founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

September 2015

young irish poets

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume ccvi • number 5 CONTENTS

September 2015

YOUNG IRISH POETS patrick cotter 443 Introduction dean browne 446 Tabernacle nick laird 447 Glitch ailbhe darcy 448 Ansel Adams’ Aspens Hair After my son was born cal doyle 452 Echolocator roisin kelly 454 Oranges declan ryan 456 Rope-a-Dope dave lordan 457 Muck Savage doireann ní ghríofa 460 While Bleeding leanne o’sullivan 461 Three Poems for My Husband tara bergin 464 Appointment with Jane Austen aifric mac aodha 466 Sop Préacháin [A Crow’s Wisp] Translated by David Wheatley martin dyar 478 The Donnellys alan gillis 479 Flat White Afternoon To Be Young and in Love in Middle Ireland Nuggets ciaran berry 486 Liner Notes The Death of Elvis victoria kennefick 490 Paris Syndrome The Preacher’s Daughter john mcauliffe 492 From “Home, Again” michael mckimm 494 Watermark caoilinn hughes 496 Boundary Condition billy ramsell 497 Sound Things No Longer There stephen connolly 500 Fianaise Bhréagach “And then the sun” ailbhe ní ghearbhuigh 502 Filleadh ón Antartach [Return from Antarctica] Conriocht [Werewolf] Translated by Billy Ramsell michelle o’sullivan 506 A Sound Box Bespoke miriam gamble 508 Marine Snow paul perry 509 From “The Ghosts of Barnacullia” Shepherd’s Purse caitríona o’reilly 512 The Airship Era

COMMENT thomas mccarthy 517 Poetry and the Memory of Fame maya catherine popa 527 Forever Writing from Ireland

contributors 538 Editor don share Art Director fred sasaki Managing Editor sarah dodson Assistant Editor lindsay garbutt Editorial Assistant holly amos Consulting Editor christina pugh Design alexander knowlton

cover art by clare rojas “Star Pattern,” 2012

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Poetry • September 2015 • Volume 206 • Number 5

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patrick cotter

Introduction

Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Epic” has talismanic importance to older Irish poets who took from the following lines license to write about the minutiae of their own locales:

I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind. He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance.

To be from a small country and to write intimately about your own affairs is to risk making your poetry impenetrable, irrelevant, or both, even when writing in a global language like English. And yet to ex- clude your own affairs, to eliminate the parochial from your “epic” entirely risks self-censorship or a denial of one’s own truth. An American poet can mention the film Predator, Henry Kissinger, or the town of Ferguson and an informed and cultured Irish person will know the references. Conversely, if an Irish poet chose to write about Wanderly Wagon, Pádraig Flynn, or the town of Granard even a cultured American reader, unless a specialist in Irish Studies, would be lost. These thoughts came to me not in the context of contemplating Irish poetry but while considering the obstacles poets of minority languages, such as Estonian and Macedonian, encounter in seeking to have their poetry translated into English with the hope of reach- ing a global audience. As a poet living in Europe, I translate and am often translated. I have noted how certain poems lend themselves better to translation and reach alien readers with more appeal. As poets our capacity to communicate our concerns is limited not just by language but by the unrelenting, mostly one-way flow of information and cultural dissemination from large, powerful nations to smaller ones. The British know more about America than Americans know about Britain. The Irish know more about Britain than the British know about Ireland, and Irish speakers in Ireland know more about the world of their monoglot Anglophone compatriots than the latter

PATRICK COTTER 443 do about the discourse taking place in the minority Irish-speaking networks and communities. Artistic compromises are frequent for small cultures reaching out to larger, more dominant ones. Such considerations have shaped my selection for this issue. I say all the above as a caveat to a North American reader of this special issue of Poetry, the second in its cen- tury-long history and the first in twenty years. Here you will find work representative of Irish poets, but not the whole story. I am hop- ing this selection will provoke many to seek out more Irish poetry in bookstores and online through excellent resources such as poetryin- ternationalweb.net. There are so many excellent poets writing in Ireland that it would be impossible to adequately represent contemporary Irish poetry in its totality. So, taking Don Share’s prompt to focus on new poets, I have chosen a snapshot of a generation, those born after 1969 — the generation of poets who have lived all their lives in a world of inter- national poetry dominated by Irish names such as Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon; while the selection is not exhaustive it does con- tain many of the young poets worth watching. Certain poets are not included because they were (ironically?) included in the special UK issue of Poetry last year (reaped from the pages of The Poetry Review, edited in London by my Cork compatriot Maurice Riordan). Others didn’t have new work available. I would like to have included more Irish-language poets but there were either no translations available of new work or, in other cases, the available English translations failed to convince me. Most of the attention paid to Irish poetry in America has been within the walls of Irish Studies departments. The speciality of Irish Studies carries dangers for the Irish poet. In the 1995 special Irish is- sue of Poetry the late Dennis O’Driscoll wrote:

A modest international reputation may prove possible if the poet comes to the attention of those students and academics [of] Irish Studies.... As a result, the unexamined poem may seem not worth writing and the approbation of American aca- demics is feverishly sought.

O’Driscoll went on to describe this process as “ventriloquial manipu- lation by Irish poets of their own reputations.” Many of the poets in this selection reject such “ventriloquial ma-

444O POETRY nipulation.” The world of Irish landscape, urban life, engagement with new technologies, and the intimate concerns of interpersonal relations dominate this selection. Here you will find little of the sociopolitical, historical-centered themes which dominate the fo- cus of American and British Irish Studies departments and arguably push aside the essence of poetry during the forensic examination of a poem. This issue presents a vision of contemporary Irish thought that may disappoint those with prejudices or inadequately formed and informed expectations of what Irishness means today. Many of the poets included here live in Britain and North America as well as Ireland, and their first allegiance as poets is necessarily to the lan- guage in which they write. One notable difference between this issue and the Contemporary Irish Poetry issue of 1995 is how evenly women are represented. In 1995, out of forty poets and translators presented, only six were women. I had to make no conscious effort to achieve gender balance in this selection. LGBT themes have been explored by a handful of poets of an older generation such as Padraig Rooney, Mary Dorcey, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, and Sarah Clancy. As to the representation of racial diver- sity in Irish writing — that must await the next generation. Walking the streets of Cork I take great pleasure in hearing local accents emit from Filipino, Nigerian, and Chinese teenagers. I look forward to reading them in a special Irish issue of Poetry in the future.

PATRICK COTTER 445 dean browne

Tabernacle

Castaways, we hit the forest — our camping stove turned low, I gripped my tent close for its trial in virgin attitudes of stiffness while lamps fluttered on the dark. My roof sank wave on wave accordion-like, the only sin we knew; and soon the Jameson appeared. I’d burned one back and by the third she laid her hand on mine, like a napkin ...

Later, I caught those tiny gasps from Joan and Michael’s tent where he slipped into her like (this I thought) a frog à la Bashō; those dark rippling walls where she kept center, held her breath, so I had to puzzle how one could leave and neither be alone.

446O POETRY nick laird

Glitch

More than ample a deadfall of one meter eighty to split my temple apart on the herringbone parquet and crash the operating system, tripping an automated shutdown in the casing and halting all external workings of the moist robot I inhabit at the moment: I am out cold and when my eyes roll in again I sit on the edge of the bed and tell you just how taken I am with the place I’d been, had been compelled to leave, airlifted mid-gesture, mid-sentence, risen of a sudden like a bubble or its glisten or a victim snatched and bundled out, helplessly, from sunlight, the usual day, and all particulars of life there fled except the sense that stays with me for hours and hours that I was valuable and needed there.

NICK LAIRD 447 ailbhe darcy

Ansel Adams’ Aspens

To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky must seem a miracle. I’d commit the scene to black and white if I could, the sky bright

and bottomless, trees gnarled as the knees of elephants. Helpless in his Biltrite pram, Ansel Adams is watching the clouds roll in. Then the clouds would gather speed,

roll out again, and the camera pan down to Ansel Adams the man kneeling on granite, choosing one filter over another. It’s as though more and greater apparatus

were needed to recapture that first exposure, says the voice-over: as though Ansel Adams were a pioneer toiling after the spirit, not just the body, of America.

To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky must seem a matter of fact. It’s the mind beneath he wants to grasp, stowed in its smart black

enclosure. I’d have his pram gather speed and transform, a cartoon robot against the heavens, wheels spinning, into Ansel Adams’ camera. Now the bright black sky

is Ansel Adams and Ansel Adams the filter; light renders each tree a bouquet of paper; the Great Depression gathers like so much weather.

To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky is what it is, taut with its isness. Some time before dawn, the section framed

by interior blackens and brightens and each tree out there glows with itself, with the certainty of all Ansel Adams’ aspens. No one is watching but this one bewildered

448O POETRY immigrant, toiling after sleep, saturated in monochrome. Sometimes it’s all you’ll find in the wilderness: Ansel Adams, tiny in his pram, composing the day just gone.

AILBHE DARCY 449 Hair

After Alice Maher’s “Andromeda”

Kind bolus of hair, we who have shoehorned ourselves into dream dresses, spooled Louis heels down fettled steps

to grooms, or steeled ourselves in suits for the clinch, counter- signatures gripped in fists; we who have lain on carpets

beside infants, parched for clear shocks of blue, feculence collecting in our drains, do not forsake us. Domesticated chyme,

damp hank slap-lavished on pillow, pray for us. We who have fetched home inventing storage solutions,

breaking up space, who feed you and braid you, scratch compact plans on compact days, give us thole to bear up.

We’d bindle paradise and stow it where the dust bunnies futz, given leave. Swindle us, please, some less dear salvation.

Croon of nootropics, caffeine, tacit utopia, game feel. How the way we live days is the means to live lives. Chevy

us through. Tonight, in the kitchens where we make obstacles of each other, we’ll fiddle with the knobs of electrical cookers.

Hobs simulacra for hobs, pixelating heat, steam, spall; tumble from above as if from nowhere.

Let one of us fright, dash a palm too near. Let flesh char, hair. Give us our brimstone. Be in our waking.

450O POETRY After my son was born

I’d a snip cut in his tongue. Blood scissored down his chin. At every squall I’d been unsnibbing myself and starving him. He knocked me so my nose coughed blood, punched a finger through my cornea. Blood blubbed on my nipple where his gums met. On the radio somebody was saying something about Syria. My son jerked knots of hair from my head, tears dashed off his fontanelle. He’d fixed my hips so my clothes didn’t fit. I blundered him once against the doorjamb: blood. I’d bit his father when we were younger, drinking harder, made blood come then. Twice I tried to leave him screaming, twenty minutes at a time, but couldn’t keep schtum. One breakfast I broke the mug that insisted “Don’t Mess With Texas.” Smashed it. And all the time I smiled so much my teeth dried. He made everything heavy. Like they say the bomb did for a while, so that Americans swam through their homes, eyes peeled, picking up everyday things and dropping them as though they were violated with light and pain. As though blood hadn’t always been there, waiting.

AILBHE DARCY 451 cal doyle

Echolocator

When it became my turn to speak all that my tongue produced was dust. I hold my cat to this. I wear finery.

in moments of clarity there is no grace it sits into the jar, the kitten, we pace

As I watched the saplings become trees I found a song my father sung, in my mouth. No words, just melody. I am unuttered.

on black and white flm we are dressed in a shadow of lace it sits into the jar, the kitten, we pace

I hold my cat still, as he becomes. The names of ships that sank on their maiden voyages are not its. I shall name him Castro.

among the flotsam were documents the sea-air could not erase it sits into the jar, the kitten, we pace

If it becomes like it was, is, ever shall I will partake in blood-lettings to appease the vengeful sky-god. I am deep ecology.

our feet wet in the sand at night, there was a lantern we would always chase it sits into the jar, the kitten, we pace

452O POETRY When my memory becomes, like my tongue, dust, effluvial, sunken, and pure melody, please, on sand, draw the Batavia for me. with your hands remember the contours of my aging face we slip into the light, your fngers, they lace

CAL DOYLE 453 roisin kelly

Oranges

I’ll choose for myself next time who I’ll reach out and take as mine, in the way I might stand at a fruit stall

having decided to ignore the apples the mangoes and the kiwis but hold my hands above

a pile of oranges as if to warm my skin before a fire. Not only have I chosen

oranges, but I’ll also choose which orange — I’ll test a few for firmness scrape some rind off

with my fingernail so that a citrus scent will linger there all day. I won’t be happy

with the first one I pick but will try different ones until I know you. How will I know you?

You’ll feel warm between my palms and I’ll cup you like a handful of holy water.

454O POETRY A vision will come to me of your exotic land: the sun you swelled under the tree you grew from.

A drift of white blossoms from the orange tree will settle in my hair and I’ll know.

This is how I will choose you: by feeling you smelling you, by slipping you into my coat.

Maybe then I’ll climb the hill, look down on the town we live in with sunlight on my face and a miniature sun burning a hole in my pocket. Thirsty, I’ll suck the juice from it. From you.

When I walk away I’ll leave behind a trail of lamp-bright rind.

ROISIN KELLY 455 declan ryan

Rope-a-Dope

Nothing for days, then a message: “I want to see a fight. An old one,” so I bring a fight to you. You know nothing of these men; even the most famous get to slink in their youth again — for you Foreman is Leviathan, unstoppable; Ali just past his prime flown “home” to muscle back his title. Not sure how you’ll react to violence we lie down again together — your feet in woollen stockings kneadable across my thighs, your mouth close to my ribs and their inmate: a pouting lifer. I fidget and you scold. As Ali opens up with right-hand leads you flinch but soon you’re lost to the screen where he waits it out along the ropes, takes everything Foreman throws. You don’t believe he can soak up all this pain and go on standing; we cheer him on, winter softened in the tropic of his strength. When Ali comes alive to put Foreman on the ground I see a hallelujah look as you turn to face me. “He won,” you say into my cheek. “He did,” I say.

456O POETRY dave lordan

Muck Savage

The minute the fiddler takes to the stage betwixt the rapper and the organist I dive out through a slit in the rear of the reggae tent, meaning to take a slash and chill. But there’s a rave throbbing in the woods beyond. Bonfires radiating inside holly, spruce, and ash.

Canvas banners thrashing in the storm. Chinese lanterns chase across the speckled dusk like molten bloodhounds packed against the moon.

I’m twisted, I’m a little bit skagged. Can’t recall who I tagged along to the festival with, what o’clock or eve it is, precisely ...

How the trout am I gonna get home? ... Did I bring a tent ... Yo! What the sugar’s the hun with the glow sticks, the yokes, the coloredy fleece called again? ... If you fly with the crows you’ll be shot with the crows ... my Dad said. Could be doing with a suck on a spliff ... a dab ... so scanning fore, then midground for someone to tap, I sketch three paralytics at a tipped-over shitehouse, legless, clasping wire fence to hold upright. Never piss on electric wire.

In Tipperary Gah shirts. Tall guys. Hurlers. Sinewy bastards. Dude in the middle bending double belching steam and spittle like a hot bog in Iceland, chucking up loads. Distressed he is. Heavyweight retching bout. Losing control. Nearly throwing the towel in, collallapsing.

DAVE LORDAN 457 I see him stretched out to dissolve in the land and its zillions of ants, trillions of carcasses. What a banquet he’d make

for the jackdaws. If ya lie down with the dogs ya’ll rise up with the fleas. Small urge in me for calling an ambulance. Small

but rapidly growing. ’Til the others start egging him on. G’wan Jamey! Fucking champion craic man! Jamey swims with the general will —

hauls himself rigid and warrior-tall, drawing gallon-swills of boosting oxygen, then arches crablike at the waist to balance

backwards on his massive palms, stalling as the constellations eddy, the cosmos rearranges around him, ’til his whistling tongue-tip

comes aligned with the prong of The Plough and he launches like Polaris through the murk, propelling himself straight, hurling bilious floods

of intermingled crackers, croutons, crisps, sausage rolls, Diarmuid’s Special Offer Salsa Dips, Guinness, Smirnoff Ice, Devil’s Bit, roasted nuts

and Dubonnet and effervescent codeine foam and fizz up up

up

up over the fence

458O POETRY up over the flags up over the maize down into the pines down into the flames down into the rave.

DAVE LORDAN 459 doireann ní ghríofa

While Bleeding

In a vintage boutique on Sullivan’s Quay, I lift a winter coat with narrow bodice, neat lapels, a fallen hem. It is far too expensive for me, but the handwritten label [1915] brings it to my chest in armfuls of red. In that year, someone drew a blade through a bolt of fabric and stitched this coat into being. I carry it to the dressing room, slip my arms in. Silk lining spills against my skin. I clasp the belt and draw a slow breath as a cramp curls again, where blood stirs and melts. In glass, I am wrapped in the weight of old red:

red pinched into girl cheeks and smeared from torn knees, lipstick blotted on tissue, bitten lips, a rough kiss, all the red bled into pads and rags, the weight of red, the wait for red, that we share.

In the mirror, the old coat blushes. This pocket may once have sheltered something precious — a necklace, a love letter, or a fresh egg, feather-warm, its shell brittle around a hidden inner glow, held loosely so it couldn’t crack, couldn’t leak through seams, so it couldn’t stain the dress within.

460O POETRY leanne o’sullivan

Three Poems for My Husband

walking to the hospital How the autumn dawn burned through the misty broods and settled down in fire; how quickly the sun glittered my shadow, how my shadow cried, a moment, with joy.

A light frost, a vision of light crackling down the maples, down the tinder ash.

I was the good thief. I held my Love’s sweet breath, his beautiful, intelligent gaze.

I closed my eyes and he woke inside me. When I saw, he saw the inflamed world.

A bird sang deeply from the gutter eaves. When I closed my eyes I was elsewhere.

I walked through the fire of his sleep.

LEANNE O’SULLIVAN 461 leaving early My Love,

tonight Fionnuala is your nurse. You’ll hear her voice sing-song around the ward lifting a wing at the shore of your darkness. I heard that, in another life, she too journeyed through a storm, a kind of curse, with the ocean rising darkly around her, fierce with cold, and no resting place, only the frozen rocks that tore her feet, the light on her shoulders.

And no cure there but to wait it out. If, while I’m gone, your fever comes down — if the small, salt-laden shapes of her song appear as a first glimmer of earth-light, follow the sweet, hopeful voice of that landing. She will keep you safe beneath her wing.

462O POETRY in your sleep

After “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughan Williams

The moment the lark finally vanishes into the spread green sky of the forest is the moment you suddenly lift

your bruised arm up, over your body, as though to show me the wing’s eclipse, or the wing, or the season of your dream.

And even as your hand lapses silent onto your chest, and your breath goes sluggish, I am already watching your feet

prepare their slow first step under the sheet as the last notes of sunlight fall quiet, and you do not move again. My love,

are you a bird reviving in a summer field? Was it the lark ascending that you heard, a ghost among its shy-hearted tunes?

Yes. I heard the lark escaping, too.

LEANNE O’SULLIVAN 463 tara bergin

Appointment with Jane Austen

Blushing in a manner out of keeping with my age (my graying hair, my falling face) I entered Greyfriar’s Inn. I was blushing, and out of keeping with my age. In I went, making my foolish entrance, folding down my umbrella self-consciously — aware of the locals at the bar with their gin and their small talk — and walked right up to the barmaid, somewhat brazenly, I thought. One glass of beer, I said to her, and she, smiling kindly, pulled it. I stood and waited. I waited for them all to stop their fond, drunken reminiscences, for them to stop putting forth their opinions, and to turn to me and say — in an accusatory way — What are you doing here? On a Wednesday night? Unaccompanied? With an accent we can’t quite identify?

I waited ready:

Why am I here? I would say. I am here as an imposter, an outsider, a reluctant admirer of your lovely daughter Jane — I am here for my Lecture in the Picturesque, to learn of sidescreens and perspectives, to learn of window tax and syntax — and “ha-has” — for harmless gambling in the parlor, wearing mittens and handworked collars and a pretty amber cross — I am here to steal a pistol and a spoon found underground, to rob the peacock feathers streaming from the silly boy’s crown — I am here, I would say, for sensation — For sensation? they would say, and I would say: Yes! Painful sensation of restraint or alarm!

464O POETRY Oh ye patrons of Greyfriar’s Inn, I would exclaim, I am here to meet your high-waisted Jane, to embrace her as my comrade; as my brother-in-arms!

I stood and waited. But the good patrons of Greyfriar’s Inn, they never said a thing; just continued talking amongst themselves, quietly reminiscing. I paid the barmaid and turned my head. I looked out at the wet; I looked out at the southwest rain, and the redbrick houses. I watched the famous silhouette, gently swinging back and forth above the gate. I raised the glass to her impassive, sideways face. Nothing ventured. Nothing gained.

TARA BERGIN 465 aifric mac aodha

Sop Préacháin

Do Keara

stuaim Ba cheart bhur gcur ó aithne, tá an tír róbheag, teanga níos stuama a chleachtadh nó seasamh siar ón tús.

Ach anois thar aon am eile, níl teacht ná dul ón tosach. Ag cóisir daoibh in íoslach tí, thug tú úll dó in áit osclóra.

Bíonn dúil agus dúil ann, a shonc féin, ba mheidhreach: Bíonn diúltú agus diúltú ann — No thanks, I’ve read the Bible.

466O POETRY A Crow’s Wisp

For Keara

cant Wipe your memory: the country’s too small, practice holding your tongue or stand back from the thing.

As much as ever now there’s no getting past how she slid with aplomb not a corkscrew but an apple into his palm.

There’s come-ons, and come-ons and then some. His comeback was winsome. There’s no thanks, and no-thanks-but-frisky — If that makes me Adam, then you must be ...

AIFRIC MAC AODHA 467 an chéad phlaic I seile an sciatháin leathair, tá ceimiceán a choisceann an fhuil ar théachtadh: De nádúr an ainmhí é gur luaithe tál ná téarnamh.

468O POETRY the first mouthful There’s a chemical in bats’ saliva that stops our blood congealing. The animal in us puts giving before healing.

AIFRIC MAC AODHA 469 an dara plaic Ba gheall le moladh an dara priocadh: gur chaith tú uait gan chothrom fola

crúbáil na hoíche faoi sholas obann: tabhairt na doraidh go glé, dá dtabharfaí.

470O POETRY the second mouthful Praise be, you thought, when you gave up the ghost. But where’s the glory with no blood lost?

The nails of the night beneath a bare bulb: your challenge spotlit. Now take it up.

AIFRIC MAC AODHA 471 an tríú plaic, nó ath-quoof i Aithníonn sé faoin am seo, an fear i do theannta, nach ligtear as do cheann iad, na cuimhní cinn a roinntear, go mbíodh colúir theachtaireachta aige féin is a athair is go ndéanaidís blaoscanna uibhe a théamh chun gob an éin a neartú. Thug is tugann leat, an taom a bhuail an buachaill,

é ag fanacht in oirchill is na blaoscáin á róstadh, gur fhág sé faoin teas rófhada iad — d’aon turas — a chroí ina bhéal aige — le teann spóirt, b’fhéidir, féachaint, dá ainneoin féin, mar a bheadh acu

dá bpléascadh blaosc san oigheann air.

472O POETRY the third mouthful (quoof: slight return i) Pillow-talker, as you’d be the first to admit, a cat let out of the bag won’t go back in. Now she’s up to speed on how you and your dad used eggshells to harden the beaks of your pigeons, nodding off over them, billing and cooing,

waiting for the shells to roast. Once you left them under the heat on purpose, for devilment maybe — come on, come on — curious what might happen

if left in too long.

AIFRIC MAC AODHA 473 an ceathrú plaic nó ath-quoof ii Aithníodh sé thairis — leathchéile na cuilte, nach slogadh gan chogaint í, an chuimhne cinn leathoilte.

Súil siar is túisce a bhuaileann an sprioc: an buachaill nach gcodlaíodh nuair ba thrúig oilc an tost.

Níorbh fhéidir a shuaimhniú go gcloiseadh fead na traenach: má bhí tiománaí ina dhúiseacht, ní raibh sé ina aonar.

474O POETRY the fourth mouthful (quoof: slight return ii) Something else to chew on besides the tales he’s spun: he should recognize, no matter where, his duvet twin.

For the boy keeping watch when sleep would be nobler, the place to look may be over his shoulder.

Who can’t rest until the train whistle blows: if the driver is out there he can’t be alone.

AIFRIC MAC AODHA 475 iarfhocal Bhí a fhios aici, an bhean sin, nárbh ionann súil is éisteacht. Is d’admhódh de chogar claon gur fhadaigh tost an béaldath.

Sop préacháin a deirtí le bean a chaitheadh fear uaidh, píosa tuí a d’ardaigh an ghaoth nuair nár oir go beacht don éinín.

476O POETRY afterword Well she knew that holding an eye isn’t having an ear; and beyond that she knew how silence improves lipstick.

A woman a man drops is called a crow’s wisp: something the wind takes when a bird lets it slip.

Translated from the Irish by David Wheatley

AIFRIC MAC AODHA 477 martin dyar

The Donnellys

Someone in an accent of seduction whispered salmon. Then someone filled a bucket up with sleep.

Mermaidism in the Donnelly house was five sisters deep.

478O POETRY alan gillis

Flat White Afternoon

Forget about it for you’ll never win, never hit the jackpot, move in to a solar-powered eco mansion and modest philanthropy, become a panjandrum of diaphanous pleasures but must sink or swim beneath mood- mutable skies, coconut milk clouds, in the shadow of high flats, low sales, bright fronts, strung crowds of literally miraculous people in expensive skin like bed sheets you would wrap yourself in and which you now touch lightly as you enter this café past a clutch of mitching schoolgirls with pierced noses and Tintin hairdos who look at you as if to say is it dial-a-dickhead day in here? or maybe that’s aimed instead

ALAN GILLIS 479 at the guy eating flatbread with five thousand friends on his phone who types with a grin

all is well with the world, when all is not well with the world —

the burden of debt as your granny might say heavy as sin — although who would begrudge this incense of crushed coffee in steam this clatter and chatter latex flowers under halogen lights and who’d demean that woman with her small child wiping the small child’s chin to the delight of a lonely well-off older person or w.o.o.p. — I believe they call them woopies — at the next table over who scoops two shaking spoons of sugar into a steaming cup then begins to call her son Oh my lost Son asking after her granddaughter while the mitching girls

480O POETRY swagger out the door — look, one forgot her phone — ah good, someone caught her — and who would begrudge the yin and yang of this moment sitting here coming or going anyone and no one here or somewhere else stuck nowhere and flowing in the mix like everyone for you are blurring below indigo and ink-dim skies as time passes by like steam vapors into the run-of-the-mill gray coat you put on pausing, before leaving to meet this falling day which as your granny might say is the only day you’re in.

ALAN GILLIS 481 To Be Young and in Love in Middle Ireland

The girl from the satellite town holds berries in the fast stream supermarket queue. She carries her longing like a stream of song, her melody a body over the boundary of what is solid and what flows.

The guys in the depression- hit town are tripping in the fruit aisle. Falling for her berry lightness they slip out from their outlines. One guy says she takes the form of a dream, or the dream of a form.

On the page of the regional night berries pulse like the notes of a song in the stream. The girl who sheds the skin of her longing escapes into more longing.

In a dream on the margins of town one of the guys hears a girl sing, her voice like strings, a basket of ripe berries floating into the night on a stream.

The girl, the guy, in derelict bedrooms hear lucent songs undressing,

482O POETRY streaming from their outlines through the boundaries of town wrapping around them the scent of fresh berries.

And I was the guy and the girl was within the page of the town ever, over, after, never, the song long, long, long, long. The stream is slipped as the ground you stand on.

Build houses out of song. The berries are undressing. The stream is long, gone, long. The girl dreams a form of dream, or forms a dream of form: the boundaries of song in the night undressed as a stream in the morning.

ALAN GILLIS 483 Nuggets

Emptied, precious, querulous, frail, a box of butter biscuits by the bedside, dun pills in a pale plastic tray, your grandmother lies in her tiny bones and mumbles, mysterious, while you say nothing, barely thirteen, blank as the day.

You were to keep an eye on her breathing, her little bones heaving, and your eyes scan figurines, mementos on the windowsill — Little Bo Peep has lost her head — and green fields through the window: hay barns, small farms, a chicken battery shed.

Bwwaaakk! Buck-back-bock-buckaaaakk! Rows upon rows of chickens. There was a funnel hung from a gibbet that swung like a big steel conical conundrum above their dun feathers — the color of your grandmother’s tights scrumpled on the floor.

Even a year before, she would have swooned for shame at the sight of those tights half-trailed under her bed, their crinkled wee ankles jouking out, as if they had crawled under and tipped their wrinkled cargo into the void — your grandmother in bed, waiting for the spoon.

Her weak breath does not reach heaven but hazes among the chipped figurines, the dull color television’s black screen, fading flesh-colored flowers on the wall- paper, dun as the wings of those dirt-crusted rows upon rows of throbbing chickens.

484O POETRY When you dropped one into the funnel its head pushed through that blood-rimmed O to stare chicken-eyed at the other side, blackened numbles and giblets upon which it would soon stream like warm port, its feet still in a fidget.

What gets passed on, through generations? Your grandmother tries to speak. Her bony fingers clutch your hand — and you bend your head down. But you’d get more sense from the sea in a seashell as your father enters the room beaming, Well! Well?

ALAN GILLIS 485 ciaran berry

Liner Notes

Because this song’s made of the airwaves a time machine, you start to play the air guitar of memory, making a country so you can walk back into it, like a man on rewind in a silent film, his whiskey tumbler filling up again as he rises from his stool and steps backwards towards the avenue, where the cars, cabs, trucks reverse away from him, and the lights, for once, turn amber to green; where the two hands on his watch unravel time, like a maiden aunt unpicking a whole evening’s worth of knitting over the dropped stitch that means she must go back before she can go on. You raise the record from its sleeve again, hold it grail-like into the wayward light to read the liner notes on a life you’ve lived all wrong. Wind in the sycamores outside, rain coming down in a town you left behind and not this one, where the backward longing can strike you anytime — breath on the nape of your neck when you’re the only one in line, cat with a broken spine dragging itself off into the undergrowth to die. Where the silence might give way to a high-hat or snare drum, the lub-dub of the bass, a brass section. After a long absence, you take up the thread again, take up the line, what you listen for, try not to listen for, stirring the tiny hairs within your inner ear, weighting the wet tip of your tongue, like the scuff and fumble of the blind needle finding its way from silence to the first track on side one. You nod your head “yes.” You sing along. You tap the steering wheel of the car in which you pass under a strobe of stars, a quarter moon,

486O POETRY until, despite yourself, you are sixteen again and walking home in a downpour with your Ken Dodd quiff, your flowers of sulfur, toward the box of records from which you’ll pick a tune to name the afternoon. Its scattered showers with a chance of sunny spells later, its gust and bluster from Rathlin to Cape Clear. This one would sound good in a stadium. It’s all guitar shimmer, tremolo arm, a chorus that staggers smitten toward the open bar. This one’s a plea, a paean on just six strings until the horns cut in, like the bully at a prom. It recalls the taste of cigarettes and bubblegum on the tongue of the first girl you ever kissed. All broken glass and bruised finger, its swoon circles forever the turntable in that blue room where you fed and watered every slight and scar. And so you’d like to thank the engineer, his assistant who provides the harmonies and made the tea; the trumpet player, his spit still wet in the mouth of a solo that the vinyl keeps pristine, black box recorder to your submerged plane. The singer with a bone stuck in her throat, which is another way to say “longing.” The producer, who fills in on Hammond organ. You could go on like this, lost in the noise again, in your baroque joy at what was and is, and what the words become, talking to yourself in the second person, as if you’re fooling anyone, reading the liner notes on a life you measure song by song.

CIARAN BERRY 487 The Death of Elvis

This lip, too, used to curl a little easier, and we, all of us, must enter our Vegas years.

Blessed the pacemakers, blessed the painkillers, blessed our famed quiffs grown flyaway, grown thin,

the gray starting to sprout under the dye. So much to hide beneath the spit and mascara.

So much to powder puff and trim. Nose hairs, for instance, and sideburns, the skin seasick

as we’re made to play dress-up one final time. A daughter’s bracelet slipped over a wrist,

and, for the ring finger, a lightning bolt ring. How far we venture from a love of peanut butter

and Wonder Bread, how far from a Stutz Bearcat and Kahlil Gibran. From codeine, meperidine,

diazepam, the room with the teddy bears and the empty syringe. How far

from the last book we dived into to learn about sexual positions and astrological signs.

And far, too, from the myth of our baritones coming alive in Tupelo, of how we could turn on

and off the rain. “That’s the way the mop flops,” I think he’d say, as they lay him out flat

under the chandelier, then in the limousine. “That’s the way the mop flops,” as five men

488O POETRY enter his mausoleum with water, cement, and a wheelbarrow full of sand,

the instruments set down, the stage lights dimmed, “Thank you very much! Goodnight, Graceland.”

CIARAN BERRY 489 victoria kennefick

Paris Syndrome

The Eiffel Tower erected itself in my head, we couldn’t find the lifts, climbed the stairs.

Of course there were fireworks.

We stared at each other, rare exhibits in the Louvre — you licked my Mona Lisa smile right off.

Of course we were both in imaginary Chanel.

We drank warm cider and ate pancakes, yours flambéed. I got drunk, my tights laddered on both legs.

Of course we experienced tachycardia at the Moulin Rouge.

Our hotel, a boxed macaron on a navy boulevard — we spun around in the dark outside, rain-dizzy.

Of course we slept at the Ritz.

Our little room tucked into the corner, a pink pocket you slipped into that night.

Of course our fingers hunted for change.

In the mirrored elevator I couldn’t meet your eye, I crushed you into the laminated sample menu and died.

Of course it was only la petite mort.

490O POETRY The Preacher’s Daughter

We drink too much pineapple rum, straight from the bottle, bitch about the red-haired girl, the fetish model, a preacher’s daughter with a thing for unreasonable shoes.

From her faded patchwork quilt, bleeding hearts, we watched her mutate into a PVC Alice Liddell. How did she manage in seven-inch patent heels?

She was tall as wheat — or the ceiling was low. Cradling a mewing ginger-ball, she kissed the mirror where their confederate-blue eyes matched. Three scars began to scab on her arm, deep big-cat scrawls she told us she cut herself because it’s art and her clients like her that way. We followed her clip-clop down the rabbit hole; me, to hear tales of her running track in those shoes; you, to see her white skin even paler under lights. Back in your dorm room, I am static. You pay to watch her pixelated Snow White online; complain her constant chatter ruined it, or her, for you.

VICTORIA KENNEFICK 491 john mcauliffe

From “Home, Again”

swans The arc of the driveway is what’s left, where someone built a house and tended a lake to walk beside, discussing politics and how a tree moves in the wind. Its music is a jetty drifting away from the boathouse whose rolled-shut metal door tricks visitors into thinking it holds a life raft.

The house drifts beyond its purpose, is demolished for a car park and picnics and returns in a special room, small, sturdy, becoming anonymous as its windows empty, enormous insects swanning around — they own the place — occasionally stunning themselves on the glass.

492O POETRY secretarial The country, sometimes, still appears to ask to just be taken down, even by a tourist, on no one’s side, a tourist lost at home, blue book open, ticking off each task. But when old Colin, in pajamas, explained how I could evade the barbed and electric wire that fenced off fields and the bull let loose to scare the stranger off (I’d stopped to ask for directions), I was ready to wade through cowshit and knee-high grass to see if the poet, long abroad, was written in the ruin’s native life.

Colin stopped me then, leaning on the open door of the Renault — noting first the English registration I’d parked outside his roadside bungalow, and said his father hated that his mother called him Colin, but he’s the one who stuck it out. No one, it seems he had to tell me this, no one belonging to them ever had to go over to England, a sally he follows up with a question about where I live, before naming the man on whose land the castle rested: we do nothing, he says, but damage what we inherited, bulldozing the medieval church and causing the collapse of the foxhole the settler and his family used, legend has it, to make, under a smoldering fire, their escape. This new heir has his eye on the castle, no doubt. It will soon be more literature than history. We are not all the same, he said. I recall, at the edge of the clearing, the grant’s nice clause saying the poet had a right to possess new areas discovered by his survey ... To belong, a moment’s authority is nothing.

JOHN MCAULIFFE 493 michael mckimm

Watermark

From a microlight, the Owens River, cut and siphoned to an aqueduct: a corridor through banks of trees, into scuffed desert dunes, mountains scaling to the right, to the left dry veins in the valley, saline and pink, the water channeled slowly through scatch grass, under dirt tracks and fences, twenty miles, thirty — black line turning silver in midday sun, dipping beneath the roar of Route 395 into the shade of the alkaline hills. It zigzags past farms, arcs around quarries, swipes the bar code of a glinting new town, the alien discs of pivot irrigation growing sunflowers, roses, and corn. Then follows the highway, just after Big Pine, rejoins the river north of Fish Springs, is diverted again, south of the reservoir —

And does water care, if it’s river or aqueduct? Its vessel curved concrete, but the same constant flow, gunneling south, hugging the contours of eastern Sierra, past Independence, the airport, the golf course, along the right hand of Owens’ dry lake bed, red swirling dust clouds kept down by sprinklers. From up in the air the twin Haiwee Reservoir is knuckle and knee joint where the line disappears — becomes pipeline and conduit under the desert, punching for groundwater, surfacing riveted over Mojave, two hundred miles on from its native cradle, gray zombie spring tracing through forest to Santa Clarita, the treatment plant:

494O POETRY the last reserve and loud cascades above the lights and life of Los Angeles.

MICHAEL MCKIMM 495 caoilinn hughes

Boundary Condition

From the platform, iron iterates way into time. The tracks are staples intervaled along my father’s spine.

Before me might be somebody’s father, waited for — white choker of a condor, dry lips of lifelong acolyte.

I barely brush his arm, so as not to make him start. Who knows how he might play out: cave in, tear apart?

He deeds toward me, wet wood breakable. All in all of direst bark. This is how it starts, at last, I recall.

“I thought you were someone, otherwise.” The rail lines rattle like beetle files.

He frowns. Establishes his palms. “Tell me. Does that happen often, lamb?”

496O POETRY billy ramsell

Sound

To Norbert Valath

To render the ocean one needs a whole year with Zoom in freezing fingers on a quarter-mile of coast. Sound is the one true vocabulary of nature and not the peacock-palette painters swear he uses for his best stuff, for his daily disposable frescoes. To render the ocean one needs a whole year on the quayside tracking the tide’s increasing stature, its drones and climaxes, the diminuendo when it shows sound is the one true vocabulary of nature.

Nature plays bass clarinet in a Barcelona pop-up theatre. In a polo neck he solos the ocean. He tongues, he blows to render the ocean. One needs a whole year or centuries to capture even its least-most feature: like the boat-cove’s lapping, backwashed contraflows. Sound is the one true vocabulary of Nature, who’s lost in his MacBook, applying filter after filter to this day-long rock-pool’s jazz, its stadium of echoes. To render its ocean one needs a whole year: sound is the one true vocabulary of nature.

BILLY RAMSELL 497 Things No Longer There

I gcead do Kobus Moolman

Poor deleted Tarragona, our city of bonfires. Our city of casual drug use and vinyl that’s been consigned to the archive of snow.

What what what’s missing, what’s conspicuous by its absence from the main square and its tributaries: the future perfect or future con- tinuous?

I can’t find that beautiful thing you asked me for. I can’t find my memory of making it.

When that device was triggered in Placa del Pi at first no one noticed anything. But then the different parts of speech began to shrivel and petrify, to disappear completely; interjections, measure words gone within a fortnight.

We’d open our mouths to utter them but nothing.

Shortly after that came the battalions, marching in ebony lockstep across a border we’d misplaced, had long ago forgotten ever existed.

They just appeared one Sunday in their expressionless squadrons, they appeared like chimes solidifying in their obsidian fatigues.

They occupied Jew Hill, the barracks, the Generality.

By then all the hard-edged abstract words had rotted, had grown incontinent and squelching, as the canker advanced with terminal facility from diamantine epidermis to pulpy interior.

No plums anymore.

When they come they come in the predawn to confiscate recollec- tion, targeting random apartments in the sour-milk light, each wears

498O POETRY a helmet.

No sausages. No tannled twisters. None of those lavender-remem- bering pears I’d bring in baskets for you every October.

They’re unscrewing the street signs on Patrick Street and Dennn Street.

Your clean, cedar-hinting scent, your scent of

I can’t find my memory of

they can’t

BILLY RAMSELL 499 stephen connolly

Fianaise Bhréagach

In September 1607 the village of Fianaise Bhréagach was hit by an unidentified disease, taking the lives of all the villagers. The village was razed and official records expunged. In 2007 an account written by the local undertaker was found buried in the roots of a tree in the quarantined village’s square which unearthed details of this disaster.

They sent a horse along the roads to say our town had been closed in, its bloodied hooves had been unshod. The shoes were kept to save the iron

or bless the fate of those who stayed across the glens or down the coast. This horse’s message came our way while sentries occupied their posts,

the note was tied around its neck declaring death was soon to reach where all would feel its fevered knock: the butcher’s shop, the mill, the church.

The hardest village men played tough until the store of ale ran dry; the women stopped their mouths with cloth and held their husbands as they died.

Disease took hold with sudden force. We thought that we could hush the moans so skinned and burned the flagging horse and let the fire consume its bones.

My children’s skin turned cold and flushed. Acquainted as I was with death I saw their end and held their trust so cut their throats and sucked their breath.

I dug their graves and then some more.

500O POETRY “And then the sun”

i.m.

And then the sun came slicing sideways, clear water reflecting it, giving it slant. A gloss of rain so quick and light that day hardly made a sound. The thought of sheets hung out and drying on the line, of seeds in soil and soil itself, the glutting ends of stems of leaves that will them to let fall up and out and through the trees, the shape that shoots could take, of you and this moment as it happens: our echoing hush as we try to hold the close music of the blackbird in the bush.

•

And then the sun continued on. Lough Neagh cooled under the firm keels of fishing boats on the water’s taut skin, their painted hulls in pointed arcs an emblem of balance so finely wrought that they could tell the weight of light or air.

Each night we walk along the shore, expecting still to find your sturdy figure waist-deep in waders, plumbing darkness, hauling it in, but never again your grip on the reel and never again the deft music of the blackbird nesting in your hand.

STEPHEN CONNOLLY 501 ailbhe ní ghearbhuigh

Filleadh ón Antartach

Cloiseann sé fós é: díoscán an oighir, tormáil i bhfad uaidh, ciúnas an tsneachta.

Is cuimhin leis go fóill an t-aer úr a shlogadh, an dá scamhóg aige glanta, fuacht naofa ag beannú a chnis.

Thug sé grá a chroí don ghoimh gheal, don díseart tostach don tírdhreach glan.

Ach b’éigean dó filleadh ar an taiseacht is ar an mbaile. Bhí air cúl a thabhairt don mbáine.

Is iomaí oíche a iarrann a bhean air go caoin an chistin a fhágaint is dul léi a luí.

Is aoibhinn leis uaigneas an tsileáin ón sconna. Is ceol aige srannán an reoiteora:

Nótaí doimhne á seimint go mall, Gliúscáil ochlánach a labhair le gach ball dá bheo.

502O POETRY Return from Antarctica

He can still hear it: the glaciers rasping, their ratcheting in the distance, the snow-quiet.

And still he remembers gulping unsullied freshness to clarify his lungs, the holy coldness blessing his skin.

He gave his heart to that stinging brightness, that taciturn redoubt, that uncluttered country.

But no choice except a return to dampness and home. He had to turn his back on blankness.

On so many nights his wife asks him tentatively to abandon the kitchen and join her upstairs.

He loves the irregular loneliness of each tap-drip and it’s music to him the refrigerator’s drone: basso profundo slow in the recital, grinding sighs that call out to his being’s every melting element.

AILBHE NÍ GHEARBHUIGH 503 Conriocht

Chonac smólach marbh sa choill é seargtha ar an screablach. Bhíos ag déanamh trua de nuair a tháinig madraí de rúid is thugadar ruathar fúm ag snapadh, ag glamadh agus drant orthu. Uaimse do tháinig liúbhéic, gach bagairt is buille coise: Bhí ina bhúirchath eadrainn. Chorraigh na ba sna goirt is chuireadar leis an gcór allta. Theith lucha is dallóga fraoigh isteach faoin doire donn, sheas madra rua ar shiolpa, a cholainn iomlán righin. Chuimhníos ar mo choisíocht; bhí ceithre chrúb fúm.

504O POETRY Werewolf

I saw a thrush-corpse shriveling on the woodland’s scrabbly floor. I was busy pitying it when there came a harrying pack of strays that set about me; they bayed and snapped, growling bare-toothed. From my throat such roaring; my every curse and foot-swing made a bellow-war between us. Fields of agitated cattle augmented that wild choir. Mice and shrewmice shrunk back into the oakleaf brown interior as a fox reared upward on a stony ridge, its stance utterly rigid. I remembered to run, felt the four paws under me.

Translated from the Irish by Billy Ramsell

AILBHE NÍ GHEARBHUIGH 505 michelle o’sullivan

A Sound Box

Down, unequal weight on his haunches and the rain driving his shirt sideways, his legs are as rigid as the stone and timber that props him up. Ears, half-opened lips slurred to bits; a head no longer able to troubleshoot the broken glass inside him.

•

Wiry treetops are blacker. The after-rain light diffused to near neon-gray. There was a boy seen by neighbors running the width of the field. One said he disappeared — as if he fell headlong into the horizon. Another said it wasn’t a boy, but a hart. Next to nothing left where Evans was found, but there was a sound box, some thing in which his soul made itself felt.

506O POETRY Bespoke

Early April and there’s a light-footed feel. Nothing troubles from the darkened underbrush, and the sun’s late beauty daubs the green wood with yellows.

As if for you, a thrush rills, blue pieces of silver that will dry like watermarks. Almost delicate, the hour around seven, a blown-glass bowl, edgeless and honed, made bespoke.

Yet somewhere inside this evening hour, a man refutes: his fist will not burden the kitchen table. A wintered heart, hard as a knot of holly.

MICHELLE O’SULLIVAN 507 miriam gamble

Marine Snow

The memory of sun, it is what they subsist upon down where the jaws snap blindly at whatever passes, where drifter is a meaningless term

and to hunt is to proffer teeth and tongue and ghost-lit lantern into a sea like liquid wind, without prior compass of the way the wind is blowing.

Should they be gifted with a corpse whose half-spoilt flesh holds distillate eternal summers spent glittering in the euphotic zone, they will give gross thanks and, in their way, be holy.

In the cartography of sea, they are kin not to dragons nor the Stella Maris but to your own bright band —

yes, you there, eating your sunlight secondhand from a long-gone grocery display, drinking it from the guts of lazy lemons.

508O POETRY paul perry

From “The Ghosts of Barnacullia”

October and the rain is warm the light moving across the water’s surface is there and not there like a voice you remember say your mother’s youthful as once she was on a day like this embracing the sunshine breaking through or watching it trace between her fingertips so real you can almost believe again in the silence between you, her breath on your cheek while you lay ill in bed and in only a moment a bell is ringing or your father is singing in the kitchen about strangers and without even an echo or the echo of an echo all of this is gone and we’re walking again to the Hellfire Club or the Sugar Loaf, it’s Sunday there’s not much traffic, and on the hills as you run twigs, and small black pellets are vanishing beneath your feet

PAUL PERRY 509 Shepherd’s Purse

In the field — shepherd’s purse:

to be seen even in the dark.

Think on it — after the gravel paths, after the roads — uneven and achingly long, across the cold promise the border makes to a sloping field, to a ditch.

A ditch like any other. A ditch I have known — since.

Imagine them: green, slender, from crown to root, a rosette of radical leaves, smooth, arrow-shaped and above them numerous small, white, inconspicuous flowers.

There was no need to ask the man to kneel but he did, as if he were going to beg forgiveness, which he did not, nor did he ask for his life.

He named his children and his wife, murmured to his own private God.

Overhead, there was the sound of pine shifting,

the moon winnowing in the distance. So, nothing terrible about the night then, if you do not count the earth tilting, or the sound in the undergrowth of a passage from this world to the next.

More than that I remember the flat-seed pouch:

510O POETRY weed some call it, as if to flourish and seed in the poorest soil is to be just that.

They are everywhere now — it seems to me, populating my field of vision like a generative disease, an affliction.

Look: a man walks into a field. A field with shepherd’s purse.

He falls. He falls again. Every day, from this day until kingdom come, he falls into the embrace of a field of flowers, into shepherd’s purse.

PAUL PERRY 511 caitríona o’reilly

The Airship Era

They’d barely emerged from the deep-green forests of that epauletted century. Geraniums bloomed on windowsills in Heidelberg. Student princes eyed the tavern keeper’s daughter through the blond foam of their tankards. The future must have seemed weightless as it came nosing through the clouds, smooth as a biblical fish throwing its giant shadow on the sea floor, its thin gold-beater’s skin pressed back against its ribs, cloche-hatted women in fox furs waving through its observation windows. Composed of too much

dream stuff to be echt matériel, shoals of them congregated silently over London in the moon’s dark phases, concealed above clouds. Their crews were unnerved by crackling blue halos; eerie lightning shot from frostbitten fingers as they lowered spy baskets on trapeze wires below the cloud cover, taking careful soundings, then dropped their antique payloads on the gaping population. Those whom they did not kill scarcely believed in them, improbable contraptions the parchment-yellow color of old maps,

vessels a rational traveler might have chosen, a half-century earlier, to pursue daft, round-the-world steampunk wagers. But for them — the gilded aerialists in their giant dirigibles — the world remained a storybook unfolding endlessly in signs and wonders, over which they drifted in stylish accidie; leviathan hunters, relaxed as Victorian naturalists. And up there everything looked different: the borders absurd, the people in their witch-fearing villages as out-of-date as peasants in a medieval breviary. The mountains, too, seemed surpassable,

offering an alternative angle on the sublime. Occasionally there was concern: a tear in the fabric, hooked to a typhoon’s tail above the China Sea,

512O POETRY or harried by storms across the Atlantic. But how lighter than air they were. They did not understand, as they fell continually upwards, how the nature of the element was the price of their rising: the assiduous atom seeking an exit, thronging the fabric of their cells. Witness was the privilege of the many: newsreels captured the death of a star and — oh the humanity! — its last leisurely plummet in fire, its ashen armature.

CAITRÍONA O’REILLY 513

COMMENT

thomas mccarthy

Poetry and the Memory of Fame

I once felt quite famous as a poet. Indeed, now that I think of it, I have felt famous twice. These two periods of really unsettling fame came back to me recently as I dealt with a young poet at the lending desk of the public library where I’ve worked for over thirty years. The young poet had been coming into my city-center branch for over a year, dropping grease-stained envelopes stuffed with five or six po- ems and then returning a few days later to listen to my responses to his raw and energetic work. But there was this one morning when we’d had a very strenuous, useful exchange of ideas around his im- proving technique. In that pause when a conversation just ends and an older poet adroitly excuses himself, the young man suddenly said to me: “You know so much about poetry; you read it so closely. Have you ever thought of writing anything yourself?” At first, I didn’t know what to say. Should I recite the titles of my eleven published books, including eight collections of poems? Should I be angry with this world that doesn’t know who I am? What the hell was he doing, handing me these regular tasks in poetry, if he didn’t know that I was already an old codger in the world of Southern Irish letters? But I did ask him why he chose me and he explained that one of my library col- leagues told him that I was interested in poetry, that he should show me his work. He turned away and left. Soon after, I was transferred to another branch library in a faraway suburb — my last posting be- fore I retired early to write full time — so we never met again. And he didn’t seek me out, so he must have quickly found another helpful, anonymous reader. But his lack of recognition, or, rather, my umbrage at not being recognized, has made me think of the way our names ebb and flow, in and out of “fame,” over a lifetime. What does it feel like to be recognized, to be made famous by persistent attention? Yes, I do re- member very clearly the first time that I felt carried away, catapulted onward by a force larger than my own life. I was just sixteen years old at the time. It was in the spring of 1970 and I’d had my first poems published in the local high school magazine. I received a letter, sent to me through my English teacher, from a mysterious Anglo-Irish aristocrat who lived in a grand mansion just three miles from my

THOMAS MCCARTHY 517 school. The letter praised my poems and invited me to take tea in this gentleman’s library. A chauffeur-driven Mercedes was dispatched to the school gate and I was driven off to my first encounter with the aristocracy, chauffeured by Tommy, who was once a rear gun- ner in a Lancaster bomber. “The master thinks yer poems are grand,” Tommy said to me, “he’s mighty interested in meetin’ a fellow writer from the neighborhood.” I can see now that he was trying not to burst out laughing. I was met at the door of the eighteenth-century mansion by a formally-attired butler and led into a magnificent library that contained twenty thousand volumes of mainly Slavic texts. The literary gentleman was W.E.D. Allen, a former British diplomat and spy-catcher, former Unionist-Conservative Member for West Belfast in the Imperial Parliament of the twenties, former editor of the thirties Fascist magazine The Blackshirt, author of the best history of the Georgian people published in the English lan- guage (according to Laurens van der Post in his autobiography, Yet Being Someone Other), author of Caucasian Battlefelds, The Ukraine, and Problems of Turkish Power in the Sixteenth Century. This seventy- year-old aristocratic scholar climbed down from the gallery of his two-story high bookshelves and introduced me to his fourth wife, a quiet Australian nurse who’d come to take care of his dying third wife, Natasha Maximovna, who had been the ikon-restorer daughter of a Moscow surgeon. Mr. Allen’s first wife had been the debutante daughter of the Earl of Lovelace, a woman who’d probably been the basis for the globe-trotting character Amber, the love interest in Allen’s pseudonymously published 1936 spy novel, Strange Coast. These details I discovered later. Though the penniless son of a country postman, I wasn’t in the least intimidated or impressed by this ménage. After all I was a poet from a small town that was famous for its poets — “Ah, Cappoquin of the poets,” was how the venerable Máire Mhac an tSaoí addressed me when we were first introduced. I assumed instinctively all the social status that the title “poet” confers in Ireland. I argued furious- ly about Irish history and poetry with the assembled company that included two Russian scholars and two directors from Barings mer- chant bank in London (my Mr. Allen, as I discovered from various editions of Who’s Who in the local library, was a director of several public corporations and a member of gentlemen’s clubs, including Bucks and Cavendish in London, the Kildare Street Club in Dublin, and Cercle d’Orient in Istanbul). After several lively hours I left the

518O POETRY house with a borrowed leather-bound copy of Lermontov’s poems. In the years that followed I was chauffeured back and forth across the Irish countryside, carrying manila folders full of handwritten poems, as if to the manor born. Although I didn’t even possess a typewrit- er I thought it the most natural thing in the world for a poet to be chauffeur-driven, pampered by butlers, petted by elderly aristocratic ladies with bald Chihuahuas in their handbags. The novelist Muriel Spark, a houseguest, set fire to one of my execrable poems with her long cigarette. She kissed me and begged forgiveness. A few years later she had a falling-out with her publisher over the ownership of a horse. The novelist Molly Keane, another expert on Irish horses who was then quietly accumulating the material for Good Behaviour, the novel that would make her famous for a second time, listened re- spectfully while I dissected the politics in her forties Irish novel, Two Days in Aragon. At the dinner table, a director of the National Gallery sought my opinion on Paul Henry’s paintings. I informed him that Mr. Henry was color-blind. The daughter of a former British ambas- sador to Moscow presented me with a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl: it was a most singular introduction to American culture. All assembled agreed that America under Nixon had gone to the dogs, that Vietnam would fall to the friends of Claud Cockburn, a Communist gentle- man who lived in another mansion in a little village nearby; and that Russian tanks would reach the outskirts of Paris before the winter of 1974. All were convinced that the future of civilization lay in some small, tax-efficient European principality like Monaco or, perhaps (if Tito could become agreeable), in the apartment of some exiled princess in Montenegro. Dry martinis and old-fashioneds, peach champagne and Hennessy Cognac all floated around the lacquered Russian antiques and Ottoman prints: this was certainly the life for a poet. My imagination became saturated with the materials of their cosmopolitan politics. If this was the life of a writer I was signed up for the duration. Also a houseguest in this lovely, not at all crumbling, Anglo-Irish mansion was Terence de Vere White, literary editor of the vener- able Irish Times. By the time I was seventeen years old I had my first poem published in the Irish Times’ famous Saturday Page. After that I became insufferable and unteachable with vanity. My school grades went slowly downhill as I studied less and less — I was simply too busy in the high society now offered by the life of a poet. A drying wind of fame blew and blew and blew: my name was called again and

THOMAS MCCARTHY 519 again in the most seductive aristocratic voices. I was a poet who had risen from the serfs and they were all smitten like Moscow boyars. To be petted continuously was simply adorable and I fell languidly into undergraduate life in the nearest city, Cork. I tried to do as little as possible and succeeded. But Mr. Allen died suddenly while I was at college and his house and library were auctioned off to strangers before I could claim back the two books I’d lent him. By then I’d found another poet-adoring aristocrat, the grandson of Ireland’s pre- mier peer, the Duke of Leinster. I moved my books into a wing of his beautiful shooting lodge inside thirty acres of woodland, organized the garden, the kitchen, the rental payments from a tenant farmer, the hanging and lighting of priceless Jacob Bogdani paintings. I held my own court for poet-friends by the Adam chimneypiece, beneath the beautiful portrait of his mother, Inez, Lady FitzGerald. My po- ems were dispatched regularly to the London offices of the exclusive stockbroking firm of Panmure Gordon where he was a partner. They were typed in triplicate by a secretary called Miss Kent and returned to me. Lloyd’s Log of underwriting names as well as the Times Literary Supplement became my weekend reading. My manuscripts, at least, were having an international life. All went well. I tended the gentle- man’s acres and wrote poems — poems that were slowly, very slowly, becoming less and less terrible. Then, in late 1977, the second blessed wind of fame blew open the windows of my writing life, which had become more settled and routine. It was a phone call, as often happens. My parents, like many working-class couples in seventies Ireland, couldn’t afford a phone, so the call came to me through a neighbor who was the lo- cal fire-chief. I jumped over three garden walls to reach his hall- way and heard, for the first time, the voice of an excited journalist. “Congratulations! You’ve won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. The judges, Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, and John Ryan, loved your work. We need to get a photographer to you straight away. Would you be prepared for interviews before five this evening? We want to run it in the Sunday papers, in all editions.” A full-page broadsheet feature interview with me on my twenty-seven poems was published in that Sunday Independent, followed by my photograph in every na- tional newspaper on Monday morning. This was the very beginning of seven years of sheer wonder, years that would be full of interviews and photographers, of invitations and introductions, of readings and wild reviews — and of three collections, The First Convention, The

520O POETRY Sorrow Garden, and The Non-Aligned Storyteller that filled my youth with undeserved honor. Less than a year after the first award I was descending the steps of a United Airlines jet into the suffocating heat of an Iowa August, a sojourn where I would share an apartment with the legendary Pakistani Lenin Peace Prize-winner, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and the Greek short-story writer Dimitris Nollas. I walked up and down South Dubuque Street with Paul Engle as he reminisced about the Irish poets he’d hired for his famous workshop, the gifted and unreliable, the puritan and the licentious. In Prairie Lights bookstore I found two American books that would set my heart ablaze with envy of their beauty, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery and Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See by Marvin Bell. I came back to Ireland to write the poems that only Ireland can force one to write: the grandson of the Duke of Leinster sent a car to Shannon to collect me. But in Iowa, at the International Writing Program, I had encoun- tered the modern and this had punctured the balloon of the hermetic aristocracy. I tried to settle down to a more modern and humiliating ordinary life in the city library. But in those years, when I was still only in my mid-twenties, work was just an interlude of rest between flights; for when you’re young and suddenly visible the world ab- solutely adores you. It literally wants to eat you. I fell into bed each night shredded by attention. It is truly impossible to explain, but it is bigger than any personal strength that one can muster against it; one is simply carried along and constantly, youthfully, so ungrateful. Those were my two great encounters with fame: seven glorious years that have been followed by over two decades of a productive quiet. There is a time for everything, I think, and life is generally very wise. It comforts the poet who will listen. In general, most poets’ lives are lived in a measured obscurity, punctuated by the brief fris- sons of published books. That long quiet through middle age is like the reemergence of white space around the very first poems. That quiet brings wisdom and turns many lyric poets into novelists because they begin to see, as the late Frank O’Connor pointed out, those pat- terns of injustice and intrigue that fill even the most banal life. Early encounters with an aristocracy taught me that one can write poetry devoid of social purpose — that certain poetic projects can be sheer self-indulgence. Left alone, I fell into a companionship of eccentric reading, collecting every edition of a forgotten priest-writer of the nineteenth century — Francis Sylvester Mahony, or Father Prout, as he styled himself in his great published work, The Reliques of Father

THOMAS MCCARTHY 521 Prout, a book of essays that was reprinted every seven years through- out the nineteenth century. This priest’s most famous poem is “The Bells of Shandon,” sung by every sentimental Irish exile for over a hundred years — what the Irish exile did not know was that the work was part of a complex linguistic attack on Ireland’s national poet, Thomas Moore of Moore’s Irish Melodies. Mahony hated Moore and hated Daniel O’Connell, the two national heroes of Ireland. Hating them, and their fame, became his life’s work. You will find Mahony all over Joyce and Beckett — Stephen Dedalus’s father sings his praises and his songs in Portrait of the Artist; and Beckett sets the seduction of Miss Counihan upon the tomb of Father Prout in Murphy. The last thing Beckett did before he left Ireland was visit the tomb of Mahony in Shandon churchyard in Cork city. “I shall always be grateful to Father Prout, always,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to Miss Mitford in October, 1848. This was the kind of company my obscure Cork balladeer and essayist kept in London, Paris, and Florence. He was independently wealthy, flu- ent in French, Italian, Greek, and Latin, and he could do what he liked — which he did, between bouts of singing and whiskey drink- ing. How can knowing any of this be of any use to any poet of today, to any earnest contemporary reader of Poetry? I can only answer: Why, in the name of God, should everything be useful? Is it not pos- sible for me and for you to make poems out of completely useless information? These elements of useless information, these aristocra- cies of self-indulgence have filled over two decades of my quiet life in the public library; giving me two books of poetry that I am so proud to have written, Merchant Prince and The Last Geraldine Ofcer. Both books were beautifully designed by the late Tamasin Cole and ex- quisitely edited by Peter Jay at Anvil Press Poetry. “You do realize,” my wife Catherine warned me again and again, “that no one will understand a word of this stuff. There seems to be no purpose to it when every Irish poet is trying to address Ulster’s problems.” She was right — neither book climbed to the lower reaches of a national short list, never mind a literary prize. Oh, but the company I kept while they were being written! This high companionship of self-indulgence is hugely underrated in modern teaching. It needs to be taught again. Poetry, the best poet- ry, the most purposeful poetry, arises out of the fullness of the self. It is not the result of a given program, an agenda, a canon. The dynamic noise of a poetry workshop, its communal imperative, does compel

522O POETRY young poets to be clear rather than complex, to be social rather than desolate. But the best education in the poetic art must oscillate be- tween the two — between the need to dream fiercely and the need to communicate. Our personal temperament is an essential part of our technical equipment as poets: it is the one part of our equipment that we cannot teach to others, though many of us yearn to do so as we grow older. Our temperament is the thing that will die with us, leaving traces only in the best work. Technically — I mean from the standpoint of writing new poems — all the historic suffering of the Irish nation has no more moral weight than the anonymous cadaver on the dissecting table of Gottfried Benn. The materials available to a new poet are that simple, that open, that personal. Have courage, I would say to any new poet; have courage while your poem invites you into itself. This fullness of being — the vain clarity before a poem begins — must have been what the twenty-five-year-old André Gide meant when he wrote in his Journals:

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. Essential to remain between the two, close to madness when you dream and close to reason when you write.

In other words, the fullness of your self is available from the start: dig into it with your pen, exploit it. For poetry’s sake, keep dissect- ing the self until you find the infection that is interesting. Be open to technique, I advise younger poets; by all means, learn everything new that can be learned about a poetic effect, about what the phrases do when they are layered together on the page. Understand that a poetic tone shared and recognized across the English language is part of the Esperanto of our modern era — we search for a tone that reas- sures us of the author’s modernity. Far from avoiding new work from young writers, most editors yearn to find something new, yet some- thing with an assured and seriously polished tone. But temperament, the personal atmosphere of your life as a poet; that is something the gods have given you at birth — throw a security cordon around it — it is yours for life, through all the fame and, more usually, the persistent absence of fame. These matters of poetry and fame, of indulgence and willful obscu- rity, seem to be in the air again as I travel throughout Ireland. This year, 2015, has been designated by our government as the year to celebrate William Butler Yeats on the 150th anniversary of his birth — “Oho,

THOMAS MCCARTHY 523 noho,” as Samuel Beckett said to the Cork beggar who’d promised to say a prayer for him. Not that again. Not that there’s anything wrong with Yeats — his work is exquisite and his fame is legendary. It’s just, well, you know ... What about encouraging a few people to read liv- ing poets, to buy books by the living? Yeats’s death in a bleak year (1939) reminds me not of Yeats, but of another Irish poet who was wandering around the East Coast of the US at that time — the Ulster poet Louis MacNeice. I’ve been carrying a copy of MacNeice’s col- lection of that time, Plant and Phantom, in my satchel these last few months. I love his plain company. I love that he was wandering. I love that he wrote this, in “Plain Speaking” — “Definition is tautology: man is man, / Woman woman, and tree tree, and world world.” At a time when Yeats died, when Ireland and Europe were falling apart, it was important to state plain facts. MacNeice would elaborate further just a few months later in his magnificent critical study The Poetry of W.B. Yeats. Here he is on the art of Yeats’s poetry:

The thought taken from its context is esoteric and, indeed, un- sound, but that does not matter for it is perfectly fused into the poetry. Diction and rhythm are happily wedded to their subject. Yeats was always a great trickster with words, but now there is something more solid beneath the gilding.

MacNeice had arrived at his chapter on Yeats’s masterpieces, The Winding Stair and Other Poems and The Tower. MacNeice overcame his and Yeats’s melancholy by studying it. Overcoming it gave him prodigious moral strength, enough strength for him to return to England and engage in the great war against fascism; a war that was, at that moment, being fought for the very survival of English civi- lization. Morally, poets seem to wander from moments of dread to moments of dread. As we wander today, for example, right now, in Ireland. For many months after Seamus Heaney’s death in Dublin I felt a cata- tonic sense of melancholy. It’s no exaggeration to say that many poets felt that a second Yeats had died — that Ireland, once more, would struggle on in that long, familiar Yeatsean shadow. An atmosphere of foreboding had already been in the air, in the very bones of poetry, after the death of Dennis O’Driscoll a year earlier — Dennis, so loved and such a lover of every kind of poetry, had been both a superb poet and Irish poetry’s number one cheerleader. Their deaths have created

524O POETRY a singular, catastrophic sense of absence. That anything else might get written seems like a miracle. Heaney’s fame displaced so many other brilliant careers in the public imagination of Ireland — Thomas Kinsella, Mhac an tSaoí, John Montague, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley — that many Irish endings seemed to fold into his spectacu- lar trajectory. The funeral itself, broadcast live on national television, with presidents, ambassadors, nuncios, actors, and rock stars, was as close as a non-president might ever get to a state funeral. And, in typical Irish fashion, it was a funeral of two parts: the Dublin part and the Ulster part. In Ireland, the integrity of our historic quarrel is always captured at a burial. I miss Heaney’s voice on Irish radio and television; and I miss those distinctive, bold, black-inked letters and postcards from O’Driscoll. A poem published in some far-off place or a poem broad- cast on radio was sure to elicit a postcard from Dennis; it was as if one was being minded. Now there is no big-hearted creature left to watch over us and to praise us so intimately. Was Ireland ever so si- lent? In truth, for my own generation at least, the deaths of these poets may mean the end of greatness. While they lived, the plot of poetry thickened: poetry had an urgently visible, public, even political, role. While they lived, we were all attending their extraor- dinary poetry workshop invented by Yeats and directed adroitly by Heaney; a workshop called Irish life. Leaving Dublin after the funeral cortege headed north, I felt as I felt when I was a twenty-four-year- old boarding the plane at Cedar Rapids airport, leaving Iowa and the companionship of serious mentors and literary scholars. A sense of hope or political intensity is always left behind on the hot tarmac of experience. Now, poetry has become very private again, very urban and European; as hermetic as the private life in Beckett’s letters or in the lyrics of Benn. Instead of catching the fruits of an outdoor Ulster poetry in Heaney’s profuse orchard, we must now scurry like true Europeans along the backstreet pavements and hard cobblestones, like refugees clutching our little green ration-books. We must write with the guilt of ordinary survivors. Yet, the idea that in poetry there is only so much oxygen to go around is a mistaken one; an erroneous proprietorial and peasant point of view; as if Irish poets had to draw lots to divide the encum- bered estate of a dead landlord. Poetry is truly an anaerobic creature, creating the atmosphere to sustain itself from the very atmosphere of itself that it creates. It is foolish to look outside the act of making

THOMAS MCCARTHY 525 poetry for that oxygen. One’s personal poetry, the fruit of one’s tem- perament, is an unassailable realm. Its success or failure has hardly anything to do with anyone else in the deepest sense. There is, of course, the post facto politics of published texts, the world of reviews and awards, yet this world is but a distant rumble of thunder barely audible in the realm where poems get written. So often one meets very new poets who are obsessed with the “politics” of poetry and its trivia: they make the heart sink because you feel that they may never arrive at that point of repose where their deepest work will get written. The place where poems get made is much quieter than the place of fame. You want to tell these youngsters to slow down, not to rush at that first rung of Cavafy’s ladder or they may miss it. In the Irish context, it is important to recall not just the illustrious ca- reer of our lost Nobel Laureate and the sixties careers in poetry that may have been pushed sideways by the force of Heaney’s fame, but those other talents and careers that flourished in the long Heaney Era during the eighties and nineties. There have been significant, even illustrious, other careers in contemporary Irish poetry — think of the work of Eavan Boland and Paul Durcan, of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon, of Paula Meehan, Theo Dorgan, and Harry Clifton, of Medbh McGuckian and Matthew Sweeney. While the greater public realm rained Heaney achievements upon us, all these other Irish po- ets went out into the sodden garden and grew a harvest of their own making. In their now long careers they have been exemplary. Beyond them, in the 2000s and 2010s, another generation flourishes, youth- ful, exotic, dramatic, filled with purpose and uncanny professionalism. Names like Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn, Leanne O’Sullivan and Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh come to mind: their newness and exuber- ance is simply magical. These poets endure both inside and outside of fame: their permanence is already an inner permanence. Fame may come up noisily to meet them, but if it doesn’t, what matter; their work is a thing of beauty. When you meet poets who are so young and so patently gifted, really burnished for fame, you want to do something — to push them on, to shove them into the arms of excited reporters, photographers, award givers. You want them to have that lovely feeling of being carried away by fame, if only for the first few years. After that, when the chauffeur-driven Mercedes and butlers carrying dry martinis have disappeared, when things become calm in that long inertia of mid-career, they can reap a more medi- ated harvest of desolately beautiful later poems.

526O POETRY maya catherine popa

Forever Writing from Ireland

What defines Irish poetry today? A survey of recently published Irish titles suggests the striking variety of voices, aesthetics, and anxiet- ies emerging from the Emerald Isle. It should come as no surprise that a country that so prides itself on its literary heritage (poems still grace the pages of the Irish Examiner and The Irish Times) would in- spire each generation to upkeep and further push poetic practice to new realms. And yet, we think of Joyce, Yeats, MacNeice, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Heaney as roots in the Irish soil from which future generations have sprung, and from whose shadows poets still face the daunting task of emerging. Many very fine contemporary Irish poets have found ways to in- herit this legacy of genius while carving their own paths and reaching new international audiences. Paul Muldoon comes to mind (though he, too, gets compared to Heaney), as well as Eavan Boland. Notably, both have lived as expats in the United States while sustaining ir- refutable, lasting literary ties to Ireland. Indeed, this speaks to one quality that begins to address the simplistic opening probe: inheritance must be reckoned with in Irish poetry, beyond the usual measure for poets. Whether sustained or challenged, tradition poses a question, and uncertainty is often a generative place from which to begin. Consulting the polished preface of any book on Irish history con- firms that it is full of complexities, wrought with the kind of political drama and dissent that invites TV dramatization. Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdom) has long been considered the center of Irish poetry, while those hailing from the Republic (indepen- dent, and whose national language continues to be Irish Gaelic) have formed their own schools. While Irish is the main language of only three percent of households, over ten percent have some fluency. In the matrix of Irish identity, the historical and political are intimately tied to the language, yielding interesting ground for exploration in literature. The four Irish poets under review, Cork-born and educated Billy Ramsell, Dublin-born Tara Bergin (who moved to England in 2002), Belfast-born Alan Gillis (now editor of the influential Edinburgh Review), and Galway-born Doireann Ní Ghríofa (long-

MAYA CATHERINE POPA 527 settled in Cork), have received an impressive list of awards between them, including Chair of Ireland Bursaries, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisting, and other accolades. Yet, what proves equally remarkable is their relationship to Ireland and their role in transmitting Irish poetry. Ramsell, a transla- tor of Irish poetry, served as editor of the Irish section of Poetry International from 2012–2015. Bergin has lectured on “Ireland as a State of Mind” internationally, while Gillis has edited several critical works on Irish writing, including The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012). Ní Ghríofa’s previous collections were in Irish, published by Coiscéim, an exclusively Irish-language publisher. These poets confront old subjects in a renewed capacity, recasting myths of transformation and pondering both global and personal pol- itics in a world driven by technology. They show an appreciation for tradition that, rather than creating superficial echoes, demonstrates daring, playful appropriation, and purposeful departure from their sources. And above all else, these four collections share the sense that you never really leave Ireland — it surfaces in memory, which stakes its claim on poetry.

The Architect’s Dream of Winter, by Billy Ramsell. The Dedalus Press. €12.00.

Gilbert Ryle coined the term “ghost in the machine” in his 1949 work The Concept of Mind. In The Architect’s Dream of Winter, Ramsell ex- plores the idea of human and technological consciousness in poems of great formal variety and tonal range. Servers offstage, wires, and machines become inextricably tangled with their human foils: mem- ory, veins, and the heart. “We’re programmed, both of us, viral,” the speaker remarks, appropriating the term used to describe massive popularity and circulation on the internet, “I’ll infect the deepest, most secret nooks of your memory, / delete your first kiss, your first lover’s hands.” “Lyric poems spring from moments of disequilibrium: something has happened to disturb the status quo,” writes Helen Vendler. Indeed, Ramsell’s poems are full of restless searching, pondering the actions and stakes of our technological revolution. Where one might expect a sort of anti-lyric (after all, computer jargon isn’t known for its lyric qualities), Ramsell’s exploration is highly musical, punctuated

528O POETRY by modified traditional lyric forms. The poems feel decidedly voiced, with moments of poignant tenderness derived from the poet’s life. Reflecting on a POS reader at dinner, the speaker considers how “It knows everything about us, / every element of the meal we’ve just eaten.” Central to the collection is an attempt to conceive of the human lifespan and its, as of yet, inevitable end after ninety or so years by way of the cutting edge, as well as through inherited systems and analogies. In “Lament for Esbjörn Svensson,” Ramsell reconciles the sacred and the scientific, wondering “if dying translates us into the condition of music; // leaves us weightless, melodious, floating bars of thought / uploaded like data into the mind of God.” Similarly, in “Lament for Christy Ring,” a decidedly Irish subject, Ramsell de- scribes the legendary hurler, interrogating the possibility of seamless integration:

He swerves, ducks his shoulder, elegantly jerks. And what gap now between thought and act, his spirit and firmware fusing?

The poems perform a consciousness grappling with, and defining, correlations. In an over-stimulated world, Ramsell takes a moment to acknowledge the repetitiousness of the heart’s essential task: “Such monotonous heroism / all alone in that blackness.” Here, too, he con- templates the possibility of merging with machines: “And though you’re part-mechanical now I still cherish you, my brother, / for the body’s a machine like any other.” Rather than man vs. machine, an easier dichotomy to depict (but one exhausted by dystopian books and film), Ramsell infuses the collection with a reciprocity — machines, too, dream their hu- man counterparts: “The circuits whisper and it dreams our names.” Elsewhere, the speaker declares, “I outsourced all my memories to machines.” Even objects that predate machines are considered through this updated eye, creating a new inter-text:

This piano speaks the language of machines. Through the foyer’s raucous out-of-town rhubarbing our eardrums search for patterns in the ragtime data-stream of chords and choruses; locate them, make them beautiful. — From Jazz Weekend

MAYA CATHERINE POPA 529 The prose poem “The Silence Bar” offers a summer menu of precisely what its title promises: different types of — increasingly scarce — silence. Here, Ramsell’s playfulness and wit is on display, though the idea of having to enter and pay for silence on HD-800 headsets provokes bouts of nostalgia. He takes the reader to his native Cork on the Irish West Coast:

The people who brought you “Hagia Sophia,” one of last year’s most popular silences, now take you inside Cork’s own St Fin Barre’s Cathedral.... Let it cleanse you of sirens and back- ground muzak, of office-gossip and radio ads.

“They dance to keep from falling,” a title adapted from a poem by Ilya Kaminsky, most explicitly confronts the screen-life with which we are accustomed. The poem’s margins provide familiar system up- dates in bold font: “All imaging processes normal”; “Your session has expired.” These impersonal, uninvited messages jarringly punctuate a narrative lyric, offsetting the speaker’s voice and the passage of time:

And I think that in this December light there’s something almost Spanish about your beauty, something piquant, out of place in this winter, ungovernable.

The collection’s concluding poem, “Ahead vast systems hunger,” re- cycles the form and language with slight variations: “there’s some- thing almost Russian about your beauty, / something chilly, beyond compass, ungovernable.” The language in the margins, which speaks of updates, current session, and imaging processes, sounds almost prophetic as the couple walks off the beach.

This Is Yarrow, by Tara Bergin. Carcanet. £9.95.

Tara Bergin’s debut is full of idiosyncratic voices, folkloric motifs, and reflections on the rhetoric and decorum of war. Her highly allusive verse is adept at a kind of conversational strangeness, a quality that offsets the violence discussed. Her speakers suffer from metaphysical illness, “I get breathless climbing, / thinking up whole men, / whole women, and I / add them to the list.” Bergin reveals the

530O POETRY startling psychology of fairy tales populated with symbolic creatures that often meet terrible fates. These unsettling elements are riddled with nostalgia for youth idioms (indeed, brides and wives make ap- pearances), and figurative substitutions that serve to complement the catastrophic political disputes. Bergin, who received a PhD from Newcastle University, play- fully appropriates the academic tradition, placing its formal register against the lyric confession:

In summary: water is a liquid consisting chiefly of this. Just one of these things, so the Fowlers say, is due to appetite. But I have a thirst / I have a fear of / I have a sin of — — From Water Is Difficult

The slashes are intentionally left to evoke the unpolished accumu- lation. The facing poem, “All Fools’ Day: An Academic Farewell,” has a tongue-in-cheek opening: “In this paper / I will make no direct reference to the above title.” But not everything in Bergin’s work is rhetorical — her speakers seem to personally engage with the read- er, infusing the collection with a personality that feels very much part of the idiom. When a question is posed, an answer might in- deed be granted: “Ask me: / have I fallen in love with the mechanic? Perhaps — perhaps, for a moment.” Weaving confession and fantasy, Bergin creates psychologically stirring metaphors: “He thought my clothes were my skin. / He thought these soft things, / this lace and these buttons, / were things I belonged in.” Elsewhere, her speaker’s musings function almost as an ars poetica, outlining how one thing transforms into another in the poet’s mind:

I sit and I think of the single ringlet and the green star of leaves.

I think of the meaning found for these things.

That the leaves are the clutching hands of soldiers, that the tendrils are the whips — — From The Passion Flower

MAYA CATHERINE POPA 531 Organized violence functions as a metaphorical engine, nature chang- ing into soldiers and whips. WWII surfaces repeatedly, with titles that summon Armistice Day and St. Patrick’s Day address. Violence is of- ten normalized and, indeed, even ignored by the crowd: “They don’t see me but I walk / into Fitzgeralds with them the half-wounded, / I sit in there at the high table with my pint, / half-wounded, thinking, I will drag my / wounds in here.” In “Military School,” Bergin pow- erfully confronts violence’s seduction of language, weaving it into England and Ireland’s political history:

The voice of violence enters our mouths and our skin, and under my own nails I hear it seduce me. I argue with nothing it says. The voice is a swan of the estuary. It laments, it recites: Sixteen Dead Men; The Rose Tree, out of pages yellowed from 1953 — it bangs oh it bangs a bodhran.

Here, again, the metaphor is riddled with folkloric details and literary allusions. Bergin invokes Yeats’s “Sixteen Dead Men,” a poem that condemns the British execution of sixteen Irishmen after the 1916 Easter Uprising, and the gruesome English fairy tale of “The Rose- Tree,” drawing from the violence of the historic event and children’s story. The mention of the bodhran, the traditional Celtic frame drum often used in war, reminds the reader that though Bergin grew up in England, the palette of her references is as Irish as it comes. “St. Patrick’s Day Address, 1920,” further interrogates tradition, this time the widely-visited Blarney Stone in Cork: “Still we insist on bending backwards / to touch the filthy stone with our lips. / What tradition is this?” The greatest tradition of all, Bergin’s collection seems to suggest, is conflict. “Garrison Supermarket” offers one of the most haunting moments in the collection; the speaker watches a group of soldiers enter the supermarket and recognizes their almost mechanical appearance: “their hands are the same — / and their faces are the same — / and no one is afraid — .” To Bergin, that restraint and desensitization seems most troubling of all. The collection concludes with a return to Bergin’s dreamlike at- mosphere, weaving the folkloric (yarrow is an age-old remedy) and

532O POETRY the urban: “In this country house I had a dream of the city / as if the thick yarrow heads had told me, / as if the chokered dove had told me.” This conversation with the past, nature, and the psyche makes Bergin’s a memorable, haunting debut, full of idiomatic strangeness that is fully her own mixture.

Scapegoat, by Alan Gillis. The Gallery Press. €11.95.

The collection opens with a condemning epigraph: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved,” Jeremiah, 8:20. Well, that might be alright if the result is as rich, frenetic, visually and audibly pleasurable a landscape as Gillis provides. Scapegoat lyri- cally and variously interrogates memories of youth through a blend of Irish dialect and imaginative narratives. Gillis’s skillful modulation of tone and his aphoristic precision allow him to create moments that ring true to feeling and afterthought, articulating the complex emo- tional resonance of memory. The opening poem, “Zeitgeist,” a series of four sonnets, intro- duces the reader to Gillis’s particular music; phonetically rich and conversational, his blend of irreverence and serious existential consideration is uniquely fitted for considering a wide variety of contemporary blights. Here, as elsewhere, Gillis considers the en- ergy and excessiveness of urbanization, the poem’s diction evoking the populated environment it describes and providing a catalogue of voices for the collection:

Outside on shopped streets swarm mothers, alpha males, screenagers, old, young, lovers, the homeless, the bewildered, ill, unique, the beautiful with their self-as-boutique — so many, thronged into one body.

Like Ramsell, Gillis is interested in technology’s impact on memory, discovery, and knowledge: “Inside the machine or, at least, on the screen / I discover everything that has been, / will be, or might never be has a place.” Unlike Ramsell, however, the collection only lingers momentarily on these considerations, drawing its power from mo- ments that feel personal to Gillis’s past, and which he captures with

MAYA CATHERINE POPA 533 brevity and intelligence. In “The Hourglass,” the speaker recollects a conversation the morning after spending the night at the apartment of a beloved:

You ask: “One half empties, the other fills. Now which half is happier?”

Both ends look dead by the end. The hourglass shows how time gathers but only lives through the movement of the sands.

Balancing a delicate narrative between the couple, this unpretentious, reflective moment in a kitchen blooms into a meditation on time. Each stanza layers the issue of compromise, closing with a lyric ges- ture that displays Gillis’s trademark music and skillfully-placed slant rhymes: “How the rain and wide-roamed / dead, rivers and wilds, give and take, / hollow as they accumulate.” Gillis’s emphasis on the revelatory in ordinary actions is plea- surably offset by a baroque phonetic sensibility: “while the rinsing breeze / ripples the leaves // and sashaying twig-tips / with a shush / to the ear.” Gillis frequently plays with line length and alliteration, creating poems whose logic appears driven by sound and lush visual images. “August in Edinburgh,” a modified sestina form, recounts a moment at a festival with wit and tender precision:

Not a cloud in the sky and it’s raining. It’s the brusqueness of things, and the drag of things, that hurts. The most beautiful woman in the world is in Edinburgh, at the festival. She looks me in the eye and says please move I’m trying to look at the artworks.

“No. 8,” the collection’s long and often humorous poem, recounts commuter proceedings in a sprawling, essayistic form. With charm and insight, Gillis takes us from the minutes prior to boarding the bus, to boarding, “Everyone looks like / they’re in an art installa- tion / where the central concept is / they’re completely normal,” to the wandering stream of consciousness inspired by gazing out the win- dow. These musings range from those that reflect on the collection’s

534O POETRY central themes, “so much mystery between us / disguised as indif- ference,” to the circumstantial, light-hearted remarks of a bored commuter. He playfully acknowledges the poem’s meta-thinking: “Does one have depths? / To get to them, I’m sure, / one might board a bus.” Here, as in other poems, Gillis masterfully modulates from humor to — not quite pathos — but a sense of restlessness with urban rituals and acknowledgment of communality with strangers. “No. 8” is recalled in a later poem: “The mind is like a Wednesday morn- ing / on a bus to work when exhaust fumes cling / the air.” Gillis carefully conjures “real” voices, down to the Irish names and colloquialisms: “Morning, when it comes, might snigger / the way Shonagh O’Dowd raised her finger / to McCandless, then split her smackers / at the sight of me in my undercrackers.” But “The Field” most closely resembles what we associate with Irish poetry, the affin- ity for relaying nostalgia for a place:

This lane can’t help but lead onto that lane I followed when I was nine, stretched to green fields from my aunt’s farm along the hedgeway that gives, through a gap, to a blackthorn-guarded glade.

The poem invokes a Heaney-esque sensibility in its graceful pace, harking to a specific age in boyhood, and a catalogue of details chal- lenging for urbanites to envision (hedgeways, blackthorn, glades). The emotional life of memory is palpable throughout the collection, suggesting that, ultimately, paths carved through memory occupy a dual place in the past and present.

Clasp, by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. The Dedalus Press. €11.50.

“There is a fearlessness in Ní Ghríofa’s work,” writes Paula Meehan. One could just as well argue that the fear of loss — and the careful examination of kinds of human loss — is equally generative for the poet. Clasp, Ní Ghríofa’s English debut, explores absence (and pos- sibilities of rebirth) through imaginative constructs and figurative retellings of tales. The speaker in “Museum” is employed with this

MAYA CATHERINE POPA 535 consideration:

I am custodian of this exhibition of erasures, curator of loss. I watch over pages of scribbles, deletions, obliterations, in a museum that preserves not what is left, but what is lost.

Contrastingly, “Instructions to Kill a Daughter’s Minotaur” is a more gruesome exploration, while “Narcissus” explores the emp- tiness behind the excess of connections on social media. Narcissus “swipes, smiles: so many likes, so many / friends. His soundless words flash onto strangers’ screens // until silence no longer feels like loneli- ness.” Other sparse, suggestive poems draw from absence to fuel their intimated narratives (memorably, fried rashers show how absence as- sumes its own space). Though Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual poet, Clasp is only occasionally speckled with Irish, infused instead with Irish flora and fauna, bogs, breweries, and skylines of Cork. The poems excel in their consid- eration of motherhood, particularly its paradoxical losses and gains, separation and unity. In “Inventory: Recovery Room,” the speaker considers the processes of motherhood shared with all of nature:

I think of milk, of beestings squeezed from a cow’s udders,

of my fingers between a calf’s gums: the fierce suck of a new mouth, and the echo of a mother’s angry bellows from the field.

The poem facing it, “From Richmond Hill,” an area in Cork City, tenderly recalls the newborn’s first days home. As the speaker re- members, stories of breweries and pubs carefully enter and offer the long-awaited moment a sense of history, serving as the speaker’s re- flection on the past, and the child’s introduction to it:

Home from hospital, you doze in my arm, milk-drunk, all eyelashes, cheeks and raw umbilical, swaddled in the heavy black smells of the brewery.

Your great-grandfathers worked all their lives in that factory. Every day they were there, breathing the same air, hoisting barrels, sweating over vats where black bubbles rose like fat.

536O POETRY Ní Ghríofa captures the anxiety of motherhood and of inhabiting the body. Certain poems feel ultimately celebratory of this cycle, as “Your Throat, a Thrush,” in which the speaker again contemplates the lineage to her son: “Countless layers fold between our time and theirs / and still, in each new skin, we sing.” And, like Ramsell, Ní Ghríofa celebrates the heart’s dual-nature as the figurative seat of emotions and a necessary engine. But there is violence and trespass, too, as the doctor breaks the speaker’s breastbone to access the place:

Stitch by stitch, he attaches the heart of a stranger to the stump and sets it moving like electricity. Under his hands, a new heart stutters and starts, filling the cavity with applause. He closes my ribcage. The machines sing. — From A History in Hearts

In Ní Ghríofa’s English debut, what seem to be long-considered obsessions are explored with tenderness and unflinching curiosity. The collection’s section titles, “Clasp,” “Cleave,” “Clench,” suggest the muscularity of attachment to the past, place, and the body that drives the poetic impulse.

•

“Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic,” said Seamus Heaney, but that paints a rather different picture than these collections offer. Indeed, though Scapegoat’s epigraph might befit this assessment, one wonders how these four poets would re- spond to Heaney. The verve of Irish streets, unforgettable seascapes, hurling heroes, ballads, and songs — the affluence of memorable de- tails seems pretty optimistic. From its folkloric hills to its Tescos, its riddled, disputed language, and its busses and POS cables leading elsewhere, what is indisputable is the central place that Ireland plays in memory. And from this difficult imagination emerges a variety of voices and possibilities that draw their center from the island and stretch far beyond it.

MAYA CATHERINE POPA 537 contributors

tara bergin * is from Dublin. Her first poetry collection is This Is Yarrow (Carcanet, 2013). She lives in the North of England. ciaran berry’s * most recent collection is The Dead Zoo (The Gal- lery Press, 2013). He is from Donegal in the northwest of Ireland and lives in Hartford, Connecticut. dean browne * was raised in Tipperary and lives in Cork. His work has appeared in Crannóg, The Penny Dreadful, and elsewhere. stephen connolly * is a postgraduate student in the Seamus He- aney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University. patrick cotter * lives in Cork, Ireland. He’s the author of Making Music (Three Spires Press, 2009) and Perplexed Skin (Arlen House, 2008). He received the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry in 2013. ailbhe darcy * is from Dublin. She published her first full-length collection, Imaginary Menagerie, with Bloodaxe Books in 2011. cal doyle’s * poetry has appeared in gorse, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. He lives in Cork. martin dyar’s * debut book, Maiden Names (Arlen House, 2013), was a book of the year selection in the Guardian and The Irish Times. miriam gamble * is from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Her col- lections are Pirate Music (2014) and The Squirrels Are Dead (2010), both published by Bloodaxe Books. alan gillis * is from Belfast and teaches English literature at the University of Edinburgh. He recently coedited The Oxford Hand- book of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2012). caoilinn hughes’s * Gathering Evidence (Carcanet, 2014) won The Irish Times Shine/Strong Award and the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. roisin kelly * was born in Northern Ireland and lives in Cork City. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Interpreter’s House, Southword, and HARK.

538O POETRY victoria kennefick * won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Po- etry Pamphlet for White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015). nick laird * was born in Co. Tyrone. He writes poetry, fiction, screenplays, and criticism, and lives in London and New York. dave lordan * is the first to win all three of Ireland’s prizes for young poets: the Patrick Kavanagh, Shine/Strong, and Chair of Ire- land Bursary. He is an editor at The Bogman’s Cannon. aifric mac aodha * was born in Dublin. Her first collection, Gab- háil Syrinx (The Capture of the Syrinx), was published by An Sagart in 2010. She is the Irish language poetry editor of The Stinging Fly. john mcauliffe’s * poems in this issue are from his fourth book, The Way In (The Gallery Press, 2015), by permisison of the author and The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland. thomas mccarthy was born in Co. Waterford and is the receipi- ent of the Patrick Kavanagh and Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Awards. michael mckimm * is from north Antrim and now lives in London. His most recent collections are Fossil Sunshine (2013) and, as editor, MAP (2015), both published by Worple Press. ailbhe ní ghearbhuigh * writes in the Irish language. Péacadh (2008) was published by Coiscéim. doireann ní ghríofa * is an award-winning bilingual poet. Her latest collection is Clasp (The Dedalus Press, 2015). caitríona o’reilly’s * poem in this issue is from Geis, published this year by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and Wake Forest University Press in the US. leanne o’sullivan * has published three collections from Bloodaxe Books, The Mining Road (2013), Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (2009), and Waiting for My Clothes (2004). michelle o’sullivan’s * poems in this issue are from The Flower and the Frozen Sea (forthcoming), by permission of the author and The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland. paul perry * is the author of five collections of poetry, including Gunpowder Valentine: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2014).

CONTRIBUTORS 539 maya catherine popa’s * poetry and nonfiction have appeared in the US and UK. She holds degrees from Oxford, NYU, and Barnard. She lives in New York City where she teaches English Literature. billy ramsell * was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary in 2013. His second collection is The Architect’s Dream of Winter (The Dedalus Press, 2013). He lives in Cork, Ireland. clare rojas* lives and works in San Francisco. Her most recent solo exhibition, Everyone Has Those Spaces, opened at Kavi Gupta Chicago | Elizabeth St in November 2014. declan ryan * was born in Mayo, Ireland. His pamphlet was pub- lished in the Faber New Poets series. He is poetry editor at Ambit and teaches at King’s College London. david wheatley has published four collections with The Gallery Press, including A Nest on the Waves (2010). He lives in rural Aber- deenshire, Scotland.

* First appearance in Poetry.

540O POETRY Caitríona O’Reilly is “excitingly sophisticated . . . possessed of metaphysical eloquence and quietly meditative intelligence.” –Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

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• Open to writers who have not yet published a book of poetry. • Submission of no more than six, previously unpublished, poems in a “traditional” form (e.g., sonnet, sestina, villanelle, rhymed stanzas, blank verse, et al.). • Poems should be printed blank with name and address information only on a cover sheet or letter. • $5.00 per poem entry/handling fee. • Postmarked deadline for entry is September 30, 2015. • Submissions will not be returned. All entrants will receive a copy of the issue in which the winning poems appear. • Mail entry to: The Morton Marr Poetry Prize, Southwest Review, P.O. Box 750374, Dallas, TX 75275-0374

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THE POETRY FOUNDATION PRESENTS September Events

Poetry on Plug Nickel Cabaret Stage with Beau O’Reilly & Judith Harding Wednesday & Thursday, September 2 & 3, 7:00 PM Harriet CAConrad Reading Series EXORCISM: Reparative Rituals with the Poetic Blade Tuesday, September 8, 7:00 PM Poetry Salon Concert: The Transcendentalists & Music Thursday, September 10, 7:00 PM Co-sponsored with the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago The Open Northwestern University’s Door Readings Mary Kinzie & Alexandra Pechman with Lake Forest College’s Robert Archambeau & Nicole Nodi Tuesday, September 15, 7:00 PM Reading Karen Villeda, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Lisa Fishman & Daniel Borzutzky Thursday, September 24, 7:00 PM Co-sponsored with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa Poetry Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe with & Music musicologist Don Michael Randel, tenor Jonathan Johnson & pianist Craig Terry Tuesday, September 29, 7:00 PM Co-sponsored with Lyric Unlimited Exhibition Dianna Frid & Cecilia Vicuña A Textile Exhibition September 4–November 27, 2015 Monday–Friday, 11:00 AM–4:00 PM

Exhibition Cecilia Vicuña Events The Origin of Weaving Performance Thursday, September 17, 6:00 PM

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