 As
Reviewed By: |
This
is the Life
|
As
Reviewed By: |
This
is the Life
|
I
am rereading Moby Dick in preparation for the exam deluge tomorrow—am whelmed
and wondrous at the swimming Biblical & craggy Shakespearean cadences,
the rich & lustrous & fragrant recreation of spermaceti,
ambergris—miracle, marvel, the ton-thunderous leviathan. One of my few
wishes: to be (safe, coward that I am) aboard a whale ship through the
process of turning a monster to light & heat.
-- Sylvia Plath, Journals, pg. 370
Sylvia
Plath’s deeply appreciative response to Melville’s Moby
Dick, her shrewd, insightful regard for its redolent language and its
powerfully evocative images of the monstrous, unknowable natural world,
provides a fitting gesture towards a similarly rich and erudite new
collection of poetry, The Sea
Cabinet by Caitríona O’ Reilly. Indeed, O’Reilly would doubtless
be moved by Plath’s comment as Moby
Dick provides The Sea Cabinet with its epigraph and Plath herself is surely a most
enabling influence in O’Reilly’s finely wrought poems with their
knowing cleverness, use of richly varied, often elliptical language and
keenly observed, finely-detailed imagery. Plath is clearly important to
O’Reilly as a poet. O’Reilly’s interest in the American’s work
goes back to her PhD thesis, titled “I Carpenter a Space for the Thing I
am Given”—itself a line from Plath’s “Thalidomide”—a study of
influence and the consciousness of space in the work of Emily Dickinson,
H.D. and Plath. However,
O’Reilly should in no way be numbered among the many contemporary
fledgling poets who may be seen as nothing more than admiring Plath-imitators,
overawed by the formidable powers of their predecessor. She is too
confident and informed a poet for that. Unlike
Eavan Boland, the Irish poet who has most persistently declared the
influence of Plath on her work and
who, as Edna Longley has put it, “signals rather than digests her debts
to Sylvia Plath,” O’Reilly has assimilated Plath’s influence,
learning from Plath and other precursors in order to forge a voice of her
own.
It is interesting to note the similarities between Plath and O’Reilly,
not least in the way that critics have responded to the work of both.
Marita Over, reviewing O’Reilly’s first collection The
Nowhere Birds for Ambit Magazine,
remarked on how “O’Reilly’s tone varies interestingly though:
sometimes she exercises a kind of fine hysteria that remains controlled
but threatens to overflow, and at other times she exudes a warm empathy
and humour towards her strange subjects.” These are much the same terms
that critics used to describe the tone of Plath’s poetry, particularly
of Ariel, as one of
“controlled hysteria” but at the same time, as Al Alvarez recognised
in an early review of Ariel,
“tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hard
minded.” Over’s concluding remark, “Superb, but definitely not one
to read without the central heating turned up a notch or two” is a
testament to this poet’s ability to discomfit as she impresses. Melville
famously professed, “I love all men who dive” and O’Reilly, as
Dickinson and Plath before her, is a poet who is driven to probe beyond
limits; to disturb, provoke and exhilarate.
Writing on Plath’s poetry, O’Reilly displays the kind of intelligent
critical engagement that is often absent in Plath scholarship. At
a thematic level, O’Reilly has encapsulated the concerns of Plath’s
poetry as, “the terrible insecurity of the self, the reality of
indifference and lovelessness, and the inevitability of death and loss.”
Such knowing observations of Plath’s work by O’Reilly lend themselves in turn to a deeper understanding of her own
preoccupations in this collection. The
Sea Cabinet, following on from her critically-acclaimed, Rooney
Prize-winning debut collection The
Nowhere Birds, continues the same reflective interrogation of the
natural world and the lone self in it as the mind struggles to apprehend
and make sense of its place in a threatening, mutable environment and
seeks to articulate something of its own alienation in an ultimately
impenetrable, unquantifiable reality. It is the sustained gaze of the
speaker that dominates in this collection. The processes of observation as
well as the objects perceived are mercilessly examined and analysed in
this most watchful, most precisely detailed of poetries. O’Reilly’s
focus is unflinching, never resting. In “Diffraction,” the distorting
effect of light on the speaker’s perception is meticulously scrutinised.
Light, as well as clarifying and making visible also warps and injures.
Here, the speaker, vulnerable to the powerful forces of light and heat in
a foreign location, is overexposed: “And the light— / it fills my eye
vessels // to overflowing” resulting in visual impairment,
semi-blindness; “A half-moon gone, / half a sentence/ smudged from the
page”. The disorder is investigated by Argus—a reference to the Greek
mythical watchman with 100 eyes—and the poem ends with the assertion
that “there are limits to what/ any eye can absorb”. Similarly “The
Floater” too, displaying a true flair for simile, has the speaker
articulate the unnerving effects of a loose particle in her eyeball as it
attacks her field of vision:
it suddenly swims into sight like
a snaggle-toothed sea-beast submerged
until now, jellied
eel in my vitreous humour. This
is highly reminiscent of Plath’s “The Eye-mote” wherein the speaker
describes the disruptive effects of a splinter stuck in her eye:
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve. Similarly,
in O’Reilly’s “X-Ray,” the speaker, supine and “unscrolled”,
is subjected to the invasive properties of light, the self under threat of
exposure and fragmentation. O’Reilly’s is a profoundly exploratory imagination. As one would expect in this age of Irish cosmopolitan poetry the work is peripatetic, encompassing locations as distant as Hull and Japan as well as journeying back in time and moving through large-scale references to art, history, science, the natural sciences, alchemy, falconry and of course whaling, always in search of more knowledge. The sea is the central image throughout, what Plath in “Berck-Plage” termed “this great abeyance,” and indeed O’Reilly’s evocative eight-line poem “Hierophant” is reminiscent of Plath’s “Full Fathom Five” and “Lorelei” with its sea-imagery of “hands white as cuttle bones” and “the sea-shell curve of his lip” and with its use of archaic words such as “fen” and “hoard”. The same “drunkenness of the great depths” that is majestically orchestrated in Plath’s “Lorelei” is there in O’Reilly’s “dark pool.”
Another
poem, the fantastical “Shortcut to Northwind” has the speaker, by way
of a computer virus that renders her monitor blank, imaginatively carried
away to another world, as she declares on a deep-sea sojourn: “The
air’s thickness/ grew, and it was without fright// I knew that I was
breathing water.” This is surely a direct reference to the vivid closing
lines of Plath’s “Full Fathom Five”: “this thick air is murderous/
I would breathe water.” Plath’s trope of bee-keeping also features. In
the prose-like “A Deserted House,” noisy colonies of bees have taken
over the chimney piece to become architects and constructors of six-walled
edifices or cell structures, in the spirit of Robert Frost’s
“Design,” giving way to, as the poem concludes, “less
a haunted house than a population in the chimney piece.” Nature,
unfathomable, has its own laws, its own mind. The poet can only use the
full forces of words and poetic forms to create some sense of order,
temporary though it must be, and in this O’Reilly surely reiterates
Plath’s “Conversation Among the Ruins”: “What ceremony of words
can patch the havoc?”
Just as O’Reilly, in her reading of Plath’s “The Night Dances,”
draws attention to Plath’s use of the word “calla” lily for its
relation to “callous”, here she comes across as a deserving successor
to Plath—a self-confessed “Roget’s Trollope”—as a poet deeply
interested in words themselves. Part V of the title poem, called The
Whale, begins, “The twenty-ninth letter of the Arabic alphabet / is nun,
which means ‘a whale’.” There is a scholarly, erudite attentiveness
to words and their meanings throughout O’Reilly’s collection as
“Calculus” declares: “I collect fine words the way others collect
birds’ eggs” only to then archly catch out the unsuspecting reader
with, “the most beautiful word in the language // is haemostasis,
which means the stopping of clocks.” The whole collection is unified by
the use of motifs and images that reverberate throughout. Thus, pivotal
words such as “eye”, “sea”, “edge”, “moon” and “bees”
sound repeatedly through the poems, making for a richly interwoven
texture. This is the same “interweaving of imaginative constants from
different parts of the oeuvre” that Seamus Heaney celebrated in
Plath’s work in his essay “The Indefatigable Hoof-taps.” Words and
symbols continually call attention to themselves, set very deliberately in
their places as the poet’s control never falters. O’Reilly’s
inventiveness with language and style of syntax is reminiscent of
Plath’s. Chillingly matter-of-fact pronouncements such as “I am six
months nearer the earth” and “I have barely moved all winter”
(“Gravitations”) imitate Plath’s monological style particularly in
her poem for three voices, Three Women.
The title poem of The Sea Cabinet,
cast in free verse over five sections was apparently inspired by a visit
to the Hull Maritime Museum’s display of whale skeletons and other
artefacts from the deep, as well as by the story of the whaling ship Diana
that sailed out of Hull in 1840 only to become trapped in ice and its
captain die. Quoting from historical documents, the poet meditates on the
whaling industry and on the accompanying themes of obsolescence and
extinction. Thronged with opulent vocabulary ranging from archaic to more
contemporary terms, the opening section itself puts forward a catalogue of
whaling implements: “flensing spades, blubber knives/ and tongue knives,
blubber pricks and seal picks, / trypots and pewter worms, gaffs and
staffs and bone gear” clanging then chiming through bursts of internal
rhyme to make up “the whaleman’s glossolalia and horizon.” Indeed,
Plath as enraptured reader of Moby Dick, would be delighted to behold the word “ambergris” in The
Whale even if her “spermaceti” does not appear (although we do get
“Mysteceti”). The title poem closes
with the following marvelously poignant realization: The whale on which their world depended is elsewhere, free of history, and casts their antique lives adrift like ambergris.
O’Reilly cleverly has the word “depended” hang precariously off the
edge of both the line and the stanza, drawing directly on the etymology of
the word which comes from the Latin, pendere,
to hang. Such attentiveness to matters of technique and erudition is a joy
to encounter, as is the fierce alertness to detail, to experiences both
real and imagined. Throughout the collection, O’Reilly meticulously
conveys the life of the mind as it encounters the world.
This is not the poetry of autobiography. Indeed,
O’Reilly has been keen to mark out the distinction between life and art,
particularly in the poetry of Plath, as she warns against the critical
approach that would “simplistically conflate Plath’s biography with
the personae of her writings.” As O’Reilly astutely realizes where
Plath is concerned “the connections between a writer’s life and her
work are numerous, indirect and mysterious.” What is more, her statement
in an interview for the Irish Times
that “All my poems come out of immediate psychic or emotional
experiences” directly echoes Plath’s famous elucidation of her own
poetic project to Peter Orr: “I think my poems immediately come out of
the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.” What is more, just as
O’Reilly goes on to say that “There are certainly fictional moments in
most of the poems. They are not direct autobiography in any kind of way”
asserting how “I’m aware of the artifice that went into writing them
and the formal considerations which make them less direct and more
mediated” Plath too stated that “I believe one should be able to
control and manipulate experiences […] with an informed and intelligent
mind.” O’Reilly, having learned from Plath, is mindful of the need to
exercise the same intellectual control over her subject matter, and she
achieves this mastery in many of the poems in this collection.
Thus voices, masks and poses proliferate.
In one poem Goya speaks, lamenting his condition of old age, while in
another, “Now or When,” following on from Richard Wilton, the sun dial
at Beverley Minster speaks of its own defunct state now that time has
moved on. Similarly, in “Netsuke” a Japanese woman depicts herself and
her world in beautifully mournful, pared-down diction over sparse two-line
stanzas. With precise attention to detail, the act of her own
self-mutilation is captured through highly metaphorical expression and the
enjambment itself, spilling over the lines, imitates the profusion that is
being described: When I draw his blade across my arm it resembles water dripping over a stone lip in the stone garden, runny wax from a candle, the new moon’s incised
smile.
O’Reilly’s intricate use of subtle internal rhyme, words repeated over
lines, assonance and alliterative technique is very assured and is this
too she has learned from Plath who pursued a poetics dedicated to aural
concerns, what she called “mouthfuls of sound.” Also, her highly
developed metaphorical imagination is reminiscent of Plath in poems such
as “Cut” where the acute scrutiny of a finger cut by a knife blade
leads into a sustained conceit for American history. In O’Reilly’s
“To The Muse” the muse of poetry, traditionally female, is inverted,
appearing as a male lover. Here, the historic Irish Confederate Wars
provides the layered backdrop for the breakdown of the relationship and
the sexual dysfunction and strained communication between poet and muse,
both trapped in an unhappy state of eternal return. Thus, poet and muse
are a ‘confederacy’—of dunces perhaps?—making for nothing more
intimate or encouraging than an impotent alliance. This poet allows for no
easy consolations, taking no comfort even from her own art.
The tellingly-titled pantoum “Persona” points again to the same
technique of taking on other voices in a play of fluid identities—what
O’Reilly sees in Plath’s own work as “the personae of her
writings.” And here, it seems to be Plath’s voice of detached
questioning, of control in the face of uncertainty and terror that
O’Reilly is deliberately taking over: And what can I do with these dark adhesions, These unmoored pieces of the night? They breathe their black into my day—
Further on, the line “See me there with the pained carved face”
immediately suggests Plath’s “Event” with its vividly etched image
of the child in the crib: “His little face is carved in pained red
wood.” Also, the presiding images here of female self as puppet,
manikin, or made of wood are Plath’s own: “little unstrung puppet,
kicking to disappear” (“Lesbos”). As Fiona Sampson too has
recognized, “If this sounds like Plath, it’s perhaps not surprising;
since O’Reilly’s poetic project, too, is the appropriation of rich
context, including Irish and British history, to personal
meaning-making.” “Gravitations,” with its use of imagery derived
from chemistry, owes much to Plath’s idiosyncratic deployment of the
same vocabulary of science and alchemy, particularly in “Nick and the
Candlestick” (Let the mercuric/ Atoms that cripple drip/ Into the
terrible well”) and the terrifying, final “image” which, as “The
glass cracks across”, “Flees and aborts like dropped mercury” that
closes “Thalidomide”: March: the grey atom I’ve swallowed drops, element-heavy plumb line to this year’s mood— as mercury might smash its
instrument—
O’Reilly has marked out Plath’s mature poems as “lyrics full of disturbingly
powerful and suggestive imagery,” and many of O’Reilly’s poems
invite the same description. The wonderfully suggestive image here:
“Faces pass / as though their owners / went on wheels” echoes
Plath’s preoccupation with the blank or featureless face, a word that
between its singular and plural usage sounds ninety-eight times in all
throughout Plath’s work, most strikingly in the closing line of “The
Surgeon at 2 am”: “Gray faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like
flowers.”
O’Reilly has stated how “Plath’s most beautiful poems present images
of absolute self-loss,” and how Plath’s “The Night Dances”
“provides an image of self not as emergent but as fragmented,
dissipated, obsolescent.” The same theme of the self under threat of
extinction or containment pervades this collection and is there in “The
Maze” where O’Reilly’s speaker, calm and matter-of-fact, details the
frighteningly enclosed nature of her existence where there are “no
words,” “no signs”: “I live in a space that was bequeathed me / a
ziggurat of stepped spires and corridors. / There is no road out.” Structural
concerns dominate O’Reilly’s poetic however such formal resources are
used subtly. O’ Reilly, having studied Plath’s poetry closely has
recognized for herself the danger of over-reliance on such devices:
“Plath’s early lyrics are rather stilted and self-conscious,
demonstrating how heavily, at first, she relied on the formal poetic
resources of rhyme and meter.” Reflecting on her own use of poetic
forms, such as the sonnet or sestina, O’Reilly has said how “it acts
as a stimulus to the poem. It’s a test of how you can think within
boundaries.” These boundaries, enclosures, confinements mirror
O’Reilly’s thematic concerns with the self and the structures it is
contained by under duress of entrapment, disintegration or obsolescence.
O’Reilly resembles Plath in her use of free verse stanza patterns, and
just as Plath, after her strictly formal and imitative beginnings grew
into a poet of real originality and formal daring, O’Reilly is a poet
who deftly handles her poetic resources while also sounding a unique,
assured voice. She is sure to reach even further heights in the future. |
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