In ‘The Intensive Care Unit as Rainforest’, a central poem which provides the title of this new collection, Paddy Bushe snatches a morphine-induced glimpse of a world far from County Kerry’s Iveragh Peninsula where many of these new poems are set, realising he is “still migrant, a bird of uncertain passage”. This shifting perspective is fundamental to Bushe’s work, in which his perennial subjects of music, poetry and place (particularly his adopted homeplace) invite historical and mythical readings as well as the directly biographical. Uncertain Passage is a book of praise for both singers and songs, a book of thanks for luck and travel and wonders, and a recognition that “In my seventy-fifth year, / I know the time is right for planting trees”.
“Paddy Bushe’s latest book, Uncertain Passage, is a triumph. His poems, like the blackbird in his eponymous haiku, are “So ordinary / Yet still incomparably / The sweetest of all.” Like the goldfinch of another haiku, his wise words illuminate us… In poems that vary from the free to the formal (his sonnets and haiku are exemplary), he discovers a kind of prayer in which he finds the only heaven he will ever know or need. Like the meditation bowl bought in a tourist shop, it still rings true when struck gently. In striking the bowl gently, the poet, Paddy Bushe, “would believe / What is far beyond belief”. Amen to that.
—Gabriel Fitzmaurice, The Irish Catholic“[I]t is something of a miracle that a work which is so instructive and thought-provoking is at the same time so riveting and enjoyable.”
—Bernard O’Donoghue, on To Ring in Silence: New and Selected Poems“… a meticulously crafted book filled with the authentic voice of poetry …The clarity, honesty and integrity of the work stand out.”
—from the judges’ citation for the 2017 Irish Times Poetry Now Award for On A Turning Wing
THE INTENSIVE CARE UNIT AS RAINFOREST
I know now, of course, about the residual
Morphine seeping the length of my spine
Like sap rising in trees. But equally, I know,
For hour after timeless, crepuscular hour
The ward hummed and pulsed and whistled
Itself into rainforest, wings flashed emerald
Or red from one branched and tendrilled bed
To another, calling out warning or reassurance
Above the rhythm of invisible cicadas, while I
Was still migrant, a bird of uncertain passage.
Cover image by Holger Lonze, by kind permission. www.holgerlonze.com
