10 reasons to visit Ireland

Add to these, exhilarating music sessions, nightly, in pubs all around the country; the eminently manageable distances in travelling from one end of the island to the other; the accessibility of  its stunning offshore Atlantic islands,  (particularly the UNESCO World Heritage site, Skellig Michael); its stunning unspoiled beaches; countless top-class literary and dramatic events.

Regret

Teenage years can leave you with regrets. You become so important to yourself, care for others drops sharply. It's normal, maybe even necessary for many, but the legacy is life-long.

 

Before The End

 

The bedside lamp shone

in the pool of her eye,

made her teeth translucent,

runnelled her face. 

Daylight and I were reluctant visitors.

The  room, smelling of trapped breath,

sickness and decay, made me anxious

that I would inhale her disease; 

and all I loved gone;

all dwindled down to duty.

The Special Place of Patrick Kavanagh in Irish Poetry

In a recent conversation, a friend and I agreed that Patrick Kavanagh had a special influence on us. The both of us rural Irish, we have that affinity with his particularly Irish view of the world.

For all Yeat’s heroic Irish peasant, Kavanagh was closer to the truth of it, and his insight is correct:

O stony grey soil of Monaghan

The laugh from my love you thieved;

You took the gay child of my passion

And gave me your clod-conceived. 

You clogged the feet of my boyhood

And I believed that my stumble

Had the poise and stride of Apollo

And his voice my thick tongued mumble.

And yet, Kavanagh knew the gold in his experience: in ‘A Christmas Childhood’, the child’s imagination is remembered, and expressed with snow-crisp freshness:

“My child poet picked out the letters

 On the grey stone,

 In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,

 The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

 Cassiopeia was over

 Cassidy's hanging hill,

 I looked and three whin bushes rode across

 The horizon - the Three Wise Kings.” 

Kavanagh saw poetry where most saw the dank misery of rural living. 

“They laughed at one I loved -

The triangular hill that hung

Under the Big Forth. They said

That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges

Of the little farm and did not know the world.

But I knew that love's doorway to life

Is the same doorway everywhere.”……………..from ‘Innocence’ 

And then there is Kavanagh the universal poet; where TS Elliot starts ‘The Wasteland’  

“April is the cruellest month, breeding  

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  

Memory and desire, stirring  

Dull roots with spring rain.” 

Kavanagh starts ‘The Great Hunger’: 

“Clay is the word and clay is the flesh

Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move

Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.

If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove

Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book

Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs

And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.

Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?

Or why do we stand here shivering?

Which of these men

Loved the light and the queen

Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer. Who was it promised marriage to himself

Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe'en?

We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain,

Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay

Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles

Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.”

 

But it is the beautifully observed detail of lives and landscape that makes Patrick Kavanagh special to writers such as myself and my friend. If he was a painter, I would call it his painterly consideration of the minute.

“One side of the potato‑pits was white with frost—

How wonderful that was, how wonderful!” 

“The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,

 A green stone lying sideways in a ditch

 Or any common sight the transfigured face

 Of a beauty that the world did not touch.” …from ‘A Christmas Childhood’

 

A poet from 'our place'; Kavanagh released the Anglo-Irish strangle-hold from around the necks of Irish poets.

 

These gates are always swinging

(it's not easy for everyone)

        

 

These gates are always swinging:

they screech,

squeal at each other.

These gates are jaws;

without partners,

they are harmless.

 

Now a field of pistons;

here work is the law.

Day and night they strain;

groaning up, collapsing down.

These pistons are muscles 

betrayed by all.

 

And this, the room of wings;

hold tighter.

These wings flap, frighten the air;

have pity on the wings,

they have no direction,

only agitation.

 

And in the end,

 

space:

here molecules disband.

Unmoored, we fall;

terrorized by incomprehension

 

we scream into eternity.

Stone Circle

Eight heads: bald, lichen-stained,
eyes closed, always listening.

One jowl-cheeked, one stub-nosed,
one with an empty eye-socket,
two with ears inclined to the earth,
another with a nasty bump,
one wearing a green skull cap,
the last, his mouth o, standing outside the circle;

all speaking in a pitch
below the range of human audibility.

The Gloaming

Gloaming: that part of the day, after the sun has gone down, and before the light finally leaves the sky.

I am in the passenger seat, travelling the road from Enniskillen to Belleek, along the north shore of Lough Erne. It is in the gloaming. The sparsely lit landscape is dotted with deciduous trees standing dark and proud against the chill January sky. The sky is a dreamscape of washed out blues, greys, pinks and dons; colours on the wane. Here and there that same sky is lapping right up to the edges of the road.

By complete coincidence, I am hearing for the first time ‘The Gloaming’, the new album from the band of that name. It is as though the music was written from this very seat; it catches the mood and atmosphere of what I am seeing perfectly. Haunting, enchanting, Irish with twists, spare in parts, sometimes ECM like,  experimental; it is a marvellous fusion. Bearing in mind the personnel in the band, maybe that’s not surprising: The Gloaming is Thomas Bartlett, Dennis Cahill, Martin Hayes, Iarla Ó Lionaird, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh.

For a bit more on The Gloaming check out http://www.hotpress.com/hotfor2013/thegloaming.html 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBkeDCCcPww

How well do you know the art of poetry?

Here's a challenge. Assonance, similes, metaphors, idioms....................................., take  a few minutes to try this quiz, it's a bit of fun.
And let me know how you've done.  http://www.quia.com/quiz/741084.html

4 minutes in space

The earth; and you with eyes receiving it, and mind capable of accommodating it.   Enlarge the picture, turn up the music and lose yourself in space for just 4  min's.

Deep Blue Day is a track from Brian Eno’s 1983 album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks which was made for a movie called Apollo. The film was later re- issued with a narration and other changes under the title For All Mankind. The video shown here features Nasa footage to Eno’s music, and is available from TheEnergyWarning channel on YouTube.

The excerpt below is from For All Mankind.

     

The Stages of Life

Have you ever looked from a harbour, or back to a harbour, at someone you love becoming smaller as a ferry leaves; slipping from clear, close-up definition, into tininess, into a dot, gone.

Caspar David Friedrich’s allegorical painting ‘The Stages of Life’ captures just that poignancy as an old man looks out, past a family, at five ships sailing on the sea of life, finally disappearing into the hazy distance of the horizon.

There is something in that forlorn rocky shore, in  the way the huge sky dwarfs the family grouping, the chill colours of evening, the exaggerated height of the sails of the ships disappearing into the distance, in that boat upturned to look like the rocks. The ships still large in the distance, as humans are to themselves all through life, are disappearing as though they don’t quite realise it themselves. 

Calling for Writers in Commemoration of John Berryman

In 2012 Dr Philip Coleman organised an all-day reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which featured among many others, Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. This year, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Minnesota, he is organizing a full public reading of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, to be held in Dublin in early October. 2014 is the 100th anniversary of John Berryman's birth.
 

Coleman,  a staff-member of the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin (who has a book on John Berryman coming out later this year) writes:
 

“ I am trying to get as many contemporary poets as possible -- 77 being the ideal number -- to write a Dream Song in honour of Berryman. While my ultimate aim would be to gather the Songs together in book form I would like to have a dozen or so ready for possible publication in ‘Poetry Ireland Review’ in its Autumn 2014 issue……….……. I would like to receive the poems by the end of March 2014.”
 

If you have a mind to penning a Dream Song for this project, Dr Coleman can be contacted at  < philip.coleman@tcd.ie>.

Flaws in Democracy

I've been thinking over the flaws in democracy; these points apply to different extents in different countries. 

·         The choice open to us at elections does not span the range of political opinion.

·         There is no genuine debate on what is best for citizens as adherents to a particular party frequently have no wish to engage with opposing views.

·         Debate among political parties tends to concern itself with providing opposition rather than being in any way constructive.

·         Mass media is used to indoctrinate or win over electors with sound-bytes rather than considered argument. Similarly recruiting celebrities to support a party is  barely more  than an exercise in cajoling the electorate.

 

·         The public have limited say in the externally imposed conditions, and international powers that national governments must satisfy or oblige.

·         Powerful advisors are faceless to the general public and we are not made aware of the activities of lobbyists.

·         We elect parties on the basis of promises and policies that are blatantly reneged on after the election.

·         We are frequently fed spurious facts and data, or we are given spin, or treated to barely disguised obfuscation.

·         Governments frequently overrule the popular opinion of the people.

·         Leaders frequently refuse to accept responsibility for mistakes, and almost never apologize.

·         Loyalty to the party generally outweighs loyalty to the people. The party whip system frequently prevents a member from following his/her own principles.

·         We are asked to vote simply yes or no on treaties which often have multiple strands, each of which deserves separate consideration.

    ·         Governments find expedient ways of flouting their own laws.

·         The system does not appear to be conducive to female representation.

·         Money spent  is often the crucial determinant in winning minds.

 

 

Wyeth: Magic and Poetry

Tell All The Truth

 

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,

Success in circuit lies,

Too bright for our infirm delight

The truth's superb surprise;  

As lightning to the children eased

With explanation kind,

The truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind.

 

 

Real beauty in eight lines by Emily Dickinson, and a message to all would-be poets.  And, as in poetry in art. Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting ‘Christina’s World’ has, perhaps, been reproduced once too often, but it has what makes the magic: a suggestion or more, and the space for the viewer to go in search of it.

Similarly, Snow Hill, in which subjects from a lifetime’s painting dance around a maypole on a page-white landscape; the landscape Wyeth lived and painted in. But is this a gently tongue in cheek retrospective of his paintings, a magical counterpoint of a May scene in deep winter, or a poignant reflection on the lives he shared and painted over the course of his life? 

 

Give Me

Give me
Gucci or Prada,
Louis Vuitton,
Chanel.

Give me
Cartier or Rolex;
Because
Because I’m worth it.

Audio Piece on The Roscommon Anthology

Conor Reynolds' audio piece features  excerpts from interviews with kevin Hora, John Waters and myself. Also included is a reading by one of Ireland's finest poets, Patrick Chapman, and singer Noel O'Grady, both recorded at the Dublin launching of The Roscommon Anthology on Thursday 28th November 2013 in the Uppercross House Hotel, Rathmines.

 

Growth

A dot: curious, stirring. 

A fleck: moving, creating. 

A fly: forming, inflating.          

A rock: swelling, building.          

A truck: bulging, looming, 

             

             bullying,

            

                            roaring

                                          You.