LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

BERNARD O’DONOGHUE’s (b. 1945) vacillating sensibility is best defined by The Fool in the Graveyard. The little dumb boy whose father dies finds himself in the centre of attention at the burial:

Every eye         

Fixed on him! It was like being loved,

And he'd always wondered what that was like.

Bernard O’Donoghue’s poetry is mostly like this little boy, holding its breath, hoping to be loved. He empathizes with the least known moments of history, and one of them is the death of Ceausescu and Romanian communism:

We were terribly lucky to catch

The Ceaucescus' execution, being

By sheer chance that Christmas Day

In the only house for twenty miles

With satellite TV. We sat,                    

Cradling brandies, by the fire,

Watching those two small, cranky autocrats

Lying in snow against a blood-spattered wall,

Hardly able to believe our good fortune.

The picture wasn't all that clear,

But the reporter told us how

The cross woman's peasant origins

Came out at the last, shouting

At her executioners ‘I have been

A mother to you and this is how

You thank me for it’. We switched over

To join in with the carols

On the blockbuster Christmas special

On the other side, thanking

The stars that had saved us, with no

Effort on our part, from such tyranny. (Carolling)

The end of the poem, describing Christmas in a place ‘saved’ by geography from ‘such tyranny’, suggests painful guilt. The poet witnessed helplessly. Could he have changed anything if he had taken active part instead of just watching life like a show? These dreamy poems all watch rather than act, but, in absence of the incident – so familiar to Desperado poems – O’Donoghue’s lines are a breath of fresh lyricism.