September 21, 1997
IN DUBLIN -- this will be my last report from the field -- in August, after we left the Aran Islands, we saw what turned out to be a very stagey and melodramatic production of Sean O'Casey's "Juno and the Paycock" at the Abbey Theater. The interesting thing about it was that the play itself seemed to me much better than I remembered. What I recalled was the banter between the Captain and his drinking buddy Joxer -- "Ah, it's a darlin' moon, Captain, a darlin' moon" -- and the politics. "Haven't I done enough for Ireland?" the maimed young man pleads to his superior in the IRA, and the IRA functionary, in his trenchcoat, says, "No man has done enough for Ireland." The Abbey played it for these big scenes, but underneath the stage fire is a much shrewder and more subtle study of the family: the helpless vortex of blustering and impotent father and long-suffering mother, the son torn between his anger and a sort of crushed piety, the daughter between her sexuality and her longing for gentility. It seemed to me that the less the play was about the drama of Irishness, the more its real power would become apparent.
And that made me realize that I was reading Irish poetry in the same way: looking for the poetry of place names and landscapes and the history and drama of Irish politics. Understandable, of course, but it's the same reason why the postcards show us old guys in tweed caps outside of pubs and not men and women in suits driving their Datsuns to work through the Dublin traffic.
My host in Dublin was Dennis O'Driscoll, a poet who left a farming family in Tipperary at the age of 16, went to Dublin, and got a job as a clerk in a government office. He's worked in the Civil Service ever since, written four books of poems and become one of the best-known reviewers and commentators on Irish poetry. In his newest book, Quality Time (Anvil Press, London), he writes in a dry, ironic way -- something of W.H. Auden and something of Philip Larkin in the style -- about office life. It's the antithesis of the intensely poetic subject matter Americans associate with Irish poetry. And it's close to home, maybe too close -- the language makes almost no effort to rise up out of its material. Here are three sections from the title poem.
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Illustration by Anthony Russo
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The Bottom Line
By Dennis O'Driscoll
Official standards, building
regulations,
fair procedures for dismissing errant
staff:
my brain is crammed with transient knowledge
-- patent numbers, EC directives, laws.
I pause at traffic lights on the way back
to headquarters; windscreen wipers skim off
visions of this seeping stone-faced town:
a warehouse frontage littered with crates,
lovers locked in an umbrella-domed embrace,
consumers at a bank dispenser drawing cash.
I race the engine, inch the car toward green.
• • •
Quality time at weekends, domestic bliss:
early pathways cordoned off by webs,
I slip out to the shops, return
to bring you tea and newspapers in bed.
On Sundays, every Sunday, I submit to the calm
of supplements, CDs, cooking smells.
All of the mornings of all of the weekdays
I leave for work; my office bin fills
with the shredded waste of hours.
A pattern regular as wallpaper or rugs
and no more permanent than their flowers.
• • •
The peace of Friday evenings after
staff have left the open-plan deserted,
before cleaners key-in for their shift.
Sun flakes out on the carpets, rays
highlight staplers, calculators, pens;
phones flop in cradles: Monday will
inaugurate another week, small talk
over instant coffee, new debenture stock . . .
Meanwhile, suspended between worlds, I drum
on the plastic in-tray, stare down at
the frenzied city, disinclined to budge.
Ten-syllable lines, sometimes stretched to 12, roughly iambic. Shakespeare's meter at the end of the 20th century: "Consumers at a bank dispenser drawing cash."
From Quality Time by Dennis O'Driscoll (Anvil Press, London). Reprinted by permission.
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