Padraic Fiacc 1924-2019: A tribute

Padraic Fiacc (born Patrick Joseph O’Connor; 15 April 1924 – 21 January 2019) was an Irish poet, and member of Aosdána, the exclusive Irish Arts Academy. Here is my address from his funeral at St Malachy’s Church, Belfast…

Padraic Fiacc’s poems are full of birds – storm-birds, surely, but also birds of all kinds – jackdaws, wrens, robins, and blackbirds. Fiacc was a birdman: ‘I recall yourself and the birds’, he writes in ‘North Man’ recounting a walk one evening along the Lagan with the writer Michael McLaverty ‘and the birds in tune with the sky gone down’.

Like a medieval monk or scribe, Fiacc’s eye was always drawn to the immediate sources of life, right from his earliest beginnings as a poet and throughout the often-tempestuous journey of his life as a writer. Along with what he called his ‘Twentieth Century Night Life’ Padraic Fiacc/ Joe O’Connor saw natural life as a consolation, even in the grimmest of circumstances:

                     poppies

And crocuses sprout

Out of the stale dry

Dust of empty soul.  

 

The creative pulse of making things as well as seeing things was always dear to his heart as in the delicate balancing act of his fine poem ‘Two Solitudes’ which opens:

You are baking bread.

I am making a poem.

 

We glow with silence like the full moon.

In a telling interview, the sense of hope and optimism Joe felt in the family home in Glengormley in the late 1950s and early 60s is finely captured, yet sadly overshadowed in his recollection:  

I remember two wee blackbirds getting trapped between the nylon drape and the window and fluttering madly, not able to get out; as I released them the sky darkened, a shadow came across the window just as they escaped. I’m a poet who believes in omens.

Joe’s poetry is full of such moments- sudden encounters, tiny details which spring into life: ‘the pruck of smoke still hovering over the fry in the morning’ from ‘A Childhood Friend’ or when he reimagines in ‘Standing Water (A Rag)’ the family entering into

 

Nova Scotia

Nineteen and twenty-nine, girl

Mother’s Delph face creaks, cracks…

It is the Northern American cold but it is also the anxiety of the emigrant, caught between excitement, anticipation and fear:

 

I cling hard tight onto

A Belfast flapper’s strong

Wrist bone. Her stiff new

Red leather raincoat CREAKS…

Joe’s poetry tells us much about the struggles to succeed in the New World; a five-year-old heading to New York. But it also, ninety years later, brings into startling focus what happens when those bad omens are not taken seriously and resolved: Childhood, innocence, political violence, physical and mental struggle cross against each other and any sense of order unravels. Joe was always on the side of the less fortunate, the downtrodden and he railed against the unacceptable conditions many ordinary people were/ are forced by circumstances to endure in this or any other society.

In one of his best-known and best loved poems ‘First Movement’ the presentiments, the omens are embedded in the local inner-city Belfast landscape which he opens up outwards; a simple but to my mind, simply wonderful poems, carrying within itself the sources of vision which Joe’s poetry always searched for, even during the worst of his times when he lived so desperately lose to the jagged edges of our unimaginable troubles.

Low clouds, yellow in a mist wind,

Sift on far-off Ards,

Drift hazily…

 

I was born on such a morning

Smelling of the Bone Yards

 

The smoking chimneys over the slate roof tops

The wayward storm birds

 

And to the east where morning is, the sea

And to the west where evening is, the sea

 

Threatening with danger

And it would always darken suddenly.

Fortunately, Joe was to reclaim and experience calm in the last couple of decades of his life.

But I’d like to end with ‘Alive Alive O’ which conveys Fiacc’s mischievous and irreverent spirit while touching upon his presence as the irascible outsider he could not help himself from being and whose spirit lives on in the poems he spent a lifetime in making:

The altar boy from a Mass for the dead

Romps through the streets of the town

Lolls on brick-studded grass

Jumps up, bolts back down

With wild pup eyes …

 

This morning at twist of winter to spring

Small hands clutched a big brass cross

Followed the stern brow of the priest

Encircle the man in the box …

 

A bell-tossed head sneezed

In a blue daze of incense on

Snivelled bit lips, then

Just to stay awake, prayed

Too loud for the man to be at rest…

 

O now where has he got to

But climbed an apple tree!

 

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© Gerald Dawe