Poet Aidan Matthews Thomas McCarthy
Few poets have written with the intensity and seriousness of Aidan Mathews; and fewer still have sustained that intensity over a career of five collections, six books of prose and six plays.
This heroic, wide ranging and always engaged achievement belies the poet’s character which has seemed at all times evasive, ironic and otherworldly. His books come to us like trails left by a nocturnal visitor who vanishes in the daylight, a Southside poetic badger, one of ‘the Republic of Letters’ oldest pretenders.’ This badger-like creature thinks in this manner:
“In this, the ultimate asylum, all houses safe,
His emptiness escorts him through wide streets.
Now it is his turn, it is his hard-earned right
To wave to the women and children at the locked windows.”
Crosshead
Covid-19 set him wandering empty streets and the core of this book is a series of pandemic poems, thoughtful and marvellous. The pandemic intensifies his isolation as it intensified everything in all of us, but it also drives him into the ‘cloud’; that is the iCloud, the ether of our new technical universe.
Spotify, Google, Wikipedia, Snapchat, all bring both connection and anxiety, accompanying the poet in his family life as “I lay in a lithium pool of the Dead Sea”, only to leave him “open-mouthed at last, to leave me breathless,/ My worry-beads, my rosary, my jailer’s clutch of house-keys…”.
Death, funerals, weddings, love-making, childbirth, celebration and Communion, all come together in poem after poem in this dynamic, linguistically energetic book.
Like that great poet Paul Durcan, Mathews has always performed leaps and cartwheels of Thomistic thought, his mind racing before us, his genius both magnetic and compressed:
“Then the soft weather lifts,
tears like a Chekhov coquette:
All corsage and no corsetry.
This is it, then. The groundswell,
Lá Fhéile Bríde, greenery
Stealing her march on Britain…”
There is such power in those six lines, the quick associations and flawless line-breaks, the Irish bit, the soft weather as a national ally, and the compression of thought.
Uncanny details elaborately juxtaposed, it’s all part of the Mathews method”
Here is our evasive poet both vigilant and watchful, a poet who recalls, remembers, analyses and simultaneously lays flowers at many graves. Thus, the dead are remembered always beautifully, whether it’s a housekeeper clutching a pocket insurance book that will pay for her funeral, or the wise John Moriarty where “a sparrow sits on your shoe-lace, a bright by-passer;” or a great-uncle, a priest whose brass cross was made from beaten bullet cases from the Great War. Uncanny details elaborately juxtaposed, it’s all part of the Mathews method.
“The last time I stripped in front of a woman,/ She was a skin specialist”, he writes in the poem ‘In Praise of Older Men’ – an ironic and hilarious poem on remembered locations of love where it always seemed to be “the 23 psalm and the 23 chromosome”.
That juxtaposition of ‘psalm’ and ‘chromosome’ is pure Aidan Mathews. In the title poem ‘Pure Filth’ he reminds us that “Metaphysics took my mind off things/ Now I’m coming to my senses.”
The irony of those two words together, ‘pure’ and ‘filth,’ words that might be bawled by a censuring monsignor, create a drama that is very much an Irish Catholic drama.
Crosshead
Complex and urbane, Mathews is one of the best living poets of Catholic atmospheres, a rare enough beast within Anglophone poetry. A fine private education and very sophisticated upper-class Catholic formation in early childhood have enriched his imagination and his work immeasurably.
This atmosphere is a dramatic joy for him, it enriches everything he writes and it gives that shock of recognition to any educated Catholic reader.
Yet, it’s for the sheer joy of well written poetry, its drama and pleasure, that one should read Pure Filth. I am certain that this book will become one of the poetry collections of the decade.