Poems for Lent (22): ‘St Patrick’s Day with Neil,’ by Thomas McCarthy

The Cappoquin Thomas McCarthy recalls in his poetry is the Cappoquin I too loved in my childhood (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I remember how, as a child, Saint Patrick’s Day on 17 March came as a break in Lent. Not only was this my name-day, which always had a feeling of being a second birthday, but it was also a day when adults and children alike put aside their Lenten fasts, abstinences and discipline.

Many of my childhood memories come back to me when I read the poems of Thomas McCarthy. And so, this morning, in my choice of a Poem for Lent, I have selected ‘St Patrick’s Day with Neil,’ by Thomas McCarthy.

Dennis O’Driscoll regards Thomas McCarthy and Paul Muldoon as the most important Irish poets of this generation. Eavan Boland says he is the first poet born in the Republic of Ireland to write about it critically. Politics, family, love, history and memory are the main themes of his poetry.

Thomas McCarthy was born in Cappoquin, Co Waterford, in 1954. And the Cappoquin he recalls in his poetry is the small town I remember when I was on my grandmother’s farm at Moonwee, a miles outside in the 1950s and 1960s: the Glenshelane woodland walk; the boathouse – used for dances and plays as well as rowing; summer cricket; the railway station that closed in 1967; and the Desmond Cinema, which closed in 2005.

I grew up thinking of Cappoquin as a town of poets … a monument to Michael Cavanagh in The Square (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

I grew up thinking of Cappoquin as a town of poets. This was the birth place of Michael Cavanagh (1822-1900), whose Fenian activities, including an attack on the barracks (the site of Walsh’s Hotel) in Cappoquin in 1849, forced him to emigrate to America. The poet John Walsh was born in 1835 at Belleville Park, Cappoquin, where his father was a steward – later the house was home for many years to the writer Molly Keane. Bishop Frederick MacNeice, the father of the poet Louis MacNeice, began his clerical life as the Church of Ireland curate in Cappoquin.

From Saint Anne’s School in Cappoquin, Thomas McCarthy went on to University College Cork, where he was part of a resurgence of literary activity inspired by John Montague. His contemporaries there included Theo Dorgan, the late Sean Dunne, Greg Delanty, Maurice Riordan and Bill Wall.

He began to publish poems while he was still an undergraduate and won awards at an early age, including the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1977 when he was just 23. Since then, eight collections of his poetry have been published by Anvil Press: The First Convention, The Sorrow Garden, The Non-Aligned Storyteller, Seven Winters in Paris, The Lost Province, Mr Dineen’s Careful Parade (which includes today’s poem), The Last Geraldine Officer and Merchant Prince. He has also written a prose memoir, Gardens of Remembrance, and two novels, Without Power and Asya and Christine, as well as editing The Cork Review and Poetry Ireland Review.

He is married with two children and has spent most of his working life as a librarian in Cork City, with occasional teaching sabbaticals in the US, including a year at Manchester College, Minnesota, which is recalled in today’s poem.

Saint Patrick preaching at Tara to King Laoghaire and his chiefs on Easter Day, 433AD … a panel on the Comerford pulpit from Carlow Cathedral

St Patrick’s Day with Neil, by Thomas McCarthy

We start this day in an embarrassment of March,
St Patrick’s Day. My wide-awake displeasure
is not of interest to you. After a year
in the US you think Bill Clinton is Taoiseach.
You still hope for the yellow truck from Schwans.
What is your nation? It’s still unclear.
Are you from Cork or the Minnesota Twins?
Don’t decide, not on this day of green beer

and things gone haywire for the umpteenth time.
You lie in our bed for comfort and praise,
the fresh weave of a blanket on your delicate face.
St Patrick’s Day in bed with the radio on.
Their public façade, their cupla focail. Your turtle-
head clears the eiderdown. You wait for the storm
of rain that always comes; then leave the place
of refuge abruptly. We’re the rejected Church

and watch you leap across the shaggy room.
St Patrick’s Day begins in kilts of heavy rain.
You were first to hear the pluralist hailstorm
and the noise of life beyond the eiderdown.
And there you speed, hero of daylight,
head forward into the day’s Fontenoy:
the battle is yours, brilliant, irredentist boy.
No panel on the radio could get this right –

how one small boy in his native country
(Prince William at Eton, Sheridan Lowell in Mass.)
can define completely his parents’ place.
I rise and follow you to better see
what you make of the drenched and native earth:
only to find you before me at the kitchen door
laughing with the daft warmth of a Celt,
your plastic beaker held aloft in the downpour.

This day you carry with an air of confidence.
I know it’s because you’ve something hoarded,
a cup full of hailstones in a freezer,
salted away like a trust fund offshore.
I watch you, bare-headed in a teeshirt,
holding the blue beaker to a bountiful sky.
The grey hail of St Patrick’s Day
bounces like nuts of wisdom on your head.

The freezer, then, has a kind of inner knowledge
that you have rights over. I can understand
from my own boyhood the strength of a hoard.
I hid coins and copies of the Hotspur
from enemies of boys. My hoard was concealed.
The loose brick in Nanna’s wall had a Swiss number.
But I never had the audacity to hide, like you,
the mysteries of weather, a hoard of hail.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

The setting sun bursts through on Saint Patrick’s Eve

The setting sun on Saint Patrick’s Eve ... seen from a mound beside Saint Patrick’s Church of Ireland parish church in Donabate this evening (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

Patrick Comerford

The announcement that Archbishop Rowan Williams is retiring at the end of the year and moving from Canterbury to Cambridge to become Master of Magdalene College in January hardly came as a surprise this morning ... rumours of a move like this had been flying around in academic circles in Cambridge when I was there earlier last month, and Magdalene was one of three colleges I heard named in conversations over the dinner table and in combination rooms.

This is a return to Cambridge, for Rowan Williams was an undergraduate at Christ’s College, where he studied theology, and he returned to Cambridge in the 1980s as a lecturer and Dean of Clare College

I first meet Dr Williams at the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury in 1998, when he was Bishop of Monmouth and I was part of the media team, including reporting for the Church of Ireland Gazette.

The news came late in the morning. It had been raining for most of the morning in Dublin, but by lunchtime, two of us decided to head north to Laytown and Bettystown on the “Gold Coast” of Co Meath for a walk on the beaches.

The grey clouds that had brought the rain earlier in the day were still cloaking the coast and stretched out east on the horizon and north too, so that it was only possible to catch the outline of the Mountains of Mourne on the coast of Down.

A window box in the courtyard at Relish in Bettystown, Co Meath, at lunchtime today (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

We postponed our walk and opted instead for lunch in Relish, overlooking the beach in Bettystown. We were given a table near one of the two bay windows, and enjoyed a leisurely hour or more over our meal.

An ugly spot on the beach in Bettystown this afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

Although the low grey clouds were still hanging in the skies when we had finished, we went for a walk on the long, sandy stretches. The tide was out, and there were few people on the beach at Bettystown this afternoon. Close to the Neptune, an apparent burst pipe was gurgling its content out onto the beach, uncontrolled and looking like a horrid little volcano.

Grey skies but beautiful sands on the beach in Bettystown this afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

But the stretch of rippled sand was unspoilt otherwise, and despite the lack of sunshine or warmth we enjoyed our stroll.

Thousands of daffodils stretching over the horizon in a field in Gormanston, Co Meath, this afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

In Gormanston, we stopped awhile to admire a filed full of thousands and thousands of spring daffodils, stretching over the brow of a hill and on to the horizon.

Sunset in Portrane this evening (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

We then visited Portrane briefly, and just as we are about to drive back to south Dublin, the setting sun started to break through the clouds and bathe the Portrane and Donabate peninsula in glorious shades and hues of red, orange, pink and purple.

Standing on a small mound in the churchyard of Saint Patrick’s Church of Ireland churchyard in Donabate, I snatched a closing glimpse of the setting sun. It was an appropriate setting to see the setting sun on the eve of Saint Patrick’s Day, and a splendid close to the day at the end of a very demanding and hard-working week.