Richard Scott
reviews
A Hundred Doors
by Michael Longley
A Hundred Doors is
Michael Longley’s ninth collection of poetry and it begins with a visit to his
beloved Carrigskeewaun in County Mayo, a place that he has always said ‘changed
his life radically’. In the first poem ‘Call’ he is seated at the edge of the
millennium wondering if it is too late to call a friend at midnight, he hears
‘a meadow pipit calling out’ and then his consciousness is dragged deeper into
the landscape; Longley becomes aware that ‘three dolphins are passing the
Carricknashinnagh shoal’ offshore. ‘Call’ starts with the explicit suggestion
that the poet has merged with the landscape, but as the poem continues we see
Longley imagining himself into his friend’s sitting room as the New Years Eve
fire makes the cottage too hot, thinking ‘how snugly the meadow pipit fits the
merlin’s foot’; a subtle reminder that everything in nature has its place,
perhaps ours is home, or at the very least a responsible way away from certain
aspects of the natural world.
The landscape, animals and plants are heavily political for
Longley, who has said that ‘the most
urgent political problems are ecological: how we share the planet with the
plants and the other animals’. The book is indeed dense with wildflowers and
birds, but, as is his want, these are not simple bucolic references, they often
hint at something much darker. In ‘Gardening In Cardoso’ the ‘Wildflowers
become weeds’ as:
the wild fig tree,
It roots under the casa
Squeezing our waterpipes
(‘Gardening In Cardoso’)
Longley wants to convey the landscape’s power and its
struggle to reclaim a place in both poetry and amid our human interventions.
But then there are poems like ‘A Swan’s Egg’ where nature seems very helpless
in the face of human recklessness. Longley imagines himself an egg collector
filling a cabinet ‘with bird silences,/ Feathery non-exsistences’ but he
doesn’t judge or condemn he simply lets the horrific image of this awful and
now illegal antique trophy pervade the poem.
Longley is adept at writing poems about Greek mythology and
the poem ‘Cygnus’ arrives towards the end of the book like a gift for those who
were waiting. The poem is utterly violent and horrendous, Longley has never
been one to let historical violences and battles acquire a rose coloured tint,
Achilles ‘kneels on ribcage and adam’s apple/
And thrapples Cygnus’s windpipe with his helmet-tongs’. But
Cygnus, the son of Neptune who was fabled to be equally as impervious to harm
as Achilles, survives his bastardly suffocation by transforming into a swan:
his lips
Protrude as a knobbly beak through which he wheezes
And he is transformed into a –
(‘Cygnus’)
Whilst Longley uses the mythological to reference current
and ongoing violence he also does not forget the wars of his lifetime. In
‘Citation’ he calls his father’s military cross citation ‘better than a poem’
and goes on to list his father’s heroism, Longley would appear to be suggesting
he is in his father’s debt as the last two lines of the poem flash forward to
present day ‘kept alive by his war cry and momentum/ I shiver behind him on the
fire-step’. A Hundred Doors is rich in family, there is a talismanic poem
dedicated to each of his seven grandchildren.
The two finest poems in A Hundred Doors are the elegies to
the poet Dorothy Molloy and the surrealist painter Colin Middleton. Both
elegies are suffused with a respect for death, how it alone can stop
creativity. In ‘White Farmhouse’ Longley writes how:
Middleton knew that he was dying,
And fitted all the colours he had ever used
Into his last painting
(‘White Farmhouse’)
And in ‘The Holly Bush’ Dorothy Molloy who only produced one
book in her lifetime, ‘Your first and last slim volume’, keeps company with the
poets she loved. The figures themselves fall into the landscape as ‘Golden
plovers – a hundred or more – turn/ And give back dawn-light from their
undersides’. These birds are performing a solemn but joyous eulogy for Molloy.
And in ‘White Farmhouse’ Middleton’s colours soon merge with the land and
disappear ‘between Octobery hedges’. Longley’s ten year long writers block
couldn’t stop him from going on to produce some of his most incredible work, so
it stands to reason that he sees old age and death, whilst being incredibly
natural and part of the landscape, as the single thing which stops artists and
poets in their tracks.
As the book ends Longley muses upon his own career, in
‘Proofs’ he asks what he would add to the proofs of his collected poems, a some
fifty years of writing. The answer is:
A razor shell,
A mermaid’s purse, some relic of this windless
Sea-roar-surrounded February quietude?
(‘Proofs’)
Again fragments from the natural world are elevated to
become poetry’s equal in Longley’s mind.
These poems are dense on the page, many of them refusing to
break into stanzas, rather taking a heftier truncated appearance; they are like
charms, full of herbs and wildflowers but also of human experience and a worry
of death. Longley was correct when he wrote in the poem ‘Ghost Orchid’, ‘Ours
was a language of flowers’.
Richard Scott was a
student on the Faber Academy Poetry Course and has recently been selected as a
2011 Jerwood/ Arvon poetry mentee. He lives in London and works as a musician.
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