Slow Food
I would like to feed this child who is dying with slow food,
So that time might stand still for him, so that a grandfather
Clock might not fall apart in his arms. All of the laziness of air
In our warm temperate climate, all the anxious hands
Of young barristers at this morning’s Farmers’ Market,
All of this complete snobbery of the gut, might bear down
Upon one dying child. Here is my Euro, child. Here is
The olive oil and the stuffed artichoke. Here is the conscience
And the conscience money. They stole my land too,
They took my small cottage apart, stone by stone.
They surveyed all of us and we nearly died. I am sending, child,
Very fast Irish food from my evicted great grandmother.
Satan’s “High Capital” gives Thomas McCarthy the title for his most recent collection, Pandemonium. The residence of “all the demons” appears at the end of Book One of Paradise Lost, constructed by Mulciber (Vulcan) who, before his fall from grace, had designed many of the towers and palaces of heaven. Even there, as Milton tells us, in a characteristically revealing small detail, Mulciber was constantly looking downwards, fascinated by the gold pavements.
Pandemonium is built on and out of gold, and, warns Milton: “Let none admire/ That riches grow in Hell; that soyle may best/ Deserve the precious bane.” For McCarthy, working on much of the collection during 2008, it becomes a symbol of Ireland’s economic rise and subsequent fall into calamitous recession.
Slow Food is a bold poem, in which the speaker moves self-scourgingly from gentle, liberal, helpless well-wishing to cold fury. The most violent contrast on earth – that of the well-fed and the foodless – fissures the poem’s lexicon, and produces unforgettably stark emotional discords.
The benefits of the “slow food” movement and the renaissance of the farmers’ markets are erased for the speaker almost as soon he has conjured them and imagined their transference to the dying child through warmth and empathy. Empathy might be dangerously close to apathy in the reference to “all of the laziness of air”. The culture that fosters traditional values in food-growing and production is unable to let go of selfish privilege and reach out, or back, to this child of famine. The first major tonal shift in the poem occurs when the speaker refers to “this complete snobbery of the gut”. That’s when the fantasy of succour begins to argue itself to pieces.
The first sign that the famine victim will not be kept at a comfortable distance occurs earlier, in the stunning and unexpected image of the grandfather clock: “I would like to feed this child who is dying with slow food, / So that time might stand still for him, so that a grandfather / Clock might not fall apart in his arms.” The term “slow food” is made literal in the idea that it might stop time for the child. Time’s standing still is a familiar figure. It’s what Denise Riley referred to as “dead metaphor” in the title of a poem in her last collection, Say Something Back. McCarthy’s poem extends the metaphor, and imagines it in terms of preventing the dissolution of a huge clock, which the impossibly thin child is somehow holding and holding together. It’s a surreal and powerful image. What adds significance is that this enormous, vulnerable object is an heirloom, a grandfather clock. The impossible, body-breaking weight is one of inheritance – the speaker’s own inheritance, too, as we shall see.
In the angry staccato of the third stanza, he almost hurls down his set of futile gifts: the Euro (once so promising), the gourmet’s olive oil and stuffed artichoke, the luxuries of conscience and conscience money. But then the poem takes another abrupt turn. In plain, precise, dramatic enunciation, the speaker enters the story with his own brutal experience of dispossession.
His time frame has shifted to a crueller period, that of the Great Famine. The utter destitution is shockingly revealed in the last line-and-a-half: “I am sending, child, / Very fast Irish food from my evicted great grandmother.” This is not, of course, fast food in the sense of convenience food: it’s food that doesn’t exist, except perhaps in the form of a terrible knowledge.
The child staggering under the weight of a grandfather clock has emerged from the 19th-century Ireland in which we must, I think, imagine him, to become the means in the poem by which the narrative clock is turned back, and the speaker enabled to connect to the same bitter origins. An image of an insoluble injustice, the ghost of famine itself, remains timeless and unappeased.
