Cassandra Voices

Tag: Ned Denny

  • Poems for Holy Week

    Poetry editor Edward Clarke selects poems from Paul Curran, Billy O Hanluain, Haley Hodges Schmid, Ned Denny and his own work to mark Holy Week.

     

    A corona Sonnet

    With no less haste than the crisis deserves,

    All faces one mask of consternation,

    We’ve learnt, through conversing in spikes and curves,

    This virus respects no race or nation.

    Virgil could not have foreseen the Tiber

    Would fill so fast with the fallen of Rome,

    Hospitals built with sinew and fibre,

    Children in hiding, on their own, at home.

    His toll’s still rising, but Death, if he could,

    Would make no attempt to keep numbers down;

    Warm April predicates wearing no hood,

    His scythe keenly sharpened shines like his crown.

    Unfasten quick this dead pathogen’s trick

    Lest lists of the late outnumber the quick. 

    April 4th, 2020

    Paul Curran was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1975. He holds a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and a Masters Degree from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. He has worked widely as a professional actor. His Only Sonnet loosely follows the pattern of the seasons, comprised of 100+ ‘alternative’ sonnets; Repeat Fees and its 80 sonnets and longer poems was published in July 2017.

     

    Stock Pile On Hope

    Walk down the bare,
    trembling aisles of your
    self. Everything dispensible
    is now after its Best Before.
    Pass by the Two for One indulgences
    of fear and doubt. Shelves stripped
    of the superfluous. The tattered packaging
    of novelties that amused us
    fade behind their
    spent Use By dates. Remembered now
    as infatuations bought to distract us.
    Is it time to close shop?
    Turn out the lights?
    Time for the din and dirge of shutters?
    We are open twenty four hours
    and we must never close.
    No matter the Feast Day.
    The Plague or The Hour.
    Turn toward that aisle within,
    so often passed in the hurry
    of what seemed to matter
    there you will find the plenty that
    always was and will be.
    Load your cart, fill your bags,
    weigh your trolley down.
    Stock pile on hope!

    Billy O Hanluain works as a language teacher in Dublin. His work has appeared in The Village and The Passage Between. He frequently reads at open mic nights across the city and has contributed to RTE’S Arts Tonight and Arena. He is a DJ with a special passion for Jazz. He lives in Kimmage, Dublin.

    The Ape in the Meme

    Like those who crouch in a bird-catcher’s hide,
    _             He has put up and part-designed
    A shiny means of destruction online,
    Whose checkout page is set and open wide
    _             As all blind graves must look for business.
    And so he means to capture browsers and listeners
    _                            Like birds in a wicker cage:
    That ape who ate his stockpile in the meme,
    _                                           Or famous adage,
    Who licks his unclean lips and can’t be seen.

    He has become fat and sleek, yeah, he’s smoothed
    _             Out all anxieties we had
    About his bad business: he prospers at
    The expense of all of us who are sweet-toothed.
    _             A devastating and wondrous thing
    Is committed in our land and we all sing
    _                            Blindly its praises. No prophet
    Even prophesises and almost every poet,
    _                                           To no one’s profit,
    Tells tales of a life, but not as you’d know it.

    What will be the end of it? Just now,
    _             At the limits of the eye, just off
    The shore of the ear, that ancient boundary of
    The world, the world can’t pass, no matter how
    _             Hard it smashes its waves into it,
    Or coaxes endlessly: just there, I intuit
    _                            You are rowed out with your answer,
    And stand before the multitude on a sea
    _                                           Of radiant stanzas
    For those with eyes to hear and ears to see.

     

    Edward Clarke’s latest collection of poems, A Book of Psalms, has just been published by Paraclete Press. He is poetry editor of Cassandra Voices.

     

    ‘See now the bewildered Christ’

    See now the bewildered Christ
    In the empty streets of Jerusalem;
    The surefooted clip clop of donkey and colt
    Accentuated by this brimming vacancy,
    By this our iron-held breath.
    We are inside reading the news;
    We are stacked in buildings, racked
    With urban exodus and suddenly beset
    By the fragrance of country miles.
    Need bares her teeth at need—
    No hosanna can emerge, no palm
    Softens the anxious cobblestones.
    Christ passes unhailed through our midst
    With eyes downcast for love.

     

    Haley Hodges Schmid came from her native America to England in 2017 to pursue introductory theological study at the University of Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall. A musician by training, she is drawn to the intersection of theology and the arts and eager to explore themes like redemption, joy, and sacredness in her writing

     

    Iron Age

    When jail shines like a blue marble in space
    and masks of fear eat into the face
    and new strains of deceit are going around
    and the dead demand to be more tightly bound
    and they scramble nine jets at the sight of a dove
    and drive in the nails yet call it love
    and cameras watch live Eden’s knoll
    and separation is the protocol
    and the long war wears the look of peace
    and Medusa stares from a million TVs
    and the cure is seeded with wasp-eyed death
    and all I can trust is my own wise breath
    and misinformation’s the name for the Word
    and they tell the biggest lies this chained world’s heard
    and commit the greatest fraud hell’s ever seen
    and say the withered tree is green

    when a dragon is about to be crowned
    and streets are empty save for the drowned
    and the wolf has the lamb’s best interest at heart
    and to stay alive you stay apart
    and an hourly dose of dread sets the tone
    and the sun itself’s been turned to stone
    and the hungry ghost of the moon descends
    and the axle of the heavens bends
    and the stars disappear through chinks in a rock
    and the hands go haywire on every clock
    and a black horse rides upon manback
    and you still think you’re not under attack
    and they turn the key to “keep us safe” from the Lord
    and at certain times we all applaud
    and death is getting desperate and iron old

    a bird will sing dawn wield your gold

     

    Ned Denny’s collection Unearthly Toys was awarded the 2019 Seamus Heaney Prize. B (After Dante), a version of the Divine Comedy, will be published by Carcanet this autumn.

  • Poetry in 2020: ‘Dream and so create’

    At the end of 2019, I wrote:

    In these times it is perhaps inevitable that people will want to write poems about climate change, or Twitter and politics. But poetry knows in its heart, what has already ended inside your consciousness, to which you and the world are gradually catching up.

    In the greatest poems I have read, an old man or great lady has already died, to be reborn inside my imagination at the dawn of a new reality. That essentially linguistic act, or border experience, at the heart of poetry, means that this art is perennially relevant, or always ahead of its time.

    The poems to which a few will continue to return must be in some way about the experience of being able to write to them from out of eternity, which is always to be found in the future.

    And it is in times like these that we need to listen to a still small voice that speaks from that revelatory moment when poetry completes the eternal act of creation in its own last judgement. Like the ancient scripture of different traditions, the poet knows we are living in an iron age, or Kali Yuga, and in his or her work, we come to withstand the day or night when the son of man is revealed.

    As W.B. Yeats declared in The Tower (1928), ‘Death and life were not | Till man made up the whole, | Made lock, stock and barrel |Out of his bitter soul’; the world can only end were we to vanish from it; ‘And further add to that | That, being dead, we rise, | Dream and so create | Translunar Paradise.’

    Thoor Ballylee in County Galway, Ireland: Yeats’s ‘Tower.’

    New Year

    At the beginning of 2020, I’d still stand by those high-sounding words, but I would like to add that we have plans to make recordings of the poems we publish.

    Poetry may well be all that I have said it is, but it is also a deeply compelling, sometimes scandalously illogical, thing that exists in the ear as much as on the page.

    A revelatory moment for me in my twenties was listening to W. B. Yeats read ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and other poems on a 1930s radio broadcast. The slightly cantankerous old poet said that he would begin with this poem from his youth ‘because if you know anything about me, you will expect me to begin with it.’

    One senses here a Yeatsian slight disdain for a modern radio audience. Or could he have felt as George Orwell imagined the poet feels ‘On the air’: ‘that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something’? Surely, Yeats cannot have hoped that his ideal reader or audience would be listening, that freckled fisherman in grey Connemara cloth whom he imagined in ‘The Fisherman’ (1919): ‘A man who does not exist, | A man who is but a dream’.

    What struck me most about Yeats’s reading was its incantatory style. Before he started, he was careful to explain: ‘I am going to read my poems with great emphasis on their rhythm and that may seem strange if you are not used to it….It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse, the poems that I am going to read and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.’

    I can’t imagine that many poets today would read with quite Yeats’s emphasis on the rhythm, and even a hundred years before Yeats’s reading, William Hazlitt in 1823 could express suspicion of ‘a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment.’

    That said, I was at first somewhat disappointed when I heard Seamus Heaney read out his poems in such a casual, almost faltering, manner, at a literary festival to which I was once taken in my youth. It didn’t quite match my expectations from the work I had read alone to myself, and it was certainly nothing like the crackly elevated recordings I had heard of Wallace Stevens, or even Tennyson and Browning, which retain something of that still, small voice I seem to hear in the poems I love.

    It was also something of a revelation working with Paul Curran a couple of years ago, making a recording of him reading out some poems of mine for a radio documentary. As we sat under duvets in the improvised studio of a back bedroom of the producer’s house, I was taken aback by the care with which Paul was able to draw out nuances of meaning during repeated takes of the same poem. I knew I would have to smarten up my act at future poetry readings.

    But, then, Paul Curran is an actor as well as a poet. You should be able to hear him read a couple of his poems on the Cassandra Voices website soon.

    To be honest, I am slightly suspicious of the strongly performative element of a lot of contemporary poetry. Poetry is not quite rap or folk song. And why get some actor to read out your poems, when it’s so endlessly fascinating to hear the poet herself read her work?

    I would say that my work’s shape on the page is as important as its shape in my ear as I mumble it out during the often-long hours of composition. Its heritage is, after all, a literate and courtly one, when manuscripts might be passed around a small readership, to be read aloud perhaps in coterie groups. Of course the roots of that tradition are ultimately in folk song and ancient incantation.

    I wonder how much of what I have now said will be applauded or deplored by the poets we have already published on Cassandra Voices. In any case, I am delighted to say that over the course of 2019, we published the following poets: Michael O’Siadhail; J.P. Wooding; Quincy Lehr; Alex Winter; Bartholomew Ryan; Edward Clarke; Sammy Jay; Alberto Marcos; Navlika Ramjee; Nance Harding; Ben Keatinge, Mark Burrows, and Daniel Wade.

    These join a list from 2018 comprised of: Chris Robinson; Ned Denny; Ernest Hilbert; Paul Curran, J.D. Smith, Jamie McKendrick; Anthony Caleshu; Timur Moon and Paul Downes.

    All poems are complimented by compelling imagery, mostly from the photographic library of Arts Editor Daniele Idini, and I am looking forward to hearing many of these poems, hopefully, read out or recited by their poets so that we can make audio files available for you too.

    Edward Clarke is Poetry Editor of Cassandra Voices. To submit a poem for consideration e-mail Edward@cassandravoices.com

    Cassandra Voices Poetry 2018-19:

    Psalm 70 by Edward Clarke

    Psalm 95

    The Firstborn

    Demon Cum

    LA RÉSISTANCE

    Double Take

    From Psalm 119

    On Suicide

    Poetry – Out Walking

    Poetry – Daniel Wade

    Poetry – Mark Burrows

    Poetry – Ben Keatinge

    The Sunset Drive-in Cinema

    White Woman Brown Heart

    Visita de obra

    Carbon Negative

    Forest

    BREXIT – A Poem

    From Psalm 119

    Two Poems

    RAT RUN

    Two Poems

    Twinned

    Nonetheless

    Gitanjali – after Rabindranath Tagore

    B Road Blues

    Visitations

    Blaze