*****
Derek Coyle published Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee Carlow in 2019. It was shortlisted for the Shine Strong 2020 poetry award for best first collection. Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster is due in 2023. He has published poems in The High Window, The Irish Times, Irish Pages, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Salzburg Review and The Texas Literary Review. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s in Ireland.
******
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890 – 1960) was a Russian and Soviet poet, novelist, composer, and literary translator. Composed in 1917, Pasternak’s first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language. He was also the author of Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel that takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. Doctor Zhivago was rejected for publication in the USSR, but the manuscript was smuggled to Italy and was first published there in 1957. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize. In 1989, his son Yevgeny finally accepted the award on his father’s behalf. Doctor Zhivago has been part of the main Russian school curriculum since 2003.
*****
Derek Coyle: Two Poems inspired by Boris Pasternak
SYMPHONY FROM A CLOUD (OVER BALLYMURPHY)
(for Arkady Shatalov)
(i)
I like to think of you
as still here, Boris.
I read you first
around the age you started
to write poetry. I can see you
still sitting up in that tree
near Molodi, your parents’ dacha,
an old birch tree, survivor
of storms, half-uprooted but still growing.
You are reading Tyutchev,
writing poetry every day for the first time,
and it is there you have your vision
of gondolas, oars, Venice in the mist.
The mist moves around the port, your eyes
dreaming and groping through that mist.
It is here that you hear the chord
played by no fingertips. I could hear it
in your poems as I travelled
from Kill to Johnstown, Naas to Maynooth.
Sitting here in Carlow, decades later, I can hear it still.
(ii)
And does it all come down to this
in the end? I see it in a flash
of lightening, that storm cloud
half the size of Mt Leinster
will thunder down as rain in Fenagh.
It will send trembling children under their beds
to remember their grandmother’s prayers.
You witnessed the dead Tolstoy,
your father called in to sketch his cold face.
He lay in the corner of a room,
a wrinkled old man, a minor character
in War and Peace, a humble servant
in Anna Karenina, the train station
of Astapovi turning over a brisk trade.
In the restaurant the waiters
complain of aching feet. Beer flows.
They run out of beef steaks.
The World’s Press have turned out
for the death of the Russian giant.
This wrinkled old man. The crosspiece
of the window throws a crucifix
across the room – an effect of the setting sun.
Tolstoy’s shell is to be taken back
to Yasnaya Polyana. It is fitting,
you think, Tolstoy should die
as a wayside pilgrim. He died by trains,
those very arteries his heroes
and heroines continue to travel,
sipping their rum-flavoured tea,
reading poetry, reading Shakespeare,
oblivious to the fact
the great eyes that dreamed them up
have now closed forever. You help me
see this, Boris, as I see you
shuttling along the viaduct in Borris,
smiling at green fields, hawthorn,
buttercup, like images from My Sister-Life.
When you see those coach doors scattered
along the back yards of Borris, you smile
with recognition at the name, this image,
your heart pouring out the window, like sunlight.
(iii)
I think I’ve always been
half-in-love with you, so handsome,
even as an old man in Peredelkino,
your arm across your breast, in that photograph
I have, your belted wool coat,
your woolly cap. You look like you are tramping
through freezing snow, the bracing air,
you who enjoyed privileges an artist
might dream of, your father a painter,
your mother a pianist. I pick you up
from the train and bring you to Borris House.
It feels like the right spot,
something historic, if privileged,
something grand with an almost perfect view.
The greenness of the valley sees you think
of Georgia in summer, outside Tiflis,
but a silence falls on you
when we enter the living room.
Something in how the evening light
furrows the room sees you back
in the half-burned, savagely looted
flat of the Phillips – you tutored their son –
the evening a pale pink bloom on the pages
of Plaintain. Akhmatova, an old dear friend.
You remember sweeping blizzards along the Neva,
this friend from the east, an angel moving on water.
‘You have no idea how experience blackened our souls.
Tsvetayeva. Mandelshtam. Mayakovsky. Blok. Dearest Anna.’
******
CARLOW POEM #223
Out on the end of a wave
of another quantum event
I’m walking with Boris Pasternak
we’ve been picking mushrooms
yellow and brown
like nothing I’ve seen in an Irish forest
I’m enjoying this worldly splendour
these rations of September
this delicious Sunday mushrooms and Pasternak
a deer has just broken cover
after her lunch of sapling
I can see an acorn swing
on the tail end of a twig
the scent of St John’s wort and camomile
strangely I think of my mother
waiting at the bus-stop near Quinnsworth
in Naas sometime in the nineteen eighties
a blue cloth rucksack stuffed full
deodorant and toothpaste
tins of peas and beans Weetabix chicken sliced pans
the weekly rations for the family
they’ll be carried home on her back
packed away mutely on shelves
I turn to tell Pasternak
he tells me it’s a sermon come to me
here on this Sunday in the woods
worthy of St Peter’s Basilica a papal mass
I listen but part my lips
to say ‘James Connolly is still right
‘a woman’s worth is that of a plough or a spade’’
*****
The High Window 