polished shoes
and
priest-clean
nails, his
sweet
talk fouling
the air
with
mouldering
lies.
Naughty boys, all of them Irish: ‘pointless to pray / for the
souls of
animals.’
‘The Corn Field’ had me almost in tears; it looks
back at a childhood
trauma through a prism sharper than mere nostalgia. With his talent for
understatement, de Paor is a master of the elegy, the cold-eyed,
warm-hearted poem that catches you up when you least expect it.
All these poems arc alive with joy or heartache; the emotions they
engender can be scarifying, but all are liberating (and in two
languages at that). For once I can truly agree with the blurb on the
back: de Paor, as Philip Cleary states, is a ‘rare and
radical talent’.
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