Kavanagh / Quinn A Poet's Country

Selected Prose
1. Auflage 2003
ISBN: 978-1-84351-215-8
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

While Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) was above all a poet, for most of his writing life he was a prolific producer of critical and autobiographical prose. Work for newspapers and magazines was often his main source of income, and provided him with a necessary outlet for his views on the writers of his time, and past times; on the spiritual function of poetry, and on his own background and experiences as an isolated genius, impoverished, sometimes ostracized, and surrounded, as he saw it, by mediocrity. The prose complements the poetry telling us things about Kavanagh that the poems do not tell. This is the first authoritative gathering of the shorter prose writings. Edited and introduced by Antoinette Quinn, Kavanagh's leading interpreter and biographer, 'A Poet's Country: Selected Prose' supplants the earlier, inadequate 1967, 'Collected Prose,' which contained material already available elsewhere and focused on later writings at the expense of work from the vital decades of the thirties and forties. 'A Poet's Country' is both a reliable scholarly edition and an immensely readable, entertaining collection. It contains the essential shorter prose works from throughout Kavanagh's career: the legendary autobiographical pieces and rural reminiscences and a thorough selection of Kavanagh's penetrating, sometimes scabrous, literary and cultural criticism. Its verve and musicality, poignancy and pitch, rage and glory, expresses as no other the voice of rural Ireland.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kavanagh, Patrick

Quinn, Antoinette

Leseproben

Some Evocations of No Importance

‘What were the happiest moments in your life?’ a man asked me one day. The happiest moments are those that are most vivid in the imagination. The imagination is, I think, incapable of evoking moments of sorrow.

It is a summer’s day and I am aged around twenty-two and I am drawing me coal from the station.

There is no work as easy as manual labour. There I was, me face black, sitting on the sate-board, me legs crossed, letting the fields look at me. Ah, the fields looked at me more than I at them, and at this moment they are still staring at me. The humpy hill beyond the railway at the Beeog’s lane. The house where the two yellow-faced brothers lived is roofless but, unlike most cabins of its class, the right masons must have built those walls. Best of bleddy walls. Could nearly be roofed again.

I am thinking of what I heard me father say of those brothers. They spoke Irish, as did their two nieces who were alive at this time, and when one of the brothers died the other lamented him loudly: ‘Mo graer, mo graer,’ he cried.

This is bad phonetics for the sound of ‘my brother’ in Gaelic but what’s the differ? But everyone said that if he had been half as good to him when he was alive he’d have him still.

I can see across to Harry Conlon’s on the side of the hill in Drum-nanalive.

Somebody is driving a sow up the hill. I don’t suppose I was ever up in that field. And it’s curious how you get a sense of travel to strange lands in going to some field less than a mile from your home. And you get the feeling of returning from a long exile when you revisit some field that you had walked through as a child.

There are several fields I long to see again. There is the corner under the Rock in our Far Field, down beside the stream, where many’s the hot summer day I sat with my feet touching the cold water and watching the violets that grew on the cool, shaded bank.

There is a pad there which leads into Caffrey’s field and another into Woods’, and I used to go that way when I was in tow with Johnnie McCabe.

Stones were always rolling into the stream at this point, and never a week passed that I hadn’t to go up there and pull them out, for this stream drained our meadow, and when it was plugged in winter you couldn’t go to Meegan’s Well without being up to your arse in gutter, as the fella said.

We were always talking about all the extra land we’d have if a few of the cuttings were sunk a foot or so. Every few years we were able to get a number of local scraidíns (scraping small farmers) together to do a week’s work on the drain. (Streams were always called drains.) Generally speaking, the combine tended to thin out as each man got as far with the job as would drain his own low-lying meadows.

And that’s the way it was when I was in wo (vogue) in that country.

This is a new cart I have. No danger of the shoeing coming off the wheels. I peep over the dashboard. God! did I speak too soon? There’s a shoeing there looks like shifting. Ah, no, it’s all right –

‘Hardy.’

‘Hardy.’

A neighbour on his bicycle has caught up with me and cycles along holding the dashboard.

‘There’s a bleddy good slack you’re drawing, Paddy.’

‘It’s not slack, it’s a class o’ nuts. We got a bargain in it. Wigan.’

‘What are yez wastin’ on it?’

‘Thirty-five bob a ton.’

‘That’s bleddy chape.’

‘Good value all right. There’s a terrible scabby field of oats – White’s.’

‘The worm got it. Do you know what? It looks more like a miss that stripe up the middle.’

‘I wouldn’t think so. Good evening, Joe.’

‘Evening, lads.’

‘There’s a man won’t be long in it, Frank. Shocking failed.’

‘I hear they sent him back from Dublin without doing a damn thing for him. Opened him up, to make out. Cancer’s a shocking disease.’

‘Shocking.’

‘I must be going. I want to buy a lock of Jeyes Fluid for we have a cow ready to calve, and you never know.’

‘So long. Might be seeing you the night.’

‘I may be at the Cross.’

‘So may I.’

The hard-stemmed wild weeds that grow on that ditch! And yet they have a curious sort of attraction for me. It’s not a ditch you’d like to sit down on, but just the same it is part of your life.

Why do you remember this particular part of the road so well? I know. Because this spot, for no special reason, reminds you of yourself going with your mother to the station of a Monday morning carrying the baskets of eggs and butter on the handlebars of the bicycle.

‘And remember what I toul’ you, to clane out them hen-houses and whitewash the roosts. And don’t forget to put the porringer on that wee calf and not have him sucking the other calf’s nabel.’

‘Don’t forget to bring me back John O’London’s.’

‘If I think of it. There’s Mary Faley ahead of us. I don’t want to catch up with her, for she’d pollute a person with her oul’ talk about the wonderful man Cissie got. As far as I hear, the devil the much he has, a few scabby acres in the wilds of Derrafanone, at the back of God’s speed where the devil shit the big needle. Might as well be transported. And there’s another thing – for God’s sake will you cut them nettles at the Meada gate, for they sting the legs of me every time I go out into the Meada. It wouldn’t take you ten minutes.’

‘I’ll do that.’

‘And you might, if you have time, tidy up that oul’ haggard. But don’t kill yourself. Don’t try to take it all away in one graipful. Nothing for you only the lazy man’s load. Go light and go often. Bad luck to her, she’s waiting for us. Good morning, Mary. I think we have loads of time.’

‘Well now, I’m not so sure. Father Gillan passed me at Little Bessy’s and it can’t be that early.’

‘We’re safe enuff,’ say I, the scientific man. ‘The signal is not down for the up train yet. Once we get this far before the signal is down we are in bags of time.’

‘Patrick, you could nearly put Mary’s basket on the carrier.’

‘Don’t bother, sure it’s not that heavy.’

‘It’s a nuance if you have a light basket, Mary. Give it to him and don’t be killing yourself. Good people’s scarce and bad people ought to try and mind themselves. Didn’t poor Micky Duffy go off very sudden? When I heard he was dead and buried I couldn’t believe me ears. I met him in the Carrick fair – was it two months ago or three? I think it was around April. When did we buy the drop calves, Patrick? Was it at the fair or an ordinary Thursday?’

‘Ordinary Thursday.’

‘The Lord save us and bless us, but it’s a sudden world. But sure he has his family reared.’

I leave them at the station, where already a number of women are waiting for the train to take them to the Dundalk market, a great weekly event in that country at that time. A social event. That is one of the mistakes the price-controllers and planners make. We don’t live by the guaranteed price alone. The controlled price killed all the fun. But people still manage to have a little.

The village of my native place is built around a disused graveyard. In that graveyard stands a somewhat stunted Round Tower. Liveliest spot in the village is that graveyard. The nettles and weeds are in blossom. Somebody who may be a commercial traveller waiting for a train is going through the graveyard, stumbling over the fallen headstones in the matted grass, reading old inscriptions. The tomb of the McMahons is here. A Protestant church stands in the graveyard beside the Round Tower. It is probably out of commission by now. Is there e’er a Prod in the parish at all?

I drive round by the Civic Guards’ barracks and up past the Far House. At the door stands a bundle of twigs and a scabbard full of Tysacks – scythes. The great maker of scythes was Tysack, though some people would swear by the ones Bolger made. The Bolger was on the heavy side.

Would I ever dream of going in to have a bottle of stout? Never such a thought in me head at that time, and look at me now.

Ah, well, times change and we change with them. Do times really change? I am not so sure. We change. Thinking back into my youth, I know I am occupying another body with a soul that is not quite the same. I am not so innocent now. I have learned to desire, and that is unwisdom.

Up the sunny, dusty road to the station. Some bollocks is after shifting the bleddy wagon down towards the stop-lock. I’ll have to back in now. I tie the reins round the crossbar and hop over the side-board into the wagon. It’s an easy wagon to fill from, for it has a smooth unpatched bottom. And the shovel I borrowed from John Parr is a powerful great shovel.

Nicely, nicely, I fill the cart. I shove the sate-boord along the tail-boord so that it will make the back of the cart higher and the coal will be in no danger of falling off going up Ednamo Hill.

Far away are cities, far away. I am a young man in the depths of the world. But I do not feel young. I feel very old.

Somebody asked me if I was twenty-two and I got red in the face. He said I looked twenty-two. And at a dance at Annavacky deck someone else said I wasn’t ‘dog ould’ and I felt he believed I was and wanted to console me.

Age is the worst complex I have ever had. I remember writing before I went to bed one...