Praise for the Microphone
Evelyn Conlon:
Interpreting Irish Women WritersCollected Poems,by Louis MacNeice,Peter McDonald (ed), Faber, 800 pp, £30, ISBN: 978-0571215744
Selected Poems,by Louis MacNeice,Michael Longley (ed), Faber, 240 pp, £12.99, ISBN: 978-0571233816
Collected Poems,by Louis MacNeice, ER Dodds (ed), Faber (1966, 1979)
The Strings are False: an unfinished autobiography, by Louis MacNeice, Faber, Faber, 288 pp, £7.99, ISBN: 978-0571118328
Louis MacNeice, by Jon Stallworthy,Faber, 608 pp, £12.99, ISBN: 978-0571176878
On August 7th, 1963 Louis MacNeice was caught in a heavy storm on the North Yorkshire moors, where he had been recording sound effects for his radio play Persons from Porlock. Instead of changing, he stopped off in Leeds and visited, as he wrote to his daughter Corinna, “an ancient music hall called the Palace of Varieties, now much invaded by strip: there was one lurid act where the girl was chased by a gorilla”. His “bronchitis” did not improve back at his part-time job in the BBC, so he spent a week at home, planning a visit to Richard Murphy in Cleggan, reading Edna O’Brien, Carson McCullers and others. MacNeice was in hospital in Shoreditch by the time the play was broadcast on August 30th and died of pneumonia three days later, at the age of 55. TS Eliot, WH Auden and Philip Larkin were among those who published obituaries and elegies. Larkin wrote:
When we were young, his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting. In addition he displayed a sophisticated sentimentality about falling leaves and lipsticked cigarette stubs: he could have written the words to These Foolish Things …
Larkin’s praise alludes, typically, to a number of MacNeice’s 1930s poems. Many have prematurely presented MacNeice as a figure from the past (“When we were young …”) as if he had done nothing much since half-inventing the 1930s brew of pop music and newsboys, shopping and the police, gardens and fashion. If Larkin saw MacNeice emerge from the shadows of Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, he could not see him beyond the 1930s (or Auden). MacNeice’s reputation has grown since then. As any reader of anthologies or student of Irish and British poetry knows, he published notable and influential poems before and after the starry and glamorous 1930s success of Autumn Journal.
In the months before his death in fact MacNeice had been furiously productive. He finished three books: Varieties of Parable, a series of Cambridge lectures written and delivered that spring (which discuss new writers like Pinter, Beckett and William Golding as well as Spenser, Coleridge and Lewis Carroll; Astrology, a coffee-table guide; and The Burning Perch, the final collection of poems, for which he wrote an introductory note on August 28th after it had been selected (like its predecessors Solstices and Visitations) as the “Choice” of the Poetry Book Society. His friend ER Dodds acted with admirable speed as his literary executor and, over the next three years, saw into print these three posthumous books, selections of his plays, an unfinished autobiography, The Strings are False, and in 1966 a Collected Poems which has until now been the definitive but problematic version of MacNeice’s work.
Dodds’s 1966 edition was a confusing and in some ways unhelpful book. Its chronological arrangement seemed comprehensive but it hid the continuities and developments, from book to book, of MacNeice’s work. By ordering the poems chronologically, without reference to their book publication, Dodds chopped them into less than coherent bundles. For example, he begins the book with “Juvenilia 1925-1929”, which jumbles together some of the poems published in his first Faber collection, Poems (1935), with a large selection from the earlier Blind Fireworks, published by Gollancz when MacNeice was twenty-two but mostly regarded by their author as juvenilia. Dodds’s Collected has never attracted readers, and a comment from a New York Review of Books notice seems typical: “It was with a certain anticipation that I opened his Collected Poems, discreetly edited by E. R. Dodds. But the event has proved more of a trial than a pleasure. The collection covers 575 pages of closely printed type … he takes better to being anthologized than to being read in quantity.”
It is a long road back from reviews like that but Michael Longley’s 1988 Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems, replacing Auden’s 1964 selection, restored the poems to the context of their book publication. Longley’s introduction usefully framed the entire selection in relation to MacNeice’s Irish context and his preoccupation with certain kinds of fleeting experience. If Dodds’s huge Collected showed, by its dates and weight at least, that MacNeice was not just a 1930s poet, Longley’s Selected showed why he should be considered more than a 1930s poet. Now, taking his cue from Longley’s work and from the recent Faber republication of the key volumes Autumn Journal and The Burning Perch, Peter McDonald has edited a long overdue and much more attractive edition of MacNeice’s Collected Poems.
McDonald’s main decision has been to return the poems to the book format in which they were originally published, i.e. as individual volumes of poems (although he hedges his bets a little and follows Dodds’s example in moving a few repudiated poems from the original books to the somewhat misleadingly titled “Appendix 5: Uncollected Poems 1932-1963”: perhaps a “Repudiated Poems” appendix would be one too many). This new restoration of the work allows readers to see how MacNeice’s first Faber collection inaugurates the themes and style that he would explore for nearly thirty productive years. MacNeice himself was hesitant about such matters, saying of one 1958 selection of his work: “My main object has been to illustrate different phases and different kinds of my work”, and, sardonically, of Solstices (1959): “Poets are always being required – by the critics and by themselves – to ‘develop’.” Despite his reservations, we can now see MacNeice develop, or at least explore further the territory he defines in the remarkable poems of Poems (1935), which now replaces Blind Fireworks as the first collection that readers meet.
It is a relief to have MacNeice’s Collected Poems open with the fizzing excitement of “An Eclogue for Christmas”, (rather than the makeshift sestina “To Hedli” that opened Dodds’s edition): it establishes his command of his medium and the interest of his perspective immediately. Its certainty and authority, a mixed relish and disdain, and modern distance from a recognisably modern world, are straightaway evident, even in the description of roadworks that stall his journey home:
Our street is up, red lights sullenly mark
The long trench of pipes, iron guts in the dark,
And not till the Goths again come swarming down the hill
Will cease the clangour of the pneumatic drill.
Reading these lines, it is easy to see why MacNeice’s first readers saw Auden’s optimistic revision of Eliot in these poems, although now it’s impossible not to be reminded also of Derek Mahon’s “Glengormley” and “Wonders are many and none more wonderful than man/ who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge/ and grasped the principle of the watering can.” And it is reminiscent (or predictive) too of the satiric-apocalyptic note MacNeice will strike brilliantly in later anthology favourites like “Bagpipe Music” and again in this 1935 collection with one of his rare sonnets, “Sunday Morning”:
Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday Morning, Fate’s great bazaar;
But “Eclogue for Christmas” goes further than sharp irony (as does Mahon’s “Glengormley”) and is also characterised by MacNeice’s distinctive rhythmic imperatives and trademark swerves to more declarative statement and a paradoxically urban pastoral:
But yet there is beauty narcotic and deciduous
In the vast organism grown out of us:
On all the traffic islands stand white globes like moons,
The city’s haze is clouded amber that purrs and croons,
And tilting by the noble curve bus after tall bus comes
With an osculation of yellow light, with a glory like chrysanthemums.
These assured lines announce a style and a subject, as well as an attitude, that MacNeice will never exhaust.
The Collected’s second poem, “Valediction”, sets out a template for another, more controversial one, the farewell to Ireland. Why couldn’t MacNeice say goodbye? His regular homecomings are one reason; another is his (and his family’s) complicated experience of living in Ireland. He consistently divides the island into three parts, the North, the West and Dublin, a division rooted in his biography and restated in every pre-1957 volume of this Collected Poems. Some readers have argued that Irish neutrality curdled MacNeice’s view of Ireland, but that is to ignore the fury of the earliest poems collected here (“Ireland is hooey, Ireland is/ A gallery of fake tapestries” in “Valediction”). His family background, the subject of poems scattered throughout this book, explains the poems’ productive inability to say one thing only.
Jon Stallworthy’s biography describes MacNeice’s childhood in Belfast and then Carrickfergus, where his father was a rector, but also shows how the MacNeices had a wider than usual experience of other parts of Ireland. MacNeice’s parents met at the Irish Church Mission training school in Clonsilla but they had both come from Galway, his mother, Lily Clesham, from Clifden, his father, John, from Omey Island, seven miles from Clifden. For them the west of Ireland was, in Stallworthy’s phrase, a “lost world”, one that MacNeice was smitten by on holiday visits to Donegal and the west coast, watching his father “in Achill sound, without his unheroic collar, bending over one of those great oars against a roaring current”. In “Valediction”, though, the West is “beaten up/ By peasants with long lips and the whiskey-drinker’s cough” even if it is also where “my father talked about the West where years back/ He played hurley on the sands with a stick of wrack”.
In the North, on the other hand, he was the rector’s son. MacNeice always felt hemmed in, as if he had to be on his best behaviour: family holidays in Portstewart by the Atlantic and boarding school in Dorset were welcome escapes from this restrictive paternal world (“See Belfast, devout and profane and hard,/ Built on reclaimed mud, hammers playing in the shipyard,/ Time punched with holes like a steel sheet”). His parents found the North equally difficult. Lily was particularly unhappy in Belfast and Carrickfergus, an unhappiness multiplied by the birth of Louis’s Down’s Syndrome brother Willie and her own deteriorating mental and physical health. Her husband’s difficulties are illustrated by his public support for Home Rule throughout his time in Belfast and Carrickfergus (and, more straightforwardly, during his four years as Bishop of Waterford). This political iconoclasm culminated in his refusal, when Bishop of Down and Connor, to allow a Union Jack to “embellish” Edward Carson’s grave. In the poems, MacNeice’s childhood is scarred by his mother’s early death and the difficult and nightmarish superstitions of the Miss MacCready who looked after Louis and his sister. For MacNeice in the 1957 draft of his never completed Countries of the Air, Belfast “took me years to penetrate its outer ugliness and dourness”.
The third aspect of MacNeice’s imaginary Ireland is Dublin, of which he also wrote in Countries of the Air: “Dublin was a glorious name in our family and had pleasurable associations of violence …Today I am so at home in Dublin, more than in any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me … it took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel – which I quite like too.” Such affection is not so apparent in “Valediction”:
Park your car in the city of Dublin, see Sackville Street
Without the sandbags of the old photos, meet
The statues of the patriots, history never dies,
At any rate in Ireland, arson and murder are legacies
The definitive title suggests a resolve that the poem’s impromptu feel belies. It denounces hypocritical southerners “taking the Holyhead boat before you pay the bill” before the poet himself says goodbye, with some balance, to all three parts of his imagined country, “Your drums and your dolled-up virgins and your ignorant dead”. But the uneven, itchy movement between North and West and Dublin predicts that he will return to each scene separately, and the Collected Poems shows that he did not stop trying to write a poem that would make these three places cohere as more than objects of scorn.
Much of Poems (1935) is set, however, in England, where MacNeice was educated from the age of ten and where he worked most of his life, as a classics lecturer in Birmingham and then London, before joining the BBC. “Birmingham” reports on a suburban life where the means of transport take no one anywhere, but the satire directed at English cities is drier, wittier and nowhere as enraged as his adjective-heavy reports on Belfast and Dublin:
the brakes of cars
Pipe as the policeman pivoting round raises his flat hand, bars
With his figure the monolith Pharaoh the queue of fidgety machines
(Chromium dogs on the bonnet, faces behind the triplex screens)
MacNeice is obsessive here and elsewhere about modern travel: his best books, and many of his best poems, travel on train, by car, ferry and bus, in taxis, between stations, airport terminals, along sidings, sleepers, rails, roads and “the hurdles of ocean”. For MacNeice, for whom time is so often both the medium and the observational matter of a poem, travel often comes to hand as the nearest and most appropriate image (“chromium dogs”) for the paradoxical, simultaneous experience of fixity and movement. And his lifestyle, peripatetic even as a child or when fully employed at the BBC, supplied unusually regular experience and images of travel, so that England in these poems is either on the move or seen fleetingly.
MacNeice’s preoccupation with fixity and movement is evident in early poems which take subjects to which he will return with greater success throughout his writing life. A poem like “Museums”, for instance, describes, a little programmatically, the invigorating encounter of an anonymous “cowed cipher” with the “art outside time” of the British Museum, where he “mirrors himself in the cases of pots, paces himself by marble lives”, but to read the Collected is to see that museum or public art encounter echo through later collections, in section 19 of Autumn Journal, in “The British Museum Reading Room” in Plant and Phantom, in “The National Gallery” in Holes in the Sky, in Canto 24 of Autumn Sequel, “Time for a Smoke” in Visitations, “Old Masters Abroad” in Solstices and “October in Bloomsbury” in The Burning Perch. If this strong, differently inflected set of museum poems (none of them reprinted in the short Longley Selected) brings together the private world of an individual with the powerful public world (of art, in this case), it also fits easily into the broader private-public contact zone of Autumn Journal.
In Poems (1935), “Mayfly” shows MacNeice writing about time and the present moment in a way that would recur throughout his work. The poem imagines a present moment where “The mayfly flirting and posturing over the water/ Goes up and down in the lift so many times for fun”. The mayfly declares suddenly: “When we are grown up we are sure to alter/ Much for the better, to adopt solider creeds”, a thought refuted by the poet:
They never have the chance but what of time they have
They stretch out taut and thin and ringing clear;
So we, whose strand of life is not much more,
Let us too make our time elastic and
Inconsequently dance above the dazzling wave
And this love poem emerges fully in its closing lines:
The show will soon shut down, its gay rags gone,
But when this summer is over let us die together,
I want always to be near your breasts.
Here is a turn or conjunction of two kinds of time, and an apocalyptic tone, that re-appears in the great, lyric love poems of succeeding books, as well as in the elegies and “parables” of the later work.
MacNeice’s joy in paradox is also evident in this 1935 collection’s most anthologised poem, “Snow”, which famously describes, or even becomes “the drunkenness of things being various” as we read: “I peel and portion/ A tangerine and spit the pips and feel”, after stating with characteristic suddenness and abruptness: “World is suddener than we think,/ Incorrigibly plural.” And if other early poems suggest the inspiration for Derek Mahon’s sceptical and sensuous poems, we see emerging from the shadows of “Snow” the blizzard that will shelter Paul Muldoon’s “The room where Louis MacNeice wrote ‘Snow’ or where they say he wrote ‘Snow’”, Ciaran Carson’s remarkably tactile “Snow”, or more recently still Michael Longley’s “Snow Water”. In these poems, MacNeice writes out of an aesthetic as good as a blank cheque (for himself as well as other poets), one that is elastic enough to allow the myriad, recurring double takes that stud his Collected Poems.
These include the short lyrics that he published in his 1938 collection The Earth Compels, poems of separation or imminent separation such as “The Sunlight in the Garden”, “The Brandy Glass”, “June Thunder” and “Postscript to Iceland”. These poems rein in the long lines of Poems (1935) and concentrate the pressure further with internal rhymes, intricate rhythms, repetition and a syntax that seems static and frieze-like in spite of their frequent active verbs. MacNeice increased the tension by unusual punctuation (McDonald acknowledges preferring the more “lightly punctuated” versions of the poems) which tend to use a comma to run images together, when something more decisive might dissipate the poem’s conjunction of different times:
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
When MacNeice does drop a colon into the verse, it is time for a spectacular shift:
The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying.
Harry Clifton has written of the importance of “the world historical dimension, the depth of field behind the love poems” but ‘depth of field behind’ overstates the reader’s possession of a poem’s context. He does not do justice to how MacNeice explicitly integrates both “every evil iron/siren” and Mark Antony’s last speech into this stanza. It is the kind of juxtaposition that he would use more expansively in Autumn Journal (1939) and in the mixed idioms of his last books.
Autumn Journal is the diary, autumnal in outlook as well as subject matter, of MacNeice’s and England’s (and Ireland’s and Barcelona’s and France’s) last months before the start of World War II. MacNeice’s talky poem is a classic whose relevance has not waned, and whose picture of European anxiety sits alongside a cinematic depiction of Londoners at work and play and an account of the failure of a love affair. Seamus Heaney has written about political poetry in terms which make allowance for the “redress of poetry”, a poem’s necessary ability to absorb its political occasion without being reducible to a headline or an argument, something MacNeice’s poem does remarkably well, so various and readable, self-scrutinising and witty even as it makes more casual arguments (“They don’t want any philosopher-kings in England,/ There ain’t no universal in this man’s town”), or packing its reportage with attitude (“Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,/ Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints,/ The born martyr and the gallant ninny”). Love poetry too ghosts in and out of its various scenes:
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.
So I am glad
That life contains her with her moods and moments ...
I shall remember you in bed with bright
Eyes or in a café stirring coffee
Smoking stub your lips had touched with crimson
Autumn Journal’s intercutting of memory, travel writing, love poem, book review, sports news also looks forward to the long, similarly various intercut poems that Paul Muldoon has made his own in works like “Yarrow” and “Incantata” from The Annals of Chile and most recently in the title poem of Horse Latitudes and “Sillyhow Stide”.
MacNeice followed this with Plant and Phantom, some of which was written while he was lecturing in the US and wooing, unsuccessfully, the writer Eleanor Clark: many of its poems had in fact appeared in The Last Ditch,a 1940 pamphlet published by the Yeats sisters’ Cuala Press, and McDonald publishes them in Appendix 3 here. It is a terrific collection: “Meeting Point”, like “The Sunlight in the Garden” is an anthology regular. Another poem, “Autobiography”, is more private, calmer and darker than earlier childhood poems and it uses one of the haunting refrains which become a hallmark of his lyrics:
My father made the walls resound,
He wore his collar the wrong way round.
Come back early or never come.
My mother wore a yellow dress;
Gently, gently, gentleness.
Come back early or never come.
“Novelettes” tries out the biography poem (to which he would return in “The Kingdom” in Springboard) andincludes a portrait of a marriage in “Les Sylphides” (“Life in a day: he took his girl to the ballet / Being shortsighted himself could hardly see it”) alongside a winning and sympathetic portrait of an illiterate gardener:
And would talk about himself forever –
You would never find his like –
Always in the third person;
And would level his stick like a gun
(with a glint in his eye)
Saying, ‘Now I’m a Frenchman –
He was not quite right in the head.
In the “Closing Album” sequence, “Cushendun” calmly observes a scene he might once have raged at, instead haunting the present moment with thoughts of war: it begins “Fuchsia and ragweed and the distant hills/ Made as it were out of the clouds and sea”, and ends:
Only in the dark green room beside the fire
With the curtains drawn against the winds and waves
There is a little box with a well-bred voice:
What a place to talk of War.
Plant and Phantom also includes a weak prescriptive poem, “Plurality”, composed in 1940 (which gains nothing from the war’s “depth of field”): its explanatory philosophising would regularly appear in MacNeice’s next books, as it does in the work of Auden and other contemporaries. Much more successful is “Evening in Connecticut”:
Equipose: becalmed
Trees, a dome of kindness;
Only the scissory noise of the grasshoppers:
Only the shadows longer and longer.
MacNeice returned to Britain in 1940 (unlike Auden and Isherwood) and started work at the BBC and as a fire warden, experience which feeds into the 1944 collection Springboard and terrific poems like “Brother Fire”, “Whit Monday” and “The Springboard”. He faces head on the reality of wartime London without the calm dividedness of the previous collection. The long sequence “The Kingdom” suggests he had been reading Whitman in the US and if its framing idea veers too close to rhetoric at times, the poem’s portraits are, as he puts it in section 4, “not elegant but poetry”. While some poets and critics (and Larkin is one of many) praise only MacNeice’s 1930s poetry, others see these wartime books as the high point of his work. Reading this Collected Poems, it becomes a lot less relevant to split MacNeice into decades.
Holes in the Sky (1948) returns to the isolation and nightmare scenes of earlier work. The muddled postwar world is productive for a poet who now seems uneasy with the binary divisions of wartime: “the bandaging dark which bound/ This town together is loosed” (“Aftermath”). The scene-switching elegy “The Strand” returns again to his father, describing both of their “island truancies” and how “then as now the floor-mop of the foam/ Blotted the bright reflections”. But emerging from, or merging with, these autobiographical instabilities are more fable- or parable-like poems such as “Relics”, where the Goths or their precursors again appear:
Obsolete as books in leather bindings
Buildings in stone like talkative ghosts continue
Their well-worn anecdotes
As here in Oxford shadows the dark-weathered
Astrakhan rustication of the arches
Puts a small world in quotes
While high in Oxford sunlight playfully crocketed
Pinnacles, ripe as corn on the cob, look over
To downs where once without either wheel or hob
Ant-like, their muscles cracking under the sarsen
Shins white with chalk and eyes dark with necessity
The Beaker People pulled their weight of God.
There is nothing of this poem’s detailed images in the collection’s long poem, “The Stygian Banks”, which seems abstract and unstructured. “A Letter from India” is one of many poems that reminds the reader that his roving journalism did not end in Spain and that his BBC life carried him all over the world: there is something Zelig-like about his following up his witness to the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia with his criss-crossing the wartime Atlantic in 1940, appearances in India at the time of its handover and bloody partition, South Africa at the height of apartheid, Greece after its civil war, or in literary terms, his early friendships with Auden et al being replaced by friendly encounters with scores of the mid-century’s best-known writers outside Britain, including Seferis, Yeats, Mulk Raj Anand, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman and Patrick Kavanagh. In London, though, he seems to have puzzled and frustrated poet-critic contemporaries such as Cyril Connolly, John Betjeman and Ian Hamilton and his life in London is not much discussed in biographies or memoirs of London friends and colleagues such as Spender, William Empson, Anthony Thwaite or even in Jon Stallworthy’s biography.
MacNeice’s next books, Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) and Autumn Sequel (1954), try to capture the ambience of that literary world. Written quickly, their repetitive discursiveness, less obvious in the latter, better-shaped but uneven book, reads flat and dull. If Peter McDonald’s edition of the poems is to be faulted, it is in the scant accompanying material which might elucidate or add interest to these poems and their contexts. Too often he simply directs the reader to Stallworthy’s biography, most notably when he does not supply the key to the assumed names in Autumn Sequel, where Gwilym is Dylan Thomas, Aidan Ernie O’Malley etc. At a time when Lowell, Moore, Montale and other mid-century poets have received collected poems with voluminous (albeit not always entirely relevant) editorial matter, McDonald’s reticence is a missed opportunity.
MacNeice’s last three books of poetry, Visitations (1957), Solstices (1961) and The Burning Perch (1963) are studded with his variations on the short lyric, where refrains rely on casual phrases, repetitions are enjambed and irregular and poems arrive propulsive and mysterious as “House on a Cliff”, which begins:
Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors
The winking signal on the waste of sea.
Indoors the sound of the wind. Outdoors the wind.
Indoors the locked heart and the lost key.
The long-lined monologues which sometimes led MacNeice towards trite moralising in the long sequences of 1952-1954 could not survive the formal tightness of these poems, any more than they could have gone unchallenged in the dialogue format of his earlier, long-lined eclogues. The charge of MacNeice’s formal contrivances is evident in even the least-noticed poems, such as “Visitations II”:
With straws in the wind
And stars in the head
And the grail next door,
Though the wind drop dead
And the thresholded sentry
Forbid – let him tread
By the light in his core,
He still finds entry.
In these books MacNeice remains a poet of movement and fixity, of the stone as well as the living stream. There is, though, a recovered wildness in the poems’ juxtapositions (“O the sun stood still above the Passport Office /And Joshua remembered Moses” begins “Jericho” in Solstices) that seems like a new discovery. Ireland is simpler, a part now of the obsessive focus on time, “my far-near country, my erstwhile” in “Memoranda to Horace”, the missed “westward train” of “Star-gazer”. The self-portraits are unembarrassed in their desolation in “Reflections”, in “Beni hasan” (“My passport lied”), or in “April Fool” (“Spring comes back, and come back I”). He returns to his childhood: “The first blossom was the best blossom” in “Apple blossom” or, on dandelions in “Nature Notes”: “Incorrigible, brash,/ They brightened the cinder-path of my childhood/ Unsubtle, the opposite of primroses”. And he veers away or alternates from the workaday world, as at the end of “Crossword Puzzles”: “It is time/ We left these puzzles and started to be ourselves/ And started to live, is it not?”, or with the “tra-la” that interrupts “The taxis”. Throughout the escaping, confining poems of The Burning Perch, his tactics remain fresh, although now more familiar from Paul Muldoon’s own double takes and revising repetitions.
Perhaps “familiar” is still the wrong word for MacNeice’s work. McDonald’s by-the-book edition is editorially self-effacing but it surprisingly introduces or reintroduces poems that stand with the best work in Michael Longley’s Selected. It also shows the patterns, recurrences and indeed “development” in the work of this fascinating writer. And one of its appendices, by the way almost, presents an enjoyable selection of MacNeice’s unpublished poems (mostly from the years before and during World War II), including his side of “Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament” and other knockabout pieces in this mode, as well as the pointed satire of “Straight Words to a Crooked Poet” (a companion piece to Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” and whose target is equally unclear), and the well-known but undated closing poem “Thalassa” (“Run out the boat, my broken comrades”) which was found among the papers he was using as he completed Varieties of Parable in the typically hectic and fruitful last months of his life.
MacNeice’s poems and reputation now resonate more with readers than they did in the decades after his death, a development this book responds to and encourages. MacNeice’s poems continue to filter through the work of younger poets who lift phrases and titles from MacNeice as easily as their 1960s predecessors. There are new additions to the imaginary anthology of Irish poems titled “Snow”, reappearances of the “here and there and nowhere birds”, a “Ravenna” that answers MacNeice’s poem, which itself ends:
What went wrong
With Byzantium as with Rome went slowly, their fame
Sunk in malarial marsh. The flat lands now
Are ruled by a sugar refinery and a church,
Sant’Apollinare in Classe. What do I remember of Ravenna?
A bad smell mixed with glory, and the cold
Eyes that belie the tessellated gold.