Chris Murray

What Kind of Love Leaves a Cunt-scar? by C. Murray

March 28th, 2015

the wasp-sting

I arise to close
the heavy window
against cold fog

her woods are littered
with little death,

sucked out corpses,
desiccate(d) fruit flies

I feel my scars —
lacerations
snaking
ridged
against

spider scatters into
her charnel house
fast-as-light

her webs,
an ocean of exoskeletons,

my feet on bare wood,
I am becoming my wounds —

© Chris Murray, a version of this poem appeared in And Agamemnon Dead: An Anthology Of Early Twenty First Century Irish Poetry. The official launch of the anthology will be take place in Skerries, Ireland on the 23rd May during the Donkey Shots, Skerries First International Avant Garde Poetry Festival

Christine Murray is a graduate of Art History and English Literature (UCD, Belfield, Dublin 4). She is a City and Guilds qualified restoration stonecutter (OPW). Her chapbook Three Red Things was published by Smithereens Press in June 2013. A collection of poems Cycles was published by Lapwing Press in Autumn 2013 . A dark tale The Blind was published by Oneiros Books late in 2013. Her second book length poem She was published in Spring 2014 (Oneiros Books). A chapbook Signature was published in March 2014 by Bone Orchard Press.

‘Crystal Clear’ and other poems by Eileen T O’Neill

March 28th, 2015

Crystal Clear

She sits alone within her own cocoon,
Shrouded from her entire surroundings.
Eyes stare without seeing today’s world,
The sound of talking is silent in her mind.
Her crystal lamp is abandoned from care,
All belongings are deserted from attention.
Her perspective is internally facing forever,
Her gaze is transparent in its sad emptiness.
This journey is taken in isolation and alone,
Farewells too late as her departure had gone.
Her dementia deteriorated in a sneaky fashion,
Only memories enliven her past participation.

© Copyright Eileen T O’Neill 20/02/2015

Solitude’s Soliloquy

Loneliness is an outpost endured,
Alone in isolation bereft of friends.
A far flung niche deserted in tundra,
Or lost in the coldness of city living.
It shrouds demeanour and self-belief,
Belonging is seemingly for all others.
Unattached except for wishful dreaming,
Solitude does not placate a lonely mind.
Seclusion is at times a necessity of desire,
Its calmness affords tranquillity to muse.
Reflections gaze and ponder their silences,
In this solitudinous mode one draws breaths.
A soliloquy considered in quiet contemplation,
This position sits well in the stillness of being.

Rebirth and Opportunity

Making that first bold move takes much courage,
The contemplation and the deliberation were easy.
Stepping away from what was life’s familiarity then,
Every worldly possession uprooted and packed away.
Closing doors of the old abode was a surreal moment,
Pulling the garden gate shut and not daring to look back.
Nearest and dearest confused in the midst of changes,
Looking beyond the confines of what had been home.
Promise and dreams awaited in a flight of sixty minutes,
The arrival revealed an environment of boring normality.
Leafy slumbers of countryside living in a haven of safety,
Opportunities grasped at every turning point of direction.
One could sit and contemplate the nothingness of something,
Or simply taste life free from the scourges of its daily violence.
That momentous date of departure remains in minds forever,
Yet a rebirth evolved from the perspective of fresh beginnings.

© Copyright Eileen T O’Neill 14/01/2015

Eileen T O’Neill was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She lives in Cheshire, England. Mum to four wonderful and loving children and one beautiful grandchild.

Eileen’s Website

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

March 27th, 2015

Thanks to Michael J Whelan for this post on ‘And Agamemnon Dead: An Anthology of Early Twenty First Century Irish Poetry’

Michael J. Whelan – Writer

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 to say that I have five poems included in the collection alongside a number of exciting and interesting new voices coming out of Ireland in the these early years of the 21st Century.

And Agamemnon Dead An Anthology of Early Twenty First Century Irish Poetry, Edited by Peter O’Neill & Walter Ruhlmann is published by Muavaise Graine (Paris 2015) –

see https://www.facebook.com/mgversion2datura

and among its 187 pages you will find poetry from

Michael McAloran — Amos Greig — Dylan Brennan — Christine Murray — Arthur Broomfield — Peter O’ Neill — Rosita Sweetman — Michael J. Whelan — Anamaría Crowe Serrano — Peadar O’ Donoghue — Strider Marcus Jones — Colm Kearns — John Saunders — Kevin Higgins — Paul Casey…

View original post 208 more words
Let’s Hear Irish Poets Speak; the need for a poetry audiobank in Ireland

March 24th, 2015

The fact that a new generation of emergent writers must await vehicles like Poetry Ireland Introductions to find an audience stinks of a paternalistic approach to poetic works that sees a few dominant poets stand between the reader and the work, as if it were radioactive. The poetry audience is not remedial and they like to go searching, hence from Ireland they will go to where accessibility is respected, to UBUWEB, to PENNSound, to Jacket2, to The Electronic Poetry Center.

‘Demeter Does Not Remember’ and other poems by Mary Madec

March 21st, 2015

Tumble

I land in you unexpectedly,
down and something silky like new grass
scattering
and it is soft and I fit perfectly
like in memory foam
and maybe it is a memory
and it is silky like a caress, your fingers
stroking me
and new, I have never come here before
and green somehow like soft summer
warming me
down deeper than I have ever known
and maybe you heard the whimper
as I gave myself to
the comfort of you concave
as a moon but not cold or blue
and I gave myself as a child
extends her little arms wide
and trusting on the world
the edge between inside and outside
blurred like tears blur
eyes that still see
and your arms wrap around me and I am satisfied.

Hades to Persephone

Your hand is so close it could touch mine
but you pull it away in time
tracing the boundary

any closer and I step
into your shadow
you into mine

and rather than disrupt
affection’s awkward reach
we play at catch the plural pronoun,

go round and round each
of our language islands,
eddies of meaning in the delta.

This vertigo of words
could throw us into each other’s arms,
leave us confused

about how to distribute
endings on verbs,
as their tense, their mood come to light.

Demeter Does Not Remember

Persephone, her shadowed daughter
in the portico, peeping through the cracked wall.
Or what she said to keep her away.

Or what she gave her to dam her legs
when blood flowed,
red into the underworld.

Demeter cannot remember her first smile or teeth,
the words she made.
Persephone would have liked to know.

Now, a woman, she looks into the still lake of her dreams,
filled by the purlings of the Styx.
What does she see?

She walks away heartbroken
from the quivering reflection.
Cries out, ‘Demeter is not me.’

Soon It Will Be Winter

And Demeter does not know what she hates most
about the change-her straw hair, her broken nails,
a shrivelling up inside, no blood rain,
insomnia as she tosses her tired head this way and that.
She thinks of Persephone, the daughter she fed
and is jealous of those pert little breasts,
those eyes, reminding her of another bed
where she was desirable as a wife.
She can feel her hardening arteries, her sagging eyes
stretched to crows’ feet as she smiles.
There is no sap inside her anymore, a greyness
rising up through her thighs.

Persephone is wet with smiles
her soft legs parting for Hades.

Demeter: Coming of Age

As I bathe alone, I wonder
what would be a good outcome.

This time I let my head
below the level of the water

and my hair spreads out
like thong weed in the sea.

My middle-aged body lops
and the water makes

tides around my hips
and breasts.

My legs with their varicose veins
the legacy of maternity
I embrace

I let it all hang out.
It makes no difference now
that this man or that

loved this body
rested on it like summer sun
on grass

Just as the grass barely notices
the creatures who crawl on the earth

just as the earth itself is indifferent
to movements on its surface

waits for boiling magma
to rise up to its thin skin.

It will take something like this
to shift the tectonic plates
reunite the old continents.

Forecast

You turn me around and change the frame.
You’re sorry and winded.

There’s some awkward readjustment of limbs,
like trees that find their branches
when the wind dies down.

We go back the way we came, the cloud breaking up
as it comes in from the sea.

Everything from this angle looks different,
you take out your thermometer,
barometer, wind vane:

The outlook is good, you say:
Cumulonimbus calvus, your favourite,

a sky filled with narrative,
great big faces puffed,
playfully portentous.

You say they will be tipped
with red and gold at sunset.

© Mary Madec

Mary Madec was born and raised in Mayo. She studied at NUI, Galway (B.A., M.A., H.Dip Ed.) and at the University of Pennsylvania from which she received a doctorate in Linguistics in 2002. She has published widely (Crannóg, West 47, The Cuirt Annual, Poetry Ireland Review, the SHOp, The Sunday Tribune, Southword, Iota, Nth Position, Natural Bridge and The Stand Orbis, The Fox Chase Review,The Recorder among others. Her first collection, In Other Words, appeared with Salmon Poetry in 2010 ; her second collection, Demeter Does Not Remember also with Salmon Poetry at the end of 2014. She has received several awards and prizes most notably the Hennessy XO Prize for Emerging Poetry in 2008. She co-founded a community writing project and she teaches a residential course at Kylemore Abbey every summer. She works for Villanova University in Ireland.

‘When You Are Old’ by Kevin Higgins

March 17th, 2015

When You Are Old

.
after William Butler Yeats

When you are old and bald and full of crap
and sitting there in threadbare rags,
reach across to your old bookcase
for a dusty old copy of a girlie mag.

Fondle it, then, a little sadly
in your withered veiny hands.
If you can manage to pull the pages apart,
take one last glad glance at a naked tart.

Remember how once you could get it up,
before your pecker just shrivelled up.

Kevin Higgins is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway City. He has published four collections of poems: Kevin’s most recent collection of poetry, The Ghost In The Lobby, was launched at this year’s Cúirt Festival by Mick Wallace TD. His poems also features in the anthology Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and one of his poems is included in the anthology The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe May 2014). His poetry was recently the subject of a paper titled ‘The Case of Kevin Higgins: Or The Present State of Irish Poetic Satire’ given by David Wheatley at a symposium on satire at the University of Aberdeen; David Wheatley’s paper can be read in full here http://georgiasam.blogspot.ie/2014/05/the-case-of-kevin-higgins-or-present.html . Mentioning The War, a collection of his essays and reviews, was published by Salmon in April, 2012. Kevin’s blog is http://mentioningthewar.blogspot.ie/ . and has been described by Dave Lordan as “one of the funniest around” who has also called Kevin “Ireland’s sharpest satirist.”

Dear Freda Laughton, your poems are being discussed at Jacket2 Magazine

March 16th, 2015

Emma Penney has verified Freda Laughton’s date of death as having occurred in 1995. Freda Laughton (1907-1995). This is Laughton’s current archive at RASCAL (Special Collections at Queen’s University Belfast) (EDIT, May 2019)

Dear Freda Laughton, Your Poems are being discussed at Jacket2 Magazine

Walt Hunter writes for Jacket2 on Dave Lordan’s interview with Emma Penney about the modern Irish woman poet Freda Laughton. Freda Laughton was born in Bristol in 1907 and moved to Co. Down after her marriage. She published one collection of poetry A Transitory House in 1945, but little else is known about her life and work. She may have lived in Dublin for some time, as her poem The Welcome details the textures of Dublin City and its suburbs, and suggests she knows the city by heart. Her date of death is unknown. There are some Freda Laughton poems published on Poethead here.

The most interesting thing I read during a weekend of convalescence, under a March sun that seemed surprised at its own intensity, was an interview with Emma Penney on the website The Bogman’s Cannon about an Irish modernist poet, Freda Laughton. Although Laughton was born in 1907, I feature the interview and her poems here because critical genealogies of twentieth-century Irish poetry are in the process of expanding dramatically. Laughton provides an alternative provenance and inspiration for some of today’s writers and their concerns or interventions—as Penney points out:

The lack of critical interest in Laughton reflects the selective vision of literary traditions which often exclude poets who do not fit with the contemporary moment or who may trouble the formation of new movements. Irish critics during the 70’s and 80’s held Eavan Boland to be the first writer to express what “poetic being” was for a woman; the first to express the domestic; motherhood; the first to map Dublin city as a woman. Laughton expresses all of these experiences in her work decades before Boland.

You can read the full article at Now I am a tower of darkness | Jacket2.

FireShot Capture - Now I am a tower of dark_ - http___jacket2.org_commentary_now-i-am-tower-darkness

“Birth Partner” and other poems by Lindsey Bellosa

March 14th, 2015

Becoming a Woman

The first time: my underwear,
stained and crumpled, squashed
into our bathroom cupboard and I am paged
to the nurses’ office at school where the nurse
asks in hushed tone if something has happened—
we have watched the videos and been shown
the diagrams, and my mother has called the school,
having found my underwear, asked: voice
full of pride and worry…so I nod as though
I know something the other girls don’t,
that the boys snicker at: still small; squeaking—
and I am so tall and so soft : already in a bra,
sprouting hair; already not a child but still
wanting to be a child, and something so tender
is lost and bleeding in me. Now, there is a secret
I am keeping but I can’t tell what it is—
something to be careful of; something
to be concealed and I am given plastic razors
and perfumes and pads and I am afraid, afraid, afraid
like a child in the dark, not knowing of what.

Conception

First there is a lush, quiet sky: sea
filled with anticipation. Then something
is released, and time grows fingers.

The moon cycles, triggering our cycles
and the cycles of fish, feeding; turtles
emerging to shore

egg-laden; heavy as moonlight.

Life is mostly waiting: on possibilities,
on hope. There are chances—
shadows that never become.

But this is not hope; this is the one,
definite thing, the only thing
that reaches and it is inside of me—

sea hovering around the start
of unseen stirrings.

Motherhood

The wild landscape of love,
moon-soaked and ragged plain.
All the edges too clear; animals
ruthless. The barren moon rules,
bald in its light, which illuminates
writhing Earth: swill of fertility,
pain and want. A squall, a mass
of tails: spinning and spinning. Now,
the heart fixes like a hook to a cry.
It is plaintive and true. Nothing
was ever so clear. Like stars
on a winter night, piercing
the uncovered universe black
and white. This is life.
This is how time keeps itself.

The Tree of Time

(based on Maria Rizzo’s painting of the same title)

Time grows in branches,
one moment very like the other:

Second son, I have been here before.
This is a dark time; your cries are waves

colliding with my dreams. Reality
is twisting into something new,

and my life is changing color….
The view of the night sky boxed,

like a window. But your eyes
are stars, constant—

shining, bright yellow,
at corners of my nights

as I wake to feed you:
obsessed with numbers—

the ounces you drink, weight.
My face is clouded moonlight:

less than slivering light. Little son,
shadows are waves on water.

This is a magical time.
We will put down new roots,

but not now. Not here. Now the sea
races like a heart, your hand

presses my face, in sleep.
Now nights are like days,

and every day is a ladder rung
reaching to a brand-new life.

Portrait

The eyes: hooded sky
the rest of the face hangs from—
little crescent moon.

Now you cast them to me:
ask your questions, make pleas,
defy with your white scowl.

Your lips are mine, drooping
roses; the pink shape of wonder
and the slope of your cheeks, mine,

but whitewashed of flaws; white
and pink, translucent as light
and thin-skinned as an egg.

Blue trails beneath the surface,
lines of a map, where eyelashes
linger: catching, giving depth.

Every day you grow arms and legs
and more looks, like light—
from me but not mine.

Like my mother in an old video—
I see me as I see you in me. She sees herself;
in the mirror, sees her mother.

The fourteen-year-old me in the video:
wiggling, excited for something I didn’t know
yet: bursting from my pink swimsuit—

My mother knew. Lips stitched into a line:
eyes on the horizon, as mine are now.
The past comes in like the tide—

and our faces swallow themselves.
We shrug in and out of them
like a borrowed sweater;

like the two imprints, potter’s
thumb slips just under your eyes:
up go the pupils,

up knit the eyebrows—
always up and away.
This is the way love travels.

© Lindsey Bellosa

Lindsey Bellosa lives in Syracuse, NY. She has an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway and has poems published in both Irish and American journals: most recently The Comstock Review, The Galway Review, IthacaLit, Crannog, Emerge Literary Journal and The Cortland Review. Her first chapbook, The Hunger, was published with Willet Press in 2014.

Lindsey’s Site

Freda Laughton and the Critical History of Women’s Poetry: an Interview with Emma Penney

March 13th, 2015

You can read a sample of Laughton’s work here.

A Celebration of Women’s Poetry for International Women’s Day 2015

March 7th, 2015

Role reversal by Nessa O’Mahony

after Eavan Boland

There will come a time, mother,
when the transformed spring opens up
and the charioteer holds out a hand;
he might have my father’s face, might not;
his gestures might be gentle or rough
as he eases you into a space made ready
and shows you the pomegranate.
And you will take the seed and eat,
willingly perhaps, not caring
that every bargain has its cost,
or will your hand be stayed
by the sun’s ray on your face?
I will not have time to catch up,
to forestall the nine long days,
the nine long nights of wandering.
And I’ll have no deal to strike;
no backward glance, no waiting
for the seasons to turn back to me.

© Nessa O’Mahony from Her Father’s Daughter (Salmon Poetry)

Nessa O’Mahony was born in Dublin and lives in Rathfarnham where she works as a freelance teacher and writer. She won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland literature bursary in 2004 and 2011. She has published four books of poetry – Bar Talk, appeared (1999), Trapping a Ghost (2005) and In Sight of Home (2009). Her Father’s Daughter was published by Salmon in September 2014. She completed a PhD in Creative Writing in 2006 and teaches creative writing for the Open University. She is a regular course facilitator at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin.

Grianstad by Aoife Reilly

Swirls of starlings
absail between sun and moon
hurl themselves into a dance
through ghosts of trees
they go where they need to go.
winter shrouds

Long nights slide in
embers empty the land
dying woods wait for the earth to turn

In the betwixt and between
I am a still frame in the granite glow
and leaves are twisted silver songs

Stars gasp, turf smoke curls
Crisscrossing the place where love was exhausted
and blankets way down in the moment before light

Ready now, I follow the starlings and birth another year.

© Aoife Reilly

Aoife Reilly is living in County Galway and is originally from County Laois. She is a teacher and psychotherapist. She has been attending poetry workshops with Kevin Higgins at the Galway Art Centre since September 2013 and has read at open mike of the Over The Edge Series at Galway City Library.

The Golden Hare by Mary Cecil

Where wild flowers cling
And heather sweetly grows
The magic hare reclines
With fur of glowing gold

His spirit of quiet magnificence
In lands of legends born
Where unicorns are dreamt of
And fairies sport in human form

To catch a fleeting glimpse
Against the burning sky
A moment in a lifetime
A flash of mystery goes by

Where came his golden sheen
That gift from other realms
To add a glowing wonder
Hidden in the ferns

So swift he flees
With graceful lops he leaps
Transporting us to mystical lands
To dream of when we sleep

© Mary Cecil
Rathlin Island

Mary Cecil is the mother of large family and Grandmother to eleven. The widow of Rathlin Island’s famous campaigner, diver, author (Harsh winds of Rathlin) Thomas Cecil. Lover of Rathlin Island, Northern Ireland’s only inhabited island. Mary enjoys community development and current events. She has been writing poetry for several years. Enjoys writing a variety of poems, spiritual, war, romantic, protest and nature. Keen to compose more poems based on Rathlin Island’s myths & legends. She worked in owning andmanaging tourist facilities both on and off Rathlin Island. Public Appointment as Lay Member, The Appropriate Authority, Criminal Legal Aid Board.

The Brightest Jewel by Christine Murray

The perfume of rosemary for remembrance.

Little botanic flower baptised in Glas Naíon,
the stream of the infants.

I see the pink flower of your hand
reaching up to your blind mouth.
I breathe your name so you will live.

The stream of the infants.

Cymbidium Minuets, the flowers that you loved
grow in a house of orchids near a dark still pool

quiet by the stream of the infants.

The Brightest Jewel is © Chris Murray and was first published in V4, Issue #4 of The WomenArts Quarterly Journal. (2014)

Christine Murray is a City and Guilds qualified restoration stonecutter living in Dublin, Ireland. Her Chapbook Three Red Things was published by Smithereens Press in June 2013. A collection of poems Cycles was published by Lapwing Press in 2013. A dark taleThe Blind (Poetry) was published by Oneiros Books in 2013. Her second book-length poem. She was published in Spring 2014 (Oneiros Books). Her second chapbook Signature was published in March 2014 by Bone Orchard Press.

Mastectomy by Shirley McClure

You get given
certain things in twos –

love-birds, book-ends,
matching china tea mugs –

and even though
on any given morning

it is all you even think of
to hook one fine china

top designer
duck-blue tea-mug

from your dry beech
draining rack

to boil and pour and stir
and watch Darjeeling towers spiral;

there are still the days
when there is company for breakfast,

and on these fine mornings
let me tell you

it is good to know
that there are two

extra special, same but different
unchipped breakfast blue mugs

……..made to grace
your table.

Living in Bray, Co. Wicklow, Shirley McClure won Cork Literary Review’s Manuscript Competition 2009 and Listowel Writers’ Week Originals Poetry Competition 2014. Her collection, Who’s Counting? is available from Bradshaw Books or via http://www.thepoetryvein.com/ She facilitates creative writing courses and workshops.

Geyser by Alice Lyons

You e-mailed your whole desktop, which is typical
.the blue of it Scrovegni chapel blue
a smile I’ve never seen before it is aware of smiling
reveals itself to the camera in the computer.
Squared-off angels, no they are JPEGs, hover
over a faux Polaroid you switched to sepia mode
so I wouldn’t look like a geyser
a river of years to reach such tender self-regard
for a moment you are unencumbered
by the monster critical eye (you meant geezer)
scissored hair blunt and sister-like and merciful
your entire kitchen liquid in the glossy Frigidaire.

It puts me in mind of Fra Angelico, those tricky frescoes
(I seem to translate everything to quattrocento time)
Christ in a blindfold, eyes like poached eggs gazing
down and inward, the gathered regal robes
the marble throne all white and pouring up, yes
like a geyser pouring up while Roman soldiers
unencumbered by their bodies beat and spit and mock.
I have always loved those arrested gestures
the mute green rectangle beautiful as your computer
in Philadelphia where Safari’s compass points
permanently Northeast and the Finder icon smiles
twice and benevolently straight on and in profile.

from Poetry Ireland Review 100 (ed. Paul Muldoon)

Note: Versions of ‘The Boom & After the Boom’, ‘Developers’ and ‘Reverse Emigration’ first appeared in Poetry(Chicago), December 2011.

A Poetry Foundation Podcast The Woman Who Quit featuring work by Alice Lyons.

Alice Lyons was born in Paterson, New Jersey and has lived in the West of Ireland for fifteen years. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Tygodnik Powszcheny (Kraków) and POETRY (Chicago), as public installations in Staircase Poems at The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon and as poetry films in cinema and gallery screenings worldwide.

She is the recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, an Academy of American Poets Award and multiple bursaries in literature and film from An Chomhairle Ealoine/The Arts Council. Her poetry film, The Polish Language, co-directed with Orla Mc Hardy, has screened in competition in over 30 film festivals worldwide and garnered numerous awards including an IFTA nomination. Her new poetry film, Developers, premiered at Oslopoesie, Norway in 2013. She has lectured in English and Fine Art at Boston University, Maine College of Art, the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology and Queen’s University, Belfast. She holds a Ph.D. from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She is currently curator of Poetry Now, Dun Laoghaire.