RPW is back with more poetry, the thing everybody loves! This week we have Dublin-based poet Ciaran O’Rourke. O’Rourke is a widely published poet whose second collection, Phantom Gang, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2023. His third collection is forthcoming from The Irish Pages Press.
These poems, entitled “John Clare Enclosed” and “The Commons,” take their inspiration from the life and writings of the Romantic poet John Clare. I’ll let the poet himself say a few words here:
The poems I submitted are from my second collection, Phantom Gang (The Irish Pages Press), which was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2023. They are meant, of course, as a tribute to Clare, a “loss-eyed wilder-man”, who was also, at different points in his life, a kind of “hierophant // of dirt-in-bloom / and revelry”. In writing them, I wanted to sift through the swarming static of contemporary history to a new zone of clarity, where the spectres (of poverty, displacement, homelessness, environmental corrosion) that so ruled Clare’s world two centuries ago might be recognised afresh in our own – “our age / of wilting seas // and homesick, lock-out blues.” Both poems are filled with quotations and semi-quotations from Clare’s own work, so I think of them as echo-chambers rather than memorials: “Is this, then, our one inheritance, / the ache where voices grow? // My poem’s a lifted echoing, / as if they might continue.”
JOHN CLARE ENCLOSED
John Clare, your eagle’s nose
grows wise and flat
on the else unsmelt
suppressions of the earth.
You knew the world particulate
and true – and here you sit,
demure in inky water-colours,
bright-berry-eyed and stately,
a water-jug at rest
in elbow-distance down the tray.
A boyish elder-look, like light,
breaks across your face; you stare
as if an age of plenty, long ago begun
in green delight and common-song,
had all dissolved, a memory,
to noise and nothingness,
some bleak beyond
that slips your faded, folding
fist of bones, for now –
though the groan (or grin)
that’s surfacing, the watch you keep,
would make a merry mix.
My own un-peasant hunger
knows no muck or grass,
the sodden thing like bread
you supped for miles
that kept your famine-fingers clean,
but longs, in indolence, sweet-bitterly,
for you yourself, restored:
a five-foot shadow,
lit by wind and all at large
a-down the ringing heath –
when time, like verse,
was gentle, coarse and full.
I’ve heard the very sun
would touch the earthen rim, far-off,
and lead you on… perhaps to this,
(my wisp of want, a lark’s desire),
to hale the air of once, and ever,
meeting no enemy & fearing none.
The Commons
Sean, our common earth’s in smoke,
the shadow-rule
of feasting, famine-fed conspirators
(a sleek elite) extends
to every nook
where gladness one-time grew.
‘Tis like a sunbeam
in the mist, said some other
loss-eyed wilder-man
of love, like you
a grey-sky-sodden
hierophant
of dirt in bloom
and revelry: John Clare,
whose digger’s life
and empty-bellied sorrowing
you praised as permanent
and true –
in this, our age
of wilting seas
and homesick, lock-out blues.
With quick largesse,
your bursting blend
of magnanimity and vim,
in a liquor-flux of inspiration,
you reeled his verse
from memory, and pictured
peasant-crowds alit
with world-transforming rage.
I trod home across
the mossy, rain-
bewintered city’s wreck
in quietness, alive
and less alone.
To feel at all: an act
of intimate dissent,
as gentle-hearted heretics
have ever felt and known.
Is this, then, our one inheritance,
the ache where voices grow?
My poem’s a lifted echoing,
as if they might continue.
Join us next time when we’ll be reading poetry by Jodie Marley! See you then!
Adam Neikirk