Clíona Ní Riordáin - English Language Poets in University College Cork, 1970-1980

Cover illustration: Melisa Hasan

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Opening my advance copy of this book on my computer, I was caught by a fragrance reaching menot from the decade that is its subjectbut from the early 1960s, from my own undergraduate years in University College Cork. A delightful time, a moment of freedom to discover people and ideas that were contemporary, with eccentric but mostly benevolent teachers to look after the past centuriesI have never learned so much or so fast, about life, art and philosophy, as I did then in a small, provincial, traditional college, in a provincial city. Of course that whiff is the fragrance of youth, but not onlythe city had a musical, theatrical, cinematic and artistic culture of the kind that flourishes in places where the whole audience moves in a body from play to concert, cinema to gallery; and the university drew on a large province, for which it was still a true centre for commerce, culture and education. Of the five years I spent as a student, what I remember most vividly is the sense of a cohort, of a group of people thinking, arguing, reading and discovering life, together.

But Clona N Rordin s book makes me ask, what was missing? Literary culture was lopsided. Although Cork had produced notable writers who were still alive and writing, notably Sen OFaolin , who had challenged the narrowness of the national debate by founding The Bell in the 1940s, much of their work was officially unavailable. Censorship was active and especially directed at fiction by Irish authors. There was a Film Festival where we saw uncensored European films, but no Book Festival to bring us The Golden Ass or The Well of Loneliness . Although (of course) we procured and read the banned books, native and foreign, we were also absorbing the message that literature and the state were at odds. And poetry, though (again of course) we were reading poetry, seemed remote from the place and time we were living in. Something that for the almost-clandestine poet I then was gave a feeling of unreality to the pursuit.

So that it was an apocalyptic moment when a newly appointed lecturer, Sen Lucy , read the poems of the emigr Corkman Patrick Galvin to a student societyI can still hear his slightly Anglo voice almost possessed by the rhythmic violence of Galvins The Kings are out :

With knives of ice

And dressed to kill

The wine flows down from Summer Hill

Christ! Be on your guard tonight

The Kings are out

Galvin was to stay abroad for almost another decade but the unmistakeable voice continued to be accessible in the broadsheets and pamphlets that occasionally erupted from his English base.

I left Cork for Oxford and then Trinity College Dublin . I went on writing, and presently published poetry in Dublin , returning to see family and friendsand then in the early seventies I happened into a student event, the launch of the Irish-language journalINNTI, that showed how much things had changed in the College. Poetry was not just visible, rooted in the place and the voices of the students who were writing, it was unapologetically in print and challenging a national readership. Older poets in English and Irish, Sen Rordin , Mirtn Direin , Pearse Hutchinson , were there to validate a student enterprise.

The phenomenon of INNTI has been widely commented on; now Clona N Rordin (who is among those who have written on that group of poets) turns her attention to the English-language strand of poetry writing that surfaced at UCC in the same period. The two lines are entangled, some poets writing in both languages, and it must be that the simultaneous presence on the campus of two writers whose verse was celebrated in Irish and English, respectively, Rordin and John Montague , helped to precipitate that sense of possibility, that made people identify themselves as poets.

N Rordins study draws on Karl Mannheim s concept of a generation and points to the introduction of free secondary education in the Republic by Donogh OMalley at the end of the sixties as the public event that gave young people in Munster permission to develop their imaginations in new ways. Id suggest that the rapid withering away of censorship after 1967 (when a new Act liberated a huge backlog of previously banned books) must have added to the sense of freedom. But her focus on an educational centre and on the impact of some exemplary teachers is both just and a corrective to the widespread emphasis on individual talent as the sole source of poetry.

But John Montagues influence was decisive. He was ten years younger than the agonising bachelor Rordin; he was embarking on his second marriage; he was professional and international in his approach. Thomas McCarthy is quoted: New collections of poetry came our way, our attention was drawn to reviews. We were made familiar with the activities that are the norm in a literary life. McCarthy, the late Sen Dunne , Greg Delanty , Theo Dorgan , Gerry Murphy , Maurice Riordan and the late Gregory ODonoghue , all born in the 1950s and all undergraduates in the 1970s, went on to make a mark as poets, widely various in style but all engaged in the life of poetry in their country and abroad. The progression happened in due course, if at uneven pace; the absence of women from the procession has been remarked. The mutual support of a cohort seems to have been lacking; female poets were perhaps still moving to a different time signature.