Is a poet I am fast falling in love with; an Irish poet, born in 1941, coming directly out of troubled Ireland his poetry is strangely, very formally controlled and metrical. I find his work incredibly influential, its subtle yet pertinent commentary on world issues, framed through very real and visceral experiences, is something that I can only dream of composing. And his use of language is simply sublime, so many interesting phrases and images litter his work. Here's a piece I read recently and have not been able to stop thinking about.
A Garage In Co. Cork
Surely you paused at this roadside oasis
In your nomadic youth, and saw the mound
Of never-used cement, the curious faces,
The soft-drink ads and the uneven ground
Rainbowed with oily puddles, where a snail
Had scrawled its slimy, phosphorescent trail
Like a frontier store-front in an old western
It might have nothing behind it but thin air,
Building materials, fruit boxes, scrap iron,
Dust-laden shrubs and coils of rusty wire,
A cabbage-white fluttering in the sodden
Silence of an untended kitchen garden.
Nirvana! But the cracked panes reveal a dark
Interior echoing with the cries of children.
Here in this quiet corner of Co. Cork
A family ate, slept, and watched the rain
Dance clean and cobalt the exhausted grit
So that the mind shrank from the glare of it.
Where did they go? South Boston? Cricklewood?
Somebody somewhere thinks of this as home,
Remembering the old pumps where they stood,
Antique now, squirting juice into a chrome
Lagonda or a dung-caked tractor while
A cloud swam in a cloud-reflecting tile.
Surely a whitewashed sun-trap at the back
Gave way to hens, wild thyme, and the first few
Shadowy yards of an overgrown cart-track,
Tyres in the branches such as Noah knew -
Beyond, a swoop of mountain where you heard,
Disconsolate in the haze, a single blackbird.
Left to itself, the functional with cast
A death-bed glow of picturesque abandon.
The intact antiquities of the recent past,
Dropped from the retail catalogues, return
To the materials that gave rise to them
And shine with a late sacramental gleam.
A god who spent the night here once rewarded
Natural courtesy with eternal life -
Changing to petrol pumps, that they be spared
For ever there, an old man and his wife.
The virgin who escaped his dark design
Sanctions the townland from her prickly shrine.
We might be anywhere - in the Dordogne,
Iquitos, Bethlehem - wherever the force
Of gravity secures houses and the sun
Selects this fan-blade of the universe
Decelerating while the fates devise
What outcome for the dawdling galaxies?
But we are in one place and one place only,
One of the milestones of earth-residence
Unique in each particular, the thinly
Peopled hinterland serenely tense -
Not in the hope of a resplendent future
But with a sure sense of its intrinsic nature.
-Derek Mahon