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The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic Mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry (Salmon Poetry)

by Adam Wyeth

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Adam said: "
Paula Meehan (Ireland Professor of Poetry) 25th of October 2013

You can’t judge a book by its cover is an old and sound saying, but in this case the marvellous cover is a reliable guide to what you will find within — to wit marvels, wonders, vivid en
Paula Meehan (Ireland Professor of Poetry) 25th of October 2013

You can’t judge a book by its cover is an old and sound saying, but in this case the marvellous cover is a reliable guide to what you will find within — to wit marvels, wonders, vivid encounters with the imagination of the ancestors. You will meet them in their myths and legends, with their heroes and gods; you will access their understanding of the interdependence and interpenetration of human and animal worlds, and of this world and the otherworld.

Adam Wyeth reminds us that one etymology for, or source of, the word Celtic is Hidden. So the book is essentially sixteen individuated forays into the minds, inspirations and compositional habits of contemporary poets. Each of the sixteen poems under his forensic gaze yields up its hidden treasure trove of poem lore and myth lore and what are the myths but the poems of the ancestors? Each essay can be read on its own but together they braid into a whole and they too are interdependent and interanimate each other.
We apprehend in these elegant readings what I call our aboriginal mind, so crucial as an antidote to the growing institutionalized mind which marks and, I believe, afflicts so much of our human culture in an age when we are the most dangerous species on the planet, a danger even to ourselves. The institutionalized mind keeps wittering on about accountability and transparancy till those words have lost their meaning and what they actually represent now is erosion of democracy and increase of bureaucracy. The institutionalized mind – devoid of a shred of common sense will, if left unchecked, drive turbo development and exploitation of dwindling resources to the point where we will make this home planet incapable of sustaining us.

This book connects us back to a Celtic dreamtime through mythology which is, no more, no less than the poetry of the ancestors. It reaffirms the vestigial and, paradoxically, central role of ancestral thought in contemporary Irish poetry in general, and in this generous selection from contemporary makers in particular. It illustrates the continuity of the trade back through the technologies, virtual and print, into the oral tradition. We can hear back to the bronze age culture of the Milesians, and read back to the first writing down of the myths and legends in the 6th to the 11th centuries. So Adam’s book is both nourishment and boon for readers in the English language who might not have access to the lore in the mother tongue.

One of the unexpected gifts of this book for me has been that it has encouraged me to go back to the source – to the mother tongue. The huge number of the ancient manuscripts that are being digitized means we can look at the very texts themselves that carried the oral tradition into the written tradition. For example the site Irish Script on Screen, or the digitized holdings of the Royal Irish Academy, and many more such sites, allow us access from our own armchairs to heretofore remote and precious, sometimes unavailable for reasons of conservation, ancient manuscripts. A lovely irony that the machine age with its digital memory restores to us a version of our earliest imaginings.

Adam Wyeth is exactly the kind of reader poets dream of. Deeply intuitive, interested in everything to do with words. Pasternak remarked that each word comes to us carrying all its ghosts; Adam, as a learned and productive poet himself, respects those ghosts and understands the shamanic heft, the magic potential of each word, and the spell-like nature of a line of poetry, each word and its host of etymological ghosts in its fated place. Adam quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson who says “Language is fossil poetry.” And becuase he is a fine poet himself he inspires confidence: he opens up, and is an impeccable guide to, the craftworking and deliberate shaping of each poet, and the poetry lore is as erudite as the folk lore. He gets the anvil music, the fluent song of water.

He brings a wealth of reference, historic, archaeological and literary to his readings of the chosen poems. And they are read with love, respect and enthusiasm. He opened up new readings for me in poems I thought I knew well – Leanne O’ Sullivan’s ‘Promise’, Paul Muldoon’s ‘Mayfly’. Indeed he opened up new readings for me in my own poem and reaffirmed what I have long suspected — that the maker of the poem is not necessarily the poem’s most informed or nuanced reader. One can be blind, as the poem’s maker, to what is blindingly obvious to the poem’s reader.

Ancient history is by its very nature highly speculative; and while I might argue with some of Adam’s speculations I applaud wholeheartedly the verve and coherence of those speculations. A lovely word itself – speculate. One of its meanings is to look at from a vantage point and that expresses exactly what Adam has achieved.
Another, though by no means the least, of its achievements is, to be a kind of core sampling through the living generations of Irish poets writing in English, which might be termed our stepmother tongue, with one representative from the mother tongue. Informative as to backgrounds, publications, contexts for writing, it is a solid introduction to a generous helping of beautiful poems.

And the placing of these recently made poems — their ink hardly dry, their soundwaves hardly digitized: by placing them against the earliest stories on the island it frees them of any individuated ego driven energies of the ‘poetry bizniz’ and restores them to their rightful place in a long continuum of makers, native and incoming, who are known to us mostly as the genius ‘Anonymous’.

I convey my gratitude at being placed in such company, both of this world and of the otherworld.

Paula Meehan (Ireland Professor of Poetry) 25th of October 2013 ...more "

Jun 13, 2014 07:27AM · see review