IRISH POET Patrick Kavanagh famously said, “Any poet worth his salt is a theologian.”
In The Five Quintets, a poetic tour de force by Micheal O’Siadhail, Kavanagh’s quip is flavorfully borne out. Quintets offers a sustained reflection on Western modernity (and its yet unnamed aftermath) in the vein of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s sustained reflection on medieval Europe (and its aftermath, the Renaissance).
O’Siadhail (pronounced O’Sheel) inspects 400 years of Anglo-Atlantic culture—artistic creativity, economics, politics, science, and “the search for meaning”—with the skillful hand of a citizen-poet, refracted through an Irish Catholic soul. Dublin born and educated, now poet in residence at Union Theological Seminary in New York, O’Siadhail embodies the vatic tradition of the Hibernian Gael—poet, prophet, priest, and, at times, jester.
His blind guide for the modern era is Madame Jazz—who encompasses klezmer from the Jewish shtetls and céilí music from famine Ireland as well. Jazz is the consummation of all that is truly human, the best of our polyphonic harmonies, a wild, joyful freedom born of shared suffering. Her chilling counterpoint, who ends the age of monarchs, is Madame Guillotine, whose shadow reaches forward into our War on Terror.
With these as guides, O’Siadhail noses through the personal and public lives of modern-era influencers: in the arts, Cervantes to Brian Friel; in economics, Adam Smith to Kathryn Tanner; in politics, Louis XIV to Nelson Mandela; in science, from centering the sun to gene editing; and in religion and philosophy, from Luther and Wesley to Hannah Arendt and Jean Vanier. All conducted in conscientious poetic forms and meter, including haiku and sonnet, iambic pentameter and terza rima.
At first O’Siadhail’s exploration in European classicism seems out of tune with the present need to decenter a Eurocentric ideal. He cross-examines the personalities and intellectual suppositions that shape the white, Christian, capitalist, patriarchal distortions that remain in place today—though mercifully met with great dissent. The reader must determine whether the nods to women, people of color, and empires in China, Japan, Persia, and southern Africa reflect only the secondary roles of the time or perpetuate that subordination.
WHY ALL THIS poetic digging through history? “No one agrees on what to call our current era,” writes O’Siadhail. But all agree that “some kind of change in our mood and attitude has occurred. Perhaps the hallmark is radical questioning of overarching certainties. The upside of this is a respect for what Jonathan Sacks calls ‘the dignity of difference.’ The downside is the danger of excessive irony and meaninglessness.”
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets shipwrecked us on this downside, a circular cage, when he closes with: “A people without history / Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments.” O’Siadhail offers a fifth canto where heaven and wholeness are attained and Madame Jazz reigns supreme. But the poet hesitates at heaven’s gate: “What business have I here / among the saints?” A glimpse of his wife’s smile in mid-morning light gives him courage to “dare / the company of saints, whose days of grace / across all time invisibly repair / whatever peccadilloes wound our pride / and seal the cracks in brittle earthenware.” She and Mother Mary introduce him to the “shining faces at the feast,” who “like sacred lanterns [are] glowing from inside.” Through saints, the poet learns to dance, be-bop, sway, “a daily choreography of praise.”
With penitential gaze, the long Lent of modernity is reviewed, which includes the “will to power” by those beyond morality as well as the death of God. And though not certain and not in every case, an ecstatic wholeness is achieved that relies utterly on forgiveness, love, humility, and grace.
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
