Uncertain Passage,
by Paddy Bushe
(Dedalus Press, €12.50pb / €20 hb)
Paddy Bushe’s latest book, Uncertain Passage, is a triumph. His poems, like the blackbird in his eponymous haiku, are “So ordinary / Yet still incomparably / The sweetest of all.” Like the goldfinch of another haiku, his wise words illuminate us.
A poet and scholar, he wears his learning lightly. In the beginning, he weeps for the meagreness of words. Later, he laments, meaning has in our time shrunk unfathomably below words, howling itself towards silence. Like the ancient poet Amergin, but now in the 21st century, his soul is bruised, his whole self-buffeted by the black winds he feels circling the earth. Nevertheless, in these troubled times, like Amergin, he steps on the shore once again and once again begins. And in doing so his words flow like honey and song is renewed.
A poet at home in his adopted place, Uíbh Ráthach, which he has made his own, he is its genius loci. I simply cannot imagine Uíbh Ráthach without Paddy Bushe, his poetry in English and as Gaeilge, without The Amergin Step, his doctoral thesis, a hymn to his adopted place which Bernard O’Donoghue has described as a “magnificent anatomy of a place, its terrain and its people”, without the enthusiasm, energy and love he has invested in his chosen place.
{{In poems that vary from the free to the formal (his sonnets and haiku are exemplary), he discovers a kind of prayer in which he finds the only heaven he will ever know or need”
In Uncertain Passage, Paddy faces illness, post-Covid lethargy, wars and rumours of wars, presenting us with a vision of a world in “a state of chassis”, as Sean O’Casey termed it in another age of turmoil. Yet there is a votive lamp lighting for his recovery, and he is quickened into healing by the wisdom of poets.
In poems that vary from the free to the formal (his sonnets and haiku are exemplary), he discovers a kind of prayer in which he finds the only heaven he will ever know or need. Like the meditation bowl bought in a tourist shop, it still rings true when struck gently. In striking the bowl gently, the poet, Paddy Bushe, “would believe / What is far beyond belief”. Amen to that.
