The Parish and Lost America: Michael Coady's All Souls (1997)

The crucial importance of Patrick Kavanagh for the generation of Irish poets succeeding those who practiced their art in the immediacy of Yeats's shadow is by now a commonplace that hardly needs commentary. Kavanagh's temperamental and aesthetic decision to privilege the parochial over the provincial opened an imaginative lane for poets like Kinsella, Montague, and Heaney, whose reputations would come to range beyond parish, province, and nation to enter the region of global recognition. Of course, it was always Kavanagh's assumption that the local housed the universal, and that what Heaney would later call the "first world" was actually the whole world in microcosm. Michael Longley's evocations of Carrigskeewaun follow Kavanagh's precept, though Longley is more a classical poet of global historical culture. It also seems arguable that Eavan Boland's concern to make the suburbs a locus for her poetry owes something to Kavanagh's example, as well as to Adrienne Rich's feminist poetics. Derek Mahon's "Glengormley," in contrast, traces the moment of the poet's refusal to assent to the local as a repository of the universal, so fraught is home with conflict and deadly sectarian nostalgia. Paul Muldoon's eclectic and often esoteric immrama, in turn, chart an elaborate subversion of Kavanagh's idea of the parish. Rather than centering itself in the local, Muldoon's work finds its dominant trope in the idea of passage, of errancy.

The tension between center and passage away from the center—one that leads eventually to the erasure of the center as a sustainable ground—defines in large measure the postmodern milieu. However, though apologists for a more reified notion of postmodernity would efface this fundamental tension with polemics against essentialism and Romantic idealism, it is the conscious exploration of the frisson between center and passage that in my view makes a poet's work significant for our time.

Kavanagh himself is no exception. When, in the introduction to his Collected Poems (1964), the poet observes that he lost his "messianic ambition" and that his "purpose in life is to have no purpose," he is doing more than announcing the now widely acknowledged shift in sensibility between his early and late poems, or even a change of temperament brought on by his surviving lung cancer. He is articulating the shift from an almost premodern appeal to place to a decidedly postmodern condition of displacement to which he willingly assents and which he finally celebrates. The path of his life from Monaghan to the Grand Canal (to allude to Heaney's important essay) traces that passage. In "The Hospital," Kavanagh declaims: "Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;/ For we must record love's mystery without claptrap, / Snatch out of time the passionate transitory." ¹ With these words, Kavanagh's parish is transported out of its central space to become primarily a function of time, a visionary clearing in which the transitory, and not the longstanding local, reveals its subtext in a universal "mystery."

The positing of universality or transcendence as a category relevant to poetry is treated with skepticism, if not outright scorn, by the contemporary literary establishment, and so it could be argued that Kavanagh's "shift" merely reiterates his inherent premodernity in another guise. On the contrary, Kavanagh's "purposeless poetic" readies the ground for the wild excursions of Muldoon, not to mention a range of other voices that collectively extend the attentions and possibilities of Irish poetry by "naming" their particular worlds, their passing individual centers of imaginative concern. The genuine poet's hope is to raise such naming out of the transitory in order to enlarge the available space for poetry, so that poetry itself might become a crossroads or meeting ground. Such a hope pervades Michael Coady's work. His first book, Two For a Woman, Three For a Man, won The Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1979. His second...