The demon smirks, having laid out her wares.
Will they see what she’s doing?
Will they realise how they’re being taken in?
Not all will grasp how an influencer works.
She hopes they won’t. Her power over them
depends on her ability to cajole and deceive.
She insinuates herself into their thoughts,
whispering temptations, telling them that the world
is theirs for the taking. Only a click away.
It’s not all about apples. Other goods are available.
Feature Image: Max Beckmann – Family Picture (1920)
One could easily mistake the names Francis, Goretti, Harry, Ingrid, and Joseph for the names of a bunch of digital nomads passing through Portugal in recent times. Yet these are the names of storms, or diluvial nomads, which have become regular visitors to Portugal, with varying degrees of impact: more or less gusty and rainy; causing some flood or roof leaks or a tree falling here and there; nothing out of this world.
So, when Storm Kristin arrived in the early hours of January 28th, it took many people by surprise, in spite of the warnings, and its impact still hadn’t sunk in after its passage. The region surrounding the city of Leiria (near the coast, roughly halfway between Lisbon and Porto) bore its brunt: several deaths, winds peaking at 200km/h, incessant rain and almost a million people left without power, water or network signal.
Among those people was my own elderly mother, who I couldn’t reach for three days, having decided to check if she was unscathed and sheltered. I presumed she’d be alright, beyond the power cut, but not hearing from someone close becomes increasingly anxiogenic.
As the region fell into a black hole, the focus of the news soon drifted elsewhere: returning to the daily incidents of the presidential election campaign and wins by Portuguese clubs in the Champions League, especially Benfica’s spectacular victory over Real Madrid. Most of the country was oblivious to the distress felt by a substantial chunk of its population.
Over the past few years, originating in a glitch in a famous video game, there has been a viral running joke that Leiria doesn’t exist, that it’s off the map. It became so well known that the local tourism board ended up adopting it as a slogan. In the aftermath of the storm, the irony wasn’t lost on most people.
It really was as if Leiria didn’t actually exist. Fortunately, my mother was alright, and unshaken. Kristin had awoken her in the middle of night. She simply got dressed, tucked her mobile phone into her pocket, grabbed a torch and the house keys and waited it out on the sofa, in the dark, with the world howling, whipping and cracking outside.
Fortunately the house remained almost unscathed too. The vegetation was, however, hard hit. Especially, the old tall trees in the back of her garden. One pine and three oaks fell to the ground, while another pine and oak are still standing but are look certain to slide with the ground they stand on. Smaller fruit trees were hit too, but that’s no big deal.
Sense of Destruction
As I got closer to her house, the sense of destruction grew stronger. Roof tiles had flown off, while posts and signs were bent and torn away. Many, sickeningly many, trees had been uprooted, or snapped in half like matchsticks, or were leaning in such a way that they faced a slow death, and would have to be chopped down.
There were sycamores, cedars, a great deal of oaks, countless Atlantic pines, and also many eucalypti, a perfect fuel for forest fires, which I could do without for the most part.
The cities of Marinha Grande, first, and then, Leiria looked like they had been under attack. Three days after the storm – under the first, short-lived, rays of sun for a long while – people were out on the streets, but the silence was eerie, mainly broken by the sound of chainsaws, trucks and hammering.
There remained a dusty haze in the atmosphere. What had been a fairly leafy city and region, looked to have been stripped naked. I foresee a weird shortage of shade in the summer.
The buildings, roofs, factories, urban equipment etc. can be fixed up and rebuilt within a short time. Even a sixteenth century chapel, part of the city’s skyline, or the pinnacles of a fifteenth century monastery in the town of Batalha, which was also destroyed by the storm. But for the economic ecosystem, the consequences may be dire.
The region, which has been one of the economic engines of the country, has managed to keep unemployment low and withstand various wider crises since the seventies, thanks to diversified industries and exporting capacity, particularly in plastics, moulds, wood and glass.
Leiria and its Castle.
Specific Trees
Trees are a different, soul-crushing, story. In Leiria and its immediate surroundings alone, never mind the broader region, it has been estimated that eight million trees were destroyed. There are specific trees, some of which have existed for as long as I can remember that I would randomly revisit and vividly see in my memories and dreams, like an amputee feels a phantom limb.
As a child, I rode my bike over tapestries of fern and pine needles. I fell off my bike due to scattered pinecones and jutting roots. I played football with trunks as goalposts. Seeing pieces of bark chipped off due to a shot hitting the ‘post’ would leave us unmoved. After all, there was such an abundance of trees, with enough time for regeneration.
The fragrance of resin, pine and eucalyptus hung in the air, especially in the summer. Over the past decades, however, due to increasing demographic and economic pressure, vast swathes of woodland have already disappeared.
One symbolic example, and also the largest of these woodlands, is the plainly named Pinhal de Leiria (Leiria’s pine forest) or Pinhal do Rei (King’s pine forest), an expanse of over 11,000 hectares of maritime pines, stretching over twenty kilometres along the coast.
This was presciently planted from the thirteenth century, in order to contain the encroaching dunes and to mitigate the effect of Atlantic winds. Also, two centuries later, the ships used by the Portuguese to venture out into the Atlantic Ocean were built from the wood of that forest.
On account of its sheer size and location by the wild ocean, it has provided magnificent views and is a refuge for many. Some would say there is a mystical side to it. At the very least, it is intrinsic to the local identity.
In October 2017, another Storm, Leslie (and possibly criminal hands as well) caused uncontrollable fires that burned 80% of the forest. I recently heard someone refer to that fire as its ‘holocaust’. A word I found sadly appropriate.
In 2026, Storm Kristin finished it off with a final sweep. The forest is gone. I guess the trees can be replanted, but how long will they take to grow? Will they be given the time to grow at all?
In the early twentieth century, local poet Afonso Lopes Vieira called it the ‘green cathedral’. Does this crumbled cathedral have sufficient followers pious enough to resurrect it?
Given the recurring fires and storms, competing priorities and the length of time it takes trees to reach maturity, I very much doubt I’ll see proper reforestation in my lifetime.
Although less ravaging, Kristin was followed by Leonardo, Marta and Nils blowing and raining into roofless houses, for a couple more weeks. The effects of climate change are palpable, by now. We are in the thick of it. Its consequences are snowballing in unpredictable ways.
Features Image: Debris from after the initial disaster, clogging up a Leiria street.
I cruise the Philosophy section of Hodges Figgis, watching, waiting. Like an old-fashioned spy I stand there on the third floor, book held up high for cover, my eyes glancing left then right over the top of it, solicitously. There are a lot of people around this afternoon; the rain has brought them in. For a while now I’ve been watching them hovering politely by the shelves, and it perturbs me to see them wanting to appear so proudly aloof from one another. Separate, despite their intimacy. Lonesome, despite their shared interests. Private and untouchable: that desperate middle-class nervous thing. The worst side of bookishness. I go back to my book, the alluring title of which is A Lover’s Discourse, and I read a few lines: the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude. But before these words have time to sink in, a young woman, an attractive student-type, comes and stands next to me. Her jaw-length reddish-brown hair is wet from the rain, and she curls a strand of it back behind her ear as she tilts her head, browsing. Beneath her damp, navy denim jacket she wears a black shirt, open at the neck. Scanning the shelves, she moves closer to me, and I have to take a step back to let her reach in for what she needs. The proximity is unbearable. I curl my toes down hard into the soles of my boots and squeeze them there, tightly, in order to dissipate the tension, to savor the self-restraint. I glance up and see her lift a copy of Jacques Derrida from the shelf. She takes a step back to her previous mark, turns a little towards me, and smiles. I catch a glimpse of her thin dark lips, the sparkling darkness in the amour fou of her eyes. I have a type, I admit it, and she fits it perfectly. When she opens the book the front cover glares at me: On Touching. I look down at the page I am reading but I can barely follow a sentence. She’s picked up that book in order to signal to me. My mind races. I look over at her now. She does not return my gaze. Desperate to tempt this further, I prepare myself for a casual remark. But before I can cross that stunning divide, she closes the book, places it back between the others, turns, and walks away. With no parting sign or invitation to follow the whole ritual falls asunder. But still, I can hardly contain myself: Touch me. Soft Eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. Quiet here alone.
Brimming over with desire, Haley Hodges’ collection Eros Rex reverberates ‘like the plucked string of a lute’ (‘Innocence’) with stark, sensuous questions about Christliness and control.
Hodges’ poems insist upon the reader’s attention in much the same way as the poetic voice demands attention from those who spark her desire, insisting upon an external authority to which power can be ceded. The headiness of many of Hodges’ poems stems from her depiction of the power within the giving up of power; the paradox of maintaining control by choosing to yield control. Again and again, the poetic voice issues commands – to religious authorities (‘Come climax / Christ, come Eros Rex’ in ‘Eros Rex’), to figures of amorous interplay (‘Make me your illumined cave / of wonders. Make me your clever girl’ in ‘Sapiosexual’) and perhaps to the reader, to the self, or both at once (‘Just try’ in ‘Maybe welcome it’). ‘Give me / the collar. Give me the crown,’ the voice commands in ‘Two Takes’, one of many images in which the wielding of control through the issuing of instructions is couched behind a veneer of subservience. And among the many imperative commands given to others, there are just as many expressions of internal desire, from the physical to the metaphysical. Perhaps the most evocative of these is found amidst the snow-covered world depicted in ‘Blizzard’, in which the poetic voice wishes for ‘snow Jesus / not acid Jesus’. As with many of Hodges’ most arresting phrases, the complexity of meaning brought forth despite the simplicity of the immediate image hits the reader as sharply as ‘Corrosive Christ’ (‘Blizzard’) eating away sin.
There is an enjoyable purposefulness to the rather jarring juxtaposition of earthly and divine woven throughout the collection. The reader is immediately made aware that we will be oscillating between the grand and the everyday, the lofty and the mundane, through the contrast between the first and seconds poems. After the titular poem’s delicious portrayal of all-encompassing desire, extending beyond the mental and the physical to the realm of the spiritual (‘spasm / of the panting soul’), over the page we find ourselves among ‘plastic mustard packets’ and ‘five-/dollar duo deals’ – we have transitioned from the realm of Eros Rex to that of a different monarch, found much closer to home (‘Burger King’). This is one example of many in which Hodges seizes the control her poetic voice so clearly enjoys offering to others through her ability to keep her reader guessing, wielding her wit and unreserved boldness to great effect.
Eros Rex oscillates between self-assured yielding in the name of pleasure and vulnerable exposure of the uncertainties of a soul adrift in a dark, unrecognisable ocean. While the likes of ‘Sapiosexual, ‘Master, Master’, ‘What was the best you ever had?’ and ‘Between the jaws’ confidently offer up a knowing eroticism with a certain glint in the eye, these are counter-balanced by the quiet stillness of ‘Heart Talks’, ‘Drifting’, and ‘What is memory, if not testament?’, each of which delivers its own sucker-punch ending. Of course, the sensual and the poignant are not divorced from one other – even amidst the eroticised religious imagery of ‘Master, Master’, there is a sudden heartfelt sincerity as the voice proclaims, ‘my love of you has been / the death of artifice’. Nevertheless, it is when the voice is not engaging in erotically charged power plays, but instead turns its focus inwards, that the single-minded confidence, unapologetic demands, and fiery sharpness of the more carnal poems are eroded like sea-glass. What remains is fragile, tender, and achingly poignant. When the satisfying and pleasurable sense of self-certainty is stripped away, we are left looking inwards with a quiet contemplation of isolation, purpose, and need.
Many questions are put forward over the course of the collection, some more explicitly than others.
Implicitly, the collection asks: Who are we when we are left alone?
And explicitly: What is memory if not testament?
Whether any reader believes that the answers can be found within these pages or not, we will surely find ourselves with much to contemplate in seeking them, buoyed by the ample richness of imagery and sound that makes up Eros Rex.
Word came through from cousin Ed in Limerick: ‘Good news, I’ve a piano for you that’ll fit in Paul’s van.’ ‘Great stuff’ I enthused, blithely disregarding the challenge of getting it as far as my house in Sligo, let alone up the steps and through the door.
Remarkably, cousin Paul agreed to make the trip on a dank evening in January when winter seemed interminable: ‘sure a road trip would be a bit of craic.’ Relative to other possibilities on that first weekend of January he was probably right.
A layer of ice shrouded the tarmac as we set off from Sligo town on Saturday morning. At the Toberbride roundabout outside Collooney we bought what were apparently small Americanos. When these appeared in pint-sized cups it begged the question: what manner of receptacle is reserved for a large one? The proprietor clearly understands the importance of motorists loading up on the dark sludge before driving the first leg of the N17, especially on a bleak January morning.
Collooney gives way to Ballinacarrow, where you find signs for Coolaney on the road to Cloonacool, then Tubbercurry anticipates Curry, and you’re into Mayo by the time the caffeine wears off.
The Saw Doctors travelled the N17 from Tuam to Galway with ‘thoughts and dreams,’ a state of mind not recommended for the winding road to Tubbercurry, an accident blackspot. As for ‘stone walls and the grasses green’, although there are plenty of the former, the boggy fields are more fawn than green at this time of year, until you get past Tuam at least.
The road widens before Ireland West Airport, outside Knock. There, Our Lady, Saint Joseph and Saint John the Evangelist appeared to Mary Byrne in 1879, but the opening of the airport in 1985 was the real miracle, as Christy Moore insisted. The messianic zeal of Monsignor James Horan brought this solitary crumb of infrastructure to a neglected north-west region in 1986.
Only featherheads now dream of the Western Rail Corridor being resuscitated as far as Sligo, despite tangible evidence of surviving track under public ownership, recalling Monty Python: what did the British ever do for us? The 2024 All-Island Strategic Rail Review proposes new lines are restricted to connecting settlements with populations over fifty thousand, but how is a city, such as Sligo, supposed to expand sustainably without further rail infrastructure, and is Donegal to remain the forgotten county forever?
The N17, which serves as the main north-south transport artery through Connacht, abuts a curiously desolate landscape, almost entirely devoid of native woodland. It offers a foretaste of the Midlands, without the charm of the waterways. Far from wild Atlantic shores, it’s scenery that nurtures disappointment.
Beyond the seemingly supernatural marilyn of Knocknashee (‘hill of the fairies’), there’s barely a hillock in view along the entire route to Galway. There the slick motorways of another Ireland come into view. I’ve never taken the route other than under a sky that promises rain, and usually delivers.
Many of the super-sized bungalows along it appear to have been constructed in the 1980s, when Ireland still exported its children. Aesthetic considerations did not figure prominently in the considerations of draughtsmen, who might as well have been paid by the room. The influence of Southfork, the Ewing Mansion outside Dallas, Texas is apparent in the expansive Southern Colonial style of some of these over-sized residences.
Ribbon developments streak from historic towns, where the number of pubs diminish with each increase in the price of a pint. They say the kids prefer to go to the gym these days in any case.
Beyond Galway, the gentle scenery of east Clare barely registered such was the speed we reached on the N18 motorway. Before long we were crawling through dystopian industrial estates outside Limerick. At last, we reached the city’s attractive inner core, including the country’s only Georgian Crescent, near the house where our piano was located.
Ed had let us know there would be 5.5 men on hand to lift the piano. It turned out the .5 of a man was a blind Jack Russel, and that the additional men were piano players rather than heavyweight lifters. Undeterred, we hefted it out of the house – which mercifully had no steps at the entrance – and squeezed it into the van, albeit at a slightly awkward angle, without too much bother.
There followed an evening of revelry, as the additional piano lifters, who turned out to be Maltese, revealed their real talent, as musicians. At one point, I am convinced, the blind dog chimed in, but sadly we lack documentary evidence to this effect. The only regret is that cousin Ed declined to sing his cult – a small cult admittedly – classic, ‘Mow’, about a young man taking refuge from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the gentle comforts of cutting the grass.
On Sunday morning we awoke early. Cousin Paul had taken further precautions against the January blues by booking a seaweed bath back in Sligo for that afternoon. The road rose to meet us at 9am, as we traced our way back home along the same route.
At Milltown, Galway a large, modernist church that spoke of a more self-confident era was welcoming the remaining Cathaholics that shuffle through its doors. Among the pillars of Old Ireland, only the GAA continues to thrive. Today its brash, new club houses might pass for aircraft hangers. This is Supermac’s country of ersatz, super-sized Americana.
After passing Tuam, we required further lashings of the dark sludge. At the petrol station in Ballindine a screen saver at the till read: ‘Coronavirus COVID-19 – Contactless – We would prefer if you could pay be contactless card.’ Covid frayed the social bonds like no other event in modern Irish history, and along the N17 it’s a gift that keeps on giving to a corporate aspiration for a brave new, cashless world.
The real challenge came at the other end. Another cousin Johnny was thankfully on hand, and our photographer’s boyfriend Shane, a strapping Mayo man, was enlisted too.
The great weight of a piano – most uprights weigh well in excess of 200kg – proved more of a challenge than anticipated, but after much heaving and straining – ribs were almost popped – we maneuvered it into the space. It now could do with tuning, and awaits a suitable hand.
Jenny Ní Ruiséil is a musician and Yoga teacher, based in the west of Ireland. She creates music inspired by her roots finding her voice through singing in the Irish language, as well as taking inspiration from medicine music around the world and devotional chanting tradition of bhakti yoga and other spiritual traditions. Jenny is inspired by the continuously changing landscapes of the natural world, our human bodies, and the relationship between mind, body and awareness that we navigate on a daily basis.
My earliest musical influences were quite classical in nature – I trained from a young age on the classical flute and played in orchestras and concert bands throughout primary and secondary school. I was always enamoured with the idea of being a singer but I didn’t officially take any lessons until I was in about 5th year in school. I taught myself guitar at fifteen – on a right-handed guitar that my dad had lying around the house (I’m left-handed).
During my teenage years I was fortunate enough to attend the Gaeltacht (Coláiste Lurgan), where I subsequently worked. It was there that my love for music and songwriting was really given a space to flourish. I often say that if it wasn’t for Gaeilge (the Irish language) and Coláiste Lurgan, I would not be a singer today. Gaeilge literally gave me my voice. My boss in the college Mícheál Ó Foighil was the first person to ever put me in a room and say – ‘tá tusa ag canadh an amhráin seo’ (you are singing this song) – for no other reason that he believed me capable of it.
I can’t tell you how impactful that was. Or how impactful it was to be part of a community centered around speaking the Irish language and creating music for young people to reconnect to it. As I got older I began spending whole summers there, and ended up working as a múinteoir and stiúrthóir ceoil (musical director). My job (along with a small group of others) was to translate songs into Irish and adapt them to suit groups of teenagers to sing in groups. We would then record the songs in a studio and shoot music videos to upload to Youtube for them to enjoy at home.
Eventually, myself and the other teachers responsible for these projects formed a band, Seo Linn, who I sang with for nearly five years. Our music was mainly as Gaeilge (in Irish), with some bilingual songs too. We were really lucky to be given some amazing opportunities to travel to Uganda, Boston, London, Scotland and all over Ireland. We played for Micheal D. Higgins on a few occasions, as well as in venues and college bars all over the country, and I can safely say they were my ‘wildest’ days!
I took a ‘break’ from the band aged twenty-two that ended up being permanent, as my mental health wasn’t good and I was struggling with an eating disorder. It was from there that yoga and meditation became important staples in my life, and I went fully into studying and practicing yoga while I travelled. I didn’t sing for a couple of years then, until one day I found myself at a Kirtan session (a form of call and response chanting), and fell in love immediately with the practice.
It was a bit outside of my comfort zone at the time, as the only reference point I had for ‘devotion’ was something I associated with mass and the Catholic Church growing up. But I quickly realised that Kirtan (and yoga for that matter) were speaking to something much more universal, and something that any human with a heart has the capacity to connect to and feel impacted by.
I began hosting kirtan sessions back in Dublin in around 2019, and was starting to write my own original songs again by this point. It is still a journey for me to reclaim the idea of being a
singer-songwriter, but I feel that mantra and my yoga practice has really bolstered me to trust my creative instincts and capacity again.
My music now reflects this, and is still deeply influenced by the land, music, spirituality and mythology of Ireland as well as my own personal healing journey.
My hope for the future is to continue writing and creating more music that can connect people to the healing capacity of song and chanting, whilst also capturing some of the essence of Ireland and the magic contained within the language and landscape of this land.
For this episode, we have asked our friend and contributor, Greek journalist and filmmaker, Alexis Daloumis, to sit in for an interview with Luke Sheehan about his newly released Documentary Belki Sibe.
Back in 2015 Alexis travelled in northern Syria to Rojava, to join the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces and soon was deployed on the frontlines as a member of the International Freedom battalion.
His documentary depicts with unprecedented candour and rawness his eighteen-month journey through war and revolution, during the advances and victory against Isis, the liberation of Raqqa in 2017, until then, the Islamic State capital and stronghold.
The documentary also includes new footage and interviews from his subsequent visit in 2021 to the same places and cities where he once fought.
Now, as a journalist, his camera turns to scrutinize civil life and institutions under the autonomous Kurdish administration.
In light of recent developments, we asked Alexis to talk about the making of his documentary, his experiences on the frontlines and that of his comrades, as well as the potential dangers that loom over the area and its people, now that United States has withdrawn its support to the autonomous Kurdish administration in favour of the newly established Syrian Central Government after the fall of the Assad’s regime.
The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of the deep pit”, he wonders, “where I’ve been / this three and a half years?” Physical and intellectual lethargy, it would seem, can be the stuff that poems are made of. Luckily for us, at any rate, Paulin’s “gift survived it all.”
If the volume, his first in a decade, has been justly lauded for its ethical courage and linguistic zing, it also confirms Paulin as successor and torch-bearer to a generation of Northern poets, whose time has largely passed. When he freeze-frames two young victims of a loyalist murder-gang – “Each in his open coffin / each with a polo-neck jumper / to hide the slashes” – we hear a murmur of Seamus Heaney’s shade, still grieved and grounded by “the actual weight / of each hooded victim, / slashed and dumped.” Likewise when we encounter, in “The Spare Room”, “the light’s ekeing growth” like “a bandage being torn off very slowly, / always with a sense of the damage / and the fictive hand’s quiet sloth”, we’re restored to the kind of hard-edged perceptual cogency pioneered by Derek Mahon, adrift “in a riot of sunlight / watching the day break and the clouds flying.”
The list could be extended. The canny imaginative shape-shiftings of Paulin’s title-poem, for instance, seem to have a Muldoonian tinge – and the same may be said of “Not to Speak of the Cheese”, a playful flex of ancestral speculation, which is also an inspired “trip”, attempting to locate “our common awkward surname / back in the town of Nîmes”, a site of “impacted paint” where “the Huguenots were massacred / in the White Terror / that followed the Hundred Days”. The book as a whole might be understood as the final flare of an aurora borealis that once seemed nearly permanent, and unassailable, in its rich, revelatory shining.
Admittedly, few of Paulin’s poetic peers and forebears have ever dared to broadcast, in print, their “regret” for “the loss / of the educational genius / of Martin McGuinness”, a former paramilitary commander who would, Paulin posits, quite sensibly, “have dropped the 11+”, and with it
the whole sectarian and therefore necessitarian system of training the minds of the young and imagine all those smug fee-paying schools taxed out of existence swept off the face of the province!
This is pure Paulin, lippy and punctilious, skillfully converting bowsy provocation into good politics and better poetry. That he’s managed to smuggle such an honourably elegiac salute into a Faber-published manuscript, indeed, may be considered a small victory in the long peace – which has yet to be won. For as Paulin reminds us, “direct rule / means the same old skules”.
In contrast to many of the younger luminaries of the Irish and Northern Irish poetry scene, for Paulin, we sense, politics means more than selective self-projection in the name of art, and necessarily transcends the well-crafted, fully costed pleas for balance that often pass for liberal opinion. Paulin is the kind of lateral thinker, instinctively partisan, for whom, bravely, there is “nothing” anymore “to be said” about “the sight of Ben Bulben, / massive and tabled”, fringed by “wild rhododendrons”: a pained vacancy that calls to mind Robert Emmet – dying for a vision of Irish nationhood that remains unrealised – and the “epitaphs / that could neither get written / nor chiselled in hard stone.” As here, the experience of personal despondency Paulin charts often comes across as the weariness of an emancipationist whose cause, for now, has been forced into dormancy.
In a literary landscape grown sleek, and chic, amid an unceasing rain of sinecures and market opportunities, the Oxford don stands out from the pack, combining the fire of a citizen-poet with the sad intelligence of a gnarly visionary. Like all great stylists, he is distinctive and elusive with every breathing lyric. To pilfer a phrase of Mahon’s, Paulin has become “The Last of the Fire Kings”: an anomaly and outsider, strangely attuned to the deeper weathers of his time and tribe. As in his tribute – one of a few – to the Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar, Namanlagh grants us entry and permission to “poke about in his darkness”: a “puzzle” that impels us with its intricacy and power, “though” we “can tell that in spirit / he’s gone out the door.”
