Reviewed by SEAN McMAHON
Conor Cruise O’Brien once defined Irishness as ‘not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.’
This was written in 1959 when the author of these excellent poems was still a medical student! Neither could have realised just how much more Irish mauling lay in store in the coming times.
Vincent Cavanagh [pictured above on right signing a copy of his book for poet Sam Burnside] began his career as a GP in 1964, a handful of years before the Troubles began but lived in Derry through the sorrowful decades that followed.
He seems on this showing comparatively unmauled (if undoubtedly Irish) or he, as a man dedicated to what he would never have referred to as the Aesculapian art, has found a means of recovery. I suspect that these poems are an important part of the cure.
The Troubles must necessarily figure in what is an informal autobiography. The challenging title (also the theme of one of the poems, ‘The Message’) is a refusal to let the ‘situation’ poison our daily lives. A Bogside granny sends her grandson to the shop for cigarettes with many warnings of the need for care but dismisses the hovering helicopter as not worth his consideration.
Of the fifty-nine poems in this elegant volume that fall neatly into five roughly equal sections, only those of the first group subtitled ‘And All the Women Wept’ are related to the ‘bother’ and the resulting criminality. In ‘Kathleen’ a Creggan pantomime’s Never-Never land glitter ends with the chilling couplet:
He was moved to the Crumlin Road today
And the coalhouse is full of explosives.
‘The Ballad of the Garage Man’ warns:
‘You should have given them the cash
And played it by the rules.’
Cavanagh could have filled the whole book with poems like these, closely observed and chillingly served, but there is for him a world elsewhere of beauty and fragile peace as in ‘Inch Lake in November’ and “Hoar Frost’.
As I have suggested Pay No Heed…is a kind of unself-conscious autobiography revealing a life enthralled with beauty, with humour, with the dangerous edge of things, with slow time.
It is fitting that the essence of the man should be encapsulated in a volume illustrated by his wife and son. As a working classicist, Cavanagh will know that the Roman poet Horace claimed that he had in his poetry created ‘a monument more lasting than bronze’. Our poet is too modest to make such a claim but his work has the capacity, I believe, to outlive us all.
(Pay No Heed to the Helicopter by Vincent Cavanagh is published by Guildhall Press, priced £7.95)
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