Upcoming Events

Culture Night 2012 is Friday, 21st Septembers. I’m looking forward to reading poems from Above Ground Below Ground at Cruachán Aí Heritage Centre in Tulsk http://www.rathcroghan.ie/ . Artist Elaine Leigh and I will present images and poems that relate to the Neolithic sites at Lough Crew in Meath, Brewell Hill and Killeen Cormac in Kildare, and the legends and myths associated with these sites. 

A body of work still in the making: the subject matter has fascinated Elaine for a number of years, I’ve only caught the bug this year, but I've been amazed at what it has taught me and at the dam-burst of ideas it has ignited, (those last few words seem to have escaped from a war comic c. 1965).

 

From  “ Above Ground Below Ground”

 

The sun enters the passage;

I meet him on my way;

he touches my head

like water. 

I emerge into day;

in the chamber

the sun dwells a moment

on my earlier impressions. 

I return after the day

to elaborate my carving,

my spirals,

my perpetual turning.

 

 

 

On Monday 24^th, I’m in Mullingar for the launching of Mullingar Scribblers, Poems and Stories Volume 5.This fantastic writer’s group, the Mullingar Scribblers, who meet on Monday nights in the Annebrook Hotel have produced excellent writing for many years; I hope they get great support from everyone in Mullingar. I might also suggest that, if you are local and half interested in writing, you could do a lot worse than call into one of their sessions.

A Memory of Ireland Past

Since Christmas brings us back to family,loved ones and our memories of those who are gone, I thought I'd post this memory. It was another time, the mid-sixties.(from "Sunfire")


Visiting the Corsetmaker.

Miss Gately, you know, the corsetmaker; her cottage thatched and whitewashed beneath sycamores ragged with crows and their bickering.

A Sunday afternoon, my mother walking to the red door and it opened and closed and nothing else stirring for ages but ourselves in the back of the white consul with the red roof at the end of the avenue, just outside the gate;stone walls and lichen patches wallpapering our afternoon.Father dropping off in the driver’s seat while Micheal O'Hehir commentated on matches, one after another, without ever taking a breath in all that pipe smoke; matches collecting in the ash-tray all burnt to tiny black bird bones and the condensation all used up with words and faces dribbling pathetically into shapeless bad temper. Over and over: will she ever come out, can’t we go now,why do we always have to come, move your legs; till eventually she would reappear, a slap in the doorway, motor jauntily, red-headed,back to the car like it’s been five minutes or something, and Dad’s awake, reversing from the gate, back into the remains of a Sunday afternoon.

And I never knew what went on in there; never saw who opened the door,never saw a package, never heard anything about it. My father didn’t know either. I remember she took my sister with her when my sister was in secondary school;I wouldn’t have wanted to join them anyway,it was obviously a woman’s house.