The following is a short retelling and interpretation of a number of Irish sagas, including two, ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ and ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, from the golden age of Gaelic literature in the early middle ages. I – The Second Battle of Moytura Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Second Battle of Moytura’) c. 875 … Read more
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”20″ gal_title=”Featured Artist of the Month: Moira Tierney”] The beach is one of the few places you’re going to see New Yorkers immobile, supine, sleeping in the sun … everyone piles onto the F train to Coney Island, or the Q to Brighton Beach, or the A to the Rockaways, with the coolers … Read more
Anthony Caleshu’s forthcoming book, from which this pair of poems is taken, is titled, A Dynamic Exchange between Us (Shearsman, 2019). He is the author of three previous books of poems, including The Victor Poems (Shearsman, 2015), and Of Whales: in Print, in Paint, in Sea, in Stars, in Coin, in House, in Margins (Salt, 2010; named a ‘book of the year’ … Read more
I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O’Siadhail’s book-length poem, The Five Quintets, is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O’Siadhail’s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter … Read more
This piece came from a little sound I heard in my head, an atmosphere, which I wanted to explore. First, I made myself a soundbed to play in, and allowed two journeying violin lines to hatch out of my imagination; then I captured them in a digital suspension, wherein I gave one of them a … Read more
We can only imagine how poetry entered human consciousness. I intuit that its emergence was linked to the first use of fire, that most seminal of technologies, whose devouring mysteries transfix us with a spirit that endows our own. I see one among a band awakening from a dream, and entering a trance. She incants … Read more
When I first moved to Dublin, I thought there were a lot of out-of-shape athletes living in the city. I later learned that my misconception was the same as the basis of a joke that had been topical fifteen or twenty years before I got there. The joke was about a politician opening a shopping … Read more
95 While someone exhorts us In song to sing to God, I’ve looked askance and asked, is he Among us here or not? And found that question, off its no-man’s land Uptaken then in hand, Lies with sheep in shade, And takes its rest in space, Beneath a large-leafed chestnut, bright With burning candles, placed … Read more
All our biographies, if they went back far enough, would begin by explaining how our ancestors came to be more or less enslaved, and to what degree we have become free of this inheritance. Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London, 1995), p.7 We are facing a world in a state of perpetual conflict, … Read more
I am made endless for your pleasure Again and again emptied and filled A frail vessel ever with fresh life And melodies eternally new Breathed through me As though a little reed flute Cast over the earth And at your hand’s immortal touch My small heart loses all limits of joy To create ineffable utterances … Read more