This is written almost fourteen years
after you died, Peter, and yet it seems apt —
your ‘obituary’ for William Trevor
was published over six years
after your own death, and even concludes
with ‘survived by’ — that editorial
interpolation that is journalistic
détournement, an ornamental
inlay in the valley of death
or just an augmenting — a post-modern reality:
facts are facts. That review reminds
me of so much personal stuff
as I walk past a Church of Ireland outpost,
and I hear of what happened to ‘its fields’,
those plots of stolen land, and I double
up against Ascendancy (as you would yourself)
and the plays of English ‘de-haut-en-bas’,
speaking painfully of the Brexit irony
that galloped over the years as the form
of cultural sundering. These verbal
plays that surround images of loss:
even recently, walking past St Martin’s
I promised to look out for you, and in the gallery
I visited our stations, those angel-paintings
we were going to write to add to our
'Saint Michael Triumphs over the Devil' — a Spanish
presence. An exquisite revelation.
How long we sat and watched
the paint continue to dry, hoping it wouldn’t
flake away, that it would outlast eternity.
A poem barely serves as authenticity,
as a competent mode of restoration.
The loss of my father is continuing
to confound me, Peter — how to match
our differences, our arranging of a timeline
incorporating death, inheritance, and sites
of life and burial. He thought himself
Irish, though it was mid-nineteenth-century
escapee stuff, and the chopping of trees
with roots deeply set was an acerbic familiarity.
You and I often talked of ‘the colonial’, and what you’d
escaped or deserted to go back to the source of the problem.
And though I left, too, I couldn’t stay away.
We bantered over the term ‘expatriate’
because it was painful in obvious
and hidden ways. Discussions about cats,
gardens, ruins, and the art of Italy,
encounters with artists and travellers,
the music we didn’t hear together but knew.
An elegy doesn’t need to be written
straight after a death... and maybe one’s
own death catches up before the obituary
we write is published. It might be something
like re-arranging modernism into structurally
sound lines, or discussing the context
of metaphors in poems about London and friendship.
John Kinsella is a poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. He is a Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.