Bernard O’Donoghue was born in Ireland, but moved to England when he was 16; he was educated first at a Manchester grammar, then at Oxford where he is still a fellow. As such he is often classified as that recognisable character the Irish émigré, along with Beckett, Joyce, and now to some extent Paul Muldoon. As with these writers, the Irish rural world of his youth is returned to constantly. The collection’s title refers to an area in County Cork where O’Donoghue was born, characters recur, such as Jer Mac ‘the greatest breaker of horses’, and local details are added with a clear but unobtrusive touch. However, there are unnamed forces behind many of the poems, which means they run no risk of being simply pastoral: “We never discovered / exactly what gift it was that brought in its train / our father clutching his chest before he fell.”

As befits the émigré writer travel is a theme that is touched on frequently, first with the opening poem in which O’Donoghue conjectures a utopian world where travellers are honoured: “you had to be from somewhere else / to get a drink.” before reverting sadly to reality after the volta of this sonnet-like poem: “They will pull / the glass out of your hand and order you / to go back to the place you came from”. In ‘Emigration’ O’Donoghue celebrates displacement, declaring “Unhappy the man that keeps to his home place”, but significantly the poem finishes with the traveller “settling down by his hearth once again.” This brings to mind the oral roots of poetry, particularly the Icelandic sagas.  This tradition is alluded to elsewhere, most explicitly in ‘Rubbish-Theory’, which wonders if it’s time to start recycling the folk wisdom of “Dinny’s sayings”, such as “’first in a wood, last in a bog.’”, and the poem ‘History’ which recalls in its delightfully convoluted ending the way first-hand accounts can be passed on, and possibly embellished:

never forget

that you once read something by someone

who said they had known when they were young

someone who said their father told them

they had been to Abraham Lincoln’s funeral.

These links to the past that O’Donoghue explores so eloquently are expanded in translations from Piers Ploughman, The Wanderer, and Purgatorio, all three of which are important works of journey and quest that help to cement the thematic unity of the book. Religion too is a quiet but constant feature of the poems, both as metaphor and as subject, so that even driving licence penalty points can be compared to Purgatory. It is this thematic unity which allows Farmers Cross to be read as a single poetic statement, rather than simply a miscellaneous collection, and gives it a resonance that far outweighs its 55 pages of mostly short poems. This is a profound but also extremely approachable collection that more than justifies O’Donoghue’s recent move to Faber.

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