Chris Arthur

Works
Words of the Grey Wind: Family and Epiphany in Ulster, foreword by J. W. Foster (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 2009), CONTENTS: Foreword by John Wilson Foster [extract]; Introduction: The Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things; Kingfishers; Ferrule; Meditation on the Pelvis of an Unknown Animal; Linen; A Tinchel Round My Father; Table Manners; Swan Song; Train Sounds; Witness; Miracles; Mistletoe; Room Empty; Waxwings.

CONTENTS. Foreword: The Willow is Green, the Flower is Red; (En)trance; Rosary; On Not Being Who You Think You Are; Bookmarks; Wisdom’s Garden; How’s the Form?; Thirty-six Views, None of Mount Fuji; Falling Memory; Broken Flags; Object Lesson on Qualia with No Mention of This Term; Essay on the Esse; Last Words.

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Commentary
J. W. Foster, Foreword to Words of the Grey Wind (2009): ‘[…] The movement of Arthur’s mind is one of exfoliation. His modus operandi, which after a few essays the reader begins with pleasure to anticipate, is a measured departure from a particular object, incident, word or memory, often commonplace but sometimes highly personal and sometimes intrinsically poetic- ferrule, table, mistletoe, swan’s wing, one afternoon’s occurrence - into its ramifying implications, symbolisms and meanings. An extended metaphor is often the required ignition. The pursuit of the subject is a “long foray”, to borrow an oxymoron from Seamus Heaney, and exemplifies not only the parsings, propositions and interrogations of analytic thought, but also its reservations, denials and reassertions, until, oddly, the essay’s stages of argument seem to exist simultaneously, even though points along the way have been decisively made and conclusions reached. The alertly cognitive becomes something akin to reverie without loss of alertness or cognition. He may have used the term ’nocturne’ for one of his titles, but “fugue” seems closer to the development of an Arthur essay. The net result is metaphysical: Arthur’s acute inquiry is accompanied all the while by an awareness that nothing, be it argument or the stuff of the world, comes to final rest. [/…/] Ireland, of course, has produced its quota of essayists, from Oliver Goldsmith through (among others) Thomas Davis, Robert Lynd, Thomas Kettle, Stephen Gwynn and Filson Young to Hubert Butler. But if Lynd can be regarded as the Irish exponent par excellence of the English essay, it’s clear that Arthur belongs to some other tradition, if he is not sui generis. His thought-processes are too unconfined, his subjects at once too spacious and narrowly focused, his procedure too conceptually chaste, and his intention too severely tasking, for the English essay. His writing has some of the curiosity of Ciaran Carson’s prose books, with their lodes of charming arcana, but does not have Carson’s almost metaphysical wit. One thinks instead of Octavio Paz or Gaston Bachelard, at times of a soberer and longer-winded Borges. But this is trawling the academic net, as Seamus Heaney once remarked of such critical activity. If an Irish affinity must be sought, then the poetry of Michael Longley, with its finely-spun lyrical procedures, moral presence and its almost Eastern sensibility, comes to mind. In any case, Arthur’s essays reveal a rarefied and rare, if not unique intelligence, and this selection from Blackstaff Press is a cause for congratulation and celebration.’ [End; online; accessed 02.06.2010.]

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Reference
The author’s website at www.chrisarthur.org contains poems and prose extracts as well as biographical information, details on his writing method and photographs of assorted materials.

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