Poem Of The Week: As You Get Older By Dermot Healy (1947-2014)

Dermot Healy’s sparse poetic framework is the very tip of an iceberg of suggestion. Resembling no less than the duplicitous simplicity of Miroslav Holub’s binary treatment of the double-edged Promethean gift in Discovery of Fire, Healy’s narrator makes an irony of cognitive dissonance, or more properly, the imitation of one attitude in the tonal colours of its precise opposite.

For the certainty of the atheistic mantra, the hammering of repetitive dogmas of denial…

I do not believe,
I do not believe anything out there

…begin to sound like the very thing they most excoriate. The ‘righteous’ indignation of the person for whom the night is closing in is articulated with the retributive venom of John of Patmos; the dissolution of his powers met with a rage that is biblical and directed.

The closing couplets of Healy’s deceptively eloquent poem are, at once, ambiguous and deeply troubling: the admixture of faith and tyranny, the implication that both are facets of a single state of mind, and the suspicion that the dissipation of creative powers is naturally replaced with the dis-ease of a perverse kind of certainty - all are conspicuous in the poem’s austere diminuendo.

‘As You Get Older’ by Dermot Healy from The Travels of Sorrow (2015) is reproduced by kind permission of the author’s Estate and The Gallery Press.

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