ABSTRACT
A technical and emotional problem for the artist is getting the right angle on his material. If it’s a botched stroke then the stone will split all kinds of ways revealing sheets of useless contours, interesting maybe, but distracting. Or the artist will find himself wandering in a wasteland of association and anxiety, inventing, circumventing. When Samuel Beckett wrote of contemporary Irish poetry in the 1930s, and praised the work of Denis Devlin, what he liked in Devlin was that he had a ‘mind aware of its luminaries’ and avoided the fashionable Cuchulainoid clichés of the day. The ‘centre’, Beckett mordantly says, ‘isn’t that kind of girl’.2 It is not possible to strike into the centre by preoccupations which take you off out into the circumference, blethering away about Fionn and the Fenians; the wet weather of the west, lost heroes, lost heifers, while all the time the centre remains unvisited, unsaid.
