The Jailbird

I’ve this gut feeling that inside somewhere,
perched, so to speak, in the innermost wood
of my body or brain, on mute since childhood
a bird-creature lurks in its cramped lair
for when the wood’s consumed, as in a fire,
though also consumed as drinks are or food
(over months or could be years ingesting crude
chemicals, making the sly one ever slyer).
But then crackle’n’pop, it’s all gone for good.
And good riddance, since freed from its bonds
the avian now preens its wings and absconds
from the scene below (that’s me, in my last throes)
skyward like a lark saying fuck to the whole brood
and piping forth some blithe hymn as she goes.

Maurice Riordan was born in Lisgoold, County Cork in 1953. His work quickly asserted a distinctive voice and viewpoint, and challenged some English stereotypes about “Irish poetry”. It has won wide recognition since his first collection, A Word from the Loki, in 1995. His latest, fifth collection, Shoulder Tap is as full of verve and creative range as ever.

“Every so often I revise my position on the soul,” asserts the speaker in a lively meditative sequence, The Seven Songs of Myself. The Jailbird may be concerned with that same perplexing entity, the soul – or something not dissimilar. Caged in the ribs of a fierce and knotty Petrarchan sonnet, but theologically free-range, this “bird-creature” finally makes its getaway with a robust curse.

The octet presents the speaker’s half-consciousness of the bird-creature, imprisoned and “on mute” inside him “since childhood” – and awaiting release. Lines four and five abbreviate that last thought unexpectedly: the bird, we’re told, “lurks / for when the wood’s consumed”. To “lurk for” is a far more sinister formulation than “wait for”: lurking is not passive but suggests a creature tensed for the pounce. This is a jailbird, after all: it knows it must be alert to the dangers beyond the gates. A jailbird is often a persistent offender. Perhaps the bird has been freed before, but recaptured?

Lines five to eight, focused on consumption either by fire or “crude chemicals”, suggest body-dissolution. The fire may be in the crematorium where the body’s “wood” (and that of the coffin) is burned. But the ingestion of the chemicals (“over months or could be years”) might allude to the treatment of terminal illness.

The last clause of the eighth line is the most tricky to interpret. Being consumed has the effect of “making the sly one slyer” – which is understandable: but the emphasis on slyness is interesting and surprising. Is “the sly one” simply the bird-creature? We might also think of the fox in popular tradition, or Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, serpentine Old Nick himself, or even that supreme trickster Odysseus, making his long way home. And the very title of Riordan’s collection refers to a practical joke whose essence is slyness – the shoulder tap. However, the etymology of “sly” connects particularly keenly to that earlier idea of the bird-creature lurking for its moment: “Twelfth century: from Old Norse slægr, clever, literally: able to strike, from sla to slay.”

Dark, cartoonish humour lurks in the phrase “crackle’n’pop” at the start of the sestet, a reminder of a once much-advertised breakfast cereal (which purportedly snapped, crackled and popped when you added milk) and so connecting, with nice mischief, to the food-consumption motif of the octet. It hints at the body’s final moment with the light sound of a breakage occurring when there’s little left to break. The tone is insistently jocular: “that’s me, in my last throes”.

Now the bird has its moment. The jail-body is dying or disintegrating, while the bird, anointed by a new ironic formality of diction (“the avian now preens its wings and absconds”) ascends and sings like a lark “saying fuck to the whole brood”. Perhaps “the whole brood” implies the whole of the body-world, not simply the hatchlings, but still the image of absconding mother persists. The lark’s female pronoun inevitably produces a stronger tone of transgression. I suspect birds use this sort of language to each other quite a lot, but few poets have traditionally dared admit it.

The Jailbird subverts the old and ever-persistent notion of a consciousness that’s more than bodily with its de-familiarised metaphor. This metaphor-bird is a little angry, a little unnerving. The sonnet form itself is refreshed, its diction often a teasing mix of the colloquial and formal. Internal rhyme dances almost self-mockingly throughout, and the end-word rhymes are bracingly un-songlike in sound and texture. Entirely to the poem’s credit, there’s no mention of the word “soul”.