Reading Bernard O’Donoghue’s Farmers Cross in 2012, it was the poem ‘Vocation’ that caught my eye. The speaker considers a farmer, sowing next year’s crops:

‘Each cold October morning he went out / into the Gate Field and walked up and down, / like the horse-drawn seed drill quartering every inch’. O’Donoghue captures fruitless effort in a bleak echo of Mark’s gospel’s parable of the sower. In Mark, something happens to the seed, even if it’s negative. O’Donoghue’s seed simply disappears – despite the methodical, back-breaking ‘quartering every inch’. The imagery is cold and bleak, and the poem ends with the subject ‘staring for inspiration / at the golden, unresponsive tabernacle’.

In contrast, the title of O’Donoghue’s latest collection, The Anchorage, offers us a firm base, a source of support, a refuge from the waves and the wind. Thinking back to ‘Vocation’, and O’Donoghue’s agricultural childhood, we might re-imagine the roots of crops, flowers and trees as anchors of sorts: dependable fixed points in the maelstrom.

The dependability of perennials brings pain as well as pleasure. Even the title of the sonnet ‘Pruning in August’ points to something amiss: roses are best pruned in February or March, not August. The speaker starts by showing us how things should be done: ‘In China, a cherished gardening skill / is to prune the shrubs in such a way that / it’s imperceptible that they’ve been pruned / at all. But here […]’ We’re only a couple of syllables into the final line of the first quatrain and we’ve hit the volta. Don Paterson writes about the octave and sestet forming (an approximate) golden ratio, and perhaps the beauty of these proportions is the reason why O’Donoghue’s speaker takes the poetic equivalent of a chainsaw to the roses: ‘But here, before departing / at summer’s end, I trim off all the shoots / that might have flowered later in the year / for those who come here after us’. It’s a grotesque display of small-mindedness. Okay, it’s not quite as moronic as the mission to fell the Sycamore Gap tree, but it might be in the same ballpark. However, as the sonnet closes, the speaker’s motive is revealed: ‘we can’t bear to think / of their display before the next comers / as if they’d never been the heart of things for us’. At a stroke, vandalism becomes an act of heart-breaking self-laceration.

A later poem, ‘Walking the Land’, explores the sale a farm. The speaker, presumably a version of the teenaged O’Donoghue, ‘led potential buyers through the fields, / showing them the bounds and listening / to their evaluation of the soil’. To evaluate: to reckon up, to work out the ‘value’ (when ‘value’ is understood in monetary terms). The buyers aren’t looking with their eyes; they’re assessing its physical, chemical and biological properties. O’Donoghue sets this against a litany of names: ‘Below the pink spreading hawthorn in Murt’s Field / was the Guttery Gap into the Quarry Field / that led to Dominic’s Inch where we used to gather / frail mushrooms in the dawn along the river’. Soft pinks and frail mushrooms are at odds with the blind assessment that sees only the underlying soil.

The Anchorage sees little miracles of beauty everywhere. ‘At the Wimpy Bar on Cornmarket Street’ takes us to Oxford city centre and opens with: ‘He has nodded off, his big head drooping / towards his knees, the half-drunk half-bottle / of whiskey sloping from the pocket / of his withered sports coat.’ Presumably the subject is a homeless man, but the ‘drooping’ head and the ‘withered’ coat demand that we acknowledge the man’s beauty – or at least its memory. Thoughtlessness and self-interest operate here too as ‘a young man reached over with a wink’ to steal the whiskey, the wink presuming the speaker’s complicity. Half a half-bottle… a trifling theft, but the bottle’s humble size reframes it as the man’s worldly goods, as both nothing and everything. The poem’s leisurely multi-causal sentences span multiple lines, but the theft changes all that: ‘You stopped what you were saying, / sprang to your feet and shouted: / ‘Put it back. It’s his. Give it back to him.’’ We can stand up for beauty and dignity. The world does not have to be cruel and unfeeling.

A couple of poems along and we’re still in Oxford, watching a young woman on the bus, framed behind glass like a painting. The title ‘Madonna’ asks us to see something beatific. She is ‘illuminated / By the light from her mobile phone’ – a glow of sanctity. Like the homeless man’s, her face is ‘downturned’ – this connecting thread pointing to our shared humanity. Her chilled fingers exhibit a ‘bare bloom’. The farm of O’Donoghue’s childhood in Cullen, County Cork, may be a world away, but it has taught him to see that humanity occupies a position in nature and not one above it.

In The Anchorage, O’Donoghue views the world with a kindly, hopeful eye. Cruelty, selfishness, and stupidity are acknowledged, but these do little to dampen his joy and love for humanity. In a late poem, ‘Maker’ (i.m. Pat Joe Morley), O’Donoghue ends, ‘he worked / to leave the world better than he found it’ and the same is true of The Anchorage: it is honest, enriching work.

Buy The Anchorage from Faber

RELATED LINKS

Bernard O’Donoghue at The Poetry Archive

Review of Farmers Cross on Poor Rude Lines