Whisht
Lisa O’Neill
There was a time, while I was working at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, when we regularly hosted gigs. The cavernous room held about a hundred seats, generously spaced, nobody stood, and it was usually lighted with candles, so the atmosphere was a curious combination of the formal and intimate. One of the performances was by the singer-songwriter Lisa O’Neill. It was memorable for her charismatic personality and unique voice, both keenly expressive of her rural Cavan roots, and I was reminded of the authenticity and fierce independence of the Irish singer Margaret Barry, sometimes called ‘the Queen of the gypsies’. I’ve followed Lisa O’Neill’s path with interest since then, and it has led me to her new album, possibly her best so far, called ‘all of this is chance’. Her excellent last record, ‘Heard A Long Gone Song’, drew directly from the Irish folk tradition, but this one is more expansive and individual, characterised in ‘The Guardian’ as ‘by turns raw and wild, warm and melodic, grief-stricken and exuberant, driven always by the drama inherent in the song’. I’ve always associated Lisa O’Neill with a kind of vehement austerity, but ‘all of this is chance’ is different - it’s rich, abundant, occasionally awkward - and it has a rare visionary quality. For all those reasons, and because it binds together loosely related images and emotions rather than coherent narratives or ideas, it has something in common with Van Morrison’s classic ’Astral Weeks’.
As is always the case with Lisa O’Neill’s music, it is deeply Irish. The record opens with words from Patrick Kavanagh’s famous poem ‘The Great Hunger’, which quickly help to establish themes of desolation and, more importantly, the beauty of nature. Much of Kavanagh’s poetry has a lyrical streak that is sometimes overlooked because of the bitterness and disillusion of his mature years, but he was often able to look beyond the surface of everyday life, finding radiance in life around him and seeing the earth ‘crammed with heaven’. The son of a shoemaker who had a small farm in Co.Monaghan, not far from Cavan, Kavanagh’s vision had a pantheistic cast; not only was he able to see ‘the immortal in things mortal’, but he felt that nature itself recognised the immortal in him. In that light it is not surprising that he should have sent some of his early poems to George Russell, known as AE, a painter and writer with a mystical bent, a nationalist, editor of ‘The Irish Statesman’, and for a long time an employee of the Irish Agricultural Organisation. Russell at first rejected Kavanagh's work but subsequently published some of his verses, which prompted the young writer to walk to Dublin to meet him. With Russell’s help, Kavanagh found his way into the Irish literary world, where he was greeted as a real peasant poet. He soon came to dislike and resent this perception.
Kavanagh later lived in and wrote about the area near the Ballsbridge end of Dublin’s Grand Canal that became known in the 1950s as ‘Baggotonia’. Its substantial red-brick houses, now transformed into offices and expensive homes, were then usually divided into flats and were popular with writers, artists, and students, which gave the neighbourhood a slightly bohemian flavour. At its heart were three pubs, a bookmaker’s, and Parson’s bookshop on Baggot Street Bridge. When I worked at the National Gallery of Ireland in the 1970s, often in the watercolour room that housed Frederic William Burton’s ‘The Meeting on the Turret Stair’, now one of Ireland’s favourite pictures and the inspiration behind a song on Lisa O’Neill’s new album, I’d walk home along Merrion Square towards the Pepper Canister church and up the canal to Parson’s, where I turned left along Baggot Street. On Saturdays, out for groceries, I would call in to the bookshop to pick up a copy of the ‘Times Literary Supplement’ and have a quick chat with the kindly Miss King or Miss O’Flaherty, the two elderly ladies who ran the shop. They knew Kavanagh well. I was aware that Parson’s was favoured by many of Dublin’s writers, but I didn’t then realise that he used to turn up nearly every day to read ‘The Irish Times’, mainly for its racing coverage, sitting at the door on a three-legged stool and tossing pages onto the floor as he finished them.
For further exploration:
‘Old Note’, from Lisa O’Neill’s new album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQGUYgNhQa4
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/patrick-kavanagh
Image on index page: detail of cover of Lisa O’Neill’s ‘all of this is chance’
Patrick Kavanagh