poetry on the wall

So, just as I’ve finally got round to pasting all the pictures and photographs that have inspired me over the years onto the walls of my work- room, guess what? The wallpaper’s beginning to fall.

But that aside, to look at the walls is to look at a history of my writing. So there’s Goya and Bacon, Kahlo, Monet, Reichter, Wyeth etc. There’s photographs of war victims next to O’Keeffe’s flowers, a baby being thrown from a burning house beside a holy well and the galician maskers that were the subject of a chapbook that was published some years ago in Galicia. The title of that small book is Felos aínda serra which was published by AMASTRA-N-GALLAR. It contains some wonderful mask illustrations by Charles Cullen and the translations into the galician were done by Sonia Vila Aragunde. There is a photograph elsewhere in this blog of the masks. I’ve yet to see the Felos in real life; it is an ambition.

Google the word peliqueiros in the images search to see what I’m talking about. If you can look at them in black and white they make a radically different impression than they do in colour; this is the way I saw them. And so the poems are dark, much in keeping with the most likely origins of the masks.


My head is an egg shell:
intact, hollow;

abandoned on the ground,
weather leaves its stains.

On the outside I smile that smile
which passers-by notice less and less;

and all I can do
is keep widening it;

wider and wilder,
eventually grotesque.

They flee;
I am left alone.