Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Lyn and I seem to have spent a large chunk of our Christmas evenings this year in the north of Ireland, Belfast to be precise, courtesy of watching Say Nothing (Netflix), the film Good Vibrations (2013) and Trespasses (Channel 4). All three are set during the Troubles; the series both star the brilliant Lola Petticrew; and Good Vibrations is a biopic of Terri Hooley, who founded the legendary Belfast record shop of the same name, starring the equally brilliant Richard Dormer, who was also so impressively fine in the first series of Blue Lights. It seems as though after years of neglect by television and film drama, aside from Kenneth Branagh’s dreadful Belfast, the Troubles have at last become a subject worthy of dramatic portrayal, and of exploring the question of whether all, or any, of that killing was actually worth it. Novelists, notably Anna Burns and Paul McVeigh, and poets got there first, of course.

Anyhow, all this got me thinking about – or, rather, even more about – my years, from 1985 to 1991, living in Portrush and latterly Coleraine. My first published poem, in Poetry Ireland Review in 1987 (I have eternal gratitude to the late, great Dennis O’ Driscoll), was set in Dundonald. My first collection included five poems directly, and two indirectly, about those times, and The Last Corinthians included three more. Of those 10 poems, one, ‘Pietà’, first published in Magma, dealt head-on with the killing of two RUC men in Portrush in April 1987. I’ve written others but never submitted them. I’ve got plenty more to say, if I ever bother to turn the tap back on – a visit over there would no doubt do the trick.

Perhaps the worst time, Troubles-wise, in those years was that fortnight in March 1988 when the SAS shot three IRA in Gibraltar, then Michael Stone, the UDA man, killed three and injured 60-plus mourners at the Milltown Cemetery funerals of the Gibraltar victims, and then, three days later, two off-duty army corporals were killed by mourners on the route of the funeral cortege of one of Stone’s victims. Thankfully, that cycle did stop, though there were countless other such reprisal attacks.

I found out about 10 years ago that my professor of Philosophy at university, Terry O’Keeffe, was one of the Catholic priests who tried to help and give last rites to some of the 13 victims of the Paras’ shootings in Derry on Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972. Terry gave evidence to the Widgery Tribunal whitewash about his arrest, beating and torture at the hands of the Paras at Fort George, and, years later, did so over again to the Saville Inquiry, who praised him for his courage and honesty. He died aged 79 in 2020, during Covid.

I’ve written elsewhere about the poet James Simmons, who taught at my university (before my time) and was the headliner at the first reading I gave, in 1987, in the Anchor Bar, Portstewart. He was the eldest of the great generation of Heaney, Longley and Mahon and is the most neglected, understandably, as much of his poetry hasn’t aged especially well; but the best has a poignancy and power which resonates across the decades. Heaney was a little uncharitable about Simmons in Stepping Stones. Simmons set to music and sang, here, his poem ‘Claudy’, about the IRA bombing in 1972 of the village of that name, coincidentally the home of one of my best friends at university, with whom (plus her sister) I spent the summer of 1987 in Berlin. Personally, I prefer Simmons’ heartfelt poetry to that of Longley, though both surely pale in comparison with Heaney and Mahon.

But I’ll close this brief bit of reminiscing with part of a poem by James (Jim) Caruth. I mentioned on here in the summer my admiration for Jim’s collection Speechless at Inch, available here. Jim hails from Belfast but has lived on the edge of Sheffield for many years. One of the many fine poems set in his homeland is ‘Milltown Sequence’ about the cemetery I referred to above. The last four of its six sections are as follows:


IV

Once, we heard a corncrake
in the meadows, watched
and waited for some sign of it,
the slightest movement in the long grass.
But only that intermittent ratchet call
as it sounded its own name.


V

Here is where we bury our Republican dead,
squeezed into this attended plot.

The killed-in-action,
the tit-for-tats and reprisals;
so many names we must remember.
Enough songs to last a lifetime.


VI

The poor ground,
three small fields of indigent grass,
few pennies to weight their eyes.
Over this shamed earth Divis broods,
its dark spine a horizon. A last frontier
before heather, bracken, bog.


For me these lines have a nobility worthy of Robert Lowell at his most serious.

My final though, far from original, thought is that it really is time that Ireland was united. Britain, or rather Norman England, began its imperial aggression by ravaging Ireland nine centuries ago and it’s high time that all vestiges of its empire in Ireland and elsewhere were removed.

Thank you to everyone who has read my ramblings on here this year and a very happy New Year to you when it arrives in your time zone.