Bernard O'Donoghue, The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber)This would not be a book for students to go searching in for 'poetry' as is meant by rhyme schemes, assonance, alliteration, mystification, playfulness or any of the other devices that they are encouraged to identify. It flies by those nets and reflects in calm, restrained lines on place, characters and events from the past. It is measured, unsentimental, honest, humane and thus admirable. It is closer to Michael Longley's similar meditations, without being quite so dependent on his sense of 'home', than Seamus Heaney's altogether more ambitious and magnificent achievement. But there's nothing that anybody has to apologize for in not being Heaney.
Bernard O'Donoghue's poems here achieve their lasting effects through low-key, prosaic lines (some might say) but they leave more behind than ever seemed to be happening as they unfolded.
The Dark Room compares those attending a 'Poetic Seminary' (and our hearts must go out to them) with bees creating honey,
intent in their darkness
and that is as concentrated as the language ever gets.
The poems achieve their rare beauty almost unnoticed, self-effacingly, and might need to be returned to before one sees quite how much was meant by such low-voltage sentences,
so, packed in ice, we can retain whatever
it was we once must have meant by love
and the kind frost that stopped it going off.
That might remind us of Prince Charles' remark about 'love, whatever that is', which I have some sympathy with, but it is not O'Donoghue's point. He knows what it is, he's just quietly celebrating its remarkable survival.
There are a number of translations from classical or Early texts here, each pertinent in their themes of mortality when in memoriam or close to the book's sense of itself and within its own civilized decorum. Having once met the poet briefly in the street in Oxford, him on his bike, that is entirely in keeping with the considered, deep intelligence that two or three minutes of chat with him and one of his ex-students that one would expect. And would expect no less than.
It is not a book that is going to thrill and excite on first reading but I strongly suspect that by avoiding quite such ready gratification, it will offer more and more as one appreciates all the things it doesn't do in favour of those things it leaves us with.