Padraic Fiacc’s poetry – visceral, often troubling, lastingly powerful – offers us an unforgettable series of visions of Belfast, but has not to date received the attention it is due. Now, the link between the writer and the city is commemorated in an Ulster History Circle Blue Plaque at Falls Road Library, close to Fiacc’s birthplace, Elizabeth Street. It was unveiled earlier this week in a ceremony marking Fiacc’s contribution to Irish letters, and his enduring importance as a subversive voice that still echoes today.
It is fitting that this recognition should arrive now. Last year marked the centenary of Fiacc’s birth: born Patrick Joseph O’Connor (in his own words, “into the Civil War … when they were just making Northern Ireland”), the poet lived through extraordinary times. At the age of five he moved from Belfast to New York with his family, against the backdrop of the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression. (Later, Paul Muldoon produced two BBC documentaries about Fiacc’s time in the United States, Hell’s Kitchen and Atlantic Crossing.) He lived there through the second World War before coming back to Belfast, where he was witness to the Troubles: the conflict that would become a central preoccupation in his work, of which he remains one of our foremost chroniclers.
But it was in New York that he had begun to write, dabbling in fiction and playwrighting, and writing poetry under the tutelage of Padraic Colum, a leading figure in the Irish Revival (and the inspiration for his eventual pseudonym). Fiacc’s Old Poet depicts the two “arguing about El Greco and de Valera” on a walk around Central Park, Colum figured as a savant who had, in his turn, “strolled the streets of Dublin with James Joyce … With a voice could be Daniel Corkery / Said what Yeats said what the best said / ‘Dig in the garden of Ireland, write of your own.’” Fiacc took that advice, returning again and again, in his early work, to the imaginative horizon represented by his country of birth. His was an immigrant’s sensibility, and in his poetry, readers find both a longing for and suspicion of “home”.
On his return to Belfast in 1946, Fiacc found another mentor, one who would profoundly influence his thinking: the novelist, short story writer and teacher Michael McLaverty. Letters between the pair, archived in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, illustrate something of the strength of their bond: Fiacc writes to McLaverty that he “used to cry when I would read your books in college because my heart was home”. (Among other influences he discusses with McLaverty are Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Gogol, Rimbaud, and Verlaine, suggesting the breadth of his literary interests.)
RM Block
As Seamus Heaney would in Fosterage (“He discerned / The lineaments of patience everywhere / And fostered me and sent me out, with words / Imposing on my tongue like obols.”), Fiacc paid tribute to McLaverty with North Man, published in his first full-length collection, By the Black Stream: “Along the evening Lagan we / Walking the broken dream under the bent bough, / Stop to adhere to the birds, / Known and named, as if by Adam, by you, / Creating poetry without words / Building silence like a house.”
It was through McLaverty that Fiacc met Heaney, and he lived and worked alongside other leading lights in the city, among them his neighbour in the suburbs, Derek Mahon. Indeed, Mahon’s poem Glengormley, with its famous last line – “By / Necessity, if not choice, I live here too.” – was originally (aptly) dedicated to the other poet.
As the political situation in the North deteriorated throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Irish poets faced a mounting pressure to respond to the violence that was breaking out around them, searching for new forms adequate to their predicament, to redirect a phrase from Heaney’s eventual Nobel lecture. Fiacc’s strategy was to further develop the jagged, raw style that had always characterised his poetry, with its fusion of traditionalism and modernism.
As a child of civil war, his fascination with the poetry of violence had been apparent from the very beginnings of his career; in those letters to McLaverty, he outlined “the method” he would continue to use in his writing: “to expose the wound in man then to cauterise it without too abstract a style to neutralise or act as an anaesthesia in hope that the grief catharsis will act antidote to the poison”.
[ Poet of the Troubles – Oliver O’Hanlon on Padraic FiaccOpens in new window ]
The results were poems that retain their ability to shock and disturb, poems like Glass Grass with its harrowing opening description of “The scorched-cloth smell of burnt flesh / From morning, a bomb in one of the parked cars, / The gulls, glinting like ice on asphalt in April, / The sun, in a smog of cheap petrol exhaust / Fumes”. Or Intimate Letter 1973: “Our Paris part of Belfast has / Decapitated lampposts now. Our meeting / Place, the Book Shop, is a gaping / Black hole of charred timber.”
“My fellow poets call my poems ‘cryptic, crude, dis / -tasteful, brutal, savage, bitter …’,” Fiacc wrote, and it is true that his poetry (and work as editor of the controversial 1974 anthology The Wearing of the Black: An Anthology of Contemporary Ulster Poetry) attracted virulent criticism from his fellow poets and critics alike, perceived as too challenging, too “hysterical” (an accusation that was levelled often), essentially, altogether too much.
[ Photographs of Padraic Fiacc, the poet of the TroublesOpens in new window ]
But the poetry attracted its champions too, notably the late Gerald Dawe and Aodán Mac Póilin, who in the 1990s published a selection of his work, Ruined Pages, and made great strides in introducing his work to a wider audience. By the time of Fiacc’s death, in Belfast, in January 2019, he had become something of a cult figure.
President Michael D Higgins noted that the poet’s “portrayal of the Troubles was stark and revealed an honesty like no other … Padraic Fiacc leaves a legacy of particular intensity.” This legacy is now made visible in the place where Fiacc’s journey began, on the Falls Road, but his influence extends much further still.
