If readers need a reminder of what language can do, how it can be rescued from the spin-doctors and made new and enthralling, they need look no further than this superb collection.
Joseph O’Connor, The Sunday Tribune, Books of the Year, 25 December 2005.

In whatever mood, the writer’s gaze is clear-eyed, observant, unflinching in the face of pain and the awareness of mortality.
Hugh McFadden, Books Ireland

New light on old memories

Belinda McKeon

For Philip Casey, who last published a book of poems almost 15 years ago, the light of experience seems to have changed.

The sun’s rays struggle through dust and cloud, the masks of moonlight are hidden, and the glare of electric bulbs drain energy from the core of the earth; in his new collection, looking again and again to the troubled places from which light now comes, Casey is very much writing in the shadows. From there, he wreathes his words in memory and reflection, breaking through at times to an image or a phrase that is both true and memorable: the moon’s ‘‘chilled zenith’’, a butterfly ‘‘like a hand/ conducting a silent adagio’’, the way a ‘‘child’s yellow gansey jibs/ above the thunderous pool’’, brothers gripping ‘‘adhesive stars of frost/ on the aluminium milkcan’’, or the sight of a bomb victim blasted on to a rock, ‘‘her body on fire’’.

He coats those words too, however, with heavy disapproval of the forces which have dimmed the sky’s luminosity, and the weakest poems are those which declare a concern for the environment without displaying any original or intimate engagement with that environment; there is no advance on catchphrase or common parlance in a poem which carps of how “the sublime/ is hawked to market the superfluous” (Trashed) or in one which contrasts “an ancient, holy place” to traffic jams and profit-seeking (The Time of No Time).

Meanwhile, Casey’s yielding to nostalgia in his interrogation of place becomes a bandwagon even more tiresome, adhering frustratingly to the formula which insists that a sight triggering a memory is, in and of itself, work enough to be called a poem. Nostalgia, in Casey’s poetry, seems either to weaken or to sedate his language, delivering him into the hands of cliche and sentimentality - a waste, given the sharpness of eye which shapes his words at points in this collection.

Skim over the generic homecomings, the misty-eyed homages to a poet
(Eternal Water) or a pastor (In Loving Memory of a Country Priest) and savour instead the force and tightness of poems like An Indian Dreams of the River - ‘‘sleep comes like a caravel of conquistadores’’ - or Starling, with its vision of a mathematician plotting the flight of birds:

. . . her study darkens with the noise

of thousands of wings, of wheezing
chucking and clicks, of whistling, coughs

and kisses, and a bewildered flock

blunders into the room through the screen.

Dialogue in Fading Light: New And Selected Poems, By Philip Casey, New Island, 66pp. €12.99

Belinda McKeon is a writer and journalist

© The Irish Times, April 8th, 2006
[reproduced courtesy of The Irish Times]

[With the gracious consent of New Island Books, Dialogue in Fading Light can be downloaded free under a Creative Commons licence from
Irish Literary Revival]

Share This

Ros Cowman on Philip Casey’s new poetry collection, The Year of the Knife

THE HIDDEN WEDDING OF THINGS

THIS collection of a decade of Philip Casey’s previous poems includes work chosen from two previous collections: eight poems from Those Distant Summers (1980), and fourteen from After Thunder (1985). The third part of the collection, The Year of the Knife with thirty six poems, forms over half of the book, with a selection of work after 1985.

This proportioning of the book reflects a growth in Casey’s work, a development of themes which, in the early work, are not yet explored.

Much of this growth takes place through the increasing power of language, and Casey writes in a language which is supple, accurate, sensitive and immensely strong, and which stretches to develop complexities of identity which were barely stated in the first collection. This theme, the experience of identity, increases in importance in the course of the three collections, its subdivisions, the self in landscape, the self in society, the self in love - unify in lines such as

…The answer may live
in the the hidden wedding
of things
-(White Horse)

… of not being afraid of what to walk and
to see
and to feel mean
-(Directions in One)

The poems from the first collection, Those Distant Summers, are poems of recall, a revisioning of a childhood landscape which, in the nature of such things, is both outer and inner landscape. Through a Glass Brightly is a haunting evocation of lost time:

…a Sunday in June
before the lane was tarmacadumed…
there would be wild strawberries
under the milkstand.

This milkstand recurs in a poem from the final collection, The Walking Shadow, where it takes on an extra dimension.

As the step of one rises
the other’s has fallen
onto the frozen gravel
towards the stand
and then is heard no more

Autobiography recalls childhood happiness, and the seasonal ebb of joy as winter sets the landscape. Discovering Joy, the closing poem of this section, watches the play of a child in a spring orchard. No threat here:

Her transfigured face is worth
the fruit of many orchards

The second poem from the second collection, After Thunder, is titled Into Whiteness; it is a beautiful image of the loss of light, colour and heat in a wintering landscape gradually becoming the dead body of an old woman, discovered by her granddaughter:

a good thoughtful girl who will age
within ten seconds into whiteness
like the century

Here we find five poems of social commentary: Liffey Bridge, Rosa Luxemburg, An Indian Dreams of the River,
Tom Moore’s Romantic Dancehall, and The Irish Wait. The themes of these - poverty, the dispossessed, the corridors of powerlessness - are developed in the final section.

The title poem of the final section, The Year of the Knife, establishes a statement between contradictions, like the propositions of mysticism - what is and is not, what is that and not-that. Here the language has become intensified, tautened to convey the power of the thought:

It dwells in a clenched fist
outside of what it was, and speaks
with sober lips, knowing it is alive

It follows Hamburg Woman’s Song and is aptly placed. Song, establishing an identity through externals and tradition -

I am a woman of Hamburg
who walked to the hungry city
side by side with my new father.
I have lived here to this day

is in strong contrast to the later poem, and paves the way for it. A poem called And So It Continues is a witty and poignant summary of the end of the search for self; its ironic understatement is followed by a glorious poem, Making Space. The title’s play on words is sustained thoughout the poem, where the concept of modern physics that all matter, including our bodies, is particles from a dead star, is reversed, with elegance and wit:

your lost black sheep
whose molecules keep your bedroom lit.
I will burn for you all night.

Art and Laughter and Monsieur Monsieur are two works which explore identity as reflection, and indentity in the killer/victim relationship. I am not a believer in this latter theory which tends to be the killer’s viewpoint - the victim being voiceless - de Sade, Hemingway and devotees of the hunt recall it ad nauseum, and there are sorry echoes of it even in St Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, where the enchanting fox sees the pattern of hunter-fox-chicken as inevitable ecology. However, the closing lines of Monsieur Monsieur need quoting:

the moment when the force of the strong
and weakness of the oppressed are one

The book’s closing poem, Answering Each Other, is absorbing, verbally and rhythmically. The lines, mainly six-syllabic with a strong ending, use an iambic trimeter which suggests the rhythm of the train wheels:

and mountains to the west
… connect the coastal towns
…Friends take me for a meal

And this is the image of the poem - a train journey along the east coast through a remembered landscape (is the cottage of a long dead and childless couple also the cottage where the old couple lived of Through a Glass Brightly?) Through this landscape, then, leaving it to return by another train, with the lovely closing image of the last stanza:

a woman with palsy smiles
at a tranquil bay
as we round the Italianate
houses which command it.
She holds her smile.
They answer each other.

[You can see more reviews of The Year of The Knife]

G R A P H, 1992

Share This

This proportioning of the book reflects a growth in Casey’s work, a development of themes which, in the early work, are not yet explored.
Much of this growth takes place through the increasing power of language, and Casey writes in a language which is supple, accurate, sensitive and immensely strong, and which stretches to develop complexities of identity which were barely stated in the first collection.

Ros Cowman, G R A P H Dublin, 1992.

This is a strong book, as joyful as Edith Piaf’s wonderful song ‘No Regrets’, but for Casey the new beginning is with himself.
It took me a while to see humour where previously I could recognise only suffering. In his homage to the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, the poem he struggled to write is placed within a narrative of obsession. Then the relieving revelation that, all my drafts were false./ I was writing about myself. The poem is released into tenderness for Kahlo, and the unique strength of her spirit.
The Desert Father Greets the Neophyte, from After Thunder,
ends with a leaving of what I feared to know. Lately, the attraction which was thwarted by fear has become irresistible. He has to know. White Horse is a powerful foray into Casey’s own forgotten pain, and what the poem hauls back is a child’s encounter with death. The poem has a knife-edge lyric intensity:

The rings of Saturn are ice,
full ten kilometres thick.
The rings over the hospital door
are rings crushed into a pillow
when the white horse
carries the Queen of Death
above the city in the still night.

Casey gives physicality to abstract ideas with great assurance and he has an eye for things which do not clamour for attention.

There are fine new love poems, and older ones which have benefited from fresh work. Making Space is humourous, generous and dazzlingly full of light. Art and Laughter sings its celebration of the common wealth of friends/making art or laughter out of the cruellest pain.
Although this 96 page collection of mostly new work could have done with some pruning, Casey has brought back armfuls of good poems.
Susan McKay, The Sunday Press, April 14, 1991

Casey is a master of precision but simultaneously manages to be inventive while using rigorous metering. The poet uses compassionate imagery and has a feel for his subjects, which range from death to generation gaps to religion. An ordered but imaginative collection.
Linda Higgins In Dublin 20 June-3 July 1991

Share This