Padraig Daly
This Glowing Place: New & Selected Poems by Pádraig J. Daly
(Scotus Press, €15.00 / £12.50)
John F. Deane
This exceptional book has been long awaited, and thoroughly rewards the reader. The cover image, of the Liffey and the city in the glimmering twilight, reflects the ecology of the poet’s life and imagination, the inner urban parish where he serves.
A Waterford man from Dungarvan, now an Augustinian friar who works in the Liberties of Dublin, Pádraig J. Daly offers perhaps the most sustained attempt at serious religious poetry in Ireland.
And the mystery of the Incarnation, it’s heartening results and promises as well as its sense of painful absence in our real lives, is at the core of this poet’s seeking. And that seeking is done through a bright and truth-telling poetry, through the insights that a poem will throw up, even to the poet who has written it.
Embedded in the work is a willed and constant sense of loyalty to the faith this poet/priest was born into”
The early poems offer an easy nostalgia for that innocent land we knew in our youth, when Roman Catholic Ireland moved like a ‘Titanic’ through untroubled waters. Daly’s work, however, moves quickly into the Augustinian concept that all our living, and all creation, is praise of God.
In this sense he has offered his public a view of the Earth which has always been ecologically aware and anticipated the encyclical of Pope Francis,Laudato Si’. Embedded in the work is a willed and constant sense of loyalty to the faith this poet/priest was born into; phrases from the work tell the tale: “in dogged loyalty” “clinging to the myth”. Then there is the title of some of the collections: “The Last Dreamers”, “Afterlife”, “Glimpsing More”.
This may suggest that the dream of pilgrimage, of that voyage to a place apart, to a place within, has stalled: and that what is now needed is a willed loyalty to the early dream. Poems in the mid-life of the work, present the one deep and moving constancy that remains: the absent, or hiding, God, is still being addressed, with sadness and joy, a steady will to love, anger, or a transcendent hope.
Those of us who pray, “I believe, help my unbelief”, will find consolation in the company of this poetry. Daly explores the task of the priest, aware of its difficulties in our time: “We belong out by the side of things;” and even more difficult in a deeply secular age, the work and prayer that keep the priest alive in hope, even in moments of great doubt: “though we / Point to Him and shout, / No one has any wish to hear.”
Collection
The poems in this large and generous collection, are unique in offering, from the inside, the story of a journey in faith, from bright beginnings, through an acute awareness of the sufferings and wars of humankind, through periods of darkness, to new, almost mystical, trust and certainty.
This journey, charted by accessible, integrate, and beautifully wrought poems, constitutes a great treasure in this Selection of poems. This, from a poem called “Trust”:
I am grateful for my life:
The kindness I feel, giving,
The kindness I feel, getting;
Sometimes strongly too and sometimes weakly,
I believe the life after life, the hosting of the dead,
A now, eternal, of rapture.
Daly’s work as a priest has brought him an awareness of the details of his parishioners’ hopes and problems, and the poems exhibit a sympathy and empathy that has made him “a people’s priest”. This from “Love Letter”:
Having no power to lift you from sorrow
I put my hope in Him who madly loves each living thing,
Who watches fretfully above our billion beds.
There is also a great source of pleasure to be found in the precise description of the joys of creation, grounding these faith-filled poems that brim with visioned details of the flora and fauna of both city and countryside, with a fine awareness of the darkness and suffering in the world.
The poetry is finely and gracefully formed, carries within it a richly memorable language and metaphorical magic”
The new poems here bring about a most wonderful development in this priest/poet’s faith and service, an almost serene and mystical hope in God in the midst of his own and our world’s darkness. He writes how “some trivial trouble / Sweeps me back to You / And a certainty of Your nearness” (‘Christos’) and “Sitting in merciful shade, / I find You, / Unconfined by word or formulae, /Bursting through the glint and shadow /Of our dappled world.”
In Daly’s New and Selected Poems, the reader, believer or doubter, will find all the challenges and the joys of contemporary living presented in a human and unvarnished story of a life lived in the service of others.
The poetry is finely and gracefully formed, carries within it a richly memorable language and metaphorical magic; the book is beautifully produced, the span of the work magnificent.
John F. Deane is the founder of Poetry Ireland; his latest publication is Selected and New Poems from Carcanet.co.uk in 2023