I open my poem . I open my poem . New and Selected Poems Gabriel Rosenstock Translations by the poet & Paddy Bushe TABLE OF CONTENTS Burning Sage 13 Susanne sa seomra folctha (1973) / Susanne in the bathroom A dream of myth 41 First published by Cló Iar-Chonnacht 2013 The weekend of Dry Martinis 42 The lay of the displaced Tribesman 44 Derek 50 Rifle with a telescopic sight 51 Poema 52 Season 53 Hey 54 Tuirlingt (1978) / Descent I open my poem 55 Méaram (1981) / Pax Gale 57 Thank God it’s raining 58 Mountain 59 In a vase 60 Om (1983) My father’s dispensary 61 5 Clock 62 Oráistí (1991) / Oranges Splint 63 Sometimes I’m a scarecrow 64 To my husband who is labouring on the Great Wall 89 Television 67 Lines written during the Gulf War, January 1991 91 Quest 68 Nourishment 93 Lascaux cow 71 Abortion 94 An apologia for daddy-long-legs 72 Ní mian léi an fhilíocht níos mó (1993) / Nihil Obstat (1984) She has gone beyond poetry now Black humour 75 Last embrace 95 Portrait of a civil servant 76 Science lesson 96 Brahms 77 A glance from Semiramis 97 Evolution 98 Migmars (1985) Dybbuk! 99 Name 78 Close your eyes 100 Billie Holiday 79 Laboratory 101 Restaurant plants 80 She has gone beyond poetry now 102 To my fellow poets 81 A view 103 Hares 82 Raven goddess! 104 Like an owl 105 Rún na gCaisleán (1986) / The shadowy crypts of your soul 106 The secret of the castles Syójó (2001) Ear 83 For Meg 84 Syójó 107 Interview 109 Portrait of the artist as an abominable snowman (1989) Zen meditation at a cliff 110 Liadhain 113 A portrait of the artist as a yeti 85 Ocean 118 Homage 86 Seán Ó Conaill 119 Maenad 87 Harry Thuillier Jnr (1964-1997) 120 Kilfinane Motte 88 Hakuin 121 Mustanbih 123 Wind song 126 6 7 Am light 127 Géaga tré Thine (2006) – Haikúnna/Haikus Homesick 128 Haiku 172 Pope Joan 129 from Rensaku in the Pyrenees 176 Rarity 130 from Rensaku in Wales 177 Never again 131 Cup of coffee 132 Xolotl 134 Eachtraí Krishnamurphy (2003) / Bliain an Bhandé (2007) / Krishnamurphy’s incidents Year of the goddess [Translations by the poet] Aviary 157 From each and every pore 178 Butterflies 158 Clean air 179 Coincheap 159 Barefoot 180 Murder 160 Everything 181 Language 161 Castrato 182 Self-portrait 162 Candle 183 Death 163 Not mine 184 Mountain man 164 Journey 185 Escape 165 Midnight 186 Apology 166 One poem 187 Slow death of summer 188 Krishnamurphy ambaist (2004) / The caveman knew you 189 Krishnamurphy, indeed Ozymandias 190 Papaji 167 Irish 191 The Buddha 168 Whortleberry juice 192 Burning 169 Take me to Your drains 193 Send Your snow soon 194 Tuairiscíonn Krishnamurphy ó Bhagdad (2007) / Advaita 195 Krishnamurphy reports from Bagdad Cat food 170 Krishnamurphy and his critics 171 8 9 Sasquatch (2013) / Fire 227 The sasquatch [Translations by the poet] Unbroken silence 228 The sky 229 Prologue 196 Blue silences 210 The sasquatch looks at himself 197 Bird in flight 198 Dánta Nua (2014) / When he looked in the window 199 New Poems Once by the coast 200 Flowers 201 Did you hear the latest 231 The smoothness of stones 202 The silenced wind 232 Stars 203 Inspired by Davitt 233 Cloud 204 I knew it was only a tree 234 When snowy peaks call 205 ScnØd: an explanation 235 Mother 206 Wolves 207 One morning 208 Ferns 209 Nothing 210 Loggers 211 Reeds 212 Sasquatch among stars 213 Rainbow 214 Geese flying north 215 Offerings 216 He 217 A dream, perhaps 218 Eagle 219 Clouds are bleeding 220 Bird flying into the moon 221 Fences 222 Autumn 223 White owl 224 Snowclad mountains 225 Moon geese 226 10 11 BURNING SAGE Gabriel Rosenstock, our most prolific writer in the Irish language, is a vast subject matter, an expanding universe of words that keeps growing and growing. Poet, dramatist, novelist, children’s writer, essayist, editor, translator, encourager. I am dazzled by the huge and heady daring of his work. For more than forty years he has been a luminous and a liberating force in Irish literature. With his energy and enterprise, his stir and sparkle he has helped in no small way to liven up and embolden the arts in our country. As a mentor he has energized many of us by his encouragement and counsel. He has the capacity to put other people in contact with their own creative vitality, to make them receptive to the inexhaustible cosmos of creativity within themselves, to make them voyagers in the universe of their own imaginations. I first met Gabriel Stefan Rosenstock as he called himself in those days at Slógadh, the annual Gael-Linn youth extravaganza – which sadly is no more – in 1972. I had read his poems in the magazines; they were already causing a bit of commotion in the Irish language literary world, stirring up a somewhat stale scene. I was excited by their offbeat themes, their catchy wordplay, their brash uninhibited playfulness. Alive and vivid, they strutted right off the page and into my mind in a way that the pale and 13 bookish poems of the classroom failed to do. This exotic doves out of a hat of abundance, he let a flock of those presence with a name alien to Gaelic – which gave an bright ideas loose in my imagination. added mystique to the poems – became my rolemodel as I Gabriel is a child of the Sixties and together with his attempted my own first fledgling flights in poetry. For me, friend Michael Davitt (1950-2005), brought all of the a brooding teenager in the throes of poetry, his poems were expanded-mind exuberance of that decade to bear on the messages in a bottle from a distant Tír na nÓg; a revitalised, writing of poetry in the Irish language. That sixties-state- groovy Gaelic Ireland that flourished defiant and free on of-mind – getting high on expansiveness – primed their the margins of English. poetry and shaped the imaginative scope of it. As editors Meeting him at that festival was a momentous occasion of Innti , their flamboyantly subversive poetry journal, and for me. He had judged the poetry competition and with the precocious brilliance of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill awarded me the main prize. I was fired up at the prospects and Liam Ó Muirthile, they made Gaelic getupandgo with of meeting him. And I was not let down as happens so dash and swagger. often with hero worship. Here was this commanding In Gabriel’s case the bliss business of Eastern beliefs gave presence, eloquent, perceptive, engaging and, best of all, his poetry a rich shimmering of mysticism. Blake and responding to my poems with delight and affection. burning sage gave his poems an incandescent glow. Swami Listening to him on that glorious April afternoon in 1972, Vivekananda, Sri Aurobino, Krishnamurti, Ravi Shankar, a new door was blown open for me on to poetry; a Rajneesh, Suibhne Geilt, A. E. (George Russell) were some liberating doorway. of his guardian angels; the spirit guides who enabled him He advised me that poetry is more about divination to blend Vedic and Druidic strains into a rich sensuous, than data; more about feelings than facts. It was not so ecstatic melody; a new utterance in Gaelic. much Truth he was seeking in poetry but what ought to be Truth. He was urging me to think of poems as lived experiences and not as thought-up experiences. Poetry as perceptions of the heart was what he wanted and not as A slow but formative period of modernism had set in ever conceptions of the mind. since Pádraig Mac Piarais, (1879-1916) a genuine I sensed in him a joyous creativity, an abounding messenger of modernity, argued for a new aesthetic in curiosity about life, a need to bite into and taste the Gaelic. In a handful of bleak and beautiful poems he multitudinous and teeming flavours of the world and the conveyed human vulnerabilities and personal frailties in a Word. He stressed that poetry lifts us out of spiritual torpor startlingy modern manner. Liam Gógan (1891-1979) was and leads us into a richly sensual, ecstatic even, sense of the another innovative influence; an erudite and intensely Divine; well beyond the constraints of doctrinaire religions. creative formalist with an ear to European trends, he An impressionable youth, I was enthralled by the beauty explored new forms of expression to deal with the and sublimity of his ideas. And like a conjuror drawing complexities of modern life and the disillusionments of a 14 15 post-independence state. But it was not until the late forties Lemass era and its new prosperity ushered in private and early fifties when the great triumvirate of Ó Direáin, yearnings for wider horizons and newer freedoms. Diverse Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi met the challenges and assertive voices were beginning to question the of their times with a new inventiveness in theme, language prevailing assumptions. There was a loss of confidence in and tone that an identifiably Gaelic modernism emerged. inherited values whether social, political or religious. A Ó Ríordáin’s (1916-1977) first volume, the magisterial gritty, urban youth culture was coming to the fore. It was Eireaball Spideoige (1952), is a majestic sweep of intense a country slowly emerging from the oppressive domination lyrics that dramatize his existential malaise with of the Catholic Church. Still, that rigid and harsh Baudelairean grandeur, a truly modern work in its delicate institution held its moral sway over a whole range of handling of unsettled identities within the dark and murk human affairs.