#seamusmurphy

PJ Harvey

Blackpool has links with more individuals who have contributed to Cork’s cultural history than might initially be realised.

Chief amongst these is the sculptor, Seamus Murphy.

At the age of 14 he began an apprenticeship which ended with him becoming, in his own words, “the only legitimate stonecarver in Cork for 25 years’’.

In 1934 he opened his studio/workshop on Watercourse Road, Blackpool. There he produced many of his works which are now judiciously distributed throughout the city.

Seamus Murphy was to stonecarving what Harry Clarke was to stained-glass windows or James Joyce to literature, each a renowned master at their craft.

For generations poetry has been used as a concise and eloquent way of paying tribute to individuals who stood apart in terms of their contribution to our nation’s cultural heritage.

In 1980, five years after his death, The Cork Review published an edition dedicated to the memory of Seamus, featuring recollections of the man and his work through essays and poetry.

Blackpool library has chosen the poems printed in that volume as its focus in celebrating Heritage Week 2020.

In this exceptional year when we came to realise that not everything we take for granted is carved in stone we remember Seamus Murphy whose works in stone remind us that some things do, in fact, endure.

Each poem is a poignant reflection on the sculptor. Murphy himself might have approved of how Christy Kenneally, a native of Blackpool, put it:

                  “And when ‘twas time to die

                  God chisel hammer-honed him down

                  to His image and likeness

                  called his name

                  and freed him from his plinth ‘’.

 Here is a selection of poems, chosen by library staff about Seamus Murphy:

Seamus  Murphy

‘Stone is in my system’

Of the materials he mastered

Stone meant the most to him:

Time and again

The tough and stubborn grain

Was civilised

By his bright chisels

 Showing its secret strength

As clear thought,

As sound feeling.

 No small matter this

Recreation

Of the deeper core

 Now tools forget his hand

And lose precision.

The streets grow dull without that keen

    perception,

Without those eyes

And that warm wit

Among curious lines.

 Light on his feet,

With his grey hair on end,

Gentle, but stubborn and active as a terrier,

A small man goes away

Leaving us here like old dust and chippings.

 He will be missed by all manner of people.

And yet we have been lucky:

Such cut and character

Bite into time,

And so we keep his mark.

 Look: on her mountain the young saint’s

   Tranquil stance.

And the steady face of courage in the city park.

                                                          by Seán Lucy

Gobnait   (for Seamus Murphy)

 witch now in this stone bewitched,

stone robed in our present mythologies

of ordinariness : a Bandon cloak

about your buxom form, no hint

of holy or satanic slyness;

around you a feast of green hills,

the familiar drone of your bees.

 Lady, for so now you are, behold my

incompetence to reach back to innocence,

to shift the mandrake root by prayer :

I need an older medicine,

as once you practised in the nights

on stone alters alone with the

winds and hills for congregations.

 such priests are dead as were before

Patrick and taught no grim theologies

but the unisons of earth and star:

Gobnait, recall the midnights and the

moons, saint of people and their witch,

and from your stone plinth hear me:

magic the mandrake from the root.

                              by Robert O’ Donoghue

   In Memoriam Seamus Murphy:  October 1975

 It is deserted today in the municipal park;

Deserted swing and slide, deserted path and riverbank;

Yet the more deserted the municipal park by the river

The more life-like appears the Virgin of the Twilight.

 What is a sculpture, Daddy?

A small girl asks of her father

As they wander through the municipal park

And he points to a sculpture

Named Virgin of the Twilight

And he stoops down and he explains:

“That was made by a man called Seamus Murphy

And it is a sculpture ‘’.

 And the daughter stares up at the Madonna and child

Carved in white limestone

And the father stares down at the daughter transfixed

In her fascination with the mystery of birth

Knowing that she too one day will wait

Alone and desolate in the world

Bereft lit creased soaked scourged

By wind rain sunlight and snow.

 “And where is Seamus Murphy now? ‘’

Cried out the small girl turning upward her eyes:

“He has gone home to God...’’ stammered the father

“And...’’ as he groped for words

She interposed as though

Already having arrived at

A final, restful and most satisfactory conclusion:

“And he has left his sculpture behind him, Daddy’’.

 And the sculpture remains:

And father after daughter

Disappears off

Into the vanishing light.

                                                            by  Paul Durcan

    Seamus Murphy, died 2nd October, 1975.

Walking in the graveyard, a maze

Of angels and families

The path is coiled like a shaving of wood

We stop to read the names

 In time they all come around

Again, the spearbearer, the spongebearer

Ladder and pillar

Scooped from shallow beds

 Carrying black clothes

Whiskey and ham for the wake

The city revolves

White peaks of churches clockwise lifting and falling

 The hill below the barracks

The sprouting sandstone walls go past

Finding below the old clockface

 The long rambles of the spider

In the narrow bed of a saint

The names in stones travelling

Into a winter of stone.

                                                       by Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin

Seamus Murphy - Sculptor

The hat

incongruous

upon a head

half-finished.

The face beneath

crevised and quarried

by the dint of searching...

searching for life and grace

where we saw

stone:

that face

soft planed

sandpapered

saved from all severity

by a sad, wry eye

And when ‘twas time to die

God chisel hammer-honed him down

to His image and likeness

called his name and freed him from the plinth.