LOUIS DE PAOR’S agus rud eile/and another thing was first published in the original Irish eight years ago. In this new edition by Cló Iar-Chonnachta, English language translations perform a valuable service by making the work of one of our best poets available to a wider audience.
There are those in the Irish language poetry world who resist translation because they see it as further marginalising the language. But for me, with my dodgy few words of Irish - enough on a good day to make some sense of Ros na Rún - these translations are my only way into Louis de Paor’s poetry.
His writing has great integrity. By this I don’t mean the faux integrity of those who rush about the place pretending to do good works. On the contrary, Louis is one of those rare poets incapable of writing a fake sounding line.
His poems are clearly worked on and then worked on some more until whatever it is he’s telling you, you believe him. Here, the mood is mostly dark. The first poem, ‘Blackberries’, sets the tone: “She plucks blood from the briars,/shadowed eyes as bright/as time to come/that has not yet darkened her days.”
‘After The Revolution’ is an outstanding poem in which he name checks the Governor of Mountjoy Prison:
“There’s a cargo of untold stories/in the hold of the ship that landed/in John Lonergan’s heart just now//that would fill the Four Courts/and the National Library with shame/while the living shadows in the prison-yard//are soaked to the skin/by the slow trickle/from the minister’s bleeding heart.//In Leinster House,/the sons and daughters of the revolution/go on and on about the weather.”
The economic weather has darkened unimaginably since this poem was written in 2002. I have to admit I tend to make immediately for the fire escape whenever a poet introduces his or her poem by making mention of the linked evils of social inequality, neo-liberal economics, and the late lamented Progressive Democrats.
Such poems tend to be seriously bad and often have a subtext which involves us dumping Cowen, Kenny, and Gilmour for this or that Dear Leader who must at all times be worshipped without question.
However, the fact that Louis de Paor isn’t one of those likely to end up carrying giant colour posters of Richard Boyd Barrett, Ché Guevara, or Erich Honecker around Eyre Square on every gathering of the disenchanted is obvious from the tone of this fine piece of work, which clearly is one man’s authentic poem in opposition to things as they are rather than hack left propaganda masquerading as concern for others.
‘Pantomime’, ‘Asthma’, and ‘Malignancy’ are also first-rate poems, each of which in its way adds to the book’s generally dark mood. Probably the strongest poem in the collection is the very unsettling ‘Conspiracy of Eyes’. Like all the best poetry, this book offers the reader valuable time out from the world of shallow everyday talk.
