Aesthetic Language In Henry Miller's Padraic Fiacc

In his study of Rimbaud, Henry Miller wrote that ‘when the poet lives his hell, it is no longer possible for the common man to escape it’.1 Miller’s paradoxical implication is that, with modern culture’s marginalization of poetry, the predicament of the individual poet, however singular, becomes the predicament of us all. This insight can inform our reading of the work of Belfast poet Padraic Fiacc, whose literary career spans almost sixty years and who has been an enduring, if often overlooked, presence in twentieth century Irish letters. His most productive period came in the 1970s during which he gained some notoriety as a ‘poet of the Troubles’, his work becoming at that time increasingly concerned with the Northern Ireland conflict. Fiacc’s

In what follows, I wish to suggest that for Fiacc – as, indeed, for others – there is something disturbingly yet irreducibly violent about the work of poetry itself.

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In an autobiographical sketch of his childhood in New York’s

Hell’s Kitchen, Fiacc observes that ‘as a boy, I had Rimbaud’s capacity to transform, say, the Reservoir in Central Park into the raging Atlantic’.2 His work, like Rimbaud’s, grows out of this intensity of vision. ‘Leaving the Monastery’ is one in a series of early pieces dealing with Fiacc’s seminary life in New York and his decision, at the age of twenty-one, to leave it: ‘Goodbye giant pine./Black branch give way/And each copper nut/Of star in the cloud.//I trek back down/

Black blind blood/To the mill town’.3 The images of the ‘giant pine’,the ‘copper nut’, and ‘the mill town’ belong undeniably to a single consciousness but they also possess a life of their own, an autonomy that ruptures the speaker’s search for a continuous or self-contained thought. The opening valedictory sentiment cannot survive the repeated ‘black’ by which the poem seems almost to insist upon

Violence poses itself as a challenge to the poetic enterprise: language falters in the face of material force. But this faltering reveals poetry’s access to language’s hidden side, a side which bathes in the very inarticulacy that would overwhelm it, and it is this revelation that allows poetry to engage violence as a problem for poetry and not just a political or social problem. Eavan Boland’s

‘Child of Our Time’ contemplates how the ‘rhymes’ and ‘rhythms’ of language are sundered by a dead child’s cry. The cries of the dead, their plangent and unreasoning ‘discord’, provokes from the poet a search for ‘a new language’, made out of the fragments of