In this short essay, reproduced from The Deep Heart’s Core, poet JOHN O’DONNELL revisits his poem ‘The Shipping Forecast’, among those included in Sunlight: New and Selected Poems (May 2018).
LIKE PROSPECTORS, poets are always anxious to know if what they’ve unearthed this time is the real thing. We make our marks and see how they compare; and there are so many other marks already, from others who for centuries have been panning for gold in the same seam.
Some poems, we know, are no more than fool’s gold, their brassy yellow quickly losing its glister, though sadly not always before they’ve made their way into print; it’s often difficult at the time of writing to tell.
It was Touchstone himself who said “the truest poetry is the most feigning”, in As You Like It, and, as a clown, he should know, planted as he is by Shakespeare to call things as they are rather than as we might like them to be. He would make a useful editor, standing at our shoulders as we write; mostly shaking his head sadly, but occasionally — very occasionally — crying “Yes!”
I’ve chosen ‘The Shipping Forecast’ from my first collection Some Other Country as my touchstone poem because, although it was written nearly twenty years ago, it’s a poem that still makes me say “Yes”. It combines, in the sonnet form I love, many of the themes I’ve returned to often, the struggle to grow up, the father-son relationship, and the sea.
John F. Kennedy suggested we all have in our veins “the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears”. I’m sure there are scientists who disagree. But like a lot of what Kennedy said, it feels right, as I hope this poem does; and if someone years from now sifting through my poems stop at this one, I hope they’ll agree.
The Shipping Forecast
for my father
Tied up at the pier in darkened harbour
the two of us below, in cabin’s amber
light; me surly in a sleeping-bag, fifteen,
and you, past midnight, calmly tuning in
to the Shipping Forecast, Long Wave’s
crackle, hiss, until you find the voice.
What’s next for us: rain or fair? There are
warnings of gales in Rockall and Finisterre.
So near now, just this teak bulkhead
between us, and yet so apart, battened
hatches as another low approaches, the high
over Azores as distant as a man is from a boy.
I think of my own boat one day, the deep.
Beside me the sea snores, turns over in its sleep.
In our new anthology, The Deep Heart’s Core: Irish Poets Revisit a Touchstone Poem, some 100 poets accept the invitation to revisit a favourite, key or touchstone poem of their own, and offer a short commentary on same — as they might at a live event.
The result is an illuminating, thought-provoking and wholly engaging volume, a unique anthology as selected by the poets themselves, and a rare glimpse into the thinking, feeling and craft behind the finished poems.
The Deep Heart’s Core is both an ideal introduction to contemporary Irish poetry for the general reader and a handbook for the aspiring practitioner or student.
The Deep Heart’s Core is edited by Pat Boran and Eugene O’Connell and features a foreword by Bernard O’Donoghue.
Graham Allen: ‘Military Hill’ – Tara Bergin: ‘This Is Yarrow’ – Eavan Boland: ‘That The Science Of Cartography Is Limited’ – Dermot Bolger: ‘While We Sleep’ – Pat Boran: ‘Waving’ – Eva Bourke: ‘Evening Near Letterfrack’ – Heather Brett: ‘Bankrupt’ – Paddy Bushe: ‘After Love’ – Rosemary Canavan: ‘Crab Apples’ – Moya Cannon: ‘Chauvet’ – Ciaran Carson: ‘Turn Again’ – Paul Casey: ‘Exile’ – Philip Casey: ‘Hamburg Woman’s Song’ – Sarah Clancy: ‘Homecoming Queen’ – Michael Coady: ‘Assembling The Parts’ – Enda Coyle-Greene: ‘Metathesis’ – Tony Curtis: ‘Bench’ – Pádraig J. Daly: ‘Complaint’ – Kathy D’Arcy: ‘Probable Misuse Of Shamanism’ – Michael Davitt: ‘Déirc’ / ‘Alms’ – Gerald Dawe: ‘The Water Table’ – John F. Deane: ‘The Poem of the Goldfinch’ – Mary Dorcey: ‘Trying on for Size’ – Theo Dorgan: ‘On a Day Far From Now’ – Cal Doyle: ‘Sirens’ – Martina Evans: ‘The Day My Cat Spoke to Me’ – John FitzGerald: ‘The Collectors’ – Gabriel Fitzmaurice: ‘Dad’ – Anne-Marie Fyfe: ‘The Red Aeroplane’ – Matthew Geden: ‘Photosynthesis’ – Rody Gorman: ‘Imirce’ / ‘Bodytransfermigration’ – Mark Granier: ‘Grip Stick’ – Vona Groarke: from ‘Or to Come’ – Kerry Hardie: ‘Life Gone Away is Called Death’ – Maurice Harmon: from ‘The Doll with Two Backs’ – James Harpur: ‘The White Silhouette’ – Michael Hartnett: ‘That Actor Kiss’ – Eleanor Hooker: ‘Nightmare’ – Breda Joy: ‘November Morning’ – Brendan Kennelly: from ‘Antigone’ – Patrick Kehoe: ‘The Nearness of Blue’ – Helen Kidd: ‘Sunspill’ – Noel King: ‘Black and Tan’ – Thomas Kinsella: ‘Marcus Aurelius’ – Jessie Lendennie: ‘Quay Street, Galway’ – John Liddy: ‘Scarecrow’ – Alice Lyons: ‘Arab Map of the World With the South at the Top’ – Aifric MacAodha: ‘Gabháil Syrinx’ / ‘The Taking of Syrinx’ – Jennifer Matthews: ‘Work Out’ – John McAuliffe: ‘Today’s Imperative’ – Joan McBreen: ‘My Father’ – Thomas McCarthy: ‘The Garden of Sempervirens’ – Philip McDonagh: ‘Water is Best’ – Afric McGlinchey: ‘Do not lie to a lover’ – Iggy McGovern: ‘Knight Errant’ – Medbh McGuckian: ‘Aunts’ – John Mee: ‘Travel Light’ – Paula Meehan: ‘The Moons’ – John Moriarty: ‘Faust’ – Aidan Murphy: ‘Touching Parallels’ – Gerry Murphy: ‘Poem in One Breath’ – Madelaine Nerson Mac Namara: ‘Atlas’ – Caitríona Ní Chléirchín: ‘Feiliceán bán’ / ‘White butterfly’ – Nuala Ní Chonchúir: ‘Tatú’ / ‘Tattoo’ – Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: ‘The Copious Dark’ – Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh: ‘Deireadh na Feide’ / ‘Last Blast’ – Áine Ní Ghlinn: ‘Tú Féin is Mé Féin’ / ‘Yourself and Myself’ – Doireann Ní Ghríofa: ‘From Richmond Hill’ – Mary Noonan: ‘The Moths’ – Julie O’Callaghan: from ‘Edible Anecdotes’ – Eugene O’Connell: ‘Doubting Thomas’ – John O’Donnell: ‘The Shipping Forecast’ – Mary O’Donnell: ‘The World is Mine’ – Bernard O’Donoghue: ‘The Iron Age Boat at Caumatruish’ – Liz O’Donoghue: ‘Suspended Animation’ – Mary O’Donoghue: ‘My Daughter in Winter Costume’ – Sheila O’Hagan: ‘September the Fourth’ – Nessa O’Mahony: ‘Lament for a Shy Man’ – Mary O’Malley: ‘The Gulls at Fastnet’ – Leanne O’Sullivan: ‘The Station Mass’ – Karl Parkinson: ‘A Love Letter to Reinaldo Arenas’ – Paul Perry: ‘In the Spring of My Forty-First Year’ – Billy Ramsell: ‘Complicated Pleasures’ – Gerard Reidy: ‘Slievemore Deserted Village’ – Maurice Riordan: ‘Badb’ – Mark Roper: ‘Firelight’ – Gabriel Rosenstock: ‘Ophelia an Phiarsaigh’ / ‘Pearse’s Ophelia’ – Colm Scully: ‘What News, Centurions?’ – John W. Sexton: ‘Sixfaces and the Woman of Nothing’ – Eileen Sheehan: ‘My Father Long Dead’ – Peter Sirr: ‘After a Day in the History of the City’ – Gerard Smyth: ‘Taken’ – Matthew Sweeney: ‘I Don’t Want to Get Old’ – Richard Tillinghast: ‘And And And’ – Jessica Traynor: ‘Scene from a Poor Town’ – John Wakeman: ‘The Head of Orpheus’ – Eamonn Wall: ‘Four Stern Faces/South Dakota’ – William Wall: ‘Alter Ego Quasimodo’ – Grace Wells: ‘Pioneer’ – Sandra Ann Winters: ‘Death of Alaska’ – Joseph Woods: ‘Sailing to Hokkaido’ – Macdara Woods: ‘Fire and Snow and Carnevale’ – Vincent Woods: ‘Homeric Laughter’ – Enda Wyley: ‘Magpie’.
We’re finally there with issue 1 of THE LEVEL CROSSING (see HERE).
THE LEVEL CROSSING is the new occasional journal of poetry and poetry-related prose from Dedalus Press. This first issue includes new work by poets from Ireland, the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, Poland and Korea, among others, poets already associated with the press as well as more than a dozen writers with no previous connection.
The issue features a report by Keith Payne on the new Galician poetry, Gerard Smyth on B.H. Fairchild, Vincent Woods’ writing on Macdara Woods’ new book, Music From The Big Tent, and Pat Boran on the attractions of haiku and landscape.
There are new poems by Catherine Ann Cullen, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Jane Williams, Tom Matthews, Hanyong Jeong and James Silas Rogers, among others.
Gerry Murphy writes about being a poet / lifeguard, and Grace Wells considers the poem ‘Selkie Moment’ from her recent collection, Fur.
There’s a sample of contributions – by Karl Parkinson, Jennifer Matthews, Paul Perry and Jessica Traynor – from the forthcoming anthology The Deep Heart’s Core: Irish Poets Revisit Their ‘Touchstone’ Poems.
And we’re delighted to present our feature on ‘Poems of Place’, the poems being drawn from over 900 submissions received in a recent open call for submissions.
In putting together THE LEVEL CROSSING, we set ourselves the target of producing a magazine that, in content, feel and attitude, was positive, outward-looking and, not to overstate the case, didn’t look like it was produced in the 19th century. For a first issue, we’re happy and excited with the result but can see lots of ways we could further improve. With a bit of luck, we’ll get that chance: after all, the barriers come down, but then the barriers also go up again!
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation on 03 Feb 2016 broadcast an edited version of Eamon Little’s very fine documentary on the life and work of the late Francis Harvey, featuring powerful readings by Frank (as he was generally known), dating from his earlier poems to more recent writings.
The show is now available to listen to or download from the ABC website HERE.
The following three poems are taken from Paula Meehan’s Mysteries of the Home (Dedalus Press, 2013). The volume gathers together the poems from her two seminal 1990s collections The Man Who was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994).
Included are some of her best-known and best-loved poems — ‘The Pattern’, ‘The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks’, ‘My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis’ and ‘The Wounded Child’ among them. They show an artist at the height of her powers producing work of “remarkable candour and … stunning lyricism” (The Colby Quarterly).
Well
I know this path by magic not by sight. Behind me on the hillside the cottage light
is like a star that’s gone astray. The moon
is waning fast, each blade of grass a rune
inscribed by hoarfrost. This path’s well worn.
I lug a bucket by bramble and blossoming blackthorn.
I know this path by magic not by sight.
Next morning when I come home quite unkempt
I cannot tell what happened at the well.
You spurn my explanation of a sex spell
cast by the spirit who guards the source
that boils deep in the belly of the earth,
even when I show you what lies strewn
in my bucket — a golden waning moon,
seven silver stars, our own porch light,
your face at the window staring into the dark.
My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis
for Brendan Kennelly
It was the piebald horse in next door’s garden
frightened me out of a dream
with her dawn whinny. I was back
in the boxroom of the house,
my brother’s room now,
full of ties and sweaters and secrets.
Bottles chinked on the doorstep,
the first bus pulled up to the stop.
The rest of the house slept
except for my father. I heard
him rake the ash from the grate,
plug in the kettle, hum a snatch of a tune.
Then he unlocked the back door
and stepped out into the garden.
Autumn was nearly done, the first frost
whitened the slates of the estate.
He was older than I had reckoned,
his hair completely silver,
and for the first time I saw the stoop
of his shoulder, saw that
his leg was stiff. What’s he at?
So early and still stars in the west?
They came then: birds
of every size, shape, colour; they came
from the hedges and shrubs,
from eaves and garden sheds,
from the industrial estate, outlying fields,
from Dubber Cross they came
and the ditches of the North Road.
The garden was a pandemonium
when my father threw up his hands
and tossed the crumbs to the air. The sun
cleared O’Reilly’s chimney
and he was suddenly radiant,
a perfect vision of St Francis,
made whole, made young again,
in a Finglas garden.
Seed
The first warm day of spring
and I step out into the garden from the gloom
of a house where hope had died
to tally the storm damage, to seek what may
have survived. And finding some forgotten
lupins I’d sown from seed last autumn
holding in their fingers a raindrop each
like a peace offering, or a promise,
I am suddenly grateful and would
offer a prayer if I believed in God.
But not believing, I bless the power of seed,
its casual, useful persistence,
and bless the power of sun,
its conspiracy with the underground,
and thank my stars the winter’s ended.
Patrick Deeley shares his thoughts on poetry with Aoife Byrne, following the publication of Groundswell, his New and Selected Poems
(Interview first published in July 2013)
Do you have a particular method of writing?
Each collection seems to tie in with a particular period of five or six years in my life. I have to live a bit, to gather fresh experiences as raw materials for poems. So for example the new work in Groundswell, recently published, has to do with my ongoing preoccupations – landscape that’s both rural and urban, stories from history and modernity, meditations on nature and folklore – but now as well there are poems that dwell on ageing, on art and music, on the sustaining of love over time and on the nourishment that comes from a long-lasting love. These themes have come more and more to the forefront.
“I write mainly at night. I enjoy the quietness. The poem often starts with an image, and I build on this and see where it goes.”
I love the physicality of being in the world. I plunge in. Images come of that sensual engagement, but then there’s narrative as well. If I’m lucky the poem gathers to some kind of earned wisdom or insight. After the rush of the initial draft I have a fair idea whether there’s something worth keeping or not. Then I edit. This job of editing is about as much fun as trying to extract a thistle thorn from your finger with a sewing needle – but crucial if the poem is to have a chance.
Groundswell: New and Selected Poems. Patrick Deeley
How has growing up in Ireland influenced your poetry?
I spent my childhood in rural East Galway in the late 1950s and early 1960s. My father was mad about machines and timber. He had a sawmill and a carpentry workshop where he made all manner of things – hurleys, furniture, cartwheels, farm implements, even coffins at one stage. I loved watching him shaping wood. My mother as well as being a home-maker did much of the farming. Part of the farm consisted of a Callows or wetland meadow, with its own specialised flora and fauna. I skived off there just to avoid work. Both the beauty and solitude grew on me, and influenced my poems, later – I saw nature in its raw state, up close, at first hand. But the skills my father possessed, and the lives of local people who lived round about us, and their colloquial speech, also chimed with me when I began to write.
My grandmother made ballads. Seumas O’Kelly, a relation of my father’s, wrote the highly regarded novella, The Weaver’s Grave. But there were few books in our house. My parents were pragmatic. They worked hard. They loved talk, the oral tradition. I began to write only after I’d moved to Dublin to train as a teacher. The home place and the memories came back to me unsentimentally. I enjoyed the quickness and the freedom of city life, and that also has shaped my poems. I still return to County Galway every so often, to meet my family. It’s the trigger of childhood memories, but when I splice these with later experiences and events from the present the poem happens out of that.
Landscape is sometimes still the spur, but I’m more interested in how we’ve harnessed and transformed it. My own memories, as well as more general notions about the primordial, can work as a starting point, but the poem must catch and connect the old world up with the possibilities of now. That, for me, is the challenge and the excitement. Somebody remarked that you have to keep glancing around and behind you while reading my poems. I like the implication, the ghost lurking in the machine of the poem at any moment liable to jump out.
Are there any particular themes that, as a poet, you feel compelled to write about?
Yes. To do with nature, but not simply as nature poems, more a case of how we impact on the earth and how the earth impacts on us. Groundswell: New and Selected has five sections and these sections have themes in common as well as specific themes of their own. In the first section, ‘The Hidden Village’, I address my early life and the lives of my neighbours in Foxhall, the townland where I was born.
In ‘King of the Wood’, trees are the compulsion, for themselves and for the myths and folktales associated with them. These are frequently given a modern twist or written at a slant. My father lost his life in a tree-felling accident, and maybe it was a working out of grief at what had happened that brought me to face up to trees, their beauty and their versatility, their panoply of legends and their mystery, and the sense of loss I felt for my father, with his sawmill and workshop and the machines and implements he had put his hand to left behind as a reminder of him.
In ‘The Flowing Bones’ section I examine aspects of the earth and its creatures at ground level, to find out what makes them tick, and I focus more on city life as well as on the increasing urbanisation of rural Ireland over the past decade or so.
In the fourth section, ‘Fear Bréige’, I’m having a lash at the recent economic disasters that befell our country – using as catalyst a rudimentary scarecrow or ‘Fear Bréige’ who finds himself in Dublin, living with some builders and made to serve as an ineffectual witness of the entire boom and bust.
And in Groundswell, the substantial batch of new poems that comprise the fifth section of the book, well… I’ve talked about some of the themes there earlier.
Has your idea of poetry changed since you started writing?
“I think poetry – the reading and the writing of it – helps to enrich and develop our consciousness.”
In my classroom in Ballyfermot when I was a teacher I encouraged the children to write poems in their own language and out of their own experience, for precisely this sense of personal enrichment – not just in terms of vocabulary but because poetry helps expand our ‘creative space’, where alternative possibilities in the way we live our lives can occur to us.
For my own part, each poem is always a beginning, a shot in the dark. It’s a more studied undertaking now, less fun perhaps because I’m trying to ratchet it up in terms of stretching the language as fully as I can, and deepening the layers of meaning or potential meaning, and aiming for beautiful expression always, even when the world the poem confronts is distasteful or unfair or considered ugly. I hope that the ‘argument’ in my poems has caught up with the imagery, that the wonder remains, and that the payoff for the reader is in finding more pleasure, greater reward in reading the poems.
Do you think that the core ingredient of a poem is that it should be read aloud in order to be fully appreciated?
It depends on the poem, I think. Some poems are slow-burn, and need a good mulling over. Others demand the carry of the air. Others still may fit both forms of presentation. People who attend poetry readings often say that the poem read aloud by the poet enables them to appreciate it more. But then, reading poems aloud to an audience is its own knack, one that not every poet can manage effectively.
What do you think constitutes a successful reading?
A big and happy crowd held spellbound by a poet performing at the top of his or her powers?
Are there any other poets to whose work you continually return?
“There are several poets I admire, but what I tend to do is return to certain poems which I consider to be great and which I never tire of reading.”
I admire the way Hopkins mints a language to match his restless search, and the passion of John Donne expressed with tremendous technical excellence. The pure vulnerability of Theodore Roethke appeals to me, his lyricism hitting the spot, taking you there. I met him once, when I was a child. He bought drinks for my father and the other men in John Joe Broderick’s pub in Kilrickle.
What are you reading at the moment?
The Bones of Creation
I’m reading Making Way, a novel by Theo Dorgan, and Savage Solitude, a book about the nature of being alone, by Máighréad Medbh. I’m also reading current issues of The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review and The Shop – but not just because I happen to have poems in them!
Are there any creative mediums that you’d like to pursue that you haven’t yet?
Recently I took early retirement from the job of primary school principal in order to devote more time to writing. Memoir interests me. At some stage I’d like to write about my father’s life – spent, as he would have it, “following tractors and various other contraptions”. I’ve had works of fiction for young people published by O’Brien Press, and if or when the poems leave me alone I may go back to that.
Which other contemporary Irish writers do you admire?
I admire far too many contemporary Irish writers to even begin to mention just a few.
Do you often find yourself in the company of other poets? If so, how do you think this might influence your work?
I don’t often meet other poets, except at the occasional book launch or festival. I never discuss my work with them – apart from with my editor, Pat Boran – nor do they discuss their work with me. I do feel that we recognise each other’s struggle, however, and the odd word of praise back or forth for work published does matter, especially from someone whose own work you admire.
Do you think the reading public has any preconceptions about poetry? If so, do you think that they are correct presuppositions?
The poetry reading public is small but passionate about poetry. I really don’t know what presuppositions there may be out there generally or even among poetry followers, but people who attend poetry readings seem well informed about the contemporary scene. What I would hope for are more informed anthologists, some of whom seem led by media perceptions of ‘who matters’ and ‘whose work is important’. I would in common with other poets also welcome more space for reviews and critical attention for poetry.
Do you use the Internet to find new poetry? If so, where do you go?
I go to various sites including that of The Munster Literature Festival and The Irish Literary Times. Naturally I go to the Dedalus Press website for their ‘Poem of the Month’ and to see what’s up. I often use the Internet to locate the work especially of the poets of old, when I can’t find their poems in books, but I still buy a fair amount of poetry books. I’ve a roomful of them, going back over thirty years.
What about some advice for aspiring Irish poets?
Apart from the obvious things such as persevering at the craft and reading the work of proven poets, I’d say follow your own path, but with an open mind and out of an emotional imperative.
What is it about poetry in particular that attracts you as a writer?
“Writing poems helps me to stay open to the world. I enjoy the pressure it puts me under, and the pleasure when the poem catches fire. It’s a solitary task and while I tend to be gregarious the solitariness of poem-making draws me in.”
As a child looking at nature, I often fell into a trance. People say of the new poems in Groundswell that the wonder is still there. The poems help me come to terms with things, in a sense preserve the experiences and the wonder. Writing poems is for me an affirmation of the world and of my place in it. And the world, for all its faults and failings, deserves to be sung – passionately, beautifully, even in the cracked voice of a poet.
¶
3 Poems from Groundswell: New and Selected Poems
Monkey-Puzzle
Again we find ourselves carried away by the thought
of having discovered each other. And in
your garden now this monkey-puzzle, fossil mother
of suburbia, suggests South America.
Wild, we both say, in the parlance of today
or yesterday. Except it all started ages ago – the way
we talked to beat the band, the love play
we wanted to make before the diplodocus that peeped
shyly round a tree could be taken for a common
streetlamp, the blundering brontosaurus
trembling hedge and tarmac become – in a heartbeat
or a time-slip – our last bus back, the one
we might run to catch or contrive to miss on purpose.
Birdsong
Perspectives through sound: a blackbird’s
oath, sworn from a chimney-stack;
the mellifluous coos of woodpigeons
conjuring sunbeams amid high ivy clusters;
a robin’s pipe, happening to approve
of cotoneaster berries. But if the tremulous,
piercing notes of the thrush
are expansions of space and time, rolling me
wide and far, I still hear the magpie’s
screeched assertion from a wall overlooking
the covered-in quarry, that all was
winter yesterday, was stone the day before.
Groundswell
Apollo did the dirt, slew poor old serpent god Python,
whose corpse gradually decomposed – the smell,
initially horrible, had tempered itself by the time
the Sibyl breathed it in, and was now an entrancing perfume.
Rubbish, say the experts, that Delphic whiff
was naturally occurring ethylene. But what a gas, still,
what prophecies came to shape the destinies
of peasants and kings trying to live up or down to them.
And if my wetlands will-o’-the-wisp must turn
to methane, or luminosities glissading my skin as I rise
from the turlough are to pass for algal
fluorescence, they’ve long since exerted their influence.
Here is ground and groundswell, fit matter
for a day’s dalliance or a lifetime spent deliberately looking.
Here we speak to each other because of the river –
not the fact of the river but the mood it pushes,
the clay-coloured flood so deep the heron must step
aside from it, the water-hen retreat under St. Patrick’s cabbage.
And, fresh as Hopkins saw it, ‘Kingfishers catch
fire’, their orange bellies flaring from a blue-plumed bush.
The following three poems are taken from piano, Eva Bourke’s 2011 collection of poems.
“In these new poems Eva Bourke leans into what she calls the “heart of things,” discovering for herself, and us, time and again that there truly is a heart of things, and to things, and that it might well survive all that conspires against it, even in the most war-broken, besieged, and harm-full places on earth. These poems suggest that the soul is an enduring gentleness in us, in others, in perhaps everything, and that it needs us to release it, to let it breathe, to nourish it with what we create rather than destroy. That gentleness is what we hear throughout the ample and beautiful margins of this book, the notes of its music being played with such care, and played softly, piano.”
—Fred Marchant
August Near Südstern
The sturdy gentleman outside
the Café Lux devours his meal, his dog
takes careful note of every bite.
The red and white umbrellas flog
high garden spirits, and the sunlight passes
through empty pools of mirrors in the bar,
each green-blue vein in cocktail glasses
a drunken streak. August, a shaggy beast,
sleeps stretched full-length beneath
dead leaves—they’re this year’s first—
and an unseasonal tristesse
creeps grey and cold among the trees
inching past couples in the shade,
until at last it settles down
next to a woman on her own
talking in whispers to herself who tries
recalling what she had known best
in all the years: the names and faces
of friends and lovers, the familiar places
so dear to her, all gone, all lost.
The Garden at the Road’s End
Turn left at the elm with the heron’s nest,
go past the Forbidden Village sign,
then right where the two thieves on the cross hide
under mounds of mildewed brambles,
take the long and narrow path for a mile or two
till you come to the garden at the road’s end.
Three magpies, those bêtes noirs in their chalk
and ink plumage will spy you first,
cackle and mock you, trotting around on the grass
over flinders of eggshells—relics of a recent
murderous foray—then flap onto the thatch
for a better view. A wren seizing his chance
will speed into the white thorn hedge.
The sun will stare through the spokes of an old motorbike
parked in the yard, nettles and dandelions open
green telegrams beneath the trees that stand
in a circle around the house, stiff and tight
as police cordons. Silence and absence.
Go up close. Your heart in your mouth.
Pressing your ear against the door, listen
to spiders glide across the black and white
piano keys, the hammers softly touch the strings,
the pedals—or somebody’s breathing—rise and fall,
the wind play funeral marches on a minor scale.
Four People on a Lake
Three hundred and sixty-five volcanic islands scattered
along the shore of Lake Nicaragua, each
with barely enough room for one house.
No human is an island perhaps, but each of these isletas
possessed a soul behind fringes of bougainvillea
and tropical green.
There was a small church on one, it glinted
in the sun, just discernible
between tree tops,
on another a school, a corrugated roof
on a few posts where wisdom could
come and go as it pleased,
on a steep rock in splendid isolation a villa—the flag
of the most powerful nation rose stiffly
in the breeze above it—
and on an island with a landing pier of rough planks
tables were set offering food and drink
in the shade of a mango tree.
Our boat glided along narrow channels through
the reeds. We sat in silence, four people
from four different countries.
White herons stood sentry-still, in the shallows.
Forgotten were sleepless nights, regrets,
worries, heart-ache.
A jewelled bird swayed on a branch, water lilies
dallied in yellow birthday hats, sea lettuce
was everywhere, rootless, adrift
on the glittering surface. The Danish woman stared
through the lens of her camera, unable
to believe her own eyes.
The young boatman who ferried us asked her politely
to post her photograph of him
to the second last house
before the old jacaranda on the León road. All this time
islands, boatman, ourselves and all else on the lake
the lake itself and all its creatures
the trees, plantations, fields and deserts around it, the far-away
coasts of two oceans, dusky cordilleras, cloud forests,
volcanoes beneath smoke rings
farms, villages, cities, people and animals were
held in the dispassionate gaze of a pair
of maritime eagles that circled
and cruised overhead, air-lifted by the thermals
into a blue way beyond
our mortal vision.
The late Francis Harvey reads one of his best known poems, ‘Elegy for the Islanders’, recorded at the launch of Collected Poems in Dublin’s Damer hall in 2007.
