Mahon, who died in 2020, presents some initial difficulties for the American reader, for anyone, that is, to whom the names Rathlin Island or Roscoff mean as little as they did to me. If Mahon drops the name of Somhairle Buidh (as he spells it) into a poem (as he does), he's not going to gloss it for the uninitiated. But the poems repay the trouble. Several of the best (and most accessible) of them are responses to paintings by Pieter de Hooch (in the title poem), Paolo Uccello, and Edvard Munch. The last is represented by a scene of several girls standing on a bridge, which could be any of a number of canvases the artist created on the same theme, perhaps the one below.
Audible trout,I don't know if this poetic form has a name, but the rhyme scheme is ABCCBA and the lines, which are centered on the page as I have reproduced them, ascend and then decrease in length. The first image seems a bit arbitrary; was it chosen because "midges" rhymed with "bridge"? Mahon was apparently dissatisfied with the line; in a later edition they are "Notional midges..." which almost brings to mind Marianne Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." (He also tinkered a bit with the punctuation.) "World-wondering" rather than "world-wandering" is apparently no error.
Bound to be midges. Beds,
Lamplight and crisp linen, wait
In the house there for the sedate
Limbs and averted heads
Of the girls out
Late on the bridge.
The dusty road that slopes
Past is perhaps the high road south,
A symbol of world-wondering youth,
Of adolescent hopes
And privileges;
But stops to find
The girls content to gaze
At the unplumbed, reflective lake,
Their plangent conversational quack
Expressive of calm days
And peace of mind.
The scene of serenity quickly becomes troubled, and the most striking stanzas, I think, are those that follow:That last line, of course, alludes to Munch's most famous painting, of which, again, there are several versions, and which also takes place on a bridge. Later versions of the poem, I'm told, stop there, but in the chapbook version there are four devastating final stanzas that link the scene with broader concerns:Grave daughters
Of time, you lightly toss
Your hair as the long shadows grow
And night begins to fall. Although
Your laughter calls across
The dark waters,
A ghastly sun
Watches in pale dismay.
Oh, you may laugh, being as you are
Fair sisters of the evening star,
But wait; if not today,
A day will dawn
When the bad dreams
You scarcely know will scatter
The punctual increment of your lives.
The road resumes, and where it curves,
A mile from where you chatter,
Somebody screams.The girls are dead,
The house and pond have gone.
Steel bridge and concrete highway gleam
And sing in the arctic dark; the scream
We started at is grown
The serenade
Of an insane
And monstrous age. We live
These days as on a different planet,
One without trout or midges on it,
Under the arc-lights of
A mineral heaven;
And we have come,
Despite ourselves, to no
True notion of our proper work,
But wander in the dazzling dark
Amid the drifting snow
Dreaming of some
Lost evening when
Our grandmothers, if grand-
Mothers we had, stood at the edge
Of womanhood on a country bridge
And gazed at a still pond
And knew no pain.
