Gone Self Storm
Gone Self Storm, by Harry Clifton. Wake Forest University Press, 2023. 96 pp. $14.95 (paperback).
Harry Clifton’s tenth collection of poetry has arrived in time for the poet’s 71st birthday and provides a kind of creative reckoning by the poet with his own “child-self” from the perspective of “old age” (“Neruda,” p. 16). The collection circles back to “a lost maternal ground” after “half a century” of writing, as the book’s back cover informs us, and the poet’s reclamation of that “lost ground” is an occasion for imaginative returns to his life’s antechamber, specifically Antofagasta in northern Chile, where the poet’s parents met. Displacement takes many forms in this collection and “the ghosts of the Andes” remain a speculative and specular presence with the poet’s mother, Dorothy Clifton, and grandmother, Laura Allende, as the less-spoken-of side of the poet’s two ancestries — Irish and Latin American — which, he underlines, he has “never cease[ed] to explore” (“A Ship Came from Valparaiso,” p. 11).
As befits a collection addressing a lost, in some ways irretrievable past, the poet sifts through fragments of memory and half-memories, reimagining the past, evoking the aura of “another age / Of smoke and jazz” in “A House Called Stormy Weather” (p. 30) but also a painful inheritance of “drink and demons,” “lost weekends” and “waterless deserts” in “To the Engineer Herbert Ashe” (pp. 13-14). He calls this painful inspiration “the muse of unlove” in an Irish Times article about his grandmother “Granny Allende,” published in The Irish Times (April 5, 2023), the same maternal ancestor who inspired one of the finest of all Clifton’s poems, “A Gulf Stream Ode’” from Secular Eden (2007). The mysterious ocean drift of family background and inheritance permeates this cascade of rhyme and half-rhyme, the Gulf Stream pulling familial currents from the South Atlantic towards Ireland more as a giant whirlpool than as a linear progression:
How had we fetched up here, in this maritime state
Of “warm wet winters, summers cool and damp”
Our house so filled with pebbles, sea-shells, bird-cries,
Hurricane-lamps, that threw gigantic shadows,
Calcified fishes, drifted tropical seeds
Inscrutable with oceanic force
The Gulf Stream brought us? Shadows, Granny Allende—
Even then, I was spooked by my own lost origins.
(Secular Eden, p. 101)
These lines invoke powerfully “a Gulf Stream of energy, tragic knowledge” (The Irish Times, April 5, 2023) and one feels that Connemara, with its shifting skies and ever-changing weather, provides an equivalent “Frightening clarity” (p. 13) to the deserts of northern Chile in this new collection, a feeling bolstered by the atmospheric, somber seascape as its cover image. Two ancestries, two climates converge in poems that evoke a mixture of “lovelessness” (“The Aching Void,” p. 12) and “wonderment” (“A Woman Drives Across Ireland,” p. 29). The displaced yet strangely reconciled poet, a “beachcomber, in old age” (p. 16), expresses bemusement on behalf of his mother and grandmother “at how far / I had come, and how much I had survived,” his voice becoming theirs and voicing their and his sense of “peace” and transcendence. (p. 29). This is Clifton’s Odyssean homecoming framed in psychological terms.
The book’s title helps us to appreciate the psychological journey which the poems take. The phrase “Gone Self Storm” is from Keats’s marginalia to William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817) and combines a past participle, “Gone,” with an abstract noun, “Self,” and a more concrete noun, “Storm,” in a very resonant phrase. Keats wrote the following:
If we compare the Passions to different tuns and hogsheads of wine in a vast cellar — thus it is — the poet by one cup should know the scope of any particular wine without getting intoxicated — this is the highest exertion of Power, and the next step is to paint from memory of gone self storms
The poetic power of Clifton’s new poems is perhaps consonant with that praised by Hazlitt in Shakespeare, the gift of writing “not so much as an imitator, [but] as an instrument of nature” (the words are those of Pope, quoted approvingly by Hazlitt as the starting point for his discussion of Shakespeare). Importantly, this direct presentation, the storm itself, so to speak, gains its “most inimitable manner,” in Shakespeare, through its “gradual progress from the first origin” (again, Hazlitt is framing his own discussion, this time citing August Wilhelm Schlegel). “Self” in Clifton’s poems is circular or cyclical and Keats’s phrase draws our attention to these layerings. Time itself loses linear impetus and instead we exist “Back to front, upside down, / Inside out,” on a continuum looping back towards our origins (“The Aching Void,” p. 32). Clifton, via Keats, helps us to feel and see the lives which populate his poems through the prism of “pure becoming, gone self storm” (“A House Called Stormy Weather,” p. 30).
Keats’s phrase also draws attention to the way Clifton uses focalization of time present and time past to endow individual poems with greater force. In a book with three sections, the maternal presence in Part One is that of Dorothy Clifton, the poet’s mother, as well as his grandmother, Laura Allende; Part Three is dedicated to Mary McKavanagh Madden, the poet’s mother-in-law. But Part Two forms a sequence of elegies dedicated to Dennis O’Driscoll (“After the Barbarians”), Derek Mahon (“The Fur Trade”), artist Tony O’Malley (“Inscape”) among others, all of whose shades weigh heavily upon the poet. The full weight of these losses is consolidated in a poem titled “Alice,” a woman whose irretrievable presence is conveyed by the sheer remoteness, in time and space, of her benevolent agency. The poet remembers her from “long ago and far away” in the refugee camp “Khao I Dang,” a Holding Center for Cambodian refugees, similar to Mairut, another refugee camp and subject of Clifton’s well-known poem “The Holding Centre.” In the squalor and desperation of the Thai-Cambodian border in 1981, Alice somehow escapes the moral compromises all around her, “Always living out of her better self.” She is a holding center, a humane presence crossing the years.
Even where bohemian loucheness is the poem’s subject, Clifton focalizes his poetry to retain a somber sense of life’s exorbitant cost. Such is the case with “Gainor Crist,” a poem about the legendary Dublin “character” who hailed from Dayton, Ohio:
Who the hell was Gainor Crist
You and I once asked.
Was he a genius? An also-ran?
Was he the Ginger Man
Floating about Dublin in tweeds,
Frequenting the usual bars,
Affecting art, in the strange years
After the War, . . .
(“Gainor Crist,” p 42)
Those “strange years” have been immortalized in J.P. Donleavy’s novel The Ginger Man (1955) and in Anthony Cronin’s classic memoir Dead as Doornails (1976), both works with a bittersweet sense of what it is to be “Drunk and penniless” (p. 42) in Dublin and further afield. Clifton’s maintains his own “holding centre” by dedicating the poem to his friend and contemporary Darragh O’Connell (1952-2018), thereby grounding these ruminations on the mythical “Ginger Man” in an ongoing conversation with his friend.
That sense of life’s inexorable course runs deep in Gone Self Storm where the resonant “Gone” reserves for itself the gong-like reverberation of a death knell. David Marcus (1929-2004) is another for whom the bell tolls in a moving poem marking the end of a literary era in Ireland. “The Has-beens” casts Ireland herself as a “desolate traffic island” where the poet encounters his sometime editor and counsellor, Marcus, now in old age and afflicted with dementia (p. 44). Clifton’s generation, the poem implies, are stranded, eclipsed and “left behind” as “half of Ireland surges through / To its next re-incarnation” (p. 44). As the poem testifies, Marcus was a sympathetic and supportive editor “cruel to be kind,” generous in praise and criticism, sensitive and shy himself, aware of his authors’ vulnerabilities. By once again traversing between the then (1970s, when Clifton started to publish) and now (2000s), the poem captures a panoramic vista of literary Ireland with the veteran poet (Clifton) looking back on his much younger incarnation.
In Part Three, we move towards something perhaps more grounded and contemporary. The perennial outsider and impractical poet, Clifton, witnesses farming routines in the north of Ireland where the poet’s wife, the novelist Deirdre Madden, is from. So, “The Ulster Cycle” juxtaposes tractor jargon — “a neighbour’s Massey Ferguson” — with the poet’s unworldly calling (p. 84); but, in the modern agricultural community as in bardic days of yore, “land and cattle” go to “the heart of the matter” bringing poet and farmer together (p. 85). The “lost maternal ground” mentioned above is reprised in “The Felling,” “The Spinsters” and “In Brontë Country,” where plural meditations on “sisters, maiden aunts” (p. 69) and “wise women” (p. 72) draw on communal and domestic routines. The collection loops back across time even while it witnesses the day-to-day of “coffee and tea,” the “getting out of bed” in its most obviously grounded poem, “The Earliest Breakfast in Northern Ireland”; so this is always a poetry of “long distances” (p. 91).
Significantly, the journey taken by the long-distance hauliers whose breakfasts are eaten before dawn is from west to east towards Belfast just as the journey across Ireland taken in “A Woman Drives Across Ireland” is from east to west towards Connemara. Aside from the obvious symbolism of the eastern and western horizons, the daily arc of the sun as life cycle, the collection validates an Ireland “Before and after the age of borders” (“Praeger,” p. 90). And as the elegy to Dennis O’Driscoll asserts, “There are no barbarians any more,” the Northern Irish Troubles having calmed (“After the Barbarians,” p. 63). The collection as a whole, then, celebrates the “sheer wonderment” (p. 29) of movement and offers a certain historical hopefulness in time and space and, eschatologically, beyond time and space towards the ”great unknown” (p. 90).
—Reviewer Ben Keatinge won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2022 for his manuscript The Wireless Station. His academic publications include, as editor, Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy (Cork UP, 2019).