Last
October my wife Kathy and I spent a
splendid Saturday at one of our
favorite spots, the Irish American Heritage
Center in Chicago. The occasion was
the annual Irish Book, Arts, Music
Festival (iBAM). We enjoyed some fine music, attended a couple
of fascinating lectures, browsed exhibits by authors, artists, and artisans, enjoyed
some Jameson’s and Harp at the Fifth Province Pub, and endured some Irish cuisine that was about as good as you would expect. We picked up a couple of author autographed books and a CD
or two. But the bonus for the day
the Center’s library sale—surplus books
for just one dollar each including a like-new hardback copy of Gerhard Herm’s The Celts and a slender gem, Unlacing: Ten Irish American
Women Poets edited by Patricia
Monaghan from Fireweed Press, Fairbanks, Alaska in 1987.
The
title was a wink-and-nod to an old
term for Irish Americans of a certain level of respectability—lace curtain
Irish. Some of the poets had
published collections, others had work culled from literary magazines. None
were particularly well known when the book was published and are more obscure today. They included both immigrants and second or
third generations assimilated but
yearning to connect with lost roots
or struggling against the conventions and expectations of the new world.
They were young, old, and in-between; radical, pro-Irish Republicans or surprisingly apolitical, dutiful wives and sexually
liberated rebels; urban as a late
bus or caught up in nature and the new ecology
movement; faithful Catholics, lapsed one and those seeking to connect
with an ancient pagan tradition.
Monaghan
revealed scant information about any
of them in her brief introduction preferring
for the poets to reveal themselves
in their verses.
The
collection reflects the turbulent times
in which it was assembled—The Troubles back
in the old country, American urban unrest, rising environmentalism, post-Pill and pre-AIDS sexual liberation, and above all feminism.
In
her introduction Monaghan also took on how Irish women writers had been marginalized.
When the
Irish-American literary tradition is charted, it looks like a pub in the old
country. Finley Peter Dunne is there,
and James Farrell with him. Eugene O’Neill
drops in as does F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara. A couple of the new lads—William Kennedy,
John Gregory Dunne—make a showing. It’s
a place for the boys to get away from the world of women, and where a woman who
shows her head outside a “snug” is no lady.
On special occasions
Mary McCarthy is let in for a round, or Kay Boyle, or Mary Gordon. But the image of the Irish-American writer as
a hard-drinking, priest and mother-ridden puer
deterna doesn’t leave much room for them or other of our sex. Irish-American poets find no acknowledged
tradition here from which to draw.
Now
let’s turn to a few of her choice picks.
 |
Margaret Blanchard.
|
Margaret Blanchard has published
six novels, two books of poetry, and
three books on intuition. She is now
a Professor Emerita of Graduate Studies
living in Montpelier, Vermont.
The Convent,
1900: Eileen’s Choice
I’m sorry, so
sorry, dear
lord, I cannot
follow
your call, as
the sheep
and the
shepherd. More like the fox
we tried once to
tame,
I long to rush
into the woods
without even a
glance
back at the
rigid
bars, pin-hole
vistas,
constraining
rules which trap
me here.
Fled is the
simple
faith which led
me along this
narrow way,
went across the
plains,
where one got
lost forever
if she strayed.
Please don’t
abandon
me now as I
forsake
you holiest
path. The woods
are full if
threats:
excommunication if
they
forbid me to
leave; the shame of
my family; the
cage of
spinsterhood or
the restraints
of marriage, the
pit
of heathenism.
Like an unblazed
trail, the path out
is crooked,
steep. One slip,
far from this
comfortable
prison, and I
could fall
to even worse:
the mire
of lost souls.
Holy Mary, don’t
let them cast me
out
of our mother
the Church.
Please don’t let
this be a
mistake
I’ll live the
rest
Of my days
regretting.
Soon I must
choose.
I don’t care it’s
never
been done before;
it’s the first
and only time
for me too.
Once we’ve
embraced the future
as she leaves
her touch on us.
As the century
turns, for
better or
worse, I begin
to move.
—Margaret Blanchard
 |
Tess Gallagher in the 1970's.
|
Tess
Gallagher was
born into a logging family in 1943
and stayed in that area most of her life.
She is poet, essayist, short story writer who studied with Theodore Roethke at the University
of Washington. Her honors include a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts award, and
the Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award. This poem is from her collection Under
the Stars published by Graywolf
Press in 1978.
Conversation
with a Fireman from Brooklyn
He offers,
between planes,
to buy me a
drink. I’ve never talked
to a fireman
before, not on from Brooklyn
anyway. Okay.
Fine I say. Somehow
the subject is
bound to come up, women
firefighters,
and since I’m
a woman and he’s
a fireman, between
the two of us,
we know something
about the
subject. Already
he’s telling me
he doesn’t mind
women
firefighters, but what
they look like
after fighting a fire, well
they lose all
respect. He’s sorry, but
he looks at
them,
covered with
cinders of someone’s
lost hope, and
he feels disgust, they
are sweaty and
stinking, just like
him, of course,
but not the woman
he wants, you
get me? And come to that—
isn’t it too
bad, to be despised
for what you do
to prove yourself
among men
who want to love
you, to love you,
love you.
—Tess Gallagher
 |
Patricia Monaghan
|
Finally
one from Monaghan herself who was born in 1946 on Long Island into an extended
family was a poet, a writer, a spiritual
activist, and an influential figure
in the contemporary women’s spirituality
movement. She wrote over 20 books on a range of topics including Goddess
spirituality, earth spirituality,
Celtic mythology, the landscape of Ireland, and techniques of meditation. In 1979, she
published the first encyclopedia of female divinities, a book which has
remained steadily in print since
then and was republished in 2009 in
a two volume set as The
Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines.
She died in 2012 at age 56.
In County Mayo
The turf settles
as we again assign
blame for the
unfathomable, cousins
in a house perishing
with loss: sons
poisoned or
dead, the border at hand,
a war at the
table, wounded mother,
father poisoned
with clarity. My left
leg scalds from
the blaze, my right
is numb from a
doorway breeze.
It is one
a.m. Hot and damp in a crowded
bedroom, Ita coughs
and calls from
the other bed.
Over here, secret forces
evade the grip
of security police;
there is a plot
to overthrow
the government
and counter attempts
to unmask
sixteen conspirators.
These dreams are
as familiar as cousins
and jumprope
rhymes, and strange
as an old land
finally visited.
It was too easy
when I said
there were
things I might die for
but I did not
know if I could kill.
The dreams, the
dreams. This split
island and its
wars, grandfather
songs, glory-o, glory-o and
cousin’s stories
late at night.
—Patricia Monaghan
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