Poet’s Note
Of childhood memories, Flannery O’Connor said: The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.
This poem, like many others I’ve written, weaves memories of a trip to Ireland with imagination. My mother’s family is from Donegal, which is in the Northwest corner of the country. To get there from Dublin, back when I was a child, meant driving through Northern Ireland (the North). The Troubles were in full force then and I remember waking to soldiers ordering us out of the car; I remember signs with pictures of Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers. My granny really did kill that lovely goose for dinner. Cows do plop their plats right on the road as they walk. Those three weeks were filled with experiences I didn’t quite understand, things beyond the ken of a child. I think that lack of understanding is why many of the moments are still as alive as if they’d just happened and why I keep writing about them, making up details to fill in the blanks in order to achieve the emotional complexity of that experience.
Before learning to write formal verse, I was always grasping to write about those three weeks in Ireland, never quite saying what needed saying, and so learning to write in blank verse was a revelation. The versatility of iambic pentameter allows a poet to do just about anything. “Shifting the Cattle” is one of my earlier attempts at blank verse, the first draft written (lucky me!) while I was in the MFA program at UST, under the tutelage of the great poet James Matthew Wilson. There was a lot of revision, based on suggestions from James and my classmates, and then more revisions from my thesis advisor, the great Ryan Wilson (lucky me, again). And then, more revisions after the great Steve Knepper read it (lucky me, again, again!), and then more revisions as I attempted to record it. Anthony and Luma, both very insightful readers, also shared their thoughts, helping me to see that some revisions were not for the better. I am grateful to all of them.
Anthony’s Note
As happens often with Mary’s poetry, “Shifting the Cattle” leaves one comforted. The blunt innocence of this child’s pilgrimage through rain, mud, and turf, those things concrete and tactile, are through the poet’s words uplifted into the numinous where we encounter the mystical connections between land, cattle, family, and history.
The poem has this effect perhaps because, for many of us, there is scarce room in life for the contemplation of Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinanss (the English cognates give a good idea of Otto’s meaning) or to use Virgil’s words, the “tears in things”.
Faithful to a child’s voice, the images in the poem are plain-spoken but luminous, contemplative but not sentimental:
—“the sky is black as a bruise”
—“the cows come over to stare at me with watery, sad, brown eyes”.
The many shades of green described in the poem recall Petrarch’s verde etate, the green age of youth, soon lost, which for the child is literal and spiritual at once.
I believe the reader will find, as did I, that the encounter with “Shifting the Cattle” is as much an act of remembrance as it is of reading, a recollection of the duties of memory and inheritance, of the goodness, grief, and grace of life immediately lived. Thus the rain, the rosary, the cattle, granny’s stoic tenderness, the uncle pointing at the ruins all lead to the striking spiritual intimation: “this whole world is an abandoned castle / and this farm is its little alcove shrine.”
This is for us not so much an observation but a revelation, a calling to the duties of pietas: devotion and loyalty to land, family, ancestors, posterity, and God.
