Cassandra Voices

Tag: Ciaran O’Rourke Cassandra Voices

  • Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin

    Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber and Faber, 2025)

    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.”

     

     

  • Contemporary Turkish Poetry Considered

    Review: Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets (Dedalus Press, 2025)

    “A writer’s life”, the poet Nick Laird once remarked, with a self-assurance befitting a Royal Society of Literature Fellow, “is a cycle of trying to get to their work, sitting staring at the blank screen, wandering off, steering their reluctant bodies back” to the desk where they compose – out of the ambient, affluent bustle of London or New York, where they live – a “pattern” on the page, to make sense of the “chaos of daily circumstance”. Given the apparently placid tenor of Laird’s own routine, such “chaos” would appear to be largely symbolic, or at least to unfold outside the pale of the writer’s bubbled existence, self-absorbed and self-admiring.

    Sometimes, of course, the amiable sequestration of even the most punctilious of poetic solipsists can be disturbed: by disruptive riots or bad reviews, human rights abuses or pesky up-starts who have the audacity to care. It’s then that the holy guardians are called on to defend and re-sanctify the art, imperilled by a round of “daily circumstance” grown all too intrusive. To quote Ireland’s current Chair of Poetry, speaking in 2017:

    Must poetry be louder, must it be more active, more politically and socially engaged? I can’t bring myself to believe that the answer to this is yes. Poetry’s response must be to remain true to itself rather than rush into rhetoric. Poems shouldn’t be about getting a point across.

    Poetry’s right to be pointless, the poet’s freedom to shun the claims of political or social conscience: these are the resounding criteria, the engraven ingredients, of literary greatness.

    We might wonder how such prescriptions would be received in Turkey, a country which, under the influence of Recep Erdoğan, has undergone a process of forceful “authoritarian consolidation” in recent years: the diversity of a multi-ethnic polity replaced by a top-down state “restructured along hyperpresidential lines” and specialising in “the mass persecution”of perceived “dissidents, who have been jailed in their thousands.” Where censorship and imprisonment are looming realities for citizens (including writers) who dare to ask questions – and even occasionally attempt to get their “point across” – it’s possible that the supposed right of poets not to think or care about very much beyond their own line-breaks would smack of empty-headed conformism, rather than the liberty its advocates pretend.

    Perhaps post-doctoral literary scholars of the future will resolve such paradoxes and speculations definitively, for one and for all. For now, readers can occupy themselves with Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets, a new bi-lingual anthology from Dedalus Press, carefully curated and translated by Istanbul-based poet, Neil P. Doherty.

    Doherty’s versions pay tribute to the range and vitality of his chosen poets – spanning multiple generations, but all still in their literary prime. His own style becomes recognisable as the book progresses: each voice he presents has its own kind of under-stated wit and oneirc clarity, catching the rhythms of history in a vivider light. “The world is a saddleless horse”, observes Gökçenur Ç., “we try not to fall off”, though “we whisper ‘you couldn’t be real’ / into its ear.”

    There is often a philosophical undercurrent surging just below the surface of these writers’ attentions, poem after poem, in the words of Cevat Çapan, “tirelessly / seeking for the roots of life itself.” The marginality and strange endurance of human yearnings become connecting threads in the expansive tapestry Doherty draws into billowing life. “This graveyard we call memory”, notes Elif Sofya, “grows and grows in our heads”, a “haunting of the body” now metamorphosed into words

    Time and again, the richness and intensity of individual perceptions are balanced – granted weight and depth – by a galvanizing recognition of story-telling as a mode of shared (albeit frequently contested) consciousness. Gonca Özmen thus recalls and elegizes the victims of the Roboski massacre, carried out by the state military against a group of (mostly teenaged) Turkish civilians. “Branches entwined in a verdant forest” give way, in the poem, to “arms and legs entwined in an empty forest”, as a spectral crowd of grieving mothers assembles in the aftermath, “day and night clutching these soaking wet photographs”. Mustafa Köz, similarly, manages to hold the broken world, like a fallen teardrop, in delicate suspension: it “was for all of you that we exiles set out on the road at dawn”, he sings, “for the sake of these lands, crushed under bloody, iron heels.”

    The full range of felt emotion – encompassing grief, joy, whimsy, longing – seems somehow distilled and honoured in this vibrant anthology. Among other things, its arrival may send a reviving gust of energy through the more insular spaces of Irish culture. Poetry’s horizons have always been broader than the comfortable confines within which many of our cliqued and sinecured gate-keepers have been content to keep it slotted. Its home is the world, and its journeys manifold – across languages and histories, alive with “the honour of carrying / This light.”

  • Poem: The Revolutionary

    The Revolutionary
    Andrée Blouin, 1921-1986

    A hungry child can never truly sleep. In the orphanage
    for sinful offspring – our fathers white, our mothers
    African – the nuns were merciless, severe. I shook
    by night inside a narrow, iron cot, aware only
    of my body’s hunger, a heavy shadow
    shuttering my limbs. I prayed for pity
    in the nothing-blue that slowly turned
    to grey – another dawning misery. My later
    love for liberty began beneath the weight.
    Softened after rain, I ate the red-mud bricks
    that walled the yard in fingerfuls, to ease
    the ricket-sting within my belly. Eventually
    I sickened; a nurse and officer appeared
    to valuate my case; the reverend mother
    eyed me down. Knuckle-tough, the holy
    order washed their fists of me, like dirt.
    Cruelty, you see, ensures reiteration:
    the orphanage and colony were images
    of one another, their legatees incurably
    suspicious, incapable of kindness
    to the Africans they ruled. Sickly, sore,
    dispatched away, my life began again
    in freedom: mending coverlets and dresses
    for imperious françaises, plantation wives
    intent on delegation. I worked, in truth,
    unendingly, determined to survive:
    my labour served me well. When
    Guinea first, and then the Parti Solidaire
    demanded heartened soul, unstinting
    dedication, day and night, I gave my all,
    humming like a never-empty engine
    of vivacity for Africa, my nation. Long
    debased, the cresting Congo filled
    my veins with euphony and joy – a song
    of jubilation, born of fire, tears, and blood,
    now winnowed to an ache. I strode as one
    among the risen generation. Possessed
    of an uncommon poise, Gizenga always
    seemed at home in quietude: the Belgians
    feared his silence, knowing him a strategist,
    percipient and fierce; he listened like a man
    in meditation, untroubled by the fray
    to which he nonetheless devoted
    both the clarity and passion of a saint.
    Struggling together, comrades in the fight,
    I considered him a friend. And dear Patrice…
    as if in fever, I recall his grace, the easy
    trust he held in those around him, and
    the smiling way he seemed to bless
    the people he addressed, gliding
    lightly when he stepped, alive to hope,
    assured of the integrity of service
    to the cause: the Congolese empowered
    by the Congolese themselves, the copper-
    hearted mercenaries tossed into the tide.
    A dignified idealist, he radiated calm.
    Assessing the equation, the European
    lackeys sprang a trap: the president
    renditioned, his body would be cut
    in blocks, and dipped in acid
    swilling in a barrel. They burned
    the living trace of him to vapour, ordering
    the rest of us to leave or disappear.
    They kept a single tooth for decoration.
    His dream and he are vivid to me still.

  • We Must Begin with the Land

    Review: We Must Begin with the Land: Seeking Abundance and Liberation through Social Ecology by Stephen E. Hunt (Zer0 books, 2025)

    Environmentalists find themselves in the paradoxical situation of living in a golden age of radical ecological thinking – even as our global economic system blasts through one climactic tipping-point after another, more or less guaranteeing the extinction of planetary life as we know it at present. A rich field of research and intellectual inquiry has sprung up from between the fault-lines of the emerging climate crisis, along with concomitant movements centred (among other aims) on food sovereignty, habitat protection, the democratization of land holdings, and anti-extractivist resistance. Joining in this spirit of stewardship and challenge, Stephen E. Hunt has produced a prospectus for what might be described as eco-socialist change, in an attempt to measure and mitigate “the profound reengineering of life on Earth” that capitalist food systems have wrought. In place of monopolistic land-hoarding and ever-expanding “agri-business” – which trace their roots to the era of settler colonialism – he makes the case for a not-for-profit, “circular economy”, based on the principle that “nutritious food” is “an essential human need.”

    If Hunt draws inspiration from “utopian” ideas – the notion, say, that local commoning could provide a vital food source for significant numbers of people in the U.K. (where he lives), in place of the corporate or commodified provisions they currently rely on – he is nothing if not clear-eyed about the scale and extremity of the climate catastrophe predicted to engulf our already warming world. The vitality of his analysis might be said to stem from its symbiotic pairing of transformative hopes with a deep-running awareness of natural necessities. It is simply not possible, he states, to reach or maintain “ecological integrity within planetary boundaries” without simultaneously “addressing profound social problems embedded in deep history.” Far from being inevitable, he argues in a similar vein, famine is “primarily a social problem that demands solutions founded on social justice.”

    If Hunt often focuses on the practicalities of ecological action – how to grow wholesome food, and nurture communal practices, in a durable way – he nevertheless situates his proposals within an internationalist horizon. His book draws as much on the lessons of the Kurdish revolutionaries in Rojava, say, or the grassroots agricultural labourers comprising La Via Campesina, as on the experience of local campaigners in Bristol, his home. We Must Begin with the Land is anything but parochial. In fact, by arguing for the radicalism of community gardening, foraging, the conversion of waste grounds into allotments, and the like, Hunt may find himself in the vanguard of progressive thinking. Some commentators – not without reason – have attempted to hitch the cause of ecological adaptation exclusively to the wagon of the nation-state, essentially envisaging climate adaptation as a matter of enlightened technocratic adjustments from on high. Hunt’s contrasting emphasis is on the importance of localised, grassroots environmentalism, with an anti-capitalistic edge – aligning him politically with the late Grace Lee Boggs, for example, whose campaigns for community-led ecological regeneration in Detroit offered a new model of labour agitation in that industrialised city.

    Hunt also invokes the “social ecology” of Murray Bookchin, a multi-faceted philosophy that advances a critique of “the historic turn towards hierarchy and patriarchy” within radical movements – often hampered, ironically, by rigid structures and internal power imbalances – as well as a diagnosis of the “statism” and “capitalism” that define wider social structures, particularly in the global north. By re-examining our conceptions of urban and rural, of agricultural production and consumption, Hunt observes (via Bookchin), reformers can “ensure that human and ecological well-being are at the heart of democratic initiatives”, bringing the grand ideals of socialist transformation down to earth – and into an actionable zone inhabited by actual communities. During the Occupy Wall Street protests, he recalls (perhaps with a tinge of nostalgic over-statement), the occupiers’ “self-managed food provision” merged into something of an improvised welfare service. The movement exposed the degree of social isolation in the twenty-first century’s metropolitan centres. One of the chief benefits of communal eating is to help to address alienation.

    Such schemes, of course, are driven as much by physiology as by psychological or socio-econonmic factors. Our ability not only to think beyond the present infrastructre of a capitalistic economy, but physically to survive, is directly connected to the attitudes we hold and the measures we take regarding food and the land it grows from. It was hunger, after all, and not just a spirit of experimentation and progressivism, that inspired the rebellious denizens of Kronstadt to cultivate the waste grounds of their city in 1921 – instituting a “horticultural commune”, according to the historian Voline, that the Bolsheviks, intent on centralization, were zealous in repressing, even after the famous mass of striking sailors there had been executed or dispersed. Then as now, democracy and ecology may be thought of as connected strands of any authentically revolutionary endeavour. As Kristin Ross has written:

    Land and the way it is worked is the most important factor in an alternative ecological society. Capital’s real war is against subsistence, because subsistence means a qualitatively different economy; it means people actually living differently, according to a different conception of what constitutes wealth and what constitutes deprivation.

    Such issues take on a palpable urgency in the age of climate change, as extreme weather events merge with the predicted decimation of habitats and food-chains. Whether or not we realise it, how we feed ourselves (and learn to live with one another) is a crucial question for communities everywhere – a question likely to turn into an existential dilemma if left unanswered. In Hunt’s words,

    as the food crisis worsens, it will be increasingly necessary to make productive use of urban or “peri-urban” land for local self-provisioning… it is wise to activate urban gardening as a collective form of commoning that transcends the atomisation of communities into clusters of individuals.

    Noting the explosion of factory farming and other for-profit models of meat production globally, he wonders: “Can the straight trajectory of relentless economic growth be bent into the spiralling plenty of truly regenerative production?” For readers in Ireland, these speculations hold special resonance. A nation-wide campaign centred on community-organised green spaces and vegetable allotments – such as Hunt envisions – could serve as an original, effective response to the expanding epidemic of dereliction afflicting Irish towns and cities (itself in part a symptom of the housing and cost-of-living crises that have caused concomitantly high levels of emigration and homelessness). As to the issue of food sovereignty, despite inspiring efforts by networks such as Talamh Beo to implement sustainable models of “agro-ecology” across the country, successive Irish governments seem to have remained in thrall to a meat (and dairy) industry operating on a commercial model hostile to workers’ rights and favouring large-scale operations that are emissions-intensive. Meanwhile, the goal of reaching even the minimum requirements for decarbonising our farming practices seems as illusory as it’s ever been. A dramatic re-set in local and national policy is needed – and soon.

    Among other things, there is arguably a risk of hubris in a progressive politics that centres its aims and actions solely on the state and its traditional organs of power. As Hunt suggests, in an era of drastic ecological and economic ruptures, a consumerist society that simultaneously “does not know how to feed and dress itself”, that destroys abundant eco-systems to make way for industrial-scale farming and vast monocultures, can hardly be taken as the sanest or safest of socio-environmental paradigms. We must begin with the land, he declares – and re-build our agricultural economy from the grassroots up. The change we need starts here and now.

  • Poem: ‘A Chapter in the War’

    A Chapter in the War
    Appian, 95-165 CE

    Under orders from Octavian, the hardened captains – Pansa,
    Carfulenus – patrolled the narrow pass they had determined to defend,
    with the Martian legion and half a dozen cohorts in their train.

    Surrounded all about by mulling marshland, heavy bogs,
    eight miles south-east of Mutina, their suspicions
    as they carried on were roused on either side

    by movement from the rushes; softly here and there a shield
    or helmet seemed to glint, a fog of shining apparitions.
    Suddenly the Antonian praetorians appeared, in grim array.  

    Having nothing in the way of tactical advantages
    or spaces to maneuver, the men instructed new recruits
    to linger at the rear, lest they lose or hamper the attack.

    Then spreading through the swamp, the veterans
    unsheathed their blades and readied for the fray.
    The massacre was brutal – for these were brotherly

    antagonists, Roman known to Roman, lethally opposed.
    Worse by far than war itself, a savagery incarnate,
    is the rending of a nation from within, neighbour

    killing neighbour – the enmity unending. On this occasion,
    the Antonians resolved on rooting out the ones
    they called defectors, in the name of the republic;

    the Octavians believed themselves entitled to revenge
    for the calamities inflicted at Brundisium. Thus
    the armies clashed ferociously, in silence: because

    of their experience, the soldiers never raised a cry,
    knowing their assailants to be seasoned, unafraid.
    No sound was heard but metal in the mist, the guttural

    alacrities of flesh. Since the sodden ditches offered little hope
    of charging or retreat, the soldiery were locked as in a pit
    together, limb to limb, dealing death between them.

    When one fell downwards, blacking out, another instantly
    stepped up into the gap. None had any need of bidding
    or encouragement, for all became their own commanding

    officers in battle. They fought with the intensity
    and muscled grace of dancers, in a muggy April sun
    that never broke. The novices, obeying their instructions

    from the start, watched in wonder as the butchery continued,
    with everywhere an eerie quiet hovering, a shroud.
    Having gained the upper hand at last, the Antonians caroused

    along the avenue, relieved. But history is fickle as a breeze.
    When Hirtius had word of the catastrophe, from Mutina
    he led a squad of legionnaires in haste, and tracked

    the weary victors down the road. He killed them all,
    methodically reversing the result. Octavian was cheered
    by the intelligence. He slept, that night, as gently as a babe.

     

    Feature Image: Augustus of Prima Porta, 1st century

     

  • Review: Trump Rant by Chris Agee

    “Trump Inhabits Trumpistan”, writes Chris Agee in his rampaging poetic satire, Trump Rant: “Trump Is the Wolf of Washington”. Written over a four-year period from 2017 onwards, and arranged as an expanding series of mock-newspaper headlines, Agee’s book begins as an act of stinging personal portraiture and ends as a thorough-going investigation of America itself – which appears, over the course of the poem, as both an empire in decline and a dysfunctional democracy in crisis. “Trumpian Fever”, Agee writes, “Continually Reminds Me of the Civil War Build-up of the 1850s”. As Agee recognises, and as Mark Twain likewise knew, the past and present have a habit of rhyming through the flux.

    A US-born Irish citizen, based in Belfast, Agee is singularly sensitive to the totalitarian impulses and tribal resentments that the title-figure – a “Beacon of Malevolence” – has proven adept at mobilising, both in and out of political office. “Trump Is Ten Times Worse Than Nixon”, he insists, reminding us that the current Republican nominee for president “Openly Supported the Kenosha Shooter”, Kyle Rittenhouse, in 2020. Such precedents alter the civic atmosphere, toxifying public politics, possibly beyond repair.

    The Trumpian era, Agee suggests, is defined by ruthlessness, for “Trump” at heart “Is a Political Cutthroat”: a charismatic leader with brash demogogic tendencies, brazenly echoing white nationalist discourses in his bloated ascent to political power. “Trump Is Malcolm X’s “American Nightmare””, we’re informed: a proposition that feels at once historically grounded and chillingly prophetic.

    In this respect, the Rant may bear a resemblance to the work of Allen Ginsberg, combining oratorical force with a deep-running sense of cultural urgency. “Trump Is the Real Plot Against America”, Agee declares, “Trump Is a Mouth Who Loves Mouthing”. It should be said that part of the appeal of Trump Rant – what stops it from being merely abrasive and makes it, instead, thought-provoking and often funny – is its fizzing sense of how ludicrous Trump can be. It’s possible, indeed, that when faced with the former president’s one-man circus-show, laughter may be the sanest response. “Trump Is Impossible To Imagine as a Scuba-diver”, Agee quips, and any honest observer would struggle to disagree.

    “Trump Speaks No Languages (Not Even English)”, he continues, and we begin to understand the complex blend of fixation and anger that propels Trump Rant along its hurricane-course. Whereas Trump wields language like an ugly weapon, scattering falsehoods and distortions whenever he speaks, Agee, a poet, is using his words to hold up an accusing mirror to power itself. “Trump”, he suggests, “Is The Corrupted Dream”. The Rant, by contrast, might be thought of as a visceral attempt to re-galvanise the original promise – of language as a mode of truthful speech, and of the United States as a vibrant democratic republic (or what Langston Hughes called, with painful justice, the “land that never has been yet”).

    With his Democratic rivals staunchly committed to neoliberalism at home and genocide abroad, and his own party plunging ever deeper into a sludge-pit of weaponised nativism, toxic conspiracy culture and personality-worship, as a political figure Trump in 2024 seems as peculiarly emblematic as he has ever been: both homegrown product and representative man, incarnating the feral aggression and strange emptiness of American capitalism. “Trump Is a Tacky Gatsby Bamboozling the National Nick (We’ve Read It All Before!)”, Agee writes, and the tarnished nature of America’s self-mythology seems all the more polluting; the rot too rampant to be reversed.

    For all its declarative zest and referential range, Agee’s book is saturated with political dread: we read it in the shadow of things to come.

    Feature Image by DonkeyHotey – Donald Trump – Caricature, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66578850

  • Poem: ‘The Vagabond’

    The Vagabond
    J.M. Synge, 1871-1909

    To comprehend, regard the brutal wilderness to hand.
    More than most, the burrow-broken vagabonds
    recall the living tune. In remoter reaches
    of the Wicklow hills, they live where a sodden soul
    could barely pass, and look out all the year on unimpeded
    barriers of heath. In every season, heavy sleets of freezing water
    descend interminably, so the roof-thatch drips a colour
    peaty-blue, and the cottage-floors are sinking,
    boggy in the wet. The wide skies rock in hellish
    storminess: by dawn the ragged larches that endure
    are bent and twisted, bowing bleakly to the rim
    where sunlight somehow rises in the summer.
    Down the beggar-glens the churning wind, as well,
    comes whirling with a river-roar that time
    to time will lessen, of a sudden, giving way
    to hush – enough, that is, to sow a tension
    in the listening body, neck and limbs, of anyone
    who waits, crouching with an ear ajar
    for the mournful cries of country-dogs
    that prowl among the crags. The elder-folk
    who keep and carry on the memory, the quenchable
    tradition, of risen insurrection, raising fire in the guts,
    are dwindling today, a disappearing army, blown afar –
    though here and there, disguised among the lonely
    and the low, I’ve met them as I passed along,
    and gathered up their words. To see these Irish men
    and Irish women sunken, unrepenting, their leather-
    skin and ageing eyes ablaze again, condemned for good
    not to the viscerating gibbet, but to the slow obscurity
    of dying-out, forgotten but by dreamers and the fey –
    it’s been enough to wring me with the pang of isolation,
    an echo of that dumb, determining distemper, impossible
    to heal, of unredeemed deracination… a share, perhaps,
    of the desolation mixed in every region of the land
    with the waterfalling beauty of experience itself, the luminous
    cascade we all have known, elusive, controvertible, but actual
    and active to the penetrating mind. I raise my hungry fist
    in health – to the ferocity and wonder of the world.

    Image: © Daniele Idini

  • Poem: Fragments of a Litany

    Fragments of a Litany
    Gaza, 2023-24
    Grieve with the butchered gods of love
    for Layan al-Baz, the young, the strong,
    her soft arms cut by shrapnel,
    her wounded leg a stump.

    May the world record unquietly
    the wordless eyes of Abdul,

    of Kenza, and Karam – who buried
    their mothers in a barren yard.

    And remember the nameless orphan, too:
    removed from the rubble of a screaming ward  –

    blood in the mouth, her vision blurred.
    Sow seeds, oh poem, for the baby, Salma,

    and her shock-haired sister, Alma, twin,
    mewling by the roadside when the brutal rains abate.

    Feature Image: Aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal area of Gaza City, October 9, 2023

  • A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    In the poem your butchers
    fear to breathe, the murdered nurseries

    are clean, the brimming
    table-top restored – your every room

    aflush with idleness again,
    a bowl of flying spices

    near to hand, the oven-bread
    uplifted through the haze: a feast

    the windy air will sing
    from the open-hearted balcony

    to the salted promenade below,
    where a boy

    is counting ripples out to sea,
    and the market-men

    are bundling their wares,
    the coming dark

    a gentleness
    and rustling of wings:

    no raining heat
    or carnage to allay,

    the waterways unpoisoned
    by cruelty or death.

    You see – the dream
    your fingers fashioned like a sail

    is soaring in the breeze;
    your pen

    outlives the bullets
    of the eviscerator’s gun.

     

    The Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) was killed along with his family in Gaza on December 6th. His final broadcasted poem, “If I must die” makes reference to his statement in an interview that if soldiers arrived on his doorstep he would fling his pen, his only weapon, in their faces. 

  • Bliain an Áir – ‘The year of slaughter’ 1740-41

    Bliain an Áir
    ‘The Year of Slaughter’, 1740-41

    Around the earth, a warring, wooden sea of brigs
    was bristling, a-flame; volcanic ash
    descending on the vacillating map. The weathered world
    began to shift – a tiny alteration
    sowing ice across the land. The shining-bellied geese
    no longer wintered by the lough. The turf-blue river
    waters died. An iron frost persisted, all the spring,
    without a rain, the blooming yearly crop undone –
    in every rill and valley, sick. The factious common people
    roared in protestation; then dwindled down, masticating
    slowly, like a herd, on sour, curdled soup and sallow greens:
    a meal of nettle stems and charlock – the lush,
    green-leafed, light-golden-flowered thing that grows
    among the grass. The lark-lit summer moors
    were blank; the meadow-birds aghast. No longer
    having feed to give, the grieving poor death-rattled
    in the fields, as the little cows they tended fell.
    Like rotten sheep themselves, after supping
    dead potatoes in distress, whole parishes surrendered,
    passing out, in fever-thin delirium, to waste
    and bloody flux: a plague of desperation, day by day.
    Town and city quickly filled with remnants of the living.
    The census-takers floundered; swelling ditches overflowed.
    To put an end to expiration, the famous bishop
    brewed a broth: a medicine made up of milk
    and boiling water, with a sprinkling of chalk –
    to be dispensed among the stricken, till the ague settled down.
    Feature Image: gravestone in Coolaghmore, county Kilkenny of the Lee family, of whom three members died in 1741–42.