This week I decided to pick a poem from the top 100 Irish poems list. And I picked number 54 by the excellent Paul Muldoon.
The title immediately caught my eye as, typically, Irish poets use Irish-themed names for their poem titles. Such as Mise Éire or Cill Chais.
So when I saw the title “Incantata” I thought to myself, ‘that’s not Irish!’ and indeed it is not. It is Italian, and the word means “enchanted” or “spellbound.” But I do prefer the sound of the Italian word. The poem “Incantata” itself is unique and beautiful. While this is a very long poem that has even been turned into a play, it is worth reading.
The poem is written in memory of Mary Farl Powers, the printmaker and his former partner, who died in 1992. Who is Paul Muldoon? Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet. He has published over thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize.
I did say it is a long poem, and Muldoon even performed this as a play in 2019. To be precise, it was the actor Stanley Townsend who performed it, in a production that opened at the Galway International Arts Festival in 2018 and later toured to Dublin and New York. It is certainly worth the read, and you will find my notes on it below.nbsp;
INCANTATA
by Paul Muldoon
In memory of Mary Farl Powers
I thought of you tonight, a leanbh, lying there in your long barrow
“Incantata” is Paul Muldoon’s elegy for Mary Farl Powers, the Minnesota-born printmaker who made her life in Dublin and was his partner for a time. She died of cancer in 1992, aged just 43. The poem was published in The Annals of Chile (Faber, 1994), the book that won Muldoon the T. S. Eliot Prize.
It is a big poem, 360 lines in forty-five eight-line stanzas, and it moves between grief and real fun. Muldoon remembers their years together through her art, the humble potato that runs right through the poem, and jokes about Beckett’s characters, Irish words, old songs and Dublin life. Underneath the wordplay is a hard question: her belief that fate governs everything, and his wish that some cure or charm could have saved her.
The second half turns into a great rolling list of memories, and the poem closes on a single tender image of two artists’ ink-stained hands. It was later staged as a one-man show by the actor Stanley Townsend, directed by Sam Yates, at the Galway International Arts Festival in 2018.
You will find the full poem in The Annals of Chile (Faber) and in Paul Muldoon’s Poems 1968-1998 (Faber).