Philip Casey

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