Pearse Hutchinson

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Commentary
Geoffrey Grigson reviewing John Montague, ed., Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974), in Irish Times (9 March 1974), damns the selection but praises Hutchinson’s “Málaga”, espec. lines about the scent of jasmine: ‘The senses, after all. I felt as much in that poem, enveloped by it, as I felt myself enveloped by some of the stricter tropical poems of Leconte de Lisle such as Le Bernica or Le Merichy.’

Augustine Martin, review of Peter Fallon & Derek Mahon, eds., The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (Penguin 1990), in Poetry Ireland (Summer 1990), remarking on ‘the lyric caress’ of the poem “Malaga”.

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Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Collected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press), calls it ‘a wonderful book’ and remarks, ‘the unheroic presentation of himself belongs with a strongly conveyed sense of the realities of poverty, need, desire, which compress our lives.’ Further, ‘in the end, the reader’s experience of watching how he copes, with the long disasters and the moments of vision, is an intensely pleasurable one, a sharing in his avid encouter with realities, an enlightenment.’ (The Irish Times, 23 March, Weekend, p.11.)

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Fred Johnston, reviewing of Pearse Hutchinson, Collected Poems, in Books Ireland (May 2002), writes, ‘Collected Poems is [...] a wonderful, fulsome insight, apart form anything else, into the journeyman’s career’. Cites headings: Tongue Without Hands (1963); Watching the Morning Grow (1972); The Frost is All Over (1975); Climbing the Light (1985); Barnsley Main Seam (1995) and New Poems - 1995-2001. Notes a poem ded. to Justin O’Mahoney. ‘Hutchinson’s breadth of vision, poetical and political - and his compasion, his wincing at the world’s indulgence of injustices big and small - is startling, given the narrowness of vision of too many younger poets here. He came up [...] when the jaggedness of the Spanish Civil War was still in the air and the pubs of Dublin were jagged too with the civil war poets, Kavanagh for one.’ (pp.126-27.)

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Quotations
“Two foreigners in a century / perhaps, break through to a nation’s core: / to them, honour; let grateful others take / some personal boons, and claim no more; / respect and love dispense / at once with blindness and omniscience”; also, “In this way, it remains a dowdy secret / That only his earth-sized, meticulous capacity / For admiration keeps him free of idols; / And the granite glory of his unrelenting eye / Could not have been reared and lit by anything but love.” (Quoted in Richard O’Brien, review of Pearse Hutchinson, Collected Poems, Oldcastle: Gallery Press, in Times Literary Supplement, 3 May 2002, p.24.)

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Ar teanga: “To kill a language is to kill a people”: ‘Is Carleton where the tenderness must hide? / Or would they have the Gaelic words, like insects, / [Carwal] up the legs of horses, and each bite / Or startle, be proclaimed for heritage? / Are those who rule us, like their eager voters, / Ghosts yearning for flesh? ghosts are cruel, / and ghosts of suicide more cruel still. / To kill a language is to kill one’s self.’ (The Frost is All Over, 1975).

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Aosdána: ‘I was fifty-four when I was invited to become a member and frankly I was at the end of my tether. I might have carried on but I would have been in the gutter because I would have been evicted or I would have gone mad or killed myself or both.’ (Interview, in Poetry Ireland Review, No. 52, ed. Liam Ó Muirthile; cited in John Boland, Bookman’, Irish Times, 8 March 1997.)

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References
James Simmons, ed., Ten Irish Poets (Cheadle: Carcanet 1974), selects ‘Connemara’; ‘Lovers’; ‘Bright after Dark’; ‘A Rose and a Book for Sant Jordi’; ‘Fleadh Cheoil’; ‘A Man’; ‘The Nuns at the Medical Lecture’. See also Frank Ormby, ed., Poets from Northern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff 1979; rev. & updated 1990).

Peter Fallon & Seán Golden, eds., Soft Day: A Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Writing (Notre Dame/Wolfhound 1980), ‘Fleadh Cheoil’; ‘Gaeltacht’; ‘Geneva’; from ‘All th Old Gems’.

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Peter Fallon & Derek Mahon, eds., The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (Penguin 1990), selects ‘Malaga’ [p.16 in Selected Poems, 1982) [supra].

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3: selects from Faoistín Bhacach [913]; Tongue Without Hands; The Frost is All Over [1334-46]; BIOG 1431-32.

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Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1995), selects “Málaga” [146]; “Gaeltacht” [147]; “Sometimes Feel” [148].

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Notes
Kith & Kin: Pearse Hutchinson is the son of Harry Hutchinson, a Scottish printer whose father had left Dublin (Seville Place) for work, and who was himself Sinn Féin treasurer in Glasgow, being interned in Frognoch in 1919-21; his mother, Cathleen Sara, dg. of Donegal emigrants to Scotland, was born in Cowcaddens, Glasgow, and was a friend of Constance Markievicz; in response to a letter from Cathleen (so they could bring up their son in ‘holy Catholic Ireland’), Eamon de Valera found work in Dublin for Harry as clerk in Labour Exchange, and later he held a post in Stationary Office. Hutchinson lives at 179, Rathar Rd., Dublin 6.

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Nano Reid: Pearse Hutchinson called Nano Reid ‘for my money the best Irish painter, mo cheol thú, a Nano’]. (See Brian O’Doherty, The Irish Imagination 1959-1971, 1971 [Rosc Exhib. Cat.])

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