On Trevor Joyce

Abstract

The Irish poet Trevor Joyce is a distant cousin of his novelist namesake, as I learned when a glazier repairing a window of Joyce's house, broken in a fit of rage by a mainstream poetry critic at the party that concluded an avant-garde poetry festival held in Cork, said that if he'd known of the relationship he'd have done the work for half-price. That's the work reputation can do in Ireland, and, though the tensions that led to that incident of the broken window were not exclusively literary, it does provide a fitting image for the knockabout absurdities of distinctions between "mainstream" and "avant-garde" that readers expect to hear when one reviews a poet like Trevor Joyce. Yes, they take these matters seriously in Ireland, as elsewhere--which is a pity, as such divisions are surely as slippery and unhelpful in the Irish context as they are, to my mind, in North America or the U.K. By rights there ought to be a community of interest between readers of challenging "mainstream" poets like Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson, and readers of challenging "avant-garde" poets such as Joyce, Maurice Scully, Catherine Walsh, and Randolph Healy. The obstacles in the way of bridging such audiences are persistent but (I think in my more optimistic moments) not likely to be permanent in the long run, despite resistance from various quarters. (1) But I'm moving too fast, or letting my hopes distract me from the text at hand, the collected poems of an author who has now been writing for almost four decades but can still expect the response "Who's Trevor Joyce?" from even that sliver of the public that follows contemporary poetry. Trevor Joyce was born in Dublin in 1947. While still in his teens he met the poet Michael Smith, who, five years his senior, became an important friend and mentor. In 1967 they cofounded New Writers' Press in order to do something about what they pugnaciously diagnosed as "the stagnancy of the Irish poetry scene relative to what had happened in the U.S. and Europe," with its emphasis on "a provincial literature, unambitious in its concerns, formally conservative, and rural in its outlook." (2) It was an auspicious time for such a venture: NWP and its associated journal The Lace Curtain formed part of the remarkable wave of little presses and journals that changed English-language poetry in the 1960s and 1970s. NWP published a wide variety of contemporary Irish poets, including Thomas Kinsella, Pearse Hutchinson, Anthony Cronin, Paul Durcan, and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, and a major program of international authors--Borges, Vallejo, Spicer, Neruda. The sheer diversity and ambition of NWP's activities should not be forgotten, even though it is now most closely identified with its most significant achievement: the rediscovery and republication of the 1930s generation of Irish modernists (Brian Coffey, Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin, et al), of whom only Samuel Beckett was visible on canonical literary maps. NWP's period of greatest activity ended with the 1970s (by which point it had produced over forty titles), though the imprint continues to exist, revived on an occasional basis for special projects such as the 1990 edition of Brian Coffey's Mallarme translations or the present edition of Joyce's collected poems. Joyce's first phase as a writer climaxed with the full-length collection Pentahedron (NWP 1972). In his early poetry (presented in a generous selection under the tide "Pentahedron & others" in with the first dream), Joyce demonstrates a strikingly complete absorption of nineteenth-century and modernist influences. The poems' city- or townscapes are registered through the sensibilities of a late-modernist skeptical observer, as a series of objects, part-objects, and living creatures at once oppressively plentiful and yet failing to add up to anything like a full and living world. The poems' fragmented observations are bounded on all sides by streets, walls, cobblestones, public monuments, bridges, canals, and churches, an environment neither natural nor sufficiently human. …