The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass by Harry Clifton (review)

Harry Clifton was named Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2010 on the basis of his long career as a poet, fiction writer, and essayist, and in the immediate wake of the 2007 book Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004, which won Irish Times/ Poetry Now Award in 2008. As that book's title suggests, Clifton has spent extensive periods outside Ireland—in Asia and Africa, in Italy to write his prose study of the Abruzzi, and in other European locales. His subjects in Secular Eden and other books roam the world and the mind accordingly. But his newest book, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, plants itself in Ireland's history and geography and in the modes of life the poet has known there.

To those who know the history, the title signals the book's aims. Noel Lemass was a veteran of 1916 and served in the Irish Republican Army in the 1922-23 civil war. He was abducted by Free State supporters in 1923; his mutilated body was found months later in the area known as the Featherbed in the Dublin Muntains. A monument stands at the spot today.

The title poem, placed at the end of the book's first section, speaks of Lemass and his struggles as sleeping, as broodingly present within contemporary Irish life. The titles of the book's three sections—"Twenty-six Counties," "Six Counties," "Elsewhere"—confirm the main title's signals. So does the set-off introductory poem, in which the poet seems to question himself: "Are you not scared, young man, of your Daddy's ghost / And his before him, waiting here to greet you, / Latest of blow-ins, ready to try again?"

This is not to say that most of the poems concentrate on the civil war or the Troubles or on politics directly. But the book keeps the historical conflict squarely in our field of vision:

. . . Everything out of jointsince 1922, when the disappointed

Landlord fled, and the circle of apples grew

At the base of his tree. For all you know

The creamery trucks are an ambush, the Black and TansStill drinking in the ghost of Milestone Inn . . .

Looking through this history like a scratched lens, the book nevertheless looks at all human things, including a large measure of other, older literature: Hesse, Dostoevsky, and Trollope among them. Especially dazzling among the allusive poems is "The Crystalline Heaven," in heterometric nine-line stanzas and shifting rhyme patterns, and built on a metaphor that imagines the chamber of the Dáil as the concentric rings of Dante's hell.

The book's second section is more focused than the first on the landscape, seeing "the hill farms and the high sheep country" as "Above politics—the enormous relief / Up there . . ." The question of where history and politics intrude comes up continually; again and again, places are characterized as either "beyond history" or filled with ghosts. Can history be escaped? "A Crossroads" encapsulates the problem: "To break with the past, / To make it out / In any direction / More than roads were needed." No clear boundary in these poems divides the political history from the personal. The poems in the "Elsewhere" section muse on the poet's own family past. Much of that past takes place in South America, and Clifton lets the South America theme take in others' histories, as in "The Mynah Bird," which is dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop.

The collection's other obsessions include the poet's long marriage ("The Double Chairs, Mount Melleray," "Marriage," "October") and the hard facts of aging ("Dying Generations," "The Change"). The poems are often metrical; many use unabashed full rhyme. Their technique is musical and painterly, and their focus is within. This interiority holds even in public settings—pubs, streets, train stations, the tour boat to Skellig Michael—but is most intense in meditations on nonurban place, as in these lines from the book's final poem, "Oweniny, Upper Reaches...