I met the poet at a party. He was visiting the United States for a conference on Irish literature. I was pleased to discover that, like me, he was no great fan of Seamus Heaney. People were asked to read poetry at the party, and when Goodby read I found myself listening with great attention. The work was certainly--to use Goodby's word--"dense," but it was also extraordinarily musical, intelligent, even funny. Later, I asked Goodby to record some of the poems so that I might play them on my radio show. I loved the sound of them.
This is how the book begins:
IN THE TROPICAL HOUSE
The butterflies seem to hatch behind ears,
from hair--the Constable, Paris Peacock,
the Lacewing--as we stray under dripping glass;
you perhaps seeking the White Tree Nymph,
me in attendance on a Bamboo Page.
They might conjure up any possibility,
Magellan's Birdwing, Dark-veined Tiger,
Common Mormon, Postman, Mocker
Swallowtail, as they lazily settle on leaves
or open their books of hours in the shade.
Yet the feather-pronged moths would never feed
in the adult stage. Despite their eye spots
and snake-headed wings, the Giant Atlas,
the Monarch and the Indian Moon Moth
could look to no future except love and famine.
Was the Owl Butterfly a butterfuly at all?
You might be a Painted Jezebel on the bridge
above the toy waterfall. I consider it, still
alighting from or on those harder names;
Red Pierrot, Sulphur Emigrant, the Great Duffer.
The tone here is slightly reminiscent of the early Eliot. The marvelous butterfly names are at once a distraction from and a commentary on the couple "[straying] under dripping glass." The speaker wonders whether his beloved may be "a Painted Jezebel on the bridge." He himself may be "the Great Duffer." Have they, like the Giant Atlas, the Monarch and the Indian Moon Moth, "no future except love and famine"? It is possible. The poem keeps wanting to name the butterflies, to enter the realm of the Magellan's Birdwing and the Dark-veined Tiger (which "might conjure up any possibility") but at the same time it keeps returning to the man and the woman, who may well be "straying" in many senses.
Things get considerably more complex in the next poem, "Loreley" (is that British spelling? an intentional misspelling?). This is a passage from the middle of the poem:
My child bride!
Ashore, our tongues would leap one in the other--
yet, from the start, the tone I half-caught
all unenamoured from her song (it poured
like strawberry blond hair from mousey roots);
was fitful; a mixed blitzen that was blind
fool's gold, our disengagement ring's claw-
set antique diamond revealing its flaw
of hesitant anthracite
That seems to me utterly amazing and utterly unlike anything to be found in American verse. We haven't the groundwork of Edith Sitwell, George Barker, Dylan Thomas; the closest we can come is the early work of Robert Lowell, but Lowell's anguished Catholicism doesn't give him permission to shift with such dazzling assurance from context to context: parodic language, serious language, ambiguous line endings, even rhyme. (The semi-colon following "mousey roots" is, I take it, a typo, but with this poet one can never tell!)
What a gorgeous sound it makes: "a mixed blitzen that was blind." Has the language of Paradise Lost come to this? we ask. Indeed it has, and a good thing too. The poem is a love poem in the vein of boy meets girl ("she sat on a crag, a glass of black stuff / to hand beside her pack of Sweet Aftons"), boy loses girl ("Spilt milk, though; sure-- / and when I had been stranded one year shy / of the seven, it had to be time to call / it a day") but the love story is filtered through a Joycean consciousness which stays constantly alive to any possible mythic resonances. It is all about language--sort of. Dismal "reality" ("strawberry blond hair from mousey roots") is there too, constantly making its presence felt, constantly pin-pricking the poet's desire (and capacity) to write in the high Romantic style:
It seemed that the Rhine slurred her syllables
in a slow dream anschluss with the Liffey,
embracing her like a long-lost sister....
Sounding momentarily a little like Prufrock, Goodby says "I":
I should have danced attendance on her gown,
should never have lost those Fifties court shoes
her Mutti handed down
and in a way the poem is about an "I." It is a "confessional" poem, a little story about a sailor poet who has an affair with a young (perhaps too young) woman. In another sense, however, the poem denies that I: its wealth of reference brings us into contact with an explosive and chaotic realm in which almost anything can happen and in which almost anything can connect with anything else--a magical area which includes "a slow dream anschluss" (anschluss = connection) of the Rhine with the Liffey. The possibly autobiographical story the poem tells is always on the brink of dream, of the Freudian "Unconscious"--or, better, on the brink of a linguistic intent which regards the real as only the starting point of an Arabian Nights of reference. Magic is always just around the corner.
A Birmingham Yank is an adventure in the amazing collision of contexts. It is "literary" in the sense that the poet frees himself to take all of literature, all of history as material for any given "anschluss." (In his notes to his poem, "Tintern Abbey" Goodby explains, "Another Tintern Abbey exists in Co. Wexford.") These are the opening lines of "The Kalif of Conamara"--the title itself is extraordinary:
The Tree of Life, they said, puts down twin roots
through Ibn al-Bawaab and the Book of Kells;
beneath Galway boughs their last hookahs fumed....
That may be true. Who knows? (The poet remarks in the notes that "shamrukh is Arabic for a triform leaf.") It is certainly astonishing and, like much of Goodby's book, hilarious.
If you're interested in something different, something you can't get in the States, try John Goodby's A Birmingham Yank.
In 336 B.C.
after the sack of Rome by the Gauls,
the Romans had erected
a temple to a pilgarlic Venus
(˜Caesar' means ˜hairy').
Jack Foley