Some poets get noticed easily, early on. Their work speaks to the moment, or to the zeitgeist, or to a nation’s or a generation’s sense of itself. Other poets—no matter how smart, or strange, or beautiful their writing—have no chance at that kind of notice. They publish too slowly, live in the wrong place, fit no trend, require a bit of patience, or demand intellection without giving academia easy ways in. If they get widely noticed, it’s less like a wave or a wildfire than a slow burn, or even a glacier advancing. And yet—if there’s justice in literary history (and I take no position on whether there is)—get noticed they will.
Randolph Healy deserves to get noticed. The Scottish-born, Ireland-raised Dublin- and Wicklow-based poet and mathematics teacher—who will turn 70 next year—has been assembling thoughtful, counterintuitive poems, short and long, into small press volumes since the 1980s. Till recently the way into his work was Green 532, a career-spanning selection brought out in 2002 by the ambitious, now-defunct British-Australian publisher Salt. The book opened with Healy’s descriptive gifts, “full deck gusts outside the playground” sorting dry leaves, “briefly forming an aerial house of cards.” [G 1] These “cards” provided the first of Healy’s many symbols for nonteleological order, with human language, concepts, and intentions gently imposed on a world that exceeds them all. Trying to understand everything all at once, the poet resembles, as Healy has it, “a king crab with a lighted tallow on its back/ pushed into a burrow by fishermen/ to frighten the rabbits into nets.” [G 8] It’s better to practice metacognition and try to watch the world sort itself out; “selection, distortion and interpolation,” he writes, “meat and drink to me, meat and drink.” [G 50]
Such attitudes bring Healy close, among living Americans, to another science-minded, not-yet-famous-enough senior poet: Allan Peterson—though Healy gets terse or gently sarcastic where Peterson stays loquacious and sincere. Among the great dead, Healy recalls A. R. Ammons, whose background in physics and chemistry also informed his anti-ideological free verse. Rather than tell the world how it ought to behave, Ammons’s verse and Healy’s both say, it’s better to stay many-minded, to “ask why an oak supports many species,” [G 26] imagine “a common root system,” and remember that “no matter how good your hearing is there are things which you will not hear.” [G 27]
Those last three quotes come from Healy’s “Arbor Vitae’” (1997), a 21-page poem (with eloquent notes) about the philosophy of language, formal logic, elementary computer programming, Deaf history and Deaf culture in Ireland, reacting to Healy’s own life as the hearing father of a Deaf child. Did you know that Irish Sign Language, uniquely, has men’s and women’s dialects, because it developed in sex-segregated schools? Or that “the sign for door/ represents the door as opening?” [G 26] Or that oralism (the destructive practice of prohibiting sign language) came late to Irish schools, but persisted at least through the 1980s? Healy’s poem won’t tell you that whole story: instead, he may prompt you to look it all up.
Other linguistic, or metalinguistic, or ludic delights await readers in Healy’s earlier work. Some derive from schemes familiar at this point to half the poets in America, but new when Healy adopted them—erasures, for example. Healy also delights in anagrams, creating forty-four of them for “The Republic of Ireland”: “her pro-life bit unlaced… launch reptile if bored.” [G 40, 42] Deeper poems come from the speech of Healy’s five kids: “people are god’s hobby said Margaret boxes/ full of bones rolls and rolls of skin he/ just keeps making them”; “if women have ovaries she asked/ do men have underies?” [G 124] Why wouldn’t they?
These strands of levity set Healy apart, without especially linking him to the other so-called neo-avant-garde, or experimental, writers among whom he’s usually placed depending where he’s read: in the Republic of Ireland, Maurice Scully and Trevor Joyce; in Great Britain, the constellation of cerebral writers around, or indebted to, J. H. Prynne.
One important reader is the critic Keith Tuma (also a poet and memoirist), who tried to introduce Healy over here in his massive 2004 Anthology of British and Irish Poetry. There I discovered “Arbor Vitae” and wanted more.
And now I’ve got it: you can get it too, thanks to Healy’s The Electron-Ghost Casino, brought out in 2024 by Miami University Press, which Tuma co-runs. It may be his best single book. Here are Healy’s intellectual skepticisms and his amazement at how the world works, at “what can work,” at the fact that anything functions at all given the chaos all round. [76] “The woman who invented/ magic knickers is now a billionaire” (Healy probably means Sara Blakely, and it’s true). [76-77] Even compared to his own twentieth-century writings, Healy indulges more often in humor. Whole poems pivot around puns and jokes: a ballad “in the person of a mother grieving for her son/ cut short by means of capital punishment” carries the one-line “refrain… They hung my Willy on a tree.” [35]
That’s Healy’s best pure joke, but it’s hardly his only one. His book ends up fun, as few so-called post-avant garde types can (another exception: Rae Armantrout). If you like Armantrout, you need Healy. You need, in particular, his quips: “the new age of enlightenment was great/ except the original cast kept their parts.” [63] Verbal twists add bizarre resonance to the political disillusion of “Morning Came Daily Except When the Night Was Long”: “At the launch of the world’s most inflated democracy, the Placeholder’s new scrotum experienced mechanical failure.” [40] America, Healy implies, acts like a titanic dinghy, or an outsized dick. Other snarky pages bear less political points, but excel in spitting mild acid anyway, as when a Breton pipe band suggests an “inter-county T-Rex throat-clearing competition.” [16]
If you want to see Healy mock the great dead, in a way that suggests admiration too, try his “Outtakes.” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” in Healy’s hands asks us to “be limp a long time,” while Seamus Heaney’s bog people become dead folks from “the Iron age upper crust/ who’d mussed a coif with French pine resin.” [5] Less effective, even gimmicky, are other new poems built around Oulipian projects. “Anthem” comments on successive homophonic translations of Ireland’s national anthem (“Sinne Fianna Fáil/ atá faoi gheall ag Éirinn” becomes “Sheen a fine with oil/ A tail failed owl egg roaring”), though Frank Ormsby made the same joke compactly in his own 2017 poem. A poet who sets out, like Healy, or like Ammons, to emphasize play cannot but sound frivolous when he’s off his game.
And yet Healy, still, now as always, pursues a serious, even traditional endeavor: he marvels at the homeostatic, constantly shifting, unplannedness, the “randomness,” that goes to make up the world, both the world that humans can perceive and alter, and the world of physical and and even mathematical truths that we can only record. [27] Youth and their new linguistic habits “rattle past like notes/ in a robin’s call,” as a kid says “fabless” (for fabulous). Everything changes; everything flows. Civilization, a literary enterprise, or a family each resemble “a huge human pyramid,” “though if you somehow make it to the top/ it’s still not going to go/ anywhere it doesn’t want to.” [14-15] Death means a lot but only to the living:
Mary handed me Dad’s casket
which I put in the ground
agonizing over whether
I’d gotten it the wrong way round
forgetting that ashes don’t have a bearing. [19]
Human beings under such cosmic lack of purpose, without a “bearing,” become “props that vanish in the absence of rehearsal/ or creatures that cannot endure without meaning… or Singing Stones that only sound when stricken.” [43] As are we. (Not struck, note: stricken.) He’s bemused, wry, taken slightly aback, able to regain his equipoise, rarely outraged and never ecstatic. But he does pay homage to the helpless weirdness that comes to our five senses, and into our thoughts, from the outside world: “O ear,” he exclaims, “you so little choose/ what enters you.” [58] And yet we can sometimes choose what to read, what to hear. Healy makes a superb—and overdue—choice.
Stephanie Burt
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her most recent book of poems is We Are Mermaids (Graywolf Press) and her podcast about superheroes and games is Team-Up Moves. She lives in Belmont, Mass. with her human, canine, feline and cryptid family.