Love Life

by Mícheál Ó Siadhail

In Love Life Micheal O'Siadhail tells of a life in love moving through the passionate erotic, the dramas of wooing, promising and quarrelling and the day-by-dayness of home.
The seasons of love unfold - young love opening to intimacy, growth into commitment and the slow transformations of life together. Throughout, the core theme a lifetime's amazement at the mystery of one woman. The book culminates in the subtleties and variations of growing old while revelling in the love of life a deux.

Genres: Poetry

117 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Oh, Kanga," said Pooh, after Rabbit had winked at him twice, "I don't know if you are interested in Poetry at all?"

"Hardly at all," said Kanga.

"Oh!" said Pooh. (A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, “Chapter VII: In Which Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest, and Piglet Has a Bath”)

For years, I’ve felt that I’m like Kanga: hardly at all interested in poetry. But lately, I’ve been enjoying a bit of poetry—first Rainer Maria Rilke’s brilliant Book of Hours, and then reading through a collection of Emily Dickinson. Now I come to Micheal O’Siadhail’s volume, Love Life, and I’m starting to wonder if what I didn’t like about poetry was merely the seeming nonsense that’s scattered throughout issues of The New Yorker. Because I’m very much enjoying these poets I’ve just mentioned.

I learned of Irish poet Micheal O’Siadhail (MEE-hawl o-SHEEL) through N. T. Wright, who mentioned him during a talk last year in Dallas. I had no idea where to start, so I checked out a copy of Love Life from the public library, and I’ve been working through it over the past few weeks. It is a fantastic set of poems.

In these poems, O’Siadhail looks back over his years of courtship and marriage. The book open with poems about him and his wife in the first excitement of dating and falling in love. This section commences with a quote from the Song of Solomon (“Your lips are like a crimson thread, and your mouth is lovely…”), which sets the tone for the poems to follow: very intimate—in fact, sometimes almost uncomfortably so. But these poems also cover aspects of courtship that brought back memories of my wife and me falling in love, now over 20 years ago. In “Healing,” for example, O’Siadhail thinks about how this love might so easily not have happened:

Think that I might never have happened on you,
Mate and match;
For all the work of genes so many ifs.

As the cycle of poems continues, we see a deep love and respect developing—with O’Siadhail often expressing that he is the lucky one, the one who didn’t deserve happiness like this, the one who took a long time to learn how to love—as in “Approach”:

Novice, I hug the outward and extern.
How slowly maleness begins to learn

Just to bask in whatever it is is you.

He even writes about how a couple, as they grow together, also bring together their sets of friends, and as each meets the other’s friends, they see sides of each other that they hadn’t known before:

Optative mood, co-optive present tense

Of past friends we both promise to share,
Stories that we now want to turn to faces.

Early tentative encounters, our debut,
Friend by friend, coming out as a pair.

The shock to find so many yous in you
And still refind the you who chooses me.

Slow transfer and knitting in of kismet.
We move among others who move in us.

I love that line: “We move in others who move in us.” That awkwardness of bringing together two lives is not something that people write about much, but it was such a significant part of the process of falling in love, and I’m glad that O’Siadhail has captured that memory for all of us.

As the volume continues, we see O’Siadhail and his wife move through different phases of their long and committed relationship. I particularly enjoyed several poems, such as “Guests,” that talk about the pair hosting guests in their home—the little details of planning a meal, enjoying friendship for an evening, and then cleaning up and talking through what was good and bad about the time.

Poems such as “Study” quietly celebrate the everyday activity in the household—O’Siadhail at his desk writing (“I think I’m happiest when I learn”), and his wife in the garden. Elsewhere, the poems show quiet evenings alone together, talking or reading:

we sit together each of us hunched in our novel
that’s slowly unfolding
itself in a busy curious equilibrium of silence

as I side-glance a story flitting across your face
like noiseless hallowed
hours of living

Conflict within a loving marriage is realistically portrayed in these lines, too. As he writes in “Weathering”:

Mostly a tiff that seemed about nothing
Or anyhow something that had nothing to do
With what we’d begun to argue about,
Although from the start I knew
I’d have to winkle out
A hurt you’d been for weeks mutely nursing.

I think we’d fall into a pattern.
It’s you who’d held our lives steady,
So how could I ride out a billow
Of sudden humours? Already
My psyche hits Skid Row
As we seesaw and gainsay out of turn.

A heated logic’s riddle-me-re.
But I’d fail to find the middle ground
And play Hamlet at the end of his tether
Until you’d come around
To pull us both together,
End up blaming yourself for blaming me.

”The years it takes to learn a double-vision!” O’Siadhail exclaims later in that poem.

The poems follow the marriage through the wife’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s, which comes as a sudden jolt to the reader. O’Siadhail becomes ever more reflective, thinking about changes in lives—not just what he sees in his wife, but what he feels about the characters he himself has played:

Change follows change, a mutable inscape
That had you half-amused, half-perplexed

At how I seem to don another personality. . . .

Rife. Desirous. Restless. Drive. Chameleon.
In all shape-shifting I return to you.

O’Siadhail’s language is beautiful, and I loved reading about a beautiful marriage. It’s rare to find words about the kind of marriage that I myself am blessed with—to encounter a poet reflecting on decades of life with his wife. Love Life is a reverent, joyful, sacred record of a good life together.