A westward gaze can be found in the poems of many twentieth-century Irish poets as they look to American poetry and culture for imaginative confirmation and enlargement. The present essay explores the effect of this gaze on the work of two of the finest post-war Irish poets: John Montague, famously an internationalist trail-blazer, and Derek Mahon, equally famously a poet of restless exile and uprooted search for ‘home.’

In his autobiographical piece ‘The Figure in the Cave’, John Montague writes with a sense of gratitude about the course of his career that might seem unguarded or fulsome, were it not for a saving wit and awareness of pain. As he thinks of his manuscripts going to some great archive in the sky—or at any rate to Buffalo—he recasts his life as ‘a fairy-tale, the little child who was sent away being received back with open arms’ and finds ‘astonishing and heartening’ ‘the way the American dimension is being restored to my life in my later years.’ Yet this dimension is associated, for him, with the great trauma of his life, the separation from his mother, which he describes as being ‘at the centre of my emotional life, affecting my relationships with women, shadowing my powers of speech.’¹ In his poem ‘A Flowering Absence’ Montague confronts directly the passage from experiential ‘hurt’ to poetic ‘grace’ and these states, the poles between which his more confessional verse moves, are described in ways that owe much to his study of American poets.² At the same time his work could never be mistaken for imitation or pastiche.

‘The Silver Flask’ (169) is a poem impossible to imagine being written without the influence of Life Studies. Yet at its most Lowellian, it is unmistakably the work of Montague. For instance, Montague breathes his own subterranean bitterness (sometimes his bitterness is very much on the surface, but at other times it is tautly repressed) into the lullingly normal opening—‘Sweet, though short, our / hours as a family together’: ‘hours’, taking a downbeat stress at the start of the second line, makes the reader involuntarily suspect an error before realising the pathos coiled inside the word. The poem's close, referring to the ‘same tinsel of decorations / so carefully hoarded by our mother / in the cabin trunk of a Cunard liner’ recalls ‘Mother's coffin’ at the end of ‘Sailing Home from Rapallo.’ That poem finishes, ‘The corpse / was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil.’ But Lowell's bitten-back irony differs from Montague's more vulnerable wavering between love and disillusion. Lowell's close punctures the absurdly snobbish dignity of ‘Mother travelled first-class in the hold’ in the poem's second paragraph. Montague's final stanza—like the whole poem—has no main verb, in keeping with his characteristic emphasis on circling, return, recycling. ‘The Silver Flask’ at once offers and withdraws the possibility that trauma can be healed in a poetic ritual, that the family circle can be rounded out in words.

Montague's debt to American poetry shares in the ambiguities that govern his internationalist poetic. Even when he expresses a debt to poets such as Robert Duncan, Montague does so through allusions that grant the American poet the status of honorary Irish (not to mention Shakespearean) writer: ‘Robert Duncan came sailing by in his Yeatsian cloak, his cast eye in a fine frenzy rolling.’³ Gerald Dawe is surely right to detect in Montague a trust that the ‘autobiographical’ and the ‘cultural’ will illuminate each other: a trust that, for Dawe, makes Montague ‘very much more a traditionalist than he would have us believe from his comments on experimentalism, international writing and so forth.’⁴ Montague speaks of ‘the long wound of poetry,’⁵ and there is a suspicion in the minds of some critics that his work rehearses cycles of pain and consolation in a way that memorialises these cycles as archetypal, bound up with what the poet himself has called ‘our racial drama of conscience.’⁶ Yet Montague the archetypalist exists in productive tension with Montague the self-conscious poet, able to suggest through the very ‘stylisation of experience’ of which Dawe half-complains a space where ‘infinite variation’ and ‘quarter tones,’ to borrow phrases from the poet's prose note, ‘I Also Had Music,’ are possible.⁷

One area in which ‘stylisation’ in Montague shows itself is, paradoxically, the poetry's awareness of the possible danger of artifice. In ‘The Water Carrier’ (189), which can be allegorised as dramatising the need for balance between the experimental and the traditional, Montague stylishly gives ‘stylisation’ the slip at the poem's close: ‘Recovering the scene,’ he writes, ‘I had hoped to stylize it … : / But pause, entranced by slight but memoried life.’ The impulse to ‘stylize’ gives way to entrancement by ‘slight but memoried life.’ It is a moment that suggests, less in its wording (which is quite Stevensian—especially in the subsequent reference to ‘the fictive water that I feel’) than in its movement, the influence of William Carlos Williams's pattern-breaking, and the surprises of perspective often found in Williams's lyrics, reflecting a delight in unexpectedness. Here and elsewhere Montague is kept from over-stylising by the example of Williams. As it laments ‘shards / Of a lost culture,’ ‘The Road's End’ (31) is saved from possible over-solemnity by the way it finishes, its ‘yellow cartwheel’ a moment of puckish homage to Williams's red wheelbarrow: ‘Only the shed remains / In use for calves, although fuschia / Bleeds by the wall, and someone has / Propped a yellow cartwheel / Against the door.’ That cartwheel is both icon of a lost culture and evidence that a rural community is still in existence. If Montague's cartwheel does not possess the free-floating thisness of Williams's wheelbarrow on which so much depends, Williams's influence can be found throughout Montague's work: in the juxtapositions of prose and poetry found in The Rough Field, in the worrying away at the meaning of the ‘local,’ and in the concern with experience as a journey, often involving what in Border Sick Call Montague calls ‘a memory, a mystery’. Montague invokes Dante explicitly in this work: ‘no purgatorial journey / reads stranger than this, / our Ulster border pilgrimage / where demarcations disappear’ (348). But the Williams of Paterson, especially Book 2, with its meditation on ‘memory’ and its emphasis on walking as a figure for the mind in action, is, arguably, a more palpable presence; the ‘wide, white world’ climbed into by Montague and his brother, for example, is illuminated by Williams's sense that ‘no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory / of whiteness.’⁸

It is for enabling such variations on Montague's obsessive themes that the influence of American poetry is rewarding. His ‘Herbert Street Revisited’ (111), among his finest achievements, is seamlessly original, and yet contributions to its success are manifold, often if not exclusively from American poets. While the triple sectionalising of the poem may recall Auden's elegy for Yeats, with its shifts of register, the opening exclamatory wryness—‘someone is leading our old lives’—is indebted to effects in Lowell (one thinks, for instance, of the painfully humorous start of ‘The Old Flame,’ ‘My old flame, my wife!’). And the beautiful wobble in the poem between stanzaic shape and rhythms based on ‘living speech,’ allowing for frequent run-ons and enjambments, suggests a close reading of authors such as Williams, whose stanzas are there to be heard as well as seen in poems such as ‘The Catholic Bells’ and ‘These.’⁹ In the poem Montague, as so often in his work, explores what he calls ‘succession’. In the first section the present tense suggests that the ‘someone’ who ‘is leading our old lives’ is, at some level, the poet himself. In the last two stanzas, though, a distancing occurs as, in a troubling off-rhyme, the ‘leading’ of a life becomes the ‘treading’ of ‘the pattern / of one time and place into history, / like our early marriage’; there, the ‘pattern’ is both imprinted on, and dispersed into, ‘history’.

The second section sees the poet as celebrant of ‘old happiness,’ ‘when alone.’ But it is in the third section that Montague manages to redefine the poem's oppositions. Using a series of ‘lets,’ as in some litany, he turns back the clock, ‘put the leaves back on the tree, / put the tree back in the ground,’ but ‘lets’ the clock wind forward, ‘let Brendan trundle his corpse down / the street singing, like Molly Malone.’ Here, in a reversal of a moment of Yeatsian violence (‘Last night they trundled down the road / That dead young soldier in his blood’),¹⁰ Behan becomes, uncannily, the celebrant of his own death. It is as if, in accepting mortality and time, the poem glimpses a way of triumphing over those things; and yet the triumph takes place in the shadowy, virtual nowhere of the poem, as is suggested by the last image of the ‘pony and donkey’ ‘parading side by side, down / the length of Herbert Street, / rising and falling, lifting / their hooves through the moonlight.’ That last image replays in ghostlier form the preoccupied mood of ‘Strange fits of passion have I known,’ where Wordsworth writes of his horse: ‘hoof after hoof / He raised, and never stopped,’ and the poet slides towards the ‘fond and wayward’ thought that the dropping of the moon signals Lucy's death.¹¹ In Montague's poem, moonlight may have the last word, but, for all the assertion in The Rough Field that ‘No Wordsworthian dream enchants me here,’ the epiphanic lyric moment at the end of ‘Herbert Street Revisited’ makes something new and its own out of a Wordsworthian trance.

Robert Duncan is another poet from whom Montague has shrewdly learned in ‘Herbert Street Revisited’: shrewdly, because it is evident that Duncan's mixture of rapturous celebration, open-field poetics, and unabashedly deliquescent courtliness of diction could prove a fatal influence. The way that Montague contrives a music that registers shape and flow, ‘pattern’ and ‘succession’ in the terms of the poem, finds a parallel in Duncan's fluid handling of tercets and quatrains, part and parcel of an imagination also much concerned with themes of ‘return.’ ‘Herbert Street Revisited’ might be glossed by the opening of Duncan's ‘Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,’ where the title runs straight into the rest of the poem: ‘as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, / that is not mine, but is a made place, // that is mine.’¹²

Again, there is difference as well as kinship. Montague roots such an awareness of the fictive, the ‘made-up,’ in the detail of a life; Duncan floats free of the empirical, moving on swiftly to celebration of the ‘Queen Under The Hill.’ But the frail trust in imagination of Montague's poem can be linked to Duncan's Stevens-like ‘as if’ at the close of his fine lyric: ‘Often I am permitted to return to a meadow / as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos.’ ‘Herbert Street Revisited’ is typical of Montague in the way it enacts the process of revisiting. As Edna Longley points out, Montague ‘favours the word “again,’” which she sees as bound up with a determinist mode of ‘perceiving events as cyclical.’¹³ Yet ‘Herbert Street Revisited’ uses its ‘agains’ to suggest change as well as repetition, the third section opening out and into the perspectives made possible by deep imaginative acceptance of the past. Such acceptance can be read as liberation; contrasting with the half-fear that ‘someone is leading our old lives,’ the parenthetical line—‘look, someone has left the gate open’—suggests the unlocking made possible by the third section.

In ‘A Bright Day’ (225) Montague discards ‘the accumulated richness / Of an old historical language’ in favour of ‘a slow exactness // Which recreates experience / By ritualizing its details.’ If Montague seems diverted from his historical themes, here, by the lure of a Williams-esque present-tense exactness (the clock ‘Moves its hands in a fierce delight / Of so, and so, and so’), the word ‘ritualizing’, with its hints of secularised worship, brings him decidedly back home, to the artist as priest, the figure affirmed and ironised by Joyce. Derek Mahon's ‘The Attic,’ dedicated to John and Evelyn Montague, is a lightly yet desperately self-mocking retort to Montague's ars poetica. Mahon also writes in four quatrains, though his rhymes are crisper than Montague, as if to assert his freedom from modernist and traditionalist alike.¹⁴ Mahon quietly denies the consolations of objects; he stares at ‘the blank spaces’ bringing down to earth Pascalian terror, and he finishes by wittily offending any ban on the interfering lyrical ego: ‘I who know nothing / Scribbling on the off-chance, / Darkening the white page, / Cultivating my ignorance.’¹⁵

Mahon's poetic identity is a curiously weightless and nonchalant thing. The more intertextual he grows, the more he seems his own man. This is partly because his poetry has always been unashamedly literary in its themes and styles. The Hudson Letter might appear to support the Barthesian view that the text is a tissue of quotations. Moreover, New York City presents itself to Mahon's imagination in linguistic terms. He concludes an article for The Irish Times, in 1993, with the following passage, ‘The city as text … The notion, though equally applicable to Dublin, London, Paris or LA (see Joyce, Dickens, Proust and Raymond Chandler), seems especially appropriate to the literary character of New York—as if, every block a quotation, the city were somehow destined to end up as a book.’¹⁶ This Calvino-like imagining governs the way that Mahon sees New York in The Hudson Letter—except for the fact that his eye detects the presence of authors as well as their textual legacies. Moreover, far from collapsing into a babel of references, his poem is on the look-out for exemplary figures, existential heroes. In section X he hails the American Auden, ‘far from Mother, in the unmarried city,’ in these terms: ‘you remind us of what the examined life involves— / for what you teach is the courage to be ourselves, / however ridiculous.’ Another exemplary figure turns out to be Yeats's father in section XVII, an unlikely surrogate for the poet, but Mahon is quick to point out affinities, describing himself as ‘A recovering Ulster Protestant like you from Co. Down.’ It is an improbable line from the author of poems such as ‘Ecclesiastes’, where identity is an elliptically conceded complicity. But it suggests the readiness to employ a language of labels of someone who knows that the labels will never quite match.

Yeats's father is seen by the poem as ‘like all of us, then as now, “an exile and a stranger.’” Though this address is more formally literary than anything to be found in Frank O'Hara, Mahon's practice here bears out O'Hara's trust in ‘Personism,’ sketched in this designedly flip way: ‘to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.’¹⁷ It should be said, however, that Mahon's ‘Personism’ is aware of the likelihood, indeed inescapability of using any ‘you’ as a mirror for the feelings and anxieties experienced by the poetry's ‘I.’ O'Hara is among the presences Mahon senses in the New York streets: ‘I go nightshopping like Frank O'Hara,’ section XIV begins, and, as often in The Hudson Letter, there is, in the writing, a vibrant sense of the city.

More pervasive and deeply felt is the poem's response to the work of Hart Crane. Mahon's elegantly lucid idiom may not have much in common with Crane's commitment to language's connotative ripples and associative richness of suggestion. But like Crane he is keen to explore—often with an ironic or even a jaundiced eye—the metaphorical and spiritual dimensions of life in the city. Indeed, as always with Mahon's exemplary figures, there is a keen if melancholy pleasure taken by the poet as he thinks of his belatedness in relation to a precursor, to borrow Harold Bloom's terms. In ‘Global Village’, section III of The Hudson Letter, he opens with a mournfully cadenced tribute to the Crane of poems such as ‘The Harbour Dawn’:

This morning, from beyond abandoned piers
where the great liners docked in former years,
a fog-horn echoes in deserted sheds
known to Hart Crane, and in our vigilant beds.

The tug of the real is obvious here—Crane, too, heard these sounds—yet, as in some Bloomian manoeuvre, the rest of the poem is vigilant about the seductive hold of the city. Mahon denies intending ‘to pen yet one more craven European / paean to the States,’ where the repeated sounds echo the sardonic sense. But in keeping with a train of thought set going by his epigraph from Berkeley's The Principles of Human Knowledge, he explores the intermeshing of representation and reality, ‘virtual realities’ and ‘the real thing’. Out of this welter of self-doubt and muddle, attraction towards and detachment from the clutter of New York's simulacra, Mahon discovers that he has found a subject to stimulate him into poetry. ‘After so many deaths I live and write,’ he comments towards the section's close, quoting from ‘The Flower,’ George Herbert's great poem of resurrected creativity; but Crane, as much as Herbert, is obsessed by the possibility of poetry as a theme for poetry, by ‘the resilience of our lyric appetite,’ as section I puts it. When Mahon finishes section II, ‘does lightning ever strike in the same place twice?’, he might be asking, among many other things, ‘can I in some way emulate Crane's achievement?’

The Hudson Letter engages in cunningly oblique dialogue with Crane's poetry. Section V, voiced for an Irish immigrant of the 1890s, has something of the calculatedly naive pathos that Crane taps in ‘Indiana’ from The Bridge. Section VI begins by recalling the opening of ‘The River.’ In Crane, materialist optimism is mocked in phrases such as ‘COMMERCE and the HOLYGHOST’.¹⁸ In Mahon, block capitals convey the frenzied whirl of newspaper headlines, concluding with one detail that captures the poet's interest: ‘ESCAPED BRONX SEABIRDS SPOTTED IN CENTRAL PARK.’ Just at the back of Mahon's speculations about the fate of these birds, imagined as ‘crazy-eyed as they peer / through mutant cloudcover,’ is Crane's ‘apparitional’ gull, ‘chill from his rippling rest.’ Crane's bird in ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’ is a fleeting harbinger of meaning and purpose as ‘with inviolate curve’ it is said recurrently to ‘forsake our eyes.’ It is the purpose of Crane's epic to recover, in the face of all that opposes it, the vision of beauty and meaning suggested by that inviolate curve, which transfers itself in the poem's central image to the Bridge itself. Mahon's birds are ‘intrigued, baffled and finally bored stiff / by the wised-up Mondrian millions lunching far below’: ‘vulnerable’, post-Baudelairean alter egos for the disenchanted poet, even if, unlike the birds, he must ‘touch garbage’—at least imaginatively.

‘They belong in another life,’ Mahon writes of the birds, as though distancing himself, with Williams and others, from a potentially destructive romanticism. But that ‘other life’ continually impinges on this, however mockingly or faintly in The Hudson Letter. Frequently the ‘other life’ celebrated in the poem is life as it turns into language, as in section XVI, which tumultuously evokes how ‘cloud-splitting Angie broke over the Keys last year.’ In so doing, Mahon recalls one of Crane's most energised later poems, ‘Eternity,’ also about a hurricane and its aftermath. Crane concludes with a memory of ‘Drinking Bacardi and talking U.S.A.’ Mahon—to borrow Crane's word—recalls a ‘memoried’ time and place through an allusion that pays homage to Crane's narrative of exhaustion after tempest. The Irish poet remembers

how we strolled out there on the still-quaking docks
shaken but exhilarated, turned to retrace
our steps up Caroline St., and sat in Pepe's
drinking (rum and) Coke with retired hippies
who long ago gave up on the land and settled among the rocks.

This passage takes pleasure both in the experience and its representation. Crane acts as a benignly presiding presence, a guarantor of the continued if always surprising fact that poetry and life can leave us ‘shaken but exhilarated.’

Both Montague and Mahon are poets attracted by the burdens and glamour of exile. Both seek to learn what is meant by home through travelling abroad, literally and imaginatively. Derek Mahon has recently depicted himself in The Yellow Book as a latter-day decadent and aesthete, and yet as a common-sensical sceptic. Evidently regretting that ‘patience, courage, artistry, / solitude’ are ‘things of the past’—‘like the fear of God’—‘we nod to you,’ he writes in the fourth section, ‘from the pastiche paradise of the post-modern.’ That crafty rhyme between ‘God and ‘modern’ (a form of rhyme sustained throughout the section in question) suggests his ambivalent position with regard to textual ‘pastiche’ and ‘post-modern’ knowingness. At the close of Border Sick Call (and concluding Montague's recent Collected Poems) is the question, ‘But in what country have we been?’ It is a question that includes among its suggestions a hint as to the hold that Montague's and Mahon's dealings with American poetry have over us. We are taken, as a result of these dealings, into the exilic, precarious mindscape of the poem.

Notes

1. ‘The Figure in the Cave,’ in John Montague, The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Dublin: Lilliput, 1989), 17-18, 16, 17.

2. The poem is quoted, as are all Montague's poems, from John Montague, Collected Poems (Loughcrew: Gallery, 1995), 180.

3. Lowell, Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1965), 45; ‘The Figure in the Cave,’ 16.

4. ‘Invocations of Powers: John Montague,’ in Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Bridgend: Seren, 1992), 29.

5. ‘The Figure in the Cave,’ 18.

6. ‘The Impact of International Modern Poetry on Irish Writing,’ in The Figure in the Cave, 213.

7. The Chosen Ground, 29; The Figure in the Cave, 47.

8. Quoted from William Carlos Williams, Paterson Books I-V (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964), 96.

9. Lowell, Selected Poems, 56; ‘A Note on Rhythm’, The Figure in the Cave, 48.

10. ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, section vi, quoted from W. B. Yeats, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 105.

11. Quoted from Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason (London and New York: Longman, 1992), 243-44.

12. Quoted from Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field (New York: New Directions, 1960), 7.

13. Edna Longley, ‘“When Did You Last See Your Father?”: Perceptions of the Past in Northern Irish Writing 1965-1985,’ in her The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994), 162.

14. Williams, Paterson, book I, section I, 14.

15. Quoted from Derek Mahon, Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin/Gallery in association with Oxford University Press, 1990), 102. Mahon's poetry is also quoted from The Hudson Letter (Loughcrew: Gallery, 1995) and The Yellow Book (Loughcrew: Gallery, 1997).

16. Derek Mahon, ‘Letter from New York: Village Voices,’ in his Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995, ed. Terence Brown (Loughcrew: Gallery, 1996), 238.

17. Frank O'Hara, ‘Personism: A Manifesto,’ in his Selected Poems, ed. Donald Allen (1991; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), xiv.

18. Quoted, as are all Crane's poems, from Hart Crane, Complete Poems, ed. Brom Weber (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1984).