Chris, I thank you for weighing in. Adam, I thank you for posting Paterson's poems. My, he is fine. I'm not ready to compare Mikey's poem for Ruairie with any poem by Don. Ask me in two hundred years.

I write poems for my nephews, because a son of my own is out of the question.

Chris, you’re defence of “old son” is ingenious, but leaves me just as convinced that the poem is a cold contrivance. It also leaves unaddressed the fact that the locution grates (at best) on British ears. Gregory may have a different view, but so far I have yet to find a fellow-countryman of mine who doesn’t feel that.

More significantly, you’re adding to the hagiographic tendency – do you really believe that MD possessed the power of prophecy? Maybe since the hyberboles do come thick and fast. Something quite unusual is happening to create this flood of hero-worship. For obvious reasons it didn’t occur when Ted Hughes or Philip Larkin died (though it’s pleasing to see Hughes being steadily rehabilitated as a man, not just as a major poet), or even after the death of George Mackay Brown, a more endearingly quirky character. All three were difficult, strange men, and didn’t excite the same personal devotion that Donaghy, to his credit, aroused in people. But it’s premature to put him on the same level as those three, and yet it seems impossible to make the case that he ever did anything wrong.

And as for the question of what three lines can do to undermine a poem – well, it seems to me that a single misplaced word can do that. Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” risks collapse by his ill-judged appeal to the dead of Treblinka and Pompeii, which diminishes an otherwise magnificent poem. In Donaghy’s case, it’s not just that in one poem he swerves away from seriousness to call in question his commitment to the foregoing narrative. This tendency to undercut, to wrong-foot the reader, is essential to his art, a signature feature. You either like it or you don’t, but it is hugely significant. In this he is thoroughly Post-modern, but I’m an unreconstructed Modernist, and I find the PoMo thing distasteful on the whole.

Maryann, the Paterson I don’t like is the one who places technique at the forefront, as if it mattered for its own sake. I don’t care for virtuosity per se, in literature or in music. It has to be servant, not master. Paterson recently ruffled a lot of feathers by announcing that as an editor, before he reads a submitted poem, he holds it at arm’s length and squints at it through half-closed eyes. He can tell by the mere shape whether it’s a good poem or not. Dear God! This has caused me difficulties in reading him ever since, not least where he indulges in a wacky form (or layout) for its own sake.

His couplets seem to trundle along like streetcars, and yes those irregularly-lined rhyming poems do have an Ogden Nash quality. Paul Muldoon can get away with them, but not Paterson.

He’s been doing a lot of translation lately, and his Rilke and Transtromer get a lot of praise, but I find them flat, and they take too many metrical and rhyming liberties for my taste. But I’m not well-enough versed in his work to go further than that.

I would just add that Donaghy's poems are not as difficult as some make them out to be. Rather, the poems themselves are something of a collective shibboleth. That is, some pronounce Donaghy better than others.

Nick

I shall pay closer attention to you, Adam, when you get a whole lot closer to writing as well as Paterson or Donaghy.

Whoa! That was a low blow!

I haven't read all the hero worship you mention; the only essay I've read is Tim's above, plus the occasional elegy or comment on the Sphere. & yes, I do think it at least plausible that he had a more intimate sense of his approaching death than we might easily credit. Not a full-blooded prophecy or a prediction to the hour, but a strong feeling that his time was limited, out of which that poem seems to have been written. I don't know, I never met the man, or heard him read, I'm just judging from the poem, which my knowledge of his early death renders the richer. Finally, you can make the case he made as many mistakes as you please, but those who disagree don't have to be persuaded, if we don't find the case persuasive.

That said, I think the best line quoted in this thread is Paterson's: See how the true gift never leaves the giver. I'm glad to be reminded of that.

Chris

Paterson's had a whack at Tranströmer? When? I was keen on Tr. a few years ago, and thought I'd dug up most of the English translations. He also did some Machado, didn't he?

This isn't premonitory. It is certainty. Michael knew he was not long for this world, and I knew it too. I clasped him to my chest and said goodbye.

Paterson doesn't really "translate". He uses (after XX) for a number of earlier poets (such as Machado) to indicate that their work has inspired his. At least that is the impression I have.

Every reasonable person knows his or her time is limited. It is a romantic illusion to ascribe premonition or presentiment, though it is encouraging for one's self-esteem to remember after the fact that one did indeed feel in his bones that X was going to die, and Y would be lost in a snowstorm and Z's house would burn down the very night it did.

But superstition thrives today just as it did several millennia ago. So much for homo sapiens sapiens.