^{Richard Gorman, Small Kitchen 1987 . Oil on board, 65 x 62.5 cm. Collection of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.} 

I had been wondering at the insistence of certain subjects: detailed memories of random places and happenings, gestures and voices, distinct as though they were there. A phrase heard only once, a glimpse through a doorway, that would never go away, always part of my daily thoughts. With these insistent memories it was not enough to leave them as recorded memories. There was a need to put them in intense words – words that would try to remake the memory and my response so as to make it possible always to re-experience the exact memory and the response.

Thomas Kinsella in an interview with Adrienne Leavy

Thomas Kinsella, who died recently, was speaking here of those poems about memory that appeared in his book ‘Notes from the Land of the Dead’ in 1973. I struggled with these poems when I read them first. They seemed like fragments of prose, with single, stark images, often without the adornment of metaphor or simile. ‘Hen Woman’ begins: ‘The noon heat in the yard/ smelled of stillness and coming thunder.’ The opening of ‘Ancestor’ reads: ‘I was going up to say something,/ and stopped.’ ‘Tear’ begins: ‘I was sent in to see her.’

They read like good opening sentences for a story or a chapter of a novel.

Despite the plainness and the lack of ornament, or maybe also because of them, these poems, with all their sour music, exude precision. And not merely precise memory, but precise emotion around memory. But more than that: something insistent, something that Kinsella has not merely summoned up, but hidden images that come back again and again as though, over years, buried in his mind, they had taken on some symbolic power.

It is important, however, not to make too much of that power. It was enough for the poet to feel the image and then write it, making sure that every word was true. It would not do just to distill the experience; it is important to write it as it was, like cutting words into stone.   

I wonder if Kinsella is right to emphasize the need ‘to make it possible always to re-experience the exact memory and the response.’ Surely the primary need is to communicate the experience, write it down so that the reader can get a sense of it, or, if the moment of reading is right, actually come to feel the experience too, live it, know it.

                            *

Unlike Kinsella, I did not know my grandparents. Three of my grandparents had died by the time I was born, my mother’s father dying at the age of forty-eight in 1936. I have never been in the house where he died, but I know it from outside. So if I said that the actual moment of his death, with my mother, aged fourteen alone in the room with him, is etched on my memory, that could not be true.   

Nonetheless, I have lived with this image as though I was close by when it happened. I know that my mother went downstairs with the news which spread soon to the busy street, and that people came, women mainly, and knelt down wherever they could and said the Rosary.

His death meant that my mother would have to leave school and that, in turn, meant she developed a reverence for books and learning, and a sort of raw engagement with poetry that followed her all her life. In the small kitchen, moving between the sink and the work-space she would say lines of poetry to herself out loud, one or two lines, often the same ones.

                       *

I am on a train that is leaving Paddington station. I am with a friend. We are going to Cheltenham. I notice that his laptop is connected to the internet. Once the train is moving, two lines of poetry come into mind as though from nowhere, lines I must not have heard for maybe fifty years, lines recited by that voice, my mother’s, in that kitchen in that house in Enniscorthy.   

I ask my friend if he could google them to see what they are:

That must be why the big things pass and the little things remain

Like the smell of the wattle at Lichtenberg [something] in the rain.

She said the words with a sort of sigh, like she said lines from Yeats or lines from Othello and maybe other lines that I have forgotten. In those years, the years when I remember her in the kitchen, herself and her friends and her sisters could talk naturally about what they thought ‘life’ was, and what it wasn’t. Golf was not ‘life’; bridge was not ‘life’. My mother would often begin: ‘When you have gone through life like I have..’ Or say about a priest or a Christian Brother: ‘They have no experience of life.’

These poems said something maybe about ‘life’, something true, but also something unfathomable, or she recited them because the words were beautiful and mysterious, or created a feeling when you said them, a strange emotion.

The lines were from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, we discovered from google. They were a refrain in his poem ‘Lichtenberg’, from a set of poems published in a volume called ‘Five Nations’ in 1903 about the lives of soldiers on duty. Lichtenberg is a town in South Africa. The narrator of the poem is an Australian soldier. The poems opens: ‘Smells are surer than sounds or sights/ To make your heart-strings crack’ and its first stanza ends:

That must be why the big things pass
    And the little things remain,
Like the smell of the wattle by Lichtenberg,
    Riding in, in the rain.

                          *

I was going to Cheltenham. It was a Saturday morning. I had the newspapers on my lap. And this poem, or lines from it, had come back out of the blue, or out of the maze of unforgotten things that carry strange emotion with them. My mother must have liked the lines for their sound as much as what they said about ‘life’.

It was all so far away: South Africa, the Australian soldier, Kipling. And then all close. Too present to be ghostly or haunting or anything like that. And not as though it was just yesterday. Not that at all. It was more that the sound of a voice in a kitchen had not ever left the memory, but during its time buried or in the shadows it had actually become richer and more powerful.

And all this on a train leaving London on a Saturday morning in the autumn of 2017.

Colm Tóibín (1 March 2022)