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
Nicholas of Bari Another night fifth in a row unsettled but unfrozen thinking I get it I get it (I don’t, but I have skin and nerves): Whatever sustains someone doing what you do, I mean never mind the privations! that unseen hand, Shoulder cupped, steering towards the leper colony – the Big Bewk saints, the Seenitalls, … Read more
AREOPAGITE The cloud moves, low, across the landscape, leaving a slick of rainwater on the backs of cows. It passes through the mind of a priest and into the eyes of a fourteen year old girl. It is a pestilence. A curse upon the territory. In the villages they are rasping for bread. No chickens … Read more
Prescription: Isolation No man is an island? Go to your room. Sweat for three days through your clothes, and gaze at the sky idling through its wardrobe. Wait, while species-wide delirium registers tremors in the earth’s heart. Dream, with Ravel, of the radio’s skirling fantasies, one ear awake to the bells tolling over Italy. Angels … Read more
The Lamps of the Virgins from Bearers of the Broken Vessel At dawn, weaving through hills, go Daughters of Jerusalem in white, faces illumed by the flames of their lamps. They sing a song about lovers, become a string of dancing lights. At dawn, before babes awakened and bawled to take suckle, their mothers lit … Read more
Try mph To Payney, Tinpan, JJ, Tom P., Tom C., Col, Ry, Peewee I know the car I would most love to own: Well red, early seventies TR6, That beautiful, British-built, roadster mix, Boldly bearing the boxed badge of renown – Great jewel in Triumph’s commercial crown – Two point five litre, manual, straight-six, Mint … Read more
Advisory Epistle From Literature Quangocrat after Alexander Pope About my person, I at all times carry a bowl of re-heated cocktail sausages and a completed application form asking that I be better funded next year. I only read novels which interrogate the relationship between gout and Islamist terrorism, translated from the obligatory French; and poets … Read more
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 … Read more