Seamus Cashman
Plenitude,
by Thomas McCarthy
(Carcanet Press, £11.99 / €14.99)
Tom McCarthy’s new collection Plenitude has that centrality of ‘pleasure’ and ‘vocation’ at the heart of poetry’s creative energies which Auden once alluded to, as indeed do so many of his recent prose works.
Plenitude completes a trilogy of collections, the previous books are Pandemonium (2016) and Prophecy (2019), all from Carcanet Press. The title indicates completion and buoyancy in tune with our contemporary Irish world.
Enriched
These poems are enriched at all times by his awareness of history – the precise histories of heritage gardens, of novelists such as Molly Keane and West Waterford neighbours who went to fight in the Great War —this is a poetry of formal short lyrics and longer poems with historical and social commentary. McCarthy’s political and historical interests, and his personal background and social experience, make for texts of immediate relevance for contemporary readers.
Especially for readers who are also gardeners, lovers of the flower world from the simple daisy to the gorgeous Amarillis, or where:
“Between primrose and watercress. Wind tightens
The sly grip of this season by a notch, one fox in the whins
Howls for a chase.”
McCarthy loves the intensity and lives of his apple trees, admitting in his magnificent nature and personal love poem Lover of Rare Apple Varieties that:
Only recently I discovered that I was the lover of a lover
Of rare apple varieties. It was a thing she had kept hidden
For years, sometimes the scent was everywhere after
A night of love, fresh linen scented with the unbidden
Feel of apple blossom, unbidden by me, but recover-
Ed by her in the way she twisted as if bedclothes were
An orchard in May.
The closing verse of this 24 line poem reads: ‘… my life has been given over to this lover of varieties, / A keeper of Gibson’s Russet, Ballinora Pippin. Such trees.’
Plenitude is flush with beautiful lines and words, sometimes tough as ‘the broken stones of the year’ in ‘the wet bracken of time”
The poem on the facing page, White Album, is dedicated ‘To Catherine’ and indeed many poems throughout the collection reveal that she too is a committed gardener and remains a significant presence throughout this poetry making.
Plenitude is flush with beautiful lines and words, sometimes tough as ‘the broken stones of the year’ in ‘the wet bracken of time’. There is then a paean to Mothers, his mother, and all mothers, entitled ‘Month of the Dead’, which offers keen observation and excitement in every line; the poem talks of ‘life’s accumulations, of ‘….scutch-grass creating nests of decay’.
But what’s unresolved / Is want’s truly permanent, as the freshwater and distinct / Mussel assembles its one pink pearl.’ Then the poet adds:
‘And ready to crack some joke about priests, to release the girl
I always sense is there. We always want to get a laugh
From our mothers
Satire
McCarthy has always been recognised for his wit and subtle satire, partly shaped by a long life in libraries and among books and art. In a short poem, The One Leaf, is this literary gem of a verse as the poet sits under a tree contemplating:
“The self that time makes worthwhile
May never seem whole
In the way Samuel Beckett was
With that one single leaf”
On the tree of his entire life:
And yes, there is a poem in the car-park of Cork City Library with two professorial poets, Seán Lucy and Seán Ó Tuama, listening and debating words for the ferocious clagernach of the rain, and bells, “Though this rain is belling down in cathedrals of sound”.
McCarthy is good on place: he brings alive the personality of Salonica, Ballyferriter, to three Romanian cities, Newark, and to Old New York streets where nothing is ever as it seems”
In a poem of 33 lines, Lustrous Gold, McCarthy writes of parents and their young:
We hoard issues instead of wealth; urgent issues fill up our coffers
With lustrous gold, newly minted. There is the issue
Of our young who cannot afford a home; there is no nest
For them in the places where they might begin to live. This
One issue burns a hole in the pocket of my brain. It creates
An unauthorised balance in the place where my soul
Should be at ease. It is every parent’s worry: how will the young
Become if they cannot begin?
McCarthy is good on place: he brings alive the personality of Salonica, Ballyferriter, to three Romanian cities, Newark, and to Old New York streets where nothing is ever as it seems.
There are also poems on memory, on Evan Boland, on little things in life and on great ones. Humour and depth are natural weavers of Tom’s unique voice and ways of thinking.
Trawlings
In his marvellously subtle language trawlings, he is ploughing the fields and turning over fresh clay, seeking new understandings and offering seeds of thought to sow for harvesting as new poems. Every poem (I do not exaggerate) in this collection earns multiple readings.
Tom McCarthy is a major poet of our time. He recently wrote that: ‘The masters teach us that we should write a poetry that has ambition in it, not just to be essential and finished, but also to be uncanny… We should keep our eyes on that uncanny destination.’
