Paul Muldoon’s clever-clever Cuba focused on a Catholic family in the nuclear ’60s subverting puritanical denials and frustrations with a gesture of tenderness. When one was sweet and twenty something, clutching at the straw of one’s virginity, it was Yeats’s lessons in lovesex that hit home, from “Brown penny, one cannot begin it too soon,” to the doting grandmother in When you are Old. Theo Dorgan’s latest collection is Nine Bright Shiners The shift in scale that permits identification with the Earth turning towards rebirth in spring is brought perfectly home in the poem’s masterstroke, the repetition of “Despite the snow” and, even more, the suspension of time in that amplifiying “falling”. It catches perfectly the trance of new love, perhaps love as yet undeclared, the dawning realisation implied in “half-words”, the reticence and delicious hesitation of one who right now, right here is discovering herself, or himself, new-fledged in love. I know of no short poem in the English language that packs so much magic and memorability into so few lines, except perhaps for Anon’s masterpiece (mistress-piece?), the early 16th-century lyric known as Western Wind.īoth poems share a deceptive simplicity of diction and seductive cadence, the evocation of the natural world as the proper theatre of love, and an air of the mysterious – but the Graves lyric, I think, reaches even farther and deeper into the psychic hinterland of besotted love than does the earlier poem. Mo thine ghealáin mar bhairlín thíos faoiĪilbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh’s latest collection is The Coast Road (Gallery Press, 2016) Is is rí-mhór m’fhaitíos gur bhain tú Dia díom.įor unadulterated sensuality, I refer you to any number of poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, although Fáilte bhéal na Sionna don iasc does end on a surprisingly tender note: The searing, heart-twisting pain of separation is more commonly featured in Gaelic love poetry, such as in the devastating lines of Dónal Óg:īhain tú thoir díom is bhain tú thiar díom,īhain tú an ghealach is bhain tú an ghrian díom,īhain tú an croí geal a bhí i mo chliabh díom, The Gaelic tradition doesn’t indulge in the schmaltz of St Valentine. I don’t suppose a marriage could amount to much if it didn’t have a pair of infatuated teenagers hidden in it.Īilbhe Darcy’s two collections are Imaginary Menagerie (2011) and Insistence (due May 2018), both with Bloodaxe
There are many fine poems about the grown-up parts of love, but it’s as infatuated teenagers that we learn romance, and as infatuated teenagers that we practice romance, all the rest of our lives. I should probably feel embarrassed at telling Ireland that this is my favourite love poem, but am unabashed. (Love is monomaniacal, love is appalling, love is secret, love is childish, love rips you from the bosom of your family, love is woozy, love is ravishing, love is scrumdiddlyumptious.) By then it had already been echoing around inside me for years, telling me the truth about love. I met my future husband at 19, and I wrote this poem in a notebook for him. What other words could there be for what I felt, at 13 or so, when I laid eyes on a certain “gold, dark boy”, but Chimborazo, Cotopaxi? Sure, these words may at times have been arbitrarily attached to other, more mountainy objects, but here, in this poem, they find their true home.