'Let the Words Glide Through the Air'

Some years ago, out of the blue, a reader whose name I have forgotten sent me a copy of No Earthly Estate: The Religious Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (The Columba Press, Dublin, 2002) by Father Tom Stack. I was grateful because it sent me back to the Irish poet (1904-67) who seems never to have earned quite the respect given his compatriots Heaney, Mahon and, of course, Yeats. Flann O’Brien famously mocked him – unfairly but amusingly. Louise Bogan claimed he possessed “an astonishing talent.” He must be read selectively, with an awareness of his slyly muted sense of humor. I don’t want to overstate Kavanagh’s virtues but wish to alert readers to his charms. Stack writes of Kavanagh’s verse: 

“It is neither false, forced nor sentimental. It is invariably simple in its depth, devoid of advocacy, always honest, sparing in style and sometimes daring in its laconic matter-of-factness.”

 

I browsed again in Kavanagh’s poems after encountering “An Appeal to the Ghost of Patrick Kavanagh” (Southwest Review, 2007) by the late Brett Foster (1973-2015):

 

“These lines, plain as the silent fields

 you ploughed as the hours fell to sunset,

 have neither the nerve of those severe

 four-faced angels shown to Ezekiel,

 nor the pure, symmetrical minuet

 that scales the marveled arc of violins

 in Handel's Largo. Even the grey-haired

 folk-house guitar player who fights

 to lay all the notes out right surely

 performs a more auspicious act tonight,

 eyes closed tightly, tracing perfectly

 this basement stage behind the square

 that hosts his quiet coronation.

 

“But if they may, let the words glide

 through the air like a mower’s blade,

 working at harvest to reap the crops,

 or let them turn and take the shape

 of a young and clumsy farmer’s blunt

 corkscrew tools, little spades that glint

 as they prod the dark earth of the heart,

 or gloved hands that -- moving the soil

 still covering the yield -- scrape apart

 the clods above the star-nose mole.”

 

In his early years, Kavanagh worked a sixteen-acre farm in County Monaghan before moving to Dublin in 1939. His best-known poem, The Great Hunger (Cuala Press, 1942), begins:

   

“Clay is the word and clay is the flesh

Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move

Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.

If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove

Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book

Of Death?”

 

Foster celebrates the plainness of Kavanagh’s verse, the way it scorns grandiosity: “[L]et the words glide / through the air like a mower’s blade.”