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REVIEWS
MEDBH McGUCKIAN
reviews
Philomena's
Revenge (Salmon
Publishing)
If poetry is or
from the North has followed some Anglo-Irish monophase from Yeats,
that from other cardinal directions derives from the prose poetry
of Joyce, O'Brien and Beckett. Rita Ann Higgins at her best shares
an epiphanic quality with Ni Dhomhnaill, Durcan and Meehan;
I liked the way
my mother
got off her bike
to the side
while the bike
was still moving
graceful as a bird.
I must confess to
being more than attracted to this confident third collection,
since my maternal grandmother, to my mother's chagrin, added
Philomena to my Christian names. This adolescent virgin was
subsequently deleted from the canonization lists and pronounced
invalid, which shook my grandmother's devotion not a jot, just as
her violent namesake in the title-poem is "shifted",
"given the treatment", by the so called health
authorities. Tragedy results from the subjugation of the Dionysian
to a saintlike, animal obedience, with the once rebellious
daughter answering to a truncated dog's nickname reminiscent of
Fido, and repeated hard 'g's:
Get the gate, Philo,
Get the gate, girl.
As powerful a
condemnation of ECG as Janet Frayne's, the bullet ending in an
example of one of Rita Ann's most enjoyable poetic skills - her
ability to suggest a whole network of scenes, relationships,
prejudices or opinions into a single biting phrase, often no
longer than a couple of words. "Platonic my eye" she
will say, or take the ludicrously poignant climax of the 'Trapped
Doctor' making love to his wife:
Gloria love, Gloria,
let on I'm tall.
Despite the
mockery, there is an edge of compassion akin to Wordsworth's guilt
towards the mad, lunatic, innocent, of Victorian rural England, in
her obsession with the malfunctioning psyche of latter-day Galway,
with the difference that her experience of the natural
individual's struggle for something approaching self-fulfilment in
a supernatural society is clearly first-hand. Her irony oscillates
from humour to saeva indignatio. It is not an intrinsically
feminist document in so far as there are as many ballads about
heroes as heroines, as many male victims and cracker-ups as female
sufferers. Their neuroses range from the mild maladjustment of
"nearly fitting in" to the alcoholic disassociation of
Uncle Someone, Uncle nothing who wants "to let in the dog we
don't have", "whose cough is getting more like a bark
every day".
"He leaves the
ironing board open" is the most sympathetic of these
sketches: they act as ballast for broadsides like 'Misogynist' or
'Crooked Smiles', where men wearing cardigans and tattoos are as
jovially dominant as you would expect them to be from Rita Ann's
pen.
This narrow
attitude might seem depressingly out-of-date, were it not for the
half-dozen or so prison poems, anti-institutional satires of a
Russian terseness. She assumes the role of outraged spokeswoman
protesting on behalf of a whole group of non-conformers being
forced to behave legally. In this world the warders are what men
are in the other. No Northern poet has dealt so directly with the
problem of political prisoners, but her technique is more
successful in pure dialogue or narrative, where there is no
authorial intervention, all is implied. Her subtly moving
'Cloud-Talker' drives her point home through indirection and
transferred emotion; the roofers would pass while the jailed and
absent did not, do not.
Though the short
line form is maintained throughout and the theme of denial and
subversion developed from one character-study to the next, there
is variety of wit and angle. The concentration on Ireland is
relieved by excursions to New York, Sussex, other international
war situations. Occasionally, she spotlights the worse fantasy
world of the normal happy consumer who does fit in. She
uses question and answer, catalogues, sometime childhood memories
with their naive viewpoint. To define her own imaginative
territory she frequently coins her own Higginisms:
"Claddagh-ringers, duffle-coaters",
"out-with-a-bang-merchants", "Mass card
glances", "know-your-loaf philosophies", "oil
the oesophagus way", "the paraffin child". 'Butter
Balls' employs a Dickensian language in the key of m and b:
Oh mean miserable minister,
misser of minor misdemeanours.
Several poems
cynically rework the traditional keen or women's lament. But the
richest and least journalistic are in the mode of Browning's
dramatic monologue, discarding the reportage in the third person
to enter as separate human personality, however split:
Kill Cassidy's the boy for you
He'd knock a son out of you no problem...
but Knock Shrine's your man.
Gems like 'His
Mother Won't Die' are utterly convincing in their capture of the
speaking colloquial voice. And the consummate ' I Want to Make
Love to Kim Bassinger', in which the most unfortunate square peg
of all, a suppressed lesbian, endures agonies at the hands of the
hairdresser in hopes of "shifting the bull of the ball"
is revenge drama indeed, and as little likely to date, either
North or South.
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