Chris Murray

‘Socrates in the Garden’ by Enda Wyley.

November 19th, 2011
Socrates in The Garden

In his world he moves,
January light fooling
this place into beauty –
broken glass glittering
on the flats’ side lane,
white graffitti translucent
on the school wall;
Pushers out!…Egg head…
Fuck off…Wanker Meehan.
Old shoes, their laces tied,
dangle over electricity wires,
beside pulled-apart phones
flung there, high above
burnt mattresses, gutted cars
and rusting bikes –
used needles jabbing the way
the children go to school.

Parents yell,
their calls like cigarette ash
billowing out
in front of their washing
hung from shabby balconies,
the grandmothers busy below
with Moore Street prams piled
with fruit, football hats, lighters
fireworks and wrapping paper –
all the stolen seasons trundling
their way to the market
down roads Matt Talbot roamed
with drink, then manic prayer,
his chains the size of a horse’s trace
wrapped around his body
one hot June day,
where he fell on Granby lane.

And in this world,
Margaret goes to get married
in a horse- drawn carriage
around Stephen’s Green.
All skin and bone,
pneumonia choking
her final days,
her name will become a ribbon
and light, on the Christmas tree,
an embroidered square
on a patch-work quilt
hung in a vast, cold place,
where the young priest
talks only to old women,
the wind outside blowing litter –
caged pigeons set free from rooftops,
rising up oblivious as Liffey gulls.

In his world he moves,
his head slanted
against doorways,
his cheeks bruised
with the cut of a city night.
Hearing the cathedral chime
hourly, cheeky, melodic –
Three Blind Mice…
In Dublin’s fair city,
he queues at the soup kitchen’s door
choosing food
over the bell-ringer’s charm.
His hunger slouching
in second-hand clothes
against the city wall,
is so acute it sends
early morning nightmares –

How the stained glass
in Nicholas of Myra cracks,
how Major Sirr rises from his grave
pulling St Weburgh’s apart,
strutting down Thomas Street to watch
Emmet’s delirium beheaded!
And sometimes into his world
you move, cooling his fever,
wetting his mouth
with fresh basil leaves
of hope, lifting his thoughts,
so that far away,
over the copper domes, lifting his thoughts,
so that far away, over the copper domes,
the shut-up, run-down flats,
he can see in the garden
Socrates –

His toes cracked, his robe
thrown across shoulders
chipped with neglect,
part of his nose fallen lost
among polite glass-houses,
herbaceous borders
and Victorian signs.
But his stare is deep-eyed
and his thoughts are river sounds
original like rain
on this bright day.
He is finding a space for you both
in the otherwise wild

of your mid-lives, letting
your hard city fall way
with each push of the gate
inwards to his green heaven.

Run to his shape
the willow trees whisper,
Pull our leaves,
like hair from his face –
find his eyes staring,
questioning you.

from Socrates in the Garden, Dedalus Press, 1998.

Enda Wyley is poet and children’s author. She was born in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin 1966 and currently lives in Dublin. She has published five collections of poetry: Eating Baby Jesus (1993), Socrates in the Garden (1998), Poems for Breakfast ( 2004), To Wake to This (2009), and Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems (2014).

Her poetry has been widely broadcast, translated and anthologised including in, The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, USA (2010), The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women Poets, USA (2011), Femmes d’Irlande en Poésie, 1973-2013, ed Clíona Ní Ríordáin, Lines of Vision, The National Gallery of Ireland, 2014.

She holds a B.Ed with a distinction in English Literature, was the recipient of an M.A in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, was the inaugural winner of the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize and has received many Arts Council Literature Bursaries for her writing. In 2014 she was the recipient of a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for her poetry. In recent years she has been Poet- at -Work in the Coombe Maternity Hospital, Dublin and Writer in Residence at The Marino Institute of Education, Dublin.

Enda Wyley’s books for children from O’Brien Press are Boo and Bear and The Silver Notebook. Her book I Won’t Go to China ! was awarded a Reading Association of Ireland Special Merit Award 2011. Enda Wyley was elected to Aosdána in March 2015.

Enda Wyley Reviews

‘New and Selected’ seems the perfectly suited appellation for the work on offer here. Ms. Wyley’s poems are perpetually fresh, utterly scrutinized, marked by vigor and virtuosity, arriving on the page as accomplished things, like settled law, fit for the long haul language calls us to.’Thomas Lynch, Poet, 2014.

‘Enda Wyley’s poems are remarkable for the way they communicate warm feeling through their lightness of touch and clarity of colour.’
The trustees of the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship, 2014.

‘Enda Wyley is a true poet. To Wake To This articulates a subtle, dreamy apprehension through a diction and an imagery all the writer’s own.’
Fiona Sampson, The Irish Times.

‘Her imagery, honesty and insight make this a first rate work.’
Poetry Ireland Review.
- http://aosdana.artscouncil.ie/Members/Literature/Wyley.aspx
- http://dedaluspress.com/authors/wyley-enda/
Published with the kind permission of Dedalus Press , Dublin http://www.dedaluspress.com/poets/wyley.html

‘Fable’ and ‘Oh Cherry Trees You are Too White For My Heart’ by Doris Lessing

November 16th, 2011

Fable

When I look back I seem to remember singing.
Yet it was always silent in that long warm room.

Impenetrable, those walls, we thought,
Dark with ancient shields.The light
Shone on the head of a girl or young limbs
Spread carelessly. And the low voices
Rose in the silence and were lost as in water.

Yet, for all it was quiet and warm as a hand,
If one of us drew the curtains
A threaded rain blew carelessly outside.
Sometimes a wind crept, swaying the flames,
And set shadows crouching on the walls,
Or a wolf howled in the wide night outside,
And feeling our flesh chilled we drew together.

But for a while the dance went on–
That is how it seems to me now:
Slow forms moving calm through
Pools of light like gold net on the floor.
It might have gone on, dream-like, for ever.

But between one year and the next – a new wind blew?
The rain rotted the walls at last?
Wolves’ snouts came thrusting at the fallen beams?

It is so long ago.
But sometimes I remember the curtained room
And hear the far-off youthful voices singing.

Oh Cherry trees you are too white for my heart

Oh Cherry trees you are too white for my heart,
And all the ground is whitened with your dying,
And all your boughs go dipping towards the river,
And every drop is falling from my heart.’

Now if there is justice in the angel with the bright eyes
He will say ‘Stop!’ and hand me a bough of cherry.
The bearded angel, four-square and straight like a goat
Lifts a ruminant head and slowly chews at the snow.

Goat, must you stand here?
Must you stand here still?
Is it that you will always stand here,
Proof against faith, proof against innocence?

Oh Cherry Trees You Are too White For My Heart, from Fourteen Poems, by Doris Lessing.

Oh Cherry Trees You Are Too White For My Heart and Fable, two Poems 1959 © Doris Lessing are reprinted by kind permission of Jonathan Clowes Ltd., London, on behalf of Doris Lessing.

Doris Lessing’s Little Known Poetry

http://poethead.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/i-have-been-reading-doris-lessings-fo urteen-poems-this-week/

250px-Doris_lessing_20060312_(jha) — Author and Poet Doris Lessing

http://poethead.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/doris-lessings-poems/

John Felstiner, a translation of ‘Todesfuge’ by Paul Celan

November 15th, 2011

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night/
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening/
we drink and we drink/
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes/
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta/
Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped/

from Todesfuge/ ST 2 in Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew . Author John Felstiner (Yale University Press, 2005 )

The above poem is excerpted from John Felstiner’s biography of Paul Celan, Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew (published 2005, Yale University Press). I lived with the poem for a week in Mayo recently, where I transcribed it a number of times in order to get to its music.

During my transcriptions, I came across another rendering of the poem on YouTube, which I am adding here. The Youtube reading is by Gerald Duffy. I am unhappy with the recording, possibly because I think it is read too fast, and maybe in this case some of the music feels lost.

John Felstiner devotes a considerable amount of his text discussing the reasons for his choice of words in his translation of the poem. For that reason I would recommend the book and his notes on the difficulty the poem presents to the translator. I do not know if the book is online but the relevant chapter of the book is A Fugue After Auschwitz (1944-45 ) /your ashen hair Shulamith.

Felstiner discusses the state of the poet who had lost both parents to the camps, his MS work and Todesfuge as the Guernica of post-war European literature.

Todesfuge is immense, challenging and multi-layered as a work. The story of the Death Tango is known to many people, there are images available to us. Celan composed the work in 1944, when information was beginning to emerge about the Final Solution. Well over a decade later Sylvia Plath would struggle with those images and convert them into her tropes and archetypes. Nelly Sachs and Ingeborg Bachmann struggled with words and images to convey the horror.

Celan wrote “Todesfuge” in 1944 with immediacy and utter control. The poem was published in 1945. Felstiner admits that it took him years to render as faithfully as possible the movement and symbols within the poem. His discussion of the problems with the poem is worth the book alone. Here in this poem is encapsulated the fear and helplessness of the final solution. I have read and listened to the poem over and over but nothing quite brings it right home than its transcription (in Felstiner’s translation).

“He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland/
he shouts scrape your strings darker you’ll rise up as smoke to the sky/
you’ll then have a grave in the clouds where you won’t lie too cramped/ ”

(Todesfuge /ST 5)

The entire poem is at the following link ,though I would recommend the Felstiner chapters for a discussion on the translator’s art and Paul Celan’s poetry: http://www.celan-projekt.de/todesfuge-englisch.html

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/paul-celan-john-felstiner/1022714270?cm_mmc=borders-_-sku-_-na-_-na&ean=9780300089226&redir=borders

I have been reading ‘Fourteen Poems’ by Doris Lessing this week.

November 12th, 2011
In a recent post, I referred to my curiosity about Doris Lessin g’s poetry, in some ways this curiosity has been sated. Alison Greenlee, special collections librarian in Tulsa University assured me that Ms. Lessing’s Book, Fourteen Poems was accessible in a Dublin College. Last Monday morning I went out to UCD to access the book and to transcribe two poems from it for use on this site.

Jonathan Clowes literary agents have agreed that the Poethead site can publish two poems from the Fourteen Poems book for a period of twelve months. The getting permission process is necessarily slow, and Poethead readers who wish to read the two chosen poems are relying on my transcriptions! Two Things about the above statement, my transcriptions are generally ok, even when they occur in climate-controlled premises (which make me sleepy) and I chose the poems (sight unseen) from a list! I like the two Lessing poems that I have chosen and I do hope that the permissions, which are winging their way to London as I write, will allow their publication here in the next week or two.

Fourteen Poems is a pamphlet, it is card-bound and is in immaculate condition. I am reproducing here the image of the copy that is included in UCD special collections. There were 500 prints, and numbers 1-50 are signed by the author. UCD does not have a signed copy. I am adding here the names and contacts of those people who have very generously facilitated a writer’s curiosity, with many thanks. I have decided to publish the poems by title, together, as part of the regular A Saturday Woman Poet articles that I have been posting for over three years.

Thanks are due to the following people for their courtesy and attention in facilitating my reading of the book :
- Olivia Guest at Jonathan Clowes literary agents http://www.jonathanclowes.co.uk/permissions/
- Alison Greenlee at the McFarlin Library, Special Collections, http://www.utulsa.edu/mcfarlin/speccoll/collections/lessingdoris/index.htm
- Evelyn Flanagan at UCD Library Special Collections http://www.ucd.ie/library/finding_information/special/
I have discovered a great interest in reading some of J.B Priestly’s Three Time Plays during this week also, but I have decided to write about reading the poetry as it was a lovely privilege to find that there was a copy available in Dublin, and to get access in such a timely manner! I have the two chosen poems and they are all ready to go.
- http://poethead.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/fable-and-oh-cherry-trees-you-are-too-white-for-my-heart-two-poems-by-doris-lessing/
A link to a VIDA conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield.

November 5th, 2011
“I discovered sexism’s glass walls—which do exist still, to a shocking degree—later rather than earlier. A great blessing, that belatedness. As a young person, I felt the world’s heritage of art and literature was mine to forage.” (Jane Hirshfield)

This week’s blog post contains just two small links because family duties had called me away from my desk. While I was away I got totally enraptured by Paul Celan‘s Todesfuge, translated by John Felstiner, which I am writing about elsewhere. For today I am adding a conversation about Women and Poetry which is related to two published posts here at Poethead.

To preface my first excerpt and link, I want to say that the VIDA interview resonated with me in relation to a letter by Anne Hays which I published in January of 2011. The letter has been hit 4,819 times, it details a lack in women’s literary publication which I can only describe as a deadener. I am adding the letter here. I thought to publish excerpts from the VIDA interview and link in the context of the Hays letter.

“We each need the speech of reason and we need the speech of feeling. And when I’m asked the unanswerable question about the origins of poetry, my speculation is similarly multiple: prayer, courtship, work song, grief song, rituals of passage and of harvest, war song, lullaby, memory-keeping mnemonic. Each of these must have pulled poetry onto early human tongues. Most are experiences shared by both men and women, and if war-making’s drum cry has more often been the domain of men, that’s counterbalanced by the murmur that sends an infant to sleeping. If one had to guess which came first, lullaby’s as plausible a guess as any.” (Jane Hirshfield)

I wonder often about how we dream a poet, I imagine that in Ireland, we think of him as a speaker of our truths.

The above paragraph is so critical to our understanding that there are areas in poetic experience in which the gender of the poet cannot be ignored, and that is hugely important to emerging women poets to see and to read other women. If all we think about are our great male-poets when we imagine our singer of tales, then the experience of the woman-poet achieves an invisibility, a chorus. Think of T.S Eliot‘s chorus from Murder in the Cathedral, Atwood’s serving girls from The Peneliopad, or the mother nodding beside the cot in Sylvia Plath‘s art. Those are the voices of the harem, the brothel, the nursery and of the chorus-line.

Poetic invisibility becomes not a diminishment of the voice of woman but a nowhere for a woman writer to hang her hook, or to resonate with women’s experiences of war, of birth, of death. VIDA alluded to this issue in The Count, which I have linked here. Eavan Boland spoke of this lack in our imagining here .

Links to the Jane Hirshfield and Eavan Boland interviews are here,
- http://vidaweb.org/human-lives-a-conversation-between-jane-hirshfield-and-leslie-mcgrath
- Exploring Poetry’s Lesser Space ,Interview with Eavan Boland http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/03/11/exploring_poetrys_lesser_space/

Poems by Doris Lessing.

October 29th, 2011

Fable

When I look back I seem to remember singing.
Yet it was always silent in that long warm room.

Impenetrable, those walls, we thought,
Dark with ancient shields. The light
Shone on the head of a girl or young limbs
Spread carelessly. And the low voices
Rose in the silence and were lost as in water.

But for a while the dance went on –
That is how it seems to me now:
Slow forms moving calm through
Pools of light like gold net on the floor.
It might have gone on, dream-like, for ever.

But between one year and the next – a new wind blew ?
The rain rotted the walls at last ?
Wolves’ snouts came thrusting at the fallen beams ?

It is so long ago.
But sometimes I remember the curtained room
And hear the far-off youthful voices singing.

Fable is © Doris Lessing, and is reprinted here by kind permission of Jonathan Clowes Ltd, London, on behalf of Doris Lessing. Olivia Guest from Jonathan Clowes Ltd

Pictured are two books of published poetry by Nobel Laureate and writer Doris Lessing (1919-2013). I am intrigued by each of the books. I thought to add some information on the status of the books and their current locations, but information is quite scanty. Thus I will be blogging the process.

Fourteen Poems by Doris Lessing , published 1959 by Scorpion Press, is unavailable, although I have located a copy in a library in a university library in Dublin.

The Scorpion Press closed in the 1970s, according to this Wikipedia entry.

Some articles from the press were obtained by the McFarlin Library, Special Collections at the University of Tulsa. I am adding here the link.

The original link (Lessing’s Scorpion/ Northwood titles) details the names of the Fourteen Poems which were published in 1959,

Under a Low Cold Sky
Older Woman to Younger Man (1)
Older Woman to Younger Man (2)
Plea for the Hated Dead Woman
Bars
Dark Girl’s Song
New Man
Night-Talk
Song
Exiled
Oh Cherry Trees you are too white for my heart’
Fable
In Time of Dryness
Jealousy

McFarlin obtained Lessing’s correspondence in relation to the pamphlet: Lessing, Doris Correspondence in reference to Fourteen Poems.

The list of poems from The Inpopa Anthology 2002 are:

The Wolf People

In the Long Dark
The Misfit
As If They Had Always Known It
Cave Wolves
Something Speaks
The Sky-fire
The Ice Comes

Both sets of poems from Ms Lessing’s Opus are listed in her published works, I for one, am incredibly curious to read her poetic writing and have applied for more information to the special collections at the McFarlin Library at Tulsa University. I will update this post when I get more information about the poems.

I am adding here Lessing’s list of published works

Since it is Saturday and the day that I generally highlight the work of a woman writer, editor or translator. I thought to link to a story by Doris Lessing from the New Yorker Magazine, as a special treat:

.
Thanks to Alison Greenlee, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Tulsa, for information about the Scorpion Press archive.

Some little books.

October 22nd, 2011

The pictured editions carry a huge poetic punch, though it would be unfair to compare them as like. The Moth Little Editions were released this month, the Ginsberg is pre-1960 and Hannah Weiner’s books as objects of art were made in the 1970/80s. They are all serious books in small form, a virtue of City Lights and other makers of accessible arts books.

This post was advised by a brief Twitter discussion on portable poetry, such as the carrying of T.S Eliot‘s Four Quartets about for reading.

Quite recently I was genuinely amazed to receive four poetry books nestled within one (white) standard office-sized envelope from Moth Editions , and although the books are small they each contain 32 poems. This post is about physical books rather than about code , or indeed the storage and the dissemination of poetry through sites like Kenneth Goldsmith’s UBUWEB, which I have referred to before now here. I carry books around in a variety of bags, in fact , the type of bag I will choose for a day is never dependant on as a fickle a thing as fashion , but upon how big a bag I will require for a notebook , diary, boo , ( mostly poetry or biography), and pencil-case and letters (yes letters , I write those).

Poets Dermot Healey, Kate Dempsey, Ted McCarthy and Ciarán O Rourke form the quartet of poets that make up the first of the Moth Little Editions, I had introduced two of Dempsey’s Poems from the series quite recently.

Of course distillation and new formats can lead to the strangest of visual concentrations, such as using QR Code to bring a whole new audience to writers, including to Herman Melville and James Joyce. In the fictional sense, the creation of a Babel Library has it’s own interest and weird beauty. This post is about the mobility and adaptability of small texts, and how wonderful it is to be able to choose a good book like the Four Quartets to bring out with one to read !

The beauty of poetry is that it is highly adaptable to both book and technology formats and thus very versatile.

moth magazine’s ‘little editions’

Ginsberg’s Kaddish (City Lights)

‘Little Books/Indians’ by Hannah Weiner
A Saturday Woman Poet, Adrienne Cecile Rich

October 15th, 2011
Adrienne Cecile Rich has been nominated for the 2011 National Book Award , so no better time to link to her opus. Adrienne is 82 years old and a poet of force. I thought to add a poem and biography here to celebrate.

Adrienne Cecile Rich, pic from Google images/JWA

Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Cecile Rich.

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

This poem is for lovers of poetry, for those who read women poets and wonder at the gender-imbalance in literary publication. I have decided to keep it simple and to add my favourite Rich , alongside a reading list. This site has always been about encouraging poetry writers and readers to research books that they enjoy and bringing the amazing words of women writers into view. We have a visibility issue which is deeply questionable in my view. There are now 62 Saturday Woman Poets published here since 2008.

Link Bibliography for Adrienne Cecile Rich.
- Arts Of the Possible , Essay and Conversations of Adrienne Cecile Rich http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780393050455-6
- National Book Award http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2011/10/12/adrienne_rich_among_national_book_awards_finalists/
- Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Rich
- Jewish Women’s Archive: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rich-adrienne-cecile
The Poem Read by Rich.
A poet-companion; Tess Gallagher translates Liliana Ursu.

October 5th, 2011

There are two posts on this blog which link to short poems by Lilian Ursu. The poems are from the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation of The Sky Behind the Forest, by Liliana Ursu. The volume had two translators, Adam J Sorkin and Tess Gallagher. Interestingly, the volume does not initial the translators work beneath the text , so it is very hard to identify which poems were translated by Gallagher. This blog is dedicated to the work of women writers, editors and translators, so I thought to examine Gallagher’s approach to the poet and to her work. I am referring to the published notes on the translations throughout.

Liliana Ursu is Romanian, she was born in Sibiu in 1949 and lived in Bucharest during the Ceaucescu regime. She graduated in English at Bucharest University and taught part-time there for ten years. Ursu has published two books of short stories, six books of translation and books of poetry. She travelled as a visiting professor to Pennsylvania State University on a Fulbright Grant in 1992-1993. I have decided to include here a Bloodaxe page about Ursu, as well as a link to Lightwall.
.

Tess Gallagher describes herself as “a poet-companion” in her preface to the Poetry Book Society edition of Ursu’s The Sky Behind the Forest. It is an apt description for a fellow-traveller in the arts.Bad translation has been a bugbear of mine for some years, given that wide internet dissemination has sometimes led to appalling and quite inflexible machine-spewed translation. The ability to translate from an academic, collaborative or empathetic base is what wholly contributes to the poetry reader’s pleasure in coming as close as it is possible to the spirit of the poem and to the intent of the author.

I chose The Gallagher translation of Ursu as an exemplar of collaborative translation, but I could just as easily point to Hugh Maxton’s wonderful translations of Ágnes Nemes Nagy’s Between , or Marion Glascoe’s edition of Julian of Norwich. Gallagher is a collaborator both as a poet and as a woman, and her ability to communicate the Ursu text , along with Sorkin, hinge on collaborations and on poetic sympathy.

Her approach is not solely academic but occurs at a level of universality, which is indicated in her approach to the work here ,

In the Dusk.

In the dusk the statues smile more enigmatically.
Not a breath of wind troubles their gaze.
You look at me and know how autumn makes its way.
In the dusk, under our bodies the hill sinks to ruin –

weightless, at last.

from The Sky Behind the Forest. Publ. Bloodaxe , 1997.
‘Yes, Minister’ a poem by John Walsh

October 4th, 2011

While brushing my teeth
I stop to think of the Minister’s words
and I feel how lucky we are indeed
to have a Green Minister like him to tell us
not to be wasting water running it
while brushing our teeth.

And I wonder if he’s noticed
that it’s been pissing the rain for weeks
and the eco-warriors are up to their eyes in muck
in their flooded dugouts on the Hill of Tara.

But he says he is not in a position to go there
for he is afraid of getting his hands dirty
and he’ll have to go washing them all over again,
wasting everyone’s time and energy,
including his own.

Seamus Heaney thinks it’s a disgrace,
but sure nobody listens to him.

Thanks to John Walsh. This poem is from Chopping Wood with T.S Eliot, Publ. Salmon Poetry 2010.

Fable

Oh Cherry trees you are too white for my heart

Fable

Link Bibliography for Adrienne Cecile Rich.