One of the most frustrating things about contemporary attitudes to the Confessional lyric is the expectation that it should be wholly autobiographical.
The likes of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell have now become so synonymous with tortured artist discourse that the more radical elements of their poetic output are continually shouted down in favour of more sensational narrative readings. Skunk Hour, for instance—from Lowell's consummate Life Studies—as well as Daddy from Plath’s posthumous masterpiece Ariel, have lost much of their dark magic owing to half a century’s worth of bad-faith mythologising and obsessive poring over the details of the artists’ respective lives. Consequently, "confessional" has become a dirty word in poetry; sentimental, sensationalised and calculatedly overwrought.
So when I say that Mícheál McCann’s debut collection Devotion is a perfect example of how the Confessional lyric should operate, I mean that it evokes all the delicious complexity that the original coinage was meant to signify. Devotion is a work in which the presumed autobiographical elements of the author’s life are stripped of their mundanity, elevated into parables and distorted with just enough attention to detail to make the domestic seem strange and the strange seem domestic. It is, too, part of the Queer canon, in that it plays with formal dexterity, positioning itself with enough shape-shifting narrative generosity that it elevates the camp into the luminous realms of high art and romance. McCann has created a new kind of Queer pastoral; one which bucks the centuries-long expectation that the more ordinary elements of life—family, faith, sex, friendship—should be the exclusive preserve of the heteronormative.
The book opens with Song, a quiet poem in the mode of Louis MacNeice's Snow which finds the "drunkenness of things being various" in an encounter with a household washing machine. Elsewhere there are ballads to McCann’s cat, odes to his mother in labour, recessionals relating casual sexual encounters, long-term relationships, and ekphrastic reflections on Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà. In short, McCann couples an old-fashioned regard for the received lyric with something entirely his own; a desire to return to the stuff that made us love poetry to begin with and inflect it with a renewed call to allow each to enjoy his lot.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Auden’s You, a beautiful three-stanza’d celebration of queer love addressed to a tantalisingly unspecified participant in a one-night stand. "Time dammed its water flow," McCann writes. "A glorious portent / of ongoing, of being glad." In lines like these, McCann is within touching distance of the masters he evokes; the influences—like Auden—he wears so lovingly on his sleeve. In lesser hands, moments like these might come across as cloying, amateurish even, though McCann manages to put just enough of himself between the lines to deliver something which is less like mimicry and more like timely recognition that there is a lineage that each of us calls back to, whether or not we do so consciously.
In John 20:15 he goes the other way, attempting to ground the spiritual in something more earthy, more human. In a reimagining of the Raising of Lazarus—itself a calling-back to Heaney’s version of the story in Human Chain—McCann positions the resurrected figure as a man with a new lease of life; a gardener, who not only wants to use his second chance to experience wonder, but to use his own revivifying gifts to restore fuchsia and cotton thistles to a state of flourish.
"Were it that we inhabited our bodies newly
each morning, and then could recognise
our last days simply: soil clumps falling
from our fingers as we turn to face
the woman calling and calling our name."
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Devotion, however, are the translations and versions of old Irish poems, which have been modified and updated to better reflect McCann’s own predicament. Though it has been referenced dozens of times in Irish literature, McCann’s version of Pangur Bán — Poet and Cat —is a controlled, playful translation of the 9th Century Irish which foregoes any idea of linguistic or historical accuracy in favour of something more directly applicable to McCann’s relationship with his own feline friend. Líadan Tests Her Love is further evidence of the poet’s attempts to put his unique stamp on those Irish lyrics of old; to enter into conversation with the likes of Heaney, Carson, Kinsella and Muldoon just as naturally as if he were sitting around a table with them.
Most remarkable of all perhaps is the book’s centrepiece Keen for A— which, though ostensibly written after Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s 18th Century epic Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, should be read as a recontextualization of the original rather than as a work of direct translation. As in Ní Chonaill’s poem, Keen for A— is a long personal lament about the all-consuming annihilation one experiences in the aftermath of bereavement. Unlike Ní Chonaill’s poem, however, McCann’s version is filled with the familiar detritus of a distinctly 21st Century relationship: a Will & Grace DVD, a disco ball, cigarettes, a set of car keys, ‘a cream leather wristwatch’.
In this way, McCann does the work of grounding the speaker’s grief in the universal; emphasising that when all else is stripped away and we are left only with an absence, these touchpoints of reality are rendered at once meaningless and imbued with the spirit of the deceased. That the whole world comes to seem a mausoleum in the absence of another, devoid of any practical bearing beyond the evocation of memory.
There is much else to say about Mícheál McCann’s Devotion and no doubt others will find new and distinctive themes to remark upon once its layers have been adequately peeled back over repeated readings. For now though, let me say that this is the book to read if you are trying to re-establish your place in the world; to find empathy in the Confessional, far from its bastardization, and to feel that life is worth living again, wounded though we are.
Devotion is published by The Gallery Press
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