## Darkness Visible : Some Hidden Aspects of the Poetry of Padraic Fiacc

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Gilligan David. Darkness Visible : Some Hidden Aspects of the Poetry of Padraic Fiacc. In: Études irlandaises, n°12-2, 1987. pp. 95-112.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3406/irlan.1987.2777

www.persee.fr/doc/irlan_0183-973x_1987_num_12_2_2777

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DARKNESS VISIBLE : SOME HIDDEN ASPECTS OF THE POETRY OF PADRAIC FIACC

David GILLIGAN (University of Ulster)

The recent publication of Padraic Fiacc's Missa Terribilis (1) once more focuses attention on the work of the controversial Belfast poet and yet, as Gerald Dawe has pointed out in his review of the above collection (2) the work of this centrally important writer exists in a critical vacuum. This critical evasion and apparent hostility has rendered Fiacc a somewhat isolated figure whose work is viewed in an estranged and oblique manner. This new collection, Missa Terribilis is a selective representation of Fiacc's work of the Seventies which earned him a tempestuous reputation as a poet who consistently confronted the horrors of the Northern Ireland situation and its political implications. This was full frontal poetry tracing the effects of oppression upon the lives of ordinary people. The new reformulation of his work takes the form of a dark missal which guides us into, and allows a vicarious participation in, the individual and collective trauma of this disturbed period of Irish history.

However, as Gerald Dawe pointed out in the October 1980 review (3) of The Selected Padraic Fiacc (Blackstaff Press, 1980), the predominantly stark and anguished imagery of this « dark » phase in Fiacc's career tends to present a somewhat unbalanced view of his work and do less than justice to its imaginative range. The concentrated intensity of this late phase in Fiacc's verse is in some ways reminiscent of that period of locked intensity in the career of Austin Clarke when he wrote such poems as « TENEBRAE ». Clarke's poetic mood was more sullen and the oppression he wrote of was of a different order yet despite these variations they share a similar sensibility and intent, through the recovery of a Gaelic mode, which Fiacc had shown an interest in but subsequently abandoned. Fiacc's verse is a stylistic contrast to Clarke's traditional metre in its sparse, cubist and shockingly energised expression of that « hour that we must mourn » that Clarke touched upon in his poetry. Yet both poets are poets of

ETUDES IRLANDAISES, n° 12, Décembre 1987, 95-112.