A fascinating journey through history and mythology...
Micheal Fanning's poems reveal a daring and adventurous imagination,
writes Brendan Kennelly. Sunday Independent, July 6, 2003.
Micheal Fanning's poetry takes the reader on a fascinating journey through history and mythology, through places near and distant, through the loving intimacy of ordinary life and the violent, majestic families of gods and goddesses.
Fanning has a daring, adventurous imagination which can slip from west Kerry to ancient Greece with ease, subtlety and conviction. Tralee stands side by side with Troy; Listowel and Ithaca nudge shoulders, and Dingle and Thebes have much in common.
Fanning's language moves in a confident manner across centuries and countries, taking the reader on an intriguing voyage through time and space, religions and civilisations, periods of peace and savage turbulence. Much of the strength of this book lies in Fanning's ability to link the ordinary and the mythical.
This thrilling sense of movement and connection characterises the poems right through the book.
And there are, too, some delightful moments of wit and humour. For example, in Coming to the Well for Water (adapted from an excerpt from The Listowel Brief, published in 1992) a witty prose piece written in memory of John B. Keane, Micheal Fanning presents a conversation with the scintillating dramatist in his pub in William Street, Listowel.
"In J.B. Keane's pub on the wall inside the bar you will see a painting of the drowned and deceased Sive laid out. Across from her on the opposite wall hangs the photograph of the pioneer Listowel Writers' Week committee of twenty one years ago.
"J.B., what do you think of the group up there in the photograph?"
"If you were to scour the dungeons of Central America, you wouldn't find a bigger bunch of chancers," J.B. replied gingerly.
"What do you like about Writers' Week, J. B.?"
"I love to meet other drunkards," he answers, "It gives an appetite for angelic expression and the divine taste of booze."
"John B., how do you think Writers' Week has done over the last 21 years?"
"It has matured far more than I have myself," says John B. with a glint in his eye.
"What's your 21st birthday wish?"
"I'd like to see more and more octogenarians doing the workshops," John B. proffers in a mischievous manner."
The Separation of Grey Clouds is a book worth reading many times. In fact, it calls out to be read several times if the reader is to get anything approaching a full sense of the depth and richness of the poems.
The Separation of Grey Clouds is a book worth reading many times. In fact, it calls out to be read several times if the reader is to get anything approaching a full sense of the depth and richness of the poems.
Divided into seven sections, the work begins with some searching poems about history, proceeds with poems about family, the long conflict in Northern Ireland, an excerpt from The Love Letters of Daniel O'Connell, a long, complex, realistic-mythical poem called Fox Hunt, then on to the title poem, The Separation of Grey Clouds, which is a sharp, observant poem about a day in Dingle; then we move to the final section, which completes the thematic circle and returns to history.
Micheal Fanning has given us a book which has the feeling of a well-planned, multi-layered and richly rewarding journey. He has, in fact, created a world of his own, a world of joy and hope, grief and suffering, war and peace, order and chaos, humanity and divinity. And all the poems interact in a shrewd, illuminating way.
The Separation of Grey Clouds is a book that readers will return to, with deepening interest and enthusiasm, again and again.
© The Sunday Independent, 2003
The Separation of Grey Clouds by Micheal Fanning
Reviewed by John O'Donnell in the Irish Medical Journal June 2003 Vol.96 No.6
When I was growing up, our family GP was the courteous and gentle Dr. Keane. On house calls he would perch on the end of our childhood sick-beds, listening carefully as we recounted our latest troubles and afflictions. Frequently he would delve into the little leather case which seemed to accompany him everywhere, coming up with a wonderful variety of gadgets. A stethoscope, of course: a thermometer. A wooden spatula to hold our tongues down as he peered into our throats. Sometimes, thrillingly, an otoscope; when he lined it up against our ears and squinted into it, it felt as if he was gazing right into our heads. You never know what you'll find inside a doctor's bag.
Micheal Fanning's latest collection of poetry is bulging at the seams with different things.
There are poems about family. There are meditations on life (and loss) on the Dingle Peninsula. There is history and allegory here. The book's final section includes a series of end-of-year poems. One marvellous poem in this section, "Christmas," deserves a place in any Yuletide selection.
But Fanning is a poet for every season. He's at his most effective observing what he sees around him. In the title poem he records the sights and sounds of a day in Dingle -- "Exultant pipits/ sing a consolation/ over our western town". In "PoemCards from Spain" the warmth of Andalucia is recalled; the shores "call us to sing in the sirroco-ocean". The simplest images show Faning at his strongest; intimate, spiritual, intense. In "Christmas in Castlegregory" the final line ("A white wall runs round our village this Christmas") invokes the shade of Kavanagh, a shade you feel is never far away in the best of these poems celebrating life in West Kerry out on the Atlantic seaboard.
Perhaps some of the longer sequences about Greek mythology or Northern Ireland are somewhat less successful because they are less intimate, although their ambition and the breadth of territory they seek to cover cannot be faulted. Fanning also translates an excerpt of O'Snodaigh's "Parnell to Queenie" (that some of the poems here are included in Irish as well as in the English translation adds to rather than detracts from the richness) and showcases (as in an earlier volume, "The Love Letters of Daniel O'Connell") his willingness to get inside the head of well-known historical figure.
Fanning (amongst others) has written elswehere of the power of verse to bind up wounds, to heal. Poetry as panacea deserves a space in every medic's case, alongside the tired instruments and the sample-packs of medication. Thoughtful and compassionate, this collection is just what the doctor ordered.
© The Irish Medical Journal, 2003
from Floating Words by Gene Yore, The Dundalk Democrat, Saturday 5th July 2003
... Another book that touched the old Celtic soul was sent to me by Micheal Fanning in Dingle, County Kerry. Micheal's collection is called The Separation of Grey Clouds and is published by the distinguished Salmon Poetry house. The collection is divided into seven different parts which vary greatly in style, but the poems I enjoy most are the tender and very moving Family Poems in Part 2 and the Christmas poems in the final section, which have some of the magic of Kavanagh's Christmas and winter poems and the added joy of an Irish "translation" on the same page.
I particularly liked Nollaig (Bun Inbhir, Abhainn na Scail). This is a magical poem. You can read it in English and then in the Irish, and if anything would make you want to learn irish, or vice versa, well, this poem is it. Abhainn an Scail is Annascaul in English, where the Arctic Explorer, Tom Crean, settled down to become the publican you see in the Guinness TV ad.
You get the real sense of being out there on a sharp Christmas Day.
Christmas-snow packs the great lap of Corran Tuathail
The sea draws her rustling dress across the bay.
Dedicated to a priest working in India, it begins with a vision of mountain goats and ends:
More than ever, again we need Mary,
and Christ's re-birth in war-wearied Bethlehem.
We'll attend early morning Christmas Mass,
visit the old people, walk Ventry strand;
after dinner, play thirty-one in the holly decorated sitting-room.
And the goats shall take away our sins.
© The Dundalk Democrat, 2003
Poetry from the Ireland of today
A review of Micheal Fanning's "The Separation of Grey Clouds" (Salmon Poetry) & Emily Cullen's "No Vague Utopia (Ainmir Publishing)
Reviewed by Peter van de Kamp, January 2004
Recalling a long Irish tradition, both Cullen and Fanning display a veneration for poetry. So do their publishers, for both these books are lovingly produced. The content of Fanning's "The Separation of Grey Clouds" is aptly visualised by Brenda Friel's post-modernist cover of a sun emerging from behind a human image set upon a blue-strafed cover that feature a mysterious small cloth-patch.
.. No two books could be more unalike, suggesting in themselves the healthy variety of recent Irish poetry.
The word 'no' does not exist in Fanning's spiritual exuberance, whereas his positive embrace of life would never fit Cullen's vignettes of souls bruised to pleasure bodies. Cullen is an erstwhile romantic grown pragmatist, her finger on the artistic pulse; Fanning is, well, his own self.
Micheal Fanning is Ireland's only real contemporary poet-mystic. His very genuine vision does not fit snugly in the confines of poetry; mystics never do. With a pinch of Blake, and a spoonful of AE, he lacerates the dictates of proper verse.
He inverts, rhymes oddly, and is at times well-nigh derivative, alluding happenstance to a world of poems (including even the fastidious Dutch Hans Lodeizen in Russian Redemption).
Yet no one could find fault with Fanning's faults, and not just because the book's peregrinations are guided by souls from classical Greece. "The Separation of Grey Clouds" couples scope with thrust.
It pantheons family and friends, writes some extremely perfect lines, and makes soul-burst seams. Fanning will never communicate with any of Ireland's poetic tradesmen! Nor should he. The first stanza of Connolly's Garden sums him up:
God's fervent word blows
through her brains and breasts
touched by the father's bread,
the Son's blood,
the Holy Spirit's fire.
Not quite the modern fashion, this, but a style deserving the praise that Yevtushenko had lauded on it in the past. Unverstandably, for "The Separation of Grey Clouds", a Dantesque Everyman, is a morality that stumbles through real life without a modicum of pretence. And all in the verse that deserves more praise than I can give it in this short New Year review.
Dr. Peter van de Kamp is a poet and academic.
