Chris Agee (born 18 January 1956, in San Francisco) is a poet, essayist and editor and photographer. He holds dual American and Irish citizenship, and has spent most of his adult life in Ireland. He also spends part of each year at his house on the Dalmatian island of Korčula in Croatia. He was educated in the United States where he attended Harvard University and studied with the poet and translator, Robert Fitzgerald. After graduating in 1979 with a degree in American Literature and Language, he moved to Ireland where he has lived ever since. Agee intended to stay only a year or two in Ireland, but by the mid-eighties his residence in Belfast had become permanent. Between 1979 and 2007 he worked in various capacities as a teacher in Belfast. Since then, he has worked full-time as Editor of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing, one of Ireland’s premier literary journals (which he founded in 2002), as well as in a freelance literary capacity, including as a reviewer for The Irish Times.
Chris Agee is the author of five books of poems: In the New Hampshire Woods (The Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1992); First Light (The Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2003); Next to Nothing (Salt, Cambridge, 2009) which was shortlisted for the 2010 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry; Blue Sandbar Moon (Irish Pages Press, 2018); and Trump Rant (Irish Pages Press, 2021).
Empty Benches – The art of the elegy 1: Next to Nothing
Elegies for adults tend to length. Witness, for example, Henry King on his wife in The Exequy; Milton on Edward King in Lycidas, Shelley on Keats in Adonais, Tennyson on Arthur Hallam in In memoriam A. H. H., or Yeats, on the son of a friend, in his In Memory of Major Robert Gregory. Elegies for children tend to brevity. Witness, for example, Ben Jonson’s On My First Son, Robert Herrick’s Epitaph Upon a Child that died, Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, or X. J. Kennedy’s lovely Little Elegy for a child who skipped rope. The poems in his third collection Next to Nothing which Chris Agee wrote on the death of his daughter, Miriam, who died suddenly in 2001, at the age of four, of complications following a volvulus of the fundus, are also brief. But they eschew the tiny formality of the latter poets in favour of what he has called micro-poems. He explains the genesis of these poems here
In addition to individual poems and several sequences, Next to Nothing includes a section entitled “Heartscapes”, which consists of 59 “micro-poems”, as I call them. Many of these are extremely short; most were written during the very bleak and soul-sick year of 2003; and the whole section (with one poem per page) will take no more than thirty minutes to read, and indeed can be read with ease by any general intelligent reader, whatever their familiarity with or experience of poetry. Swiftness of effect was, in fact, part of the intention and fidelity; the challenge here as throughout the book was to record true and deep “heart-feeling” (as opposed to the “feeling” of sensibility, apperception, historical moment, etc.) – that most delicate of poetic material, owing to the swiftness of emotion itself. For once, I think I can say that these poems wrote themselves, in the sense of my being a quite passive amanuensis caught up in pain rather than any sort of instigator – drawing on the habit of technique belonging to what had become a previous life, whilst suddenly also bereft of belief in the poetic outcome compared to the apocalypse of the loss itself – that is to say, the textual as “next to nothing”, in several distinct senses, like Matisse’s sparest line-drawings in a sea of blank space . . .
Chris Agee has called these poems, twenty of which I have reproduced below, “title-less” with the opening line in a different font. However I prefer to see them as poems with traditional titles leading into and included in the subsequent poem. On this reading Incommunicable becomes a devastating title without a poem conveying the enormity of a grief which he described as like a concentration camp. One day they let you out and there you are on the road in your big, grey coat of grief. I’ve been walking that road for six years and the camp, the grief, is always still there behind me. What is remarkable is the breadth of that grief, encompassing even political comment, conveyed in so few words. Shock and awe is one such political poem where the pity and sorrow extend outward. In a prefatory note to the collection he writes, The dates given in “Heartscapes” refer to the moment of genesis and not necessarily of composition. I have included these dates beneath the poems.
Empty Benches – The art of the elegy 2: Blue Sandbar Moon
In Blue Sandbar Moon (2018) the personal loss, first explored in the preceding collection Next to Nothing (2009), is expanded to other losses in other locations such as Sarajevo, Žrnova, Belfast, Dublin, Glasgow and The Hague, where the poet attended and comments on sessions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
The emotions engendered by the family tragedy are augmented by a sensitivity to the pain others endure, particularly as a result of political and historical acts of violence. It is what Chris Agee calls the aftermath of aftermath. Subtitled “A micro-epic“, the book consists, for the most part, of short elliptical impressionistic poems in a diary-like sequence – each poem is concluded with a date stamp. Describing what he calls, in an Irish Times article, his unusual subtitle, virtually a neologism, he explains I don’t think this term has ever previously been used in a literary context, certainly not for a series of micropoems handled in this way; and so, for me, not only the name, but the form itself – a mosaic structure, allowing for celerity and/or dwelling when reading – constitutes something of a genuine formal démarche.
Acknowleging a debt to the short poems of Samuel Menashe and to the micropoems of W. G. Sebald, he has managed to create a fresh, vibrant, plangent and resonant manner of confronting a sense of loss that is both personal and, via the personal, political. When he does let rip, politically, as he does in his latest collection, Trump Rant (2021), it leads to a litany of fierce invective. But that is another story for another time.
Brief Poems by Chris Agee
from NEXT TO NOTHING
I wish
to live
near
the coffin
of small details
Written in sleep
12 January 2003
(Miriam’s birthday)
***
The word
Death
so old
there is no
first
etymology
14 January 2003
***
According
to Amichai
God is
change
and Death
is His
prophet
14 January 2003
***
Pain
like love’s
Doppler Effect
a sudden onrush
of a passing
memory
21 January 2003
***
Still stunned
I gaze
through the glass
of the barber’s
balancing
on the edge
between the wound’s
wellspring
and the stilled surface
of living
St Brigid’s Day 2003
***
Your face
swims
in the window
where I wave
at the childminder’s
new child
4 February 2003
***
The worst
of the worst
was when
I lifted each lid
and saw
the blue eyes
I loved
more than life
stilled forever
on the splattered bed
3 March 2003
***
Incommunicable
4 March 2003
***
Shock and awe
or better
pity and sorrow
for the boy
with the back of his head
blown off
31 March 2003
***
Birdsong
at dawn
like a far-off
heavenly
music
of the dead
4 April 2003
(Miriam’s deathday)
from NEXT TO NOTHING
In the end
you still
live
in me
like clouds
in a vernal pond
whose sky
has vanished
Massachusetts
13 April 2003
***
The once
seamless
blue
now rent
with the contrail
of sorrow’s shining
cicatrix
Massachusetts
15 April 2003
***
Its life
is ending
blossom of
horsechestnut
that dripped
on my cheek
from a bough
high above
Washington, DC
6 May 2003
***
Sick
sick
sick
each dawn
as if
I bide
my time
unto Death
Washington, DC
7 May 2003
***
The empty bench
rotted
on the dock
where my father sat
where you sat
the same light
trembling
in the corner
before your
coffin came
Squam Lake, New Hampshire
30 May 2003
***
Winter sun
low
and blinding
over the place
of your funeral
at the end
I’ll be glad
to go
into
its helium glow
1 December 2003
***
Winter moon
Islam’s silver
sliver
depleted
to its bright
scoop’s
nothingness
of memory
December 2004
***
Reading
the Obituaries
I always look
for
the great
achievement
of children
5 March 2005
***
I missed
your stellata
this year
only a baker’s
dozen were left
one still
with the ghost
of a fragrance
6 April 2005
***
Here
not here
is
the one
truth
Dublin
27 May 2005
From Next to Nothing, by Chris Agee, copyright © 2009 by Chris Agee. Reprinted by permission of the author and the publishers, Salt Publishing. All rights reserved.
from BLUE SANDBAR MOON
I made it
on time
this year
defeated
and tired
your scent still
with me
thin and delicate
in the drafts
of hindsight
Belfast
May 2008
***
Is it
possible
to be returning
all your life
to a Penelope
you’ve
never met
Belfast
April 2009
***
Rembrandt
the human face
the central light
the inner glow
the
Mauritshuis
The Hague
23 April 2009
***
A petal
falling
from the magnolia
in the morning’s
dusky gustiness
threatening
the tones
of another storm
Belfast
Spring 2010
***
No
darling
I won’t
let go
no
it’s all
I have
to keep
you here
Gortahork
Co Donegal
16 July 2010
***
Moon
in the cloud
do you see it
too
earthling
in this
life only
Belfast and Glasgow
9 December 2010
***
In daylight
I already
feel
the silence
of departure
like
last night’s
dark sea
flecked
with memory’s
lights
Before departure
Dubrovnik
26 April 2011
***
The last morning
after
the last night
the crescent moon
like Islam’s
slender cusp
by a lobe of dark
waxing
towards plenitude
in our new lives
Departures
Sarajevo Airport
24 October 2011
***
As if a full-stop
clarified
the whole sentence
backwards
with a brilliant
clarification
of vanishing
breath
Hearing of a death
7 August 2012
***
This time
anyway
I travelled light
without
the heart
of life
into munificent
September magnificence
First morning
Žrnovo
14 September 2013
***
We had
her real person
for just
two years
like the morning’s
light-flooded lindens
on North Parade
before the afternoon’s
darkening tempest
then
eternal night
Belfast
July 2016
From Blue Sandbar Moon, by Chris Agee, copyright © 2018 by Chris Agee.
LINKS
An interview with Chris Agee on the poems in Next to Nothing.
Robert Peake reviews Next to Nothing.
Chris Agee reads his poetry and explains his view of micro-poems.
An interview with Chris Agee in the Strathclyde Telegraph.
The Salt Publishing page on Next to Nothing.
The Irish Pages site for Blue Sandbar Moon.
An article by Chris Agee in the Irish Times.
A review of Blue Sandbar Moon by Ben Keatinge in the Dublin Review of Books.
The Irish Pages site for Trump Rant.
Chris Agee recites sections of Trump Rant.
