ODE TO THE MOUNTAIN BROW (dedicated to Richard Greene) Cliff-topped at dawn in a euphoria so high I Paradise-verily see your wan white Pisa- Towering street-lights well-tipping utmost fealty to me, one I electrify back toward you with this Ode I compose under cadaver- soullessly blackening clouds — street-lights well-tipping with dew-new currency of gray-brown … Read more
KUNG FOOL ••••••••••••••• So you think you’re the Master? Meet the Master of Disaster: Bring your whole crew! I’ll just steal all your shoes. I’ll shoot the boot with cold Krug. Wised up? Tooled up? Tribed up? Bribed up? Congratulations. You wanna medal too? Bring the Joker & I’ll see you with a Fool. Flying … Read more
We Lie after Holly McNish My one remaining friend, now I’ve plugged out my Mum, is in my pretend life because he’s willing to not notice what I metaphorically call things. Like the fact that I carry about with me, smiling up out of my man-bag, a two day dead pike that looks like it … Read more
THE YELTSIN-CLINTON ERA, CENTRAL TIME ZONE The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, … Read more
Covid-19 has perhaps spelt a temporary death for, amongst many other things, flaneurship – that is, the practise of being able to wander throughout a city freely and unobstructed, making observations as one goes. Peter O’ Neill’s latest collection addresses the flaneur directly. With a background in translation, academia and his long- avowed admiration of … Read more
The Most Risk-Taking Poet In Ireland My split infinitives clearly the work of a man who dries his clothes recklessly, sometimes not emptying the lint tray two cycles in a row. At the height of my experiments with formal verse I once drove a Ford Focus at a tantalising twenty nine kilometres per hour when … Read more
Gold Fish I envy the gold fish the dignity of his fits and spasms mid the glass shards of his smashed aquarium, the water that was his air, evaporating, floor board sucked around him, gills screaming, cold blood pierced by the furnace of room temperature, epileptic defiance as oxygen congeals his world. The brittle bowl … Read more
Three Miles South of Carlow Town Walk with me. Don’t speak. Come to the place where the walls and stones Yield their shameful secrets. Listen. Listen. Stand and hear the black earth shifting, As she did then, to deny him his succour, And as she did when he slipped into her inky embrace. Three miles … Read more
For the purpose of perspective, I should like to carry out a short comparative study of two poems treating the subject of the sea. The first poem I should like to focus on is the great sonnet by Charles Baudelaire L’Homme et la Mer, whose composition dates back to 1852. The second poem is a … Read more
‘Liberals’ & ‘Death’ Two words that strut confident of their own historical inevitability. Everyone in time meets them, though hopefully not both ringing your door bell the same day, unless your name is Nagasaki or Vietnam; or you’re the first village no-one’s ever heard of successfully abolished from thirty thousand feet by a transgender person … Read more