Category: Images

Recours au Poème: Poésies & Mondes Poétiques

November 15th, 2013
My thanks to Matthieu Baumier, editor at Recours au Poème, and to Elizabeth Brunazzi, who published and translated four poems from my collection, Cycles (Lapwing Publications, 2013).

I am adding here Elizabeth’s translation of i and the village (after Marc Chagall)
moi et le Village

(d’après Marc Chagall)

Version française, Elizabeth Brunazzi

La rosée découle en jade une lune aux trois quarts
L’Amour O l’amour! Ta fleur arrachée embaume

De son parfarm ma main, bientôt
bientôt me rappelant une certaine musique-

Mon destin a toujours été de quitter le lieu
où la lune dansait avec la subtile Neptune!

Tout se dissout-
sauf le souvenir de ton visage,
ton rire en pleine rue et ta danse pour la lune!

Tes bagues de jade et ta fleur sont mes bijoux,
nuançant toutes choses d’une teinte de vert, de pourpre, d’un bleu profond.

La rosée découle en jade une lune ornée comme un bijou,
Sa fleur blanche fond sous le bleu.

Je me souviens d’un visage, maintenant fixé en lumière,
maintenant un ton, une bague ornée de bijoux, une certaine nuance brillante.

de :

Christine Murray
(after Marc Chagall)

Dew drops into jade a three-quarter moon.
Love, love! Your uprooted flower dissipates

Its scentedness onto my hand, soon
soon recalling to me a certain music —

My fate was always to leave the place
where moon danced with subtle Neptune!

All dissolves –
save your remembered face,
your laughing in the street and your dancing for the moon!

Your jade rings and your flower are my jewel,
shading everything green, and purple, a rich blue.

Dew drops into jade a jewelled moon,
Her white flower dissolves under blue.

I remember a face, now caught into light,
now a tone, a jewelled ring, a certain bright hue –

Link
Recours au Poème: Poésies & Mondes Poétiques

‘Fragments from Noticing’ and ‘Edge/Untitled’ by Gillian Prew

October 19th, 2013

Fragments from Noticing

 
 i
  
 The wick, uprooted/ left of light –
 ice-shawl thawing to the leaf-ends
 dissolves to the rain/ the rain’s bloom.
  
 ii
  
 Wet-edge/wet-air
 lifts the birds dampening
 to the rim of cloud quietly.
  
 iii
  
 Not-evening/
 a dimming seam
 behind the treeline/rising
 a black whir of crows.
  
 iv
  
 Opposite/
    unfastened flowers
 mantling the stone/summer’s
 tumbled frock.
  
 v
  
 Mirror-firth/silver
 with sky, with gulls’ backs.
  
 vi
  
 A dug-in place/a shadow.
 A black edge/a knuckle/a grave.
  
 Fragments from Noticing is © Gillian Prew

Edge/Untitled

 
Waiting among ghosts on the bursting stone/
white of memory/the wild weeds moved-in.

White of the rushing sea/ the gull backs/the moon.

   Waiting/as if
a blue-lit eye/a voice of glass/a leaf-sway –
                                rain.

As if the rain a slow-motion dust.

The past –
     a field/a room.

Wearing the grasses/the books
letting go/not letting go.

These pieces corrupted by time.
Small-sound stories half-writ.

The past whittled to white/and 
it is ready a cut-through bone.

Edge/Untitled is © Gillian Prew

Previews from ‘In Havoc Lights’ by Michael McAloran

October 10th, 2013

vii-

…vertigo ice/ what said/ yes/ said/ it follows/ the clasp-knife breath that lingers/ in the rat deep of vermin obsolete/ of the night’s claim/ shadowed by meat/ in the presence of the none/ a blind man’s cane tracing the brail sheets of nothing left to be/ inherent dice of the unknown/ till failure/ terror of/ asking then of the what till else/ semblant/ dissipatory/ click-clack and the roundelay of ashen promises/ so speaks the silence filled with a grandeur of displaced light/ in the laughter of confrontation with the hope that never was/ as so swings the light bulb in a deserted room filled with scarlet dust with scarlet vapours/ till a-dream in sun lights/ hence the spectacle/ the a-breeze block smashing out the remnants of the ongoing/ here alack/ vibratory tone/ perhaps/ else/ till foreign once again/ [we all fall down]/ drag of the pelt of skinned longing/ here or there a vibrant echoing/ voices/ the voice grasping for nothing/ vagrant the ice subtle as the dawn growing upon the unearth-ed flesh/ breath no/ violet no/ synergy/ some distance of/ collapse of/ said without spoken/ glacial the tide consumes the lack of air/ lung-lack/ spitting out the teeth of pissoir abnegation/ furtive/ in the silence of ever having been/ as if…sudden as if…back then to fall upon the crest the wave of it/ oceanic as a cadaver’s wonderment…

xi-

…undone/ travail yes or no/ till absentee/ a colourless distance to bear/ as if the given speech were other than/ spit polish and the ashen weight of never having been/ the silence of never having been/ in retrospect/ hard pushed/ give or take a day or naught/ settling/ settling/ throughout the given dissipate of the mock sun’s spun/ in havoc lights where claim is disrepute/ scarred the air melds in a circus dislocation/ given yes to fall/ here or there a rhythm/ a calking of features marred by ongoing finality/ snap-snap the fingers cracking/ through the delve into/ of the fragrance of/ silenced by night/ one step to take above all others/ it says/ it murmurs/ as if some encore were possible in the bleak thin air of some foreign beginning/ given to task of/ all around/ beyond/ step non-step then back to the outset of commence/ here a ruptured breathing/ such is/ what known/ nothing of/ the fingers search the lie/ a mercury tear/ given to speeches unheard/ in the collapse of all/ where mimicry shadows break upon cylindrical walls/ unearthed prayers of the dead/ none to follow/ merely to gaze upon/ through cataract eyes bound by ennui/ hence the laughter never ceases to be/ and the rot of light or vapours/ posits and henceforth yet of the given lapse in each motion of the un-primed/ and so/ step/ retrace/ trace yet following on from the none that came before/ yet still the breathless pace of haven lest to fall/ sudden then to ask/ as if the voice were never more silent…

xiii-

…no shelter from the ragged taste/ of excrement/ till trace composed/ figment or no/ haggard blood set till ember of/ scuttle of dead vermin tears/ this is sun light’s breath/ stillness of cadaver’s shine// head buried in the glimmer of the eye/ till obsolete passage/ imprint of none/ mocked spun of passage in the depths of silence/ echo of veranda/ cleft yes/ subtle yes to fall/ and so the emptiness of boned meat/ a meat hook stylus and the caress of nothing/ sneer speech/ absent speech/ traces yet to divulge/ (echoing laughter)/ the skyline it mocks it does not mock/ the earth sucks upon dead bodies/ and so in this/ the earth mocks the frozen words/ graceful to trace lies all lies it echoes/ and so forth/ breathe/ inhalations of razors and the spit of blood/ of cum/ vibrant the nocturne makes nothing of/ the eyeball sliced/ caressed by tongue/ what wounds/ effortless/ salient/ nocturne of spit speeches/ prayers to the none of/ from the none of/ walls paper walls and the skeletal starched/ back-light of a room filled with nooses/ give or take an inch/ enough to go around/ these are the dead lands/ these are the cactus lands/ spread out like a patient/ etherised upon an operating table/ in the skull of there ever having been/ stone knocked upon this is the salvage/ the nerve struck/ till dark/ all is dark/ the bone break of winter fathom and the blood struck fathomless/ given as if to cross the passage inwardly/ the voice is forever embers of what is no longer imminent/ unless/ and so the light fades/ so it burns let it go/ scraps torn away in a dressage of sight/ petals to dust/ nothing ever touched upon…

xiv-

…swaying meat/ an overture of silenced/ the dried blood of wounds and the clasp of nothing/ vibration/ yes/ as if it once/ the syringe beauty of the skulled ice/ vermin air/ the asking of as if it were other than/ null/ void/ pennies upon the eyes/ time’s passing/ absence of time/ the stain of bloody words in sands the sands of which devoured/ yet of/ so it is said/ hands dead the virus effigy/ and so it carries/ there is breath through the sneer of teeth what matter what have you/ in an elixir of silence/ (only then/ only there)/ ah the grace is enough it is not enough/ skeletal signs/ the traces of the seen/ bring out your dead your living/ nothing is all// …the fingers bite the skyline/ hence bled there is no other laughter/ collapsed/ collapsed/ head-struck the distance traced/ life no answer/ and yet the burn is this/ given to replicate/ repeat/ echo yes there will be echoes/ such is the lie of having been/ as if recalling were to recall/ in-step/ (laughter)/ the bare foot skeletal skinned of flesh makes impart in dirt// vacancy all/ dead spaces/ the hands absent the voice absent/ the shiv cannot collect the dawning/ drunkenly the whispers of teeth skin the collective waste/ there is none/ naught/ dispersed the collapsed longing for/ in the haven of desire/ till drag of obsolete returns/ voices/ voices/ the hiddeness thronged/ blinded by something that can never be spat out/ will never trickle away like piss/ and so …

These previews are © Michael McAloran , from In Havoc Lights

‘The Elm Of The Aeneid’ and ‘Spadework’ by Peter O’ Neill

September 17th, 2013

The Elm of the Aeneid

After Virgil , Lines 282-295, Book VI

In the vast shadows of the Elm,
Under her ancient boughs where,
According to men dreams are allied to nightmare,
Intricately woven into every arrow-headed leaf,
There monstrous shapes and forms
Become crafted by the elements,
As beheld through the Light Trees,
Where everyone fashions for themselves
The proper demons which people their most
Specific exactitude; Just as Aeneas saw,
Him-self, those heady Chimera and which
He pursued with wrought steel,
On through the torturous waters of the
Tarterean Archeron, where the roads led.

This translation of The Elm of the Aeneid, After Virgil , Lines 282-295, Book VI is © Peter O’Neill

Spadework

In memoriam

Out in the allotment, thinking and digging,
And considering Heaney’s analogy
Of the opened field – Immense acreage
Of sovereignty to be found there

Emanating beneath the wood of his words,
Their clayey, and powderish substance.
And, pausing to take a breath, before I too
Rake up the skeletal remains of Baudelaire.

Field then as page, words as soil or clay;
Tossing the stones and weeds from the mind,
Into Hell’s ditch! The Norsemen and

Bog bodies, as with the spectral corpse of Croppies,
Figuring there, as in any archaeological site,
All with neurological accordance of mind.

Spadework, in Memoriam is © Peter O’Neill

Peter O’ Neill’s debut collection Antiope was published by Stonesthrow Poetry early this year, “certainly a voice to be reckoned with.” Wrote Dr Brigitte Le Juez (DCU). He has had poems published in The Galway Review, A New Ulster (5,8,12), The Scum Gentry, Abridged (29) New Town How (1) Danse Macabre Online Review (66, 70) The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology (8) among others. He has an honours degree in philosophy, just completed a Masters in Comparative Literature and he has just presented his first paper on Heraclitus in the works of Samuel Beckett at the annual Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland Conference at UCD.

http://www.amazon.com/Antiope-The-Dark-Pool-ebook/dp/B00BEQP888

Martyrdom by Kristina Marie Darling

September 7th, 2013

'Visitation' by Noah Saterstrom (2012) — ‘Visitation’ by Noah Saterstrom (2012)

Martyrdom

I never imagined love as a cause for suicide. But there we
were, surrounded by all of the tell-tale signs: a breadknife,
a withered corsage, a white dress with some ruffles along
the bottom.

The night before I sensed that something had gone
terribly wrong. He told her, brushing the hair from his
eyes, how her sonnets failed to turn at the Volta.

Now she’s gliding along the surface of the lake. Her hands
folded like the knot on a small bouquet.

So he tries and tries to wake her. He looks at her perfect
wrists, nearly submerged: cold skin, a silver watch, every
bracelet fastened in place.

Martyrdom is © Kristina Marie Darling, from Brushes With (Blazevox Books 2013)

‘leave this death alone’ by Candi V. Auchterlonie

August 30th, 2013

purple blue thistle

ghosts/ghosting mouths
they’re pulling purple blue thistle/our heads
prickle their grey thumbs.
the un-holdable bouquet/clamped
with their veil of see through teeth
blood is not blood it is
a shadow veining the natural light
that our eyes fail to adjust to
and our glossy mouths fail to lipsynch
the weeded purply hill
when we speak between that strained speech

purple blue thistle is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

lookers stone

looking glass/under glass eye stares they become lazy moons/but try to catch these petaled fliers with your hands,
just try, they’re slippery mints tonguing fate.
my house is plagued with the secret of mint moths and they’ve begun to eat the hearts out from all of my best coats.

lookers stone is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

tearing cotton from your breast

poems from grand static/stasis that hurts with its stained whiteness.

tearing cotton from your breast is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

the flood of man

the tall-tall creek/creeps into your backyard.
your very own backyard/and you flood
a river into the wild
your things/they trickle out of your life
the things you always meant to keep.

the flood of man is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

the long drive

you will always have
the right of way.

the long drive is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

into the day we dream/into the night we work

spines are bridges
for tomorrow
we hold every hope up
to the jagged shadows of our bindings
each and each colourless moth
of us dissolves within the window pane of day/flirting death
only separate as wings are.
we hold every hope/we might chance/ideas of forever
and stay with them.

into the day we dream/into the night we work is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

The above poems are from Candi V. Auchterlonie’s forthcoming collection , leave this death alone. I am linking here her previous collection , Impress (Published by Punk Hostage Press, 2012)

Impress

Candi’s Homepage

Ingeborg Bachmann’s Poetry in translation by Mary O’Donnell 2.

August 21st, 2013

VERILY

For Anna Akhmatova

He who has never been rendered speechless,
I’m telling you,
whoever merely feathers his own nest
and with words –

is beyond help.
Not by the shortcut
nor by way of the long.

To make a single sentence tenable,
to withstand the ding-dong of language.

Nobody writes this sentence,
without signing up.

Verily is © Ingeborg Bachmann, this translation is © Mary O’Donnell

NIGHT FLIGHT

Our land is the sky,
tilled by the sweat of engines,
in the face of night,
risking dreams—

dreamt from skullspots and pyres,
beneath the roof of the world, whose tiles
were carried off by the wind—and then rain, rain,
rain in our house and in the mills
the blind flights of bats.
Who lived there? Whose hands were pure?
Who lit the night,
haunted the spectres?

Concealed in feathers of steel, instruments,
timers and dials interrogate space,
the cloud-bushes, touch the body
of our hearts’ forgotten language:
short long long … For an hour
hailstones beat on the ear’s drum,
which, turned against us, listens and distorts.
The sun and Earth have not set,
merely wandered like unknown constellations.

We have risen from a harbour
where to return doesn’t count
not cargo not booty.
India’s spice and silks from Japan
belong to the handlers
as fish to the nets.

Yet there’s a smell,
forerunners of comets
and the wind’s web,
shredded by fallen comets.
Call it the status of the lonely,
for whom amazement happens.
Nothing further.

We have arisen, and the convents are empty,
since we endure, an order which does not cure
and does not instruct. To bargain is not
the pilots’ business. They have
set their sights and spread on their knees
the map of a world, to which nothing is added.

Who lives down there? Who weeps …
Who loses the key to the house?
Who can’t find his bed, who sleeps
on doorsteps? Who, when morning comes,
dares to point at the silver stripes: look, above me …
When the new water grips the millwheel,
who dares to remember the night?

Night Flight is © Ingeborg Bachmann, this translation is © Mary O’Donnell

220px-Klagenfurt_-_Musilhaus_-_Ingeborg_Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, in the Austrian state of Carinthia, the daughter of a headmaster. She studied philosophy, psychology, German philology, and law at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna. In 1949, she received her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Vienna with her dissertation titled “The Critical Reception of the Existential Philosophy of Martin Heidegger,” her thesis adviser was Victor Kraft. After graduating, Bachmann worked as a scriptwriter and editor at the Allied radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot, a job that enabled her to obtain an overview of contemporary literature and also supplied her with a decent income, making possible proper literary work. Furthermore, her first radio dramas were published by the station. Her literary career was enhanced by contact with Hans Weigel (littérateur and sponsor of young post-war literature) and the legendary literary circle known as Gruppe 47, whose members also included Ilse Aichinger, Paul Celan, Heinrich Böll, Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Günter Grass.

(Wiki Extract )

Poemhunter for Ingeborg Bachmann

Mary O’Donnell is the author of eleven books, both poetry and fiction, and has also co-edited a book of translations from the Galician. Her titles include the best-selling literary novel The Light-Makers, Virgin and the Boy, and The Elysium Testament, as well as poetry such as The Place of Miracles, Unlegendary Heroes, and her most recent critically acclaimed sixth collection The Ark Builders (Arc Publications UK, 2009). She has been a teacher and has worked intermittently in journalism, especially theatre criticism. Her essays on contemporary literary issues are widely published. She also presented and scripted three series of poetry programmes for the national broadcaster RTE Radio, including a successful series on poetry in translation during 2005 and 2006 called Crossing the Lines. Today, she teaches creative writing in a part-time capacity at NUI Maynooth, and has worked on the faculty of Carlow University Pittsburgh’s MFA programme in creative writing, as well as on the faculty of the University of Iowa’s summer writing programme at Trinity College Dublin.

◾Mary O’Donnell

‘Through the blossom-gate’ by C. Murray

August 10th, 2013

Through the blossom-gate,

and quite before the acid leaf unfurls into its meaning—

we are subjected to the play of light
working on our necessity to speak out

into a flowering. It is not yet warm —
already the sun is playing at dragging up

and displaying those unwanted words
elucidatory and garish in their babblement

it is almost necessary to cut them at their source
that well-spring is a tree-wounded-gash,

the birds disagree in their illuminatory chatter
as they may—
casting their circumspections to the breeze.

Through the blossom-gate is © Christine Murray first published in Southword Journal (Munster Literature Centre). Through the blossom-gate was published in my first collection of poetry, Cycles. (Lapwing Publications, Belfast)

Poems by Rosemarie Rowley

August 3rd, 2013

ALL’S FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR

I have not been keeping a ledger or account book
Of double entries, for the cost and price
Is not reckoned in the way you look
Or what you said, in whatever form or guise
I’ll never know your motives or intentions
Whether you acted blindly or on trust
But your suspicion of all engines and inventions
Does not bury the lost meaning, or let rust

The iron will, the gold enamelling –
Byzantine portraits in detail are enthralling
And with the years there comes the mellowing
Of my survivor’s guilt, the clarity of my calling
It was not fair, but lust and beauty
Caused the raid, and not excise on love’s duty.

© Rosemarie Rowley 2012

A RING TINGLE OF FEAR IN GOLDENBRIDGE ORPHANAGE.

A ring tingle of fear ran around my belly
Deep in my secret folds a spark of anger flew
To where your ears had picked up jelly-
Fish stings that wanted to be blue
It raced back to the womb of your un-desiring
Self where, abandoned, you brindled in your edge
Of razor sharp innuendo which was firing
Your awestruck envy of a child’s winter knowledge
Your long arm bent my back, a spancel
Till it almost broke with the weight of zealous
Might that needs exorcism in a chancel
To make a penitent nun like you jealous

So clapped my eyes and ears that were burning
As you roasted me on the spit your ire was turning.

ALL THIS DOING GOOD IS VERY CATHOLIC

He said as he sat at the wrought-iron utility desk
Beside the window whose frame was too large
You’ll get over me, you will risk
The transfer of love from the office to the barge
Of the old canal of desiring in my Dutch hometown
For we knew little, who were the divine elect
But that the balance of justice He wore in his crown
Of thorns on his head hurt, yet He was not perfect
But jealous of the worship of other Gods
He admits Himself, he is staff and rod
Knew Eve’s peccadillo and Adam’s pelf.
Everything ordained, the elect will be saved
Some go to Hell on the path you have paved
With good intentions, but lacking in free will
I see your progress in my view from the hill.

Rosemarie Rowley has written extensively in form: Flight into Reality (1989) is the longest original work in terza rima in English, reprinted 2010 and now available on CD. She has also written in rhyme royal and rhyming couplets. She has four times won the Epic award in the Scottish International Open Poetry Competition. Her books in print are: The Sea of Affliction (1987,one of the first works in ecofeminism, reprinted 2010, and Hot Cinquefoil Star, (2002) (which contains The Puzzle Factory a crown of sonnets and Letter to Kathleen Raine in rhyming couplets). Her most recent book is In Memory of Her (2004, 2008) which includes Betrayal into Origin – Dancing & Revolution in the Sixties (an 80 stanza poem in decima rima (ten line rhyme) and The Wake of Wonder (a regular sonnet sequence) and many other sonnets; all books, except her first, The Broken Pledge (1985, Martello) published by Rowan Tree Ireland Press, Dublin.

In 2003, she co-edited, with town planner John Haughton, an anthology of tree poems, Seeing the Wood and the Trees (Rowan Tree Press with Cairde na Coille)

Rosemarie has given papers for academic conferences in the Universities of Galway and Limerick and the Clinton Institute (UCD) in Ireland, in Bath, Edinburgh, St. Andrews’ and Stirling, Louisville, Sarasota and Atlanta Universities in the USA. in the UK, and in Prague, Venice, Paris ,and Valladolid on the European mainland. She has been active in the green movement in Ireland and in the Irish Byron Society and worked for a time in the European institutions in Europe.

Rosemarie has degrees in Irish and English Literature, and philosophy from Trinity College Dublin, an M.Litt on the nature poet Patrick Kavanagh, and a diploma in psychology from NUI.