But ultimately the wider world of the 1980s did not have space in its consciousness for Irish poets not embroiled in the Northern Ireland conflict. McCarthy hailed from the serene, sedate fields of Ireland’s southernmost province of Munster and his poetic discourse is primarily one of a serene and sedate sensibility. Extremes of verbal music-making or contortions of form are not the markings of a McCarthy poem. The subject matter varies from the intimacies of family tragedy to the inner workings of a political party, to biographical portraits of writers and others in verse, to rigorous examinations of history and the pathways by which it has led us all to the present.

There is a richness of language to McCarthy’s poetry but rather than stemming from experiment it emerges out of McCarthy’s own vigorous emotional and intellectual engagement with the world. The elegance and sensibleness of his language are organic and integral aspects of his mode of thought – a careful, quiet, contemplative thought flavoured with rich emotional involvement.

All of these qualities are not only evident on the page with McCarthy but also in conversation with him. A McCarthy poetry reading is a riveting experience.

Thomas McCarthy will be reading along with Hassan El Ouazzani (Morocco) at 8pm on Sunday 13 June 2010 in the main auditorium of the Rotterdam City Theatre, in an event about the relationship between poetry and prose.

Patrick Cotter is the editor of the Ireland domain of Poetry International Web.

In the Old Irish Sagas, in the Fenian cycle of tales, the boy Fionn eats the flesh of the Salmon of Knowledge as he turns the fish on a spit by the River Boyne. The salmon had eaten nuts that fell from the Tree of Knowledge into the rivers of Ireland. The salmon was owned by the Wizard but the boy burns the flesh of the fish and touches its burned flesh with his finger, accidentally becoming the first to taste the Salmon of Knowledge and therefore becoming the wisest man in Ireland. Later, Fionn, the boy, grows up to become a great warrior and a great hunter. One day his companions asked him (him being wise) what was the most beautiful sound in the world: the others thought it must be the sound of a stag hunt or of a maiden in the act of love. Fionn said ‘No, the most beautiful sound in the world is the music of what happens.’ And so it is with poetry. It is both an accident and a preparation, a thing made that is both fortuitous and well planned. It is both the Knowledge and the Fish. It is wisdom without flesh, it is the hunt without any killing. It is both the moment that passes unconsciously and the accrual of wisdom over time.

Like the boy Fionn who tastes the burned flesh of a salmon, the poet also tastes the flesh of things, innocent with life and full of hope for poetry. The making of a poem begins and ends in hope. It is the hope that time stands still, that something may come out of nothing. The poet is at the centre of this making, the poet is the flesh around which the ideas accrue. At the heart of creativity the poet is not ‘for something’ in the political sense – the language as it is made to stand upright in a poem is not a banner only, but a limb, a part of life. What a poet does with that life is entirely a ‘social’ decision, never a literary one.

Therefore, we ask the questions ‘What is poetry? What is prose?’ each time we unburden ourselves, each time we make signs in language. Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago asks this question repeatedly in his Christ-like love quest, the poet Gottfried Benn asks this question repeatedly as he journeys from cadavers and syphilitic patients into the late prose meditations on wisdom in old age. The French ask this question repeatedly as they tumble and cartwheel in prose poems across the disputed territories of European poetry, from Baudelaire to Jacques Reda. Language asks this question repeatedly, as ideas pour through it, as the colour of saying things (and the weight of feeling things) fills us with a personal urgency to be understood.

There is some part of poetry that seems to belong to prose. In a very early book of mine, The Sorrow Garden, a memory recaptured became a chunk of prose-poetry. Later, in Merchant Prince, the compelling and urgent information blossomed into an entire novella at the centre of the poetry collection. In my latest book, The Last Geraldine Officer, the prose-poetry is scattered in a patchwork of history, the history of an imagined Anglo-Irish poet, Colonel Gerald FitzGerald. The information is urgent between lyrics, it is fractured and threatened like any poetry at war. It is not that there is a technical difference here, a collapse of prosody, but history releases itself at a different pace. History demands a different poet, a poet beyond my capacity to create lyrics. Here, history swarms around the desk where I’m writing. This happens with every Irish poet. We are young boys at a riverbank, eating wise salmon.

Read more about Thomas McCarthy on www.poetry.nl and www.poetryinternational.org.