The Great Fires

"Yes, that’s true and I don’t think he’s very well known over here. Again, I came across him by sheer accident. I was in Boston teaching and a very good friend of mine slipped this book under my door when he was leaving. The book was The Great Fires and it set me alight because I had been trying to be too intellectual in my poetry and too probing. This guy is passionate in the extreme, his poetry is sheer, contained passion. So much so that he doesn’t normally divide poems into stanzas of any kind. They just begin and go strongly from start to finish without any divisions and this form in itself I found interesting. He goes to the heart of the matter very very quickly and The Great Fires were basically the passions in his heart. Yes and no. He was born and brought up in Pittsburg and The Great Fires were the fires from the factories round about. But these he does apply to his own spirit, even some of the titles: ‘The White Heart of God’, ‘Between Aging and Old’, ‘Thinking About Ecstasy’. These are not just passing lyrics; they’re deeply examining the world. Refusing Heaven is the title of another book of his, so again we are back to the Hopkins thing of absolutely relishing the physical universe around him – though the opposite of Hopkins in that Hopkins was certainly pushing heaven and the rest. As well as that, Gilbert travelled a lot in the East, Japan and Europe and his imagery is quite rich and varied. As well as this passion, excitement and almost Promethean urgency in his work, there is a soft centre of love. He lived with a woman called Michiko and he wrote some absolutely delightful lyrics dedicated to her. Like R S Thomas, who wrote a few marriage poems that strike an immediate note of intimacy, while letting go of this urge to sort out the universe, and just say: but in the meantime I have loved and how wonderful that all is. Gilbert is still alive. He’s a very insightful and honest man. That is beautiful. This is the passion which I admire. That leads me to Afterlife by Pádraig J Daly. I must admit, he’s a very close friend and he’s a priest and a poet like Hopkins. He’s a very busy man running a parish here in Dublin. We have laboured in the poetry vineyard together for years and years, and our poetry is kind of close. He’s published a lot of collections down the years, but this one, Afterlife , is his newest one and I would classify it as a spiritual classic. It is, in our time, a phenomenon of optimism and belief. There are no easy answers – he has gone through questioning periods of despair and despondency for obvious reasons, especially in Ireland, a country that is riddled with scandals, pain and suffering. But this collection has poem after poem that is grounded in friends and family and the world around him. The optimism, the beauty and simplicity of the language create an absolutely magnificent world-view at the moment and excite me immensely. So I’m jealous of him."