The Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry: Pat Boran

On April 10, 2008, the University of St. Thomas Center for Irish Studies presented the twelfth O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award to Pat Boran in private ceremonies on the university's St. Paul campus. The following citation was read on that occasion.

This evening, as on eleven earlier Spring evenings since our distinguished benefactor Lawrence O'Shaughnessy first presented the award that bears his name, the University of St Thomas is privileged to welcome a versatile and accomplished Irish poet to our campus, to our table, and into our esteem. The names that are now linked with the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry speak not only to the continuing literary vitality of Ireland, but also to power of poetry itself to express and enrich our common humanity.

Pat Boran participates in Ireland's writing life as a tireless reviewer, broadcaster, and author of two nonfiction books. In his stewardship of the Dublin Writers Festival, in his steady encouragement of younger poets, and not least in his energetic service to poetry as publisher at the Dedalus Press, he is an exemplary presence in Ireland's literary life. But of course, it is Pat Boran, the poet, whom we celebrate tonight.

Our guest was born in the provincial town of Portlaoise in 1963, and, though he is long settled in Dublin, his small-town origins continue to preoccupy him. It is, after all, a poet's job is to look deep, and it was in Portlaoise that Boran first met the world. Often, his work verges on memoir—as if in writing his own life, he might also write the life of Ireland in his time. In the poem titled "Unbuild," he concludes, "And now when night falls / I go back again, I unbuild the house. / Stone by blessed stone / I have taken it apart / and still it is not gone."His poems repeatedly look to his childhood; to the small mythologies of family life, especially the shaping presence of his father; to the walls and windows of homes both occupied and empty; and to the reassurance and enigma of "familiar things"—a phrase that, in fact, serves as the title of one of his four collections.

For Boran, the prospect of meaning, though not necessarily the meaning itself, is always near. We can hear in his poems the Angelus bell, sounding the remains of Christian feeling in Irish life. On other occasions, Boran seems ready to dip a toe into the cosmic: the lofty secularmythologies of physics crop up throughout his work, and he is clearly obsessed with the mystery of time: clocks, watches, and other timepieces figure on almost every page, from the first poem of his New and Selected in which a son is sent out by his father "To bring home the time /without a watch to carry it," straight through to the last poem, which concludes, "Time itself / is in a kind of trance. . . ."

And yet, Boran never falls for a glib synchronicity or indulges in the too-ponderous reflection: his poems stay grounded in this world, this reality. In "Between the Lines," for instance, he evokes

Accidental discoveries: CoinsFallen down the backs of easy chairs;The likeness of a lover or a friend,Emerging in a loaf of bread; thingsRising from forgotten places . . .

And we see his trust in the latent meaning of objects in the 1991 poem, "Born To Shave," which describes a moment standing at the sink, reflecting that "Years from now I will reach / from some otherworldly place, / where none of this means anything, to touch / this handbasin, these dulled blades." Here and in many other poems, he enacts the wisdom with which he concludes "Between the Lines": "You find, when you reach into the world / Occasional if not always blatant signs / Underneath the covers and between the lines."

But in "Born in Shave," we notice that Boran can never quite see himself clearly: first too short, then too tall for the shaving mirror, we realize that—in repeatedly coming back to those moments when there is something askance, something not quite lined up—this poet so obsessed with...