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Predominantly
this book is a volume of narrative chunks and sequences, no individual poem
being much longer than a couple of pages. The poet's chosen metiˇr is narrative-anecdote by which to
explore his own family history. Much of this history is commonplace and
uninteresting to most readers; yet, oddly, as one gets into the book a sort
of compulsion gathers about it. One does become interested, despite oneself,
in the two, fairly lacklustre persons who were the poet's parents. So that,
eventually, one does get interested in them, not so much in their own right,
as interest in their son, the poet's, view of them. Lastly, as the Irish soul
in exile from Ireland, and in exile from his childhood in New York, the poems
form a cumulative study of place and relationship to place. In the notes
appended to the book, Tobin quotes John Montague, 'One must start from home, so
the poem begins where I began', and this could equally be Tobin's own 'policy
statement'.
When the epic poem was the only vehicle for recording a people's history and
myths, narrative was a central - perhaps the central - device of
the long poem's structure; and those other, more 'poetic', features like
metaphor and image, lyric song, dithyrambic intensity, deep craft, formal
musicality, etc., were subordinated to the narrative drive and subsumed, like
the narrative, under the generic term poem/poetry. However, narrative and
information communication have passed largely into the world of the prose
vehicle like the novel and the textbook. One would not go readily now to epic
for history, nor expect to find science presented like Lucretius' De Rerum
Naturae in verse. What
one goes to poetry for is, in Coleridge's words, 'the best words in the best
order', namely, the verbal strung together in a manner as close to perfection
as possible. In other words, it is the aesthetic and most appropriate, rather
than the indifferently but accurately recorded factual, that we think
constitutes poetry today. Consequently, viewed from this perspective, as
cumulatively interesting as the largely private history of the Tobin family
is, the narrative is indistinguishable from prose. Eamonn Wall has said of
Daniel Tobin that he is 'The Robert Lowell Irish America has been waiting
for...' But the slightly earnest yet leisurely paced narrative of this poet
lacks that neurotic tension of either the long couplets of 'By The Ocean' or
'Lord Weary's Castle, or many another of Lowell's broken-backed but vigorous
narratives and family portraits.
What Daniel Tobin is capable of in the non-familial way comes across in
'Pallbearers At Emily
Dickinson's Funeral':
She died at
sunset facing west,
her own
society
this room-her soul-its offing
a vastness
like the sea...
Incense of
apple blossom drifts
with bell
notes in the trees-
and
resurrection's skiffs embark
at dew's
velocity.
'At dew's velocity' is beautifully put; but there are few phrases like that
in the more narrative pieces; or where there is, it is somehow a comment on
the process and main intent of Tobin's writings in The Narrows, for example, 'to preserve a life from the
recordless'. The sequence 'Twentieth Century Limited' leaves one aware that
there is a sort of decency-in the sense of civilized not merely
conventional-about this poet; while in 'The Rainbow Cafe', a five
part later sequence, one becomes aware that he is a prolix poet, strong on
incident and detail, but prone to repetition and, I suspect, reluctant to
cut.
In their better lines poets always tell the truth about themselves, provide
phrases that the critic can exclaim over ,'told you so!', and these six final
fine lines of the poem 'Ballsbridge, Dark Night' are a sort of
self-summing-up:
You know all
this who are yourself
en route and
rootless, as I am.
To be neither
one thing nor the other
is to be
other always, our sad truth.
You are my
one home in transit,
with me
always never soon enough.
While I fear that Eamonn Wall's description of The Narrows as 'passionate, complex, and original' is way off
the mark, I do admire Daniel Tobin, and poets like him, for having the
initiative to attempt the longer making in poetry, and for their courage and
intelligence. It remains vital for all poets, at some time or another, to
attempt the long poem because it is a mode that will often reveal and cast
light upon areas that are closed to the shorter poem.
© William Oxley 2006
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