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The Pressed MelodeonEssays on Modern Irish Writing "This collection of essays by Ben Howard is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the state of Irish poetry today." |
"THE PRESSED MELODEON, by poet and musician Ben Howard, is a collection of essays that chronicle his encounters with Irish literary culture and encompass the Prostestant, Catholic, nationalist, and internationalist strains of Irish writing. Authors such as Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, John McGahern, and Mary Beckett-- who have challenged and redefined the Irish literary tradition--are gracefully discussed in lucid prose, offering an incisive look at comtemporary Irish letters."
-Salmon Poetry
The Pressed Melodeon is available through amazon.com.
Publishers Weekly:
"'Pomeroy, Fintona-/ place names that sigh/ like a pressed melodeon/ across this forgotten/ Northern landscape.' This verse from John Montague's book-length poem, The Dead Kingdom, gave Howard's collection of essays on contemporary Irish literature its intriguing title. Howard, who teaches literature and writing at upstate New York's Alfred University, provides a personal exploration of Irish writing in the postwar period, and offers the diligent reader a lively, readable analysis of many of the Home points and writers, and a few lesser-knowns as well. In the first essay, the inherently fractured nature of Irish literature (a result of dual languages, religions and social traditions), is illustrated through consideration of established poets like Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Montague, and Thomas Kinsella. In the second, Howard discusses anthologies of Irish verse that have tried to address this range and diversity, providing some valuable pointers on literary review of the 1940s and 1950s, and then elaborates on The Field Day Anthology, a 4000-page opus covering 1500 years of Irish writing. In 'After the Coronachs,' he highlights what distinguishes the poets from the North of Ireland, including Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Tom Paulin, Ciarar Carson and Paul Muldoon, and examines the influence of sectarianism on their work. The book's second section, made up of seven separate essays on individual writers, provides a well-rounded and erudite conclusion to this analysis of writing in Ireland today."
Michael Stephens:
"There really is no other contemporary American writer I can think of with the range of understanding and depth of reading in the field than Ben Howard."
" The generations of Irish writers since Yeats and Joyce have had the bad luck not only to follow overpowering major figures, but also to emerge in an age of generally short-sighted and jargon-choked criticism. In such circustances they are fortunate to have such an advocate and interpreter as Ben Howard, whose fine and lucid prose, thorough knowledge of his subject, and generous enthusiasm for the writers in question serve them well.
My only real objection to The Pressed Melodeon is that it is often too uncritical of these Irish postmoderns--and of the understandable but misguided contempt that some of them express toward "the mandarin, Anglo-Irish bard of Sligo" (as Howard calls him on their behalf)--the greatest poet, after all, their country or our century can boast. Whether or not one still nurtures the possibly moribund belief that political and other forms of reduction utterly miss the point of literature, it is inconceivable that the thriving industry known as Irish Studies--thanks to which even now enjoy the world's respectful attention--would exist on anything like its present scale had there been no William Butler Yeats. But of course thankless children are the norm in the history of literature.
This collection of essays and reviews (individually published between 1986 and 1995) is intended for "the general, North American reader with an interest in Irish literature and at least a passing interest in modern Irish history." Focusing Homely but not exclusively on poetry, it constitutes an excellent introduction to recent Irish and Northern Irish writing. In addition to the expected figures--Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, John Hewitt, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Mary Beckett, John McGahern,and others--Howard deals gratifyingly with such important earlier figures as Sean O'Faolain (whose periodical, the Bell, was a shaping force in the emergence of modern Ireland) and Louis MacNeice (whose importance to Irish literature is too easily overlooked by those who see him in the shadow of W. H. Auden).
When I call The Pressed Melodeon an introductory work, I of course do not mean to imply condescention--quite the contrary: the luminous overview is (or has been until recently) the very soul of literary criticism, and it is manifestly not an inferior genre in the hands of a Samuel Johnson, for example. Ben Howard has an unusual gift for creating an accurate and satisfying overview--miniature cultural analysis or critical biography that bases its illuminating generalizations on precise analysis of detail.
His distinction between modern Irish writers and their otherwise similar American counterparts is typically astute and profound in its implications: "Asked to define themselves, American poets are likely to rummage memories from childhood, recall dreams, or invoke archetypal imagery. An Irish poet, asked the same question, is likely to investigate parish history, or examine genealogies, or piece together an identity from fragments of local lore." Equally typical and penetrating is his critique of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing with its trendy editorial policy (a mixture of Derry and Derrida, as Edna Longley has termed it): "As more than one point in the anthology, the concerted effort to commit an 'act of definition' is curiously at odds with the exuberant, grotesque, and anarchic tendencies of Irish writing. And in its encounters with the likes of O'Conner, O'Faolain, Edna O'Brien, and Mary Lavin, the editors' political agenda seems more than a little discordant with the lyrical, tolerant, and forgiving sensibilities of the greatest Irish writers."
Howard deals no less effectively with individual figures: in the space of a few pages he is able to characterize such poets as Derek Mahon and such writers of fiction as John McGahern so that a reader with no knowledge of these rewarding writers can get a full and accurate sense of their distinctive qualities and their central works--and a reader who is already familiar with them may find them coming into sharp focus for the first time. Fortunately these generalizations are based on careful but unpedantic attention to such linguistic and poetic details as rhyme, rhythm, zeugma, and etymology.
In his obituary on Sean O'Faolain Howard quite correctly identifies that often acerbic national gadfly as essentially forgiving, generous, and full of "a profound sympathy for human frailties." I have always felt that the common tendancy to see criticism (despite its etymological neutrality) as a primarily negative activity is unfair to the true critic, who is generally tolerant and forgiving in the long run. For there is much to be forgiven, even--or perhaps especially--in the very greatest writers. Such generosity is normally one of Ben Howard's most characteristic and most commendable features as a critic, although, as I suggested earlier, I often find that in his enthusiasm for the Irish writers after Yeats he turns a jaundiced and sometimes myopic eye toward the complex and remarkable achievement of their predecessor. Thus I am not convinced, and I doubt that most readers will be convinced by Howard's suggestion that Patrick Kavanagh is at last beginning to take his apparently righful place as Yeats's equal. Despite these reservations, I think The Pressed Melodeon a quite valuable, perhaps even an invaluable, study of recent Irish writing."