Reviews/Articles
SHIFTING STONES
A Review by Fred Johnston
of The Western Writers' Centre
Website twwc.ie/
ANCESTOR WORSHIP. Michael S. Begnal. Salmon Poetry. ISBN 1 903392 54 3. Pbck. €12.00. 70pp.
Of the most recent brace of poets to emerge from Galway, Irish-American and Irish-language enthusiast, Michael S. Begnal is by far and away the most accomplished and the most interesting. During his time here he edited the enthusiastic magazine, The Burning Bush - where some have tried to shift heaven and earth (and every inch of newsprint in the region) to ‘confirm’ themselves as writers, Begnal has simply worked at his task. His work has appeared widely; a first collectioin appeared in 2003, ‘The Lakes of Coma,’ while some other work appearing in Galway at the same time and after was likely to induce one. He has written on the writer James Liddy and Liddy, naturally, returns the favour with a fulsome jacket blurb. He credits the Galway Advertiser’s Markings page, once edited by this writer and cancelled because it was too, eh, racy for local cultural consumption. Like most young American poets, he has pilgrimaged to Prague. Seven poems as Gaeilge appear here, if you don’t count the as Bearla ‘Burned Hut,’ which echoes the Irish-language An Teach Dóite, which in English is the name (’The Burned House’) for Maam Cross, outside Galway; one has to praise the remaking of language in such a word as ‘gorted,’ created into English from the Irish ‘gort,’ a field, or even ‘gorta,’ famine (to my mind there is a connection linguistically between the two words) in the line of his first poem, ‘Expatriation’: “. . .like the oblivion of Boston,/cast from your gorted land . . .” Begnal is no bauble-eyed romantic seeking some preposterous ancestral ‘truth’ in Erin the Green, though he is ardently nationalistic, or was, an echo of which can perhaps be heard in his ‘The Conquest of Gaul’ or in ‘Black, White and Green,’ and his translation, ‘To The Gaelic People’; these poems travel, to Mexico, Paris, and elsewhere, seeking to put down roots like some mediaeval Irish wandering mendicant “. . . suffering the slings of myself,/ my vast torpidity/and inevitable disgust/at the exclusion practiced (sic)/by myself/and others. . . .” (’Water Cress’) Note to Salmon proof-reader: this is not the US. ‘Practice’ is a noun, not a verb; the verb-form is ‘practise.’ One’s hat is off to Salmon and Begnal for publishing his Irish language poems sans traductions into English, as so many Irish language poets seem to have a need to do - and by so doing, merely point up the dependence of Irish upon English. Irish poetry could not survive, one would think to read them, without the English language. Begnal seems to offer the poem and leave the interpretive work up to the reader bare-facedly, which is fine. With the occasional shortness of breath, these poems are wonderful, experimental, courageous, in-your-face, melancholy, lyrical, all by turns. The collection in full is a voyage of personal and imaginative discovery - circumnavigating identities. The production of the book is equally gorgeous with the ‘manuscript’ for cover by Siobhán Hutson. More will be heard from Begnal, there can be little doubt of that. Meanwhile Galway’s scribes will continue, some of them at any rate, to scratch and scrape at the remaining stony grey acres of imaginative creativity. Excellent. Salmon Poetry at her best.
- Fred Johnston
Review by Tom Deignan in Irish America Magazine
Formerly the editor of the Galway literary magazine The Burning Bush, Michael S. Begnal is an accomplished poet, whose new collection Ancestor Worship has just been published. Though American-born, Begnal mingles the Irish and English languages in his work, which reflects on ancient history as well as pop culture. Take, for example, this sample from the title poem, which recalls Frank O’Hara: “It’s like when Lennon laid / his New York album on you, / and appeared in pictures / in his new image– / Revolutionary, / sudden Irishman, / Manhattanite.” Begnal’s poems are filled with similar humor and the joys and anxieties of living in the shadow of those who came before us.
PIF MAGAZINE
Review by Liam Mac Sheoinín
In his previous exemplary collection, The Lakes of Coma, Michael S. Begnal adroitly reflected on the Michael S. Begnal Cosmos. No less fleshy and turbulent than the first master of American free verse — I mean, the author of Leaves of Grass, the redoubtable Walt Whitman — Begnal continues, collection after collection, to display a Whitmanian genius for litotes. Modern poetry is about understatement. It is about uniting opposites. Perhaps poetry was transformed into a statement of eternal, simple truth by a young Dane enumerating esseric considerations to a severed consciousness. Hamlet argues for continuing his existence when all evidence contradicts his argument. Whitman is a Hamlet healed by words, words, words. Whitman’s verse is a series of addresses to the ghosts of his past. Like Hamlet and Whitman, Begnal argues with phantoms.
Begnal’s central argument seems to be with the craft he loves but also hates. The “Agenbite of Inwit” all deconstructionists must feel post Joyce, post Derrida. To his credit, this young poet seems to have an awareness of the futility of a poet’s enterprise. He actually admitted in The Lakes of Coma, his brilliant first collection, to being “vulgarized by language.” And although I stated in my Abiko Annual #23 review of The Lakes of Coma that Begnal “delights in being a poet,” as expected of a Whitmanian, his verse is polygonal: a series of complex propositions. Mercury, the Dime, Begnal’s long poem published by Six Gallery Press in 2005, is an elegy on the ephemeral claim a race has on a topography. It is a gentle howl, full of lament and acute observation. In Mercury, the Dime, actually written during the early 90s, Begnal brilliantly declares, “It was a Native American that dreamed Route 66.”
Begnal’s latest collection, Ancestor Worship, is as remarkable for its moody details. In “Beautiful People,” “Dead bird blown down the road / as light as its feathers” is a dazzling, fitting inchoate for a poem that ends with the provocative line “the knife dripping with juice.” Like Ginsberg, Begnal realizes a poem must provoke.
The title poem, “Ancestor Worship,” is refulgent with race memory, the entelechy of the Eliotian proposal of melding memory and desire. Paradoxically, “Ancestor Worship,” located at the near equator of the shining sphere of Begnal’s collection, becomes a distant journey into the cavern of the past without ever leaving the present — and possibly with a foot in the future. “Not like the bones of parents / carried out in procession / from their dark vaginal tombs / among the rocks, / mummified skin stretched / and tanned in mockery of death.” The journey ends with a burst of confidence: “ancestor worship / is the only religion / truly compatible / with the fact /of evolution.” This is a foot projected in the future.
The great poet James Liddy, in his blurb of Ancestor Worship, declares Begnal’s latest collection “a journey or pilgrimage.” Liddy maintains Begnal takes us to a place where “no one has been quite there before, along the genealogy or amid the furniture.” I am in total agreement.
Freddy Johnston, in his review published on the Western Writers Centre site, delights in Begnal’s “remaking of language.” Johnston, a very gifted poet and writer, cited Begnal’s use of the phrase “gorted land” as a prime example of the poet’s ability to shift from English to Irish. Johnston explains “gort” is the Irish word for field and “gorta” the Irish for famine. This sonorous echo is Begnal’s wink to the polysemantic brilliance of Finnegans Wake.
Imagery, however, remains the predominate ingredient of Begnal’s collection. Mercilessly eidetic-eidocentric, if you will — Begnal’s saccadic eye turns the page into cinematic experience. This is especially true of his beautiful lament, “Montparnasse Cemetery”:
think of all the bridges on the Seine,
that melancholy snake,
men and women have jumped off,
insignificants splash
in the green murk,
tempted
You can see the “insignificants” being swallowed by their own bile. Few poets are as adept at kinaesthetic image as Begnal. In fact, Ancestor Worship abounds with kinaesthetic magic: “Glass of the window / swims as you look / toward the Both Loiscthe bridge.”
As a Joycean, in particular a devotee of Finnegans Wake, Begnal submits:
There’s no present
just a continual becoming
past
All time in time and all space in space is the underlying theme of Finnegans Wake. So it’s no coincidence that in Ancestor Worship, a subtle work of genius, that magus Begnal succeeds in achieving a temporal-spacial perversion akin to Joyce’s Wake. Thus Galway and environs morphs into the streets of Prague, the royal botanical garden of Madrid, and “In the jet light of dusk tide” back to ancient Gaul and to the glorious defeat of the dying king of every Celt, Vercingetorix.
After joyously knocking my sconce against the formidable, lisible, scriptible Ancestor Worship, I have arrived at the conclusion that if poetry has produced another Heaney during our time, his name is Michael S. Begnal.
A Review by Kevin Higgins for the GALWAY ADVERTISER
An Irish-American Poet in Galway
I FIRST met Pennsylvania-born Michael S Begnal 10 years ago at an open-mic poetry session at Apostasy Café on Dominick Street when readings often went on towards midnight.
Mike was a Sinn Féin supporter with a big interest in experimental poetry, especially the Beats; I was a recovering Trotskyist who had just discovered TS Eliot. They weren’t exactly idealistic times. However yesterday always seems less cynical than today.
Later we launched The Burning Bush magazine, harbouring illusions of overthrowing the ‘literary establishment’ (I have since realised that the literary establishment exists mostly in the minds of unpublished poets and old men on park benches). The hoped for revolution didn’t happen; our exact aims were rather vague!
Yet The Burning Bush created a space where people could disagree without descending into crankiness. Mike, in particular, used the magazine to open up Irish poetry by promoting linguistically radical poets such as Alan Jude Moore, Trevor Joyce, and Randolph Healy.
It is fashionable to complain about America, but the American influence on the Galway poetry scene — from Jessie Lendennie to the late Anne Kennedy to Mike Begnal to North Beach Poetry Nights — has been profoundly positive. Mike’s contribution, from the Apostasy days to his return to the US in 2004, was important, making the publication of Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry) a cause for celebration.
As the title suggests ‘Irishness’ is one of its big subjects. From Expatriation: “I too’m ‘American’ now,/sauntering the local lanes,/land of ghostly progenitors,/cold stone,/bitter defeat”. Begnal is not any old Irish-American; he’s acutely aware that he is addressing an issue about which the greenest clichés are forever being spoken. His interest in his Irish roots is altogether more profound than that of the typical elderly Bostonian in golfing trousers boarding a tour bus outside Jurys.
A number of the poems here are written in Irish. And in the title poem, Ancestor Worship, a distinctly separatist — almost supremacist — tone is struck at the end: “like LeRoi Jones’s move to Harlem,/broke with his white friends,/changed his name://ancestor worship/is the only religion/truly compatible/with the fact/of evolution”.
The three-page The Conquest of Gaul successfully combines the political and the erotic: “breasts still sway and shake and/bodies soak in camaraderie/the soaked flesh intensely perishable/lust lush will outlast the brick/of the industrial estate”.
The weaker moments in Begnal’s poetry are when concrete images give way to too many abstract concepts. He is at his best in View from a Galway Window: “the faint smell of sewage,/some girl ditches her dog/and a fat woman/heads for the beauty parlour,/open for Saturday business/this Bealtaine,/but all I see are/Mormon missionaries/sent severely from Utah.”
This is not an easy, crowd-pleasing, collection, but then it is not trying to be. It is though, often witty, often caustic, and for me evokes the recent Irish past in a starkly unsentimental way.
A Review by Gwilym Williams for
NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL
Man’s best friend may be his dog but in Michael S. Begnal’s case it’s his ancestor.
The Irish-American Mike Begnal, as his blogspot calls him, has been rummaging around in his ancestry in various places including naturally in Ireland. Half a dozen of the poems in this publication are in the old tongue. And intriguingly the book’s cover shows an ancient document listing the death of an abbot of Kells in the year 1128.
The place to start then would appear to be with the 14th poem in the book, the title poem, ANCESTOR WORSHIP. This one might provide an insight into what it’s all about, this book of 70 or so pages containing “some of the poems” published in publications such as Poetry Scotland, Poetry Wales, Poetry Cornwall, Poetry Ireland Review, Electric Acorn, The Blue Canary and many more; some 3 dozen publications in all.
ANCESTOR WORSHIP is the basic starting point for it is, whatever your point of view:
the only religion
truly compatible
with the fact
of evolution.
It’s a brutal acceptance of the then and now:
the faces look the same
in rain
Begnal asks, demands to know:
who burrows into your eye
and says, "Who're you?"
Other variations on the theme can be found in poems like IRISH CITIES. In his Derry hotel room Begnal is in a reflective mood. On the face of it a simple matter of nostalgic pondering:
like Waterbury, Connecticut,
where not I'm from
but my father
and all his fathers
since famine time
Note how Begnal suddenly slips in his justification there. The stay-at-home slouch must plainly starve or eat humble pie. Begnal’s ancestors are nothing if not adventurers. No further justification for upping sticks is required. But it comes anyway. And with a star and stripes flourish:
like wave-battered Brendans
and populated,
planted the system within
disseminated,
the Go Nation
I could now go to some poetic place like Prague with its 4 poems but I settle for Paris and MONTPARNASSE CEMETERY. Begnal invites me as his reader to:
think of all the bridges on the Seine
that melancholy snake,
men and women have jumped off,
insignificants splash
in the green murk,
tempted
and having considered this and other Parisian matters I’m eventually taken along to the cemetery to discover the final furious truth:
cemetery toilets smell
like fermenting forest piss,
and flies congregate in gangs,
waiting to eat your shit
It matters in the end not one jot that in the first line of the first poem in the book that:
blue sky envelopes Galway
for like the old abbot from Kells we’re all going to the same place as our departed relatives.
This is an intriguing collection to discover, unearth, and to contemplate. The poems can safely be read in any order and it's probably a good idea to do so. I tried jumping about at random from one to the other building and demolishing connections. It was great fun if fun is the right word. Like a favourite bone I suspect it’s something that can be constantly returned to and chewed on with familial contemplation. The only disappointment I felt was that Bagnall couldn’t see his way to translating those half dozen Irish poems of his:
agus Joyce bainte den tenner
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