Category: Polemics

  • “Lady Jesus” and other poems by Arathy Asok

    They ask me questions I will not answer They have come to ask of me, Many answers they sought. They did not look at my breasts, Or between my legs. It was my eyes, And inside my head they probed. They put out their hands And broke open my skull; They looked in to see…

  • The Gladstone Readings Anthology

    The Gladstone Readings Anthology

      The Gladstone Readings Anthology (Famous Seamus, UK, 2017) is an anthology of contemporary writing, though predominantly poetry, and which was compiled and edited by the poet, editor and translator Peter O’ Neill. This is O’ Neill’s second stab at editing an anthology, the first was published in conjunction with the French poet and editor Walter…

  • “Treatise on Uselessness” by Kevin Higgins

    Treatise on Uselessness after Rosita Boland Throughout my truly enormous life, I’ve never found a use for gypsies. When one decides to spend the night searching online for a worse deal on one’s house insurance, there’s never a gypsy about to help. Or when one advertises a vacancy for Associate Professor of English at Trinity…

  • ‘Cry Oceans’ by Mary Cecil

    Cry Oceans   Cry oceans and weep the seas Where waves flow over The endless motions of life The swimming perfection that flees   The Armageddon of destruction By all means possible The mechanisation of death The beginning of the end   For whales and tuna to consume The mercury to garnish The insatiable greed…

  • AND AGAMEMNON DEAD : An Anthology of Early Twenty First Century Irish Poetry

    Originally posted on Michael J. Whelan – Writer: And Agamemnon DeadAn Anthology of Early Twenty First Century Irish PoetryEdited by Peter O’Neill & Walter Ruhlmann Hi everyone, I’m really happy to announce that a brand new anthology of contemporary Irish poetry has been published today (St Patrick’s Day) in Paris and I am also delighted…

  • Previews from ‘In Havoc Lights’ by Michael McAloran

    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…

  • ‘There are less Wikipedia articles on women poets than pornographic actresses’ James Gleick

    “There are less Wikipedia articles on women poets than pornographic actresses.” The above quotation is derived from Wikipedia’s Women Problem written by James Gleick at the New York Review of Books made during this last week. It interests me as it is embedded in article about the sub-categorisation of American women novelists, an ongoing row…

  • ‘Memorial’ and Guriel’s critical approach to Oswald.

    Once, I wrote about how critics approach the poetry of women writers. This was related to the quite denigrating language of the Telegraph’s Allan Massie, wherein a well-rounded spite is condensed into some throwaway aphorism which deigns to suffice as poetic-critique. “Conversely, Carol Ann Duffy’s work which speaks so clearly to many today may seem stale…

  • And Other Poems

    This is a brief note about the And Other Poems blog which is owned and written by Josephine Corcoran. What a breath of fresh air the blog is, judging by contemporary availability of good poetry (and critique). To say that poetry is sorely neglected in the face of market-forces is a wild understatement, but more polemic anon. “And…

  • The difficulty with muses

    It seems that muses, those shadowy goddesses who influence writers, are limited under current editorial and employment injunctions to give inspiration alone to great male poets. Or so Simon Gough would have us believe. Muses apparently perform some type of quasi-sexual inspirational function and it doesn’t matter if they are girls or boys, once the poet…