Reprise: 'standing on the threshold of another trembling world'
a terza rima historic narrative by Colin Carberry
Originally published on How to Grow a Poem in November 2023.
It was no simple task Colin Carberry set for himself when he determined to explore in verse the murder of an Irish nationalist hero, an incident he had been obsessed with for many years by the time he started writing “The Solicitor” in 2015.
And it was no simple route he would take to convey his compelling narrative, a dream encounter with the “shade” of the slain human rights lawyer Patrick Finucane, structured in the complex poetic form—terza rima—that Dante Alighieri had perfected centuries earlier in the “Divine Comedy.”
“It seemed apt, given that Ireland has always been at best a purgatorial situation, due to the devastating effects of British colonial policy on the Irish,” Carberry said.
Too, he said he chose the form in part as an homage to the late poet Seamus Heaney, himself an Irish hero, who had used terza rima in his “Station Island,” in which he, similarly, has a series of “dream encounters” with Irish historical figures.
Terza rima is structured as a progression of interlocking rhymes in three-line stanzas (tercets), in which the first and third lines of each stanza rhyme and the last word of each second line establishes the rhyme of the first and third lines of the next stanza.
That’s one thing in Dante’s Italian language where rhymes come easily, but more daunting in English.
“I had to fight for every word.”
“It’s difficult to find the right words [that rhyme],” Carberry said. “It caused me a world of trouble. I had to fight for every word.”
That “fight,” however, was a successful one, yielding any number of inventive rhymes, slant rhymes, and half rhymes across the 112 lines of Carberry’s ambitious poem: “smoke-tinged/impinge/visage”/”click/sympathetic/panic”/as well as such pure rhymes as “paint/saint/taint.” In all, he spent three years writing the poem, and many more researching his subject. “From 2010 to the present I have read obsessively about [Finucane],” he said.
“I got emotionally involved,” said Carberry, who was born in Toronto, Canada, and spent his childhood in Lanesboro, Co. Longford, Ireland. He is the author of four poetry collections including, most recently, Ghost Homeland (see his bio below).
If Patrick Finucane is not a household name in North America, his murder in 1989 was an event of great consequence in Ireland at the height of “the Troubles,” a period Carberry likens to the struggle for civil rights in the U.S. South.
Finucane’s place in the struggle was a complex one (a recent article in The New York Times provides a fascinating overview of his life and assassination, and the unsatisfactory aftermath). Born into a modest Catholic family, he became a successful lawyer in Belfast, but it was his very success in defending nationalists fighting British oppression (he represented the IRA fighter and hunger striker Bobby Sands, for one) that drew the rancor of many in the British government.
Finucane’s “crime,” Carberry said, was his success in using British law effectively to combat British oppression by the authorities. Far from operating outside of the law as so many on both sides did at the time, “he was one of very few people in the North of Ireland who were obeying the law,” the poet added.
And when the real-life solicitor was brutally murdered while eating dinner in his home, “it felt like JFK had died.”
Also like JFK’s assassination, perhaps, Finucane’s still unsolved murder has left many unanswered questions and much speculation. There is strong evidence that some in the highest reaches of the British government—up to and including then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, by some accounts—may have been involved in ordering the assassination.
“The doubt is there,” Carberry said.
Before delving into Carberry’s striking narrative, it bears mentioning that readers in North America are likely to encounter some Irish colloquialisms and idioms that may be unfamiliar. Most of these should be easy to unpack—”glassed” is a reference to, say, an assault with a broken glass, an occurrence all too common in pubs during the Troubles, and “dogs in the street” is “a common Belfastism,” Carberry said. The meaning of “twigged” (a wonderful word) should be readily discerned from its context. On the other hand, a seemingly common word like “collusion” is one that is fraught with meaning in a time and place in which “a rumor can get you killed.”
And there’s a word that changes dramatically in meaning when it crosses the Atlantic, Carberry acknowledged, but “it’s the word that Finucane would have used.”
So, be advised.
The word is “cunts,” a common, generally benign epithet that is widely used in Ireland (and the UK) with nothing of the the misogynistic hate speech connotation it takes on in the U.S. and Canada.
“This is a common word in Britain and Ireland, and it is used in a variety of situations, mainly for comic effect,” Carberry wrote in an explanatory note.
”It does not have anything to do with the connotations and verbal intensity associated with the word in North America. In the context of the poem, the word carries about the same weight as, say, ‘dirty bastards’.”
That said, here is “The Solicitor.”
The Solicitor
What possessed me, whether I was all there
at the time or my imagination
got the better of me or what, but there
I was peering through the broken door panes
of a disused house plunged in a smoke-tinged
hush at dead of night, half hearing the rain’s
hallucinatory static hiss impinge
on lustrous black pools in the tree-lined street,
blurring a housing estate’s grim visage
in the distance. When the impact of feet
echoed through the hall behind me. I froze,
hardly breathing, the whiff of burning meat
in my nostrils, and when I turned the knees
almost went from me. Late trespassing guest,
I thought, Fuck, the paramilitaries
must have set about him and stabbed or glassed
the poor bastard, he was that drenched with blood.
Though from his watch and the way he was dressed,
the polished shoes, this was no two-bit hood.
Staring, dazed, into the middle distance,
he moved towards me and I thought I would
fall out of my standing. Though half his face
was hanging off and his forehead blasted
open I twigged at once to who he was.
Finucane. Human rights lawyer. ‘Is it
lost you are,’ he probed, polite though wary,
‘or are you one of those terror-tourists
they have these days . . . It was a wet dreary
Sunday evening. It was in or around
half seven, as we were having our tea.
An hour before, there had been police road
blocks in place near the house and a tense calm
hung in the air. Just then a car screeched, ground
to a halt outside. I heard car doors slam,
then a bang, and when I looked masked men were
advancing down the hallway. One of them
shouted in, We’re Provies, here for the car –
figuring that’d get me to drop my guard,
I suppose – Aye, like fuck you are: you are
here to take me out, you bastards, I roared
back – as a way of warning Geraldine
to gather up the weans out of the road,
and threw myself up against the glass screen
door, while herself rushed back inside and hit
the panic alarm. I knew I was done
for. The fear in me was that they wouldn’t
leave it there: that blood lust or spite might spur
them to murder us all. Next thing I’m flat
on the broad of my back with the dinner
fork still in my hand. Aye, that’ll stop them dead
in their tracks; brilliant defence, solicitor:
curious thoughts to be going through the head
of somebody being assassinated,
you might think, but if I felt mortal dread,
there was also something of defiant
triumph. I stood my ground. I felt the thump
as the second bullet penetrated,
but the adrenalin must have been pumping
something fierce, for all that registered
was a vague shock to my chest. I looked up
as one of them moved to administer
the coup de grâce, and a stray line, 'I am
standing on the threshold of another
trembling world,’ floated up from some dim
recess of my brain. Then a photograph
of us formed before me. I won’t see them
again – my last thought as I drifted off –
thanks to these freedom fighters, and the cunts
behind them who set me up to be stiffed.
Them and their dirty tricks, the cunning stunts
we were all wise to.’ ‘Still, it didn’t click,
beyond death threats from Special Branch, that once
you were deemed unduly sympathetic
to your clients’ cause by one Douglas Hogg
in the House of Commons, hitting panic
buttons would hardly help.’ ‘Aye, shure the dogs
in the streets know now,’ he countered, a trace
of anger in his voice, ‘like some bog-wog
with qualifications could win cases
and not be in someone’s pockets’ – and then,
shadow hiding the ruined side of his face –
‘or maybe you think I colluded in
my own death,’ he mock rhetorically
enquired. Sensing I had put the boot in,
‘There’s a mural now in your memory...’
I offered, changing tack. And he: ‘Ah, now don’t paint
me with that brush, and go trying to turn me
into some kind of political saint
or human rights martyr,’ he warned, his eye
trained on me, ‘because that would be to taint
the truth a wee bit. It was never my
ambition to have this ugly mug grace
a gable in the Falls,’ he said, with a sly
sidelong glance. ‘I lived well. I loved this place,
meals out, foreign holidays, these leafy
streets that held such peace for me, all this space,’
he said, gesturing. ‘If I was guilty
of anything it was being successful,
and, worst sin of them all: not knowing my
place. Perhaps it was inevitable,
as you claim, stranger – the tale of a death
preordained – but hardly preventable
if the State wants you dead,’ he rasped, his breath
failing. ‘But I was no victim: more so
than a thousand gunmen, I was a threat
to their whole apparatus. I had to go,
and the spooks saw to it.’ ‘Well, you’re the one
doin’ the haunting now,’ I quipped. ‘Aye, who
would have thought the uppity Fenian
to have had so much blood in him,’ he grinned.
Then he shuddered violently and when
I reached out to steady him he was gone.
--Colin Carberry
Colin Carberry was born in Toronto and spent his childhood in Lanesboro, Co. Longford, Ireland. He now lives in Mexico with his wife and two daughters. He is the author of the poetry collections The Crossing (1998), The Green Table (2003), Ceasefire in Purgatory (2007), Ghost Homeland (2019), and is the translator of Love Poems (2011), along with an earlier volume of Jaime Sabines’s verse. His poems have appeared in anthologies, journals and newspapers in North America, Europe, and Asia, and have been translated into many languages. Colin has read from his work on radio and television, and at book fairs, embassies, festivals, prisons, and universities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, Serbia, Slovenia, and the United States. He was Writer in Residence at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island in July 2015, and has been awarded Writers’ Bursaries by the Ontario Arts Council.
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And one additional note. Carberry said he once sent the poem to Finucane’s son, who had witnessed the killing as a child at the dinner table. He never received a response.