Tag: Elaine Feeney

A Celebration of Irish Women Poets on Bloomsday 2015

June 14th, 2015

PEARLS AT BLACKFRIARS

For his Winter’s Tale,
Master Shakespeare calls
for a covered stage
with the scent of candle-grease
and orange-peel heavy on the air.

There must be torches
to give movement to shadows
and life to the statue;
and for Hermione’s face –
tincture of pearl, crushed.

With this bowl of dust
we’ll lacquer her age,
encase her in memory
so only a movement of the mind
might release her,

might absolve
her husband’s transgression,
as the jealous moon
flings her light
against Blackfriars slates.

Pearls At Blackfriars is © Jessica Traynor

Jessica Traynor is from Dublin. Her first collection, Liffey Swim, was published by Dedalus Press in 2014. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, The Raving Beauties Anthology (Bloodaxe), Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History, If Ever You Go (2014 Dublin One City One Book), The Irish Times, Peloton (Templar Poetry), New Planet Cabaret (New Island Books), The Pickled Body, Burning Bush II, Southword, The SHOp, Wordlegs, The Moth, Poetry 24, The Stinging Fly, and New Irish Writing among others. She is the 2014 recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. She was named Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year in 2013 and was highly commended at the 2013 Patrick Kavanagh Award. She won the 2011 Single Poem Competition at Listowel Writer’s Week. She received a Literature Bursary from Dublin City Council in 2010 and in was part of the 2009 Poetry Ireland Introduction Series.

Jessica works as Literary Reader for the Abbey Theatre and teaches creative writing courses through Big Smoke Writing Factory and the Irish Writers Centre. She also works as a freelance dramaturg.

Ode

‘More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoy’d…’
—JOHN KEATS, Ode on a Grecian Urn

You lie across my thighs as I write,
my bone-warming hot water bottle,
pure latex, guaranteed to delight the most
discriminating women, mottle their thighs
as they lie deep in their beds, pretending
this rubber sack of warm water
could never replace their lover.

The women of Ireland drive with you
across their laps, hand-knit covers
helping to keep you warm. More love,
the patterns passed down from
mothers and grandmothers, still enjoyed.
They knit covers for each new bottle,
battle the cold, inside and out.

Every woman remembers her first.
I was twelve, three hours after landing
in Ireland, in Granny’s front bedroom.
You are the best invention after
hot water on tap, and when old age hits
and you warm through rheumatism—
not period pains—I hope to bits
I will have more to hug than my hottle
(Granny’s word for hot water bottle).

Ode is © Celeste Augé

Celeste Augé is the author of Skip Diving (Salmon Poetry, 2014), The Essential Guide to Flight (Salmon Poetry, 2009) and the collection of short stories Fireproof and Other Stories (Doire Press, 2012).

The World Literature Review said that “Celeste Augé’s poems are commendable for their care, deep thought, and intellectual ambition”, while the Anna Livia Review said that “Fireproof” is a remarkably strong debut into the world of short stories and will begin to build what is undoubtedly going to be a strong readership for the author”.

Celeste’s poetry has been shortlisted for a Hennessy Award and she received a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland to write Skip Diving. In 2011, she won the Cúirt New Writing Prize for fiction. She lives in Connemara, in the West of Ireland.

BOG FAIRIES

The heather like
Pork belly cracked
Underneath my feet-

The horizon like
Nougat, melted
Its pastel line at the heath edge
Blue fading to white light.

We stacked rows of little
Houses for bog fairies –
Wet mulchy sods
Evaporating under our small palms.

Crucifixions of dry brittle crosses
Forming the skeleton-
My narrow ankles parallel to them.

Coarse and tough like the marrow of the soul,
Like the skeletons crucified under the peat.

The turf will come good
My father said
When the wind blows to dry it.

We dragged ten-ten-twenty bags
With the sulphury waft of cat piss,
Along a track dotted with deep black bogholes,
Then over a silver door, like a snail’s
Oily trail leaving a map for the moon,
And for bog fairies to dance in the mushy earth-
For us all to glisten in this late summer.

And behind the door
Once upon some time
Old women sat in black shawls
Bedding down Irregulars and putting kettles
On to boil for the labouring girls.

But I was gone.

I was gone at ten in my mind’s eye.
I was dragging Comrades from the Somme
I was pulling Concords in line with Swedish giants
I was skating on the lake in Central Park
I was crouched in the green at Sam’s Cross
I was touring Rubber-Soul at Hollywood Bowl
I was marching on Washington with John Lewis
I was in the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Mapplethorpe,
He was squatting on my lap with his lens,
Swearing to Janis Joplin I could find her a shift,
Nothing is impossible when you blow like that girlfriend.
I sang Come As You are in Aberdeen with union converse,
Blue eye liner and mouse holes in my Connemara jumper.

I was anyone but me
I was anywhere but here
I was gone

We rushed to hurry before the summer light would fade
Because animals needed to be washed and fed

And turf needed to be stacked
And all the talk of our youth
Would be said
In whispers and secrets, or written on postage stamps

Because light was the ruler as it was closing in around us,
Beating us, like the dark on the workmen
Deep in the channel tunnel that night.

The black light killed the purple heather
Yet I danced on the crackle in the dust
I crackled on the dust in the heather
My dance on the heather turned to dust.

Bog Fairies is © Elaine Feeney.

Elaine Feeney is considered a leading part of political contemporary Irish writers. She was educated in University College Galway, University College Cork and University of Limerick. Feeney has published three collections of poetry Indiscipline (2007), Where’s Katie? (2010, Salmon) and The Radio was Gospel (2013, Salmon) Her work has been published widely in literary magazines and anthologies. She is currently working on a novel.

“Elaine Feeney is the freshest, most engaging and certainly the most provocative female poet to come out of Ireland in the last decade. Her poem ” Mass”, is both gloriously funny, bitter-sweet in the astuteness of its observations and a brilliant, sly window into the Irish female Catholic experience. Her use of irony is delicious. Her comments on the human condition, which run throughout her lines, are in the tradition of Dean Swift and she rightfully takes her place alongside Eavan Boland and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill as a very, very important Irish voice.” Fionnuala Flanagan, California 2013 (Praise for The Radio was Gospel, 2013, Salmon)The Radio was Gospel, 2013, Salmon)

“A choice collection of poetry, one not to be overlooked, 5 Stars” Midwest Book Review, USA, (Praise for Where’s Katie? 2010, Salmon Poetry).

Elaine Feeney saying Mass

THE MISSION

I think of the last time we met
on the prom in Galway.
A sunny day in May
you looked cool in those shades.
You looked taller somehow.
We talked for ages.
You told me about plans
for your mother’s sixtieth.
I felt lucky to have such a nephew.
Shades or no shades.

You hid your distress well, John.
None of it was evident that sunny day.
The day of good nephews.
A month later you went to Beachy Head.
WTF John.

I think of you
leaving your bundle
on top of Beachy Head.
Your belt coiled around your watch
your wallet with a photo of your daughter
your fire fighter’s ID card
your blood donor card
your bus ticket from Brighton.
Losers weepers.

Margaret, your Irish twin,
was on a holiday she didn’t want to go on.
She had been worried sick,
she had us all demented
saying you were going to do it.
Twins know things, Irish twins know more.
I was at a wedding in June
when some friends of yours called me outside.
‘It’s about John Diviney,’
and something about Beachy Head.

Later we went to the priest
he came down to Castle Park
to tell your mother.
She thought we were there to show her the wedding style.
I wouldn’t mind, John
but I had hired a dress for the wedding.
It was a deep blue.
It sailed when I walked.
Your mother was in a daze.
‘I dreamed of him on Thursday night,’ she said.
‘He went in and out of every room.
Himself and Shannon were laughing.’

We went to Eastbourne to bring you home.
Your mother to collect a son,
Margaret to collect a brother,
Caroline and Majella to collect a cousin.
Me to collect a nephew.
Five women on a mission.

Your mother couldn’t sleep,
she was smoking out the hotel window.
She saw the undertaker
collect your best suit from reception at six am.

Despite all the sadness
we had laughed a lot on the way over.
The girls nearly missing the flight
because they had to get food.
We laughed too at nothing at all.
Declan, another cousin of yours turned up
and chauffeured us around Eastbourne
and later to Heathrow.
Losers weepers.

You had a photo in your wallet
of your daughter Katie.
I have a photo in my study
of the day we bumped into you
in King’s Cross, you and Katie.
Ye were going to some match or other.
What are the chances?
We were over to surprise Heather
on her thirtieth.

What are the chances of bumping into you now, John?
We weren’t laughing when we saw you in that coffin.
Your Irish twin ran outside and puked.
Your mother whispered things in your ear.
We started the prayers
it was a mumbo jumbo litany
We couldn’t remember how anything finished.
Hail Mary full of grace the lord is with thee…

On the way back
there was a bad storm.
We were at the airport for five hours.
Your mother kept going back out for a smoke.
Each time she went out we worried
that she’d never get back in.

You were in the hold,
in your new suit
your designer shirt
your best shoes.
We forgot your socks.
Losers weepers.

We arrived at Shannon
in the early hours.
The Divineys were there en masse.
So was Keith and Aidan.
We followed the hearse,
a night cortège.
‘At least we have him back,’
your mother said,
more than once.

After the funeral mass
your friends from the fire station
hoisted your coffin onto the fire brigade.
The army were there too.
It was a show stopper.
I never told you this, John
but I love a man in uniform.

I think of you
leaving your bundle
on top of Beachy Head.
Your belt coiled
around your watch
your wallet with a photo of Katie
your fire fighter’s ID card
your blood donor card
your bus ticket from Brighton.
Losers weepers.

‘It’s about John Diviney,’
the coroner’s office said.
‘Some young people found his things.
His belt a loop around them.’
He flew without wings
off Beachy Head.
He landed at the bottom
his back against the wall
his eyes looking out to sea.

The Mission is © Rita Ann Higgins

Rita Ann Higgins was born in Galway. She has published ten collections of poetry, her most recent being Ireland is Changing Mother, (Bloodaxe 2011), a memoir in prose and poetry Hurting God (Salmon 2010). She is the author of six stage plays and one screen play. She has been awarded numerous prizes and awards, among others an honorary professorship. She is a member of Aosdána.

Rita Ann Higgins’s readings are legendary. Raucous, anarchic, witty and sympathetic, her poems chronicle the lives of the Irish dispossessed in ways that are both provocative and heart-warming. Her next collection Tongulish is due out in April 2016 from Bloodaxe.

Mastectomy

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.




From Who's Counting?

© Shirley McClure

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.

(from Céide Fields)



Becoming the Ancestor at Downpatrick Head


As in prehistory a woman
            climbed down these wave-fretted
                        cliffs and stretched to rest
                                    on this shore,

so lay your cheek
            on this time-worn stone
                        and, looking north
                                    along longitude 9

to where the blue wind’s knife
            splits sea from sky,
                        follow its trajectory
                                    from that birthing point

to your curious eye;
            so learn, as she may have done,
                        how this earth curves,
                                    and time.

© Breda Wall Ryan

Breda Wall Ryan grew up on a farm in Co Waterford and now lives in Co. Wicklow. She has a B.A. in English and Spanish from UCC; a Post-graduate Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, and an M.Phil. in Creative Writing (Distinction) from Trinity College, Dublin. Her awarded fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2006-7 and The New Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction. Her poems have been published widely in journals in Ireland and internationally, including Skylight 47, Ink Sweat and Tears, Deep Water Literary Journal, And Other Poems, Fish Anthology, Mslexia, The Ofi Press, Orbis, Magma and The Rialto. Her first collection, In a Hare’s Eye, was published by Doire Press in 2015. A Pushcart and Forward nominee, she has won several prizes, most recently the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, 2015.

‘Sylvia Plath You are Dead’ and other poems by Elaine Feeney

May 16th, 2015

Charles Bukowski is my Dad

He stands with me in the
best-dressed-lady-line,
holding open my pearl lace
umbrella to the
ravaging Galway rain.

He calls me up on
blue Mondays and gives me
whiskey on bold Fridays.

He fills up my father-space
He fills up my mind-space
He fills up my hot-water bottle

His advice fills up my cheer
and revives my rotted liver,

but that’s a small price to pay
because Bukowski’s my Dad.

He’s my feather pillow
and my guitar string.

He’s my soccer coach and sex therapist

He paints my nails
pepperminty green and sings

raindrops keep falling on my head
on wicked trips to the racetrack.
But that’s a small price to
because Bukowski’s my dad.

Biteens

Little biteens of people, pieces all over the raven pavements and sprayed on the cracked gutters, bits of them strewn on the carpeted lanes, and propped against wheeley bins like the carcasses of bored butlers, bits of them.

Biteens of people, shards of anoraks and faded canvas shopping bags, sloven splinters of their teeth, angles of jawlines where jaws used to sit, pieces of people, god help them, dead to rush hour, dead.

Silver wisps of greasy dandruffy dead hair.

Dead waiting at the bus stop dead waiting at the counter top dead waiting at the social shop dead waiting at the hospital drop dead waiting at the morgue spot.

Putting biteens of sharred shoulders to the wind,
their half bodies and eaten bones.

The blush-blown look of the cretins, blown out of our way down alleys in corpo houses on free bus spins on acid on nebulisers on tea on glue and sugar on lithium on valium on sadnesss and sorrow on beauty on faith.

Biteens of people, pieces of them, imagine it.

Light a candle or two.

For their mass cards and petitions, for their shopping bags for our lady and their prescriptions, for their mothers for their missing sons and for their saints.

Bog Fairies

The heather like
Pork belly cracked
Underneath my feet-

The horizon like
Nougat, melted
Its pastel line at the heath edge
Blue fading to white light.

We stacked rows of little
Houses for bog fairies –
Wet mulchy sods
Evaporating under our small palms.

Crucifixions of dry brittle crosses
Forming the skeleton-
My narrow ankles parallel to them.

Coarse and tough like the marrow of the soul,
Like the skeletons crucified under the peat.

The turf will come good
My father said
When the wind blows to dry it.

We dragged ten-ten-twenty bags
With the sulphury waft of cat piss,
Along a track dotted with deep black bogholes,
Then over a silver door, like a snail’s
Oily trail leaving a map for the moon,
And for bog fairies to dance in the mushy earth-
For us all to glisten in this late summer.

And behind the door
Once upon some time
Old women sat in black shawls
Bedding down Irregulars and putting kettles
On to boil for the labouring girls.

But I was gone.

I was gone at ten in my mind’s eye.
I was dragging Comrades from the Somme
I was pulling Concords in line with Swedish giants
I was skating on the lake in Central Park
I was crouched in the green at Sam’s Cross
I was touring Rubber-Soul at Hollywood Bowl
I was marching on Washington with John Lewis
I was in the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Mapplethorpe,
He was squatting on my lap with his lens,
Swearing to Janis Joplin I could find her a shift,
Nothing is impossible when you blow like that girlfriend.
I sang Come As You are in Aberdeen with union converse,
Blue eye liner and mouse holes in my Connemara jumper.

I was anyone but me
I was anywhere but here
I was gone

We rushed to hurry before the summer light would fade
Because animals needed to be washed and fed

And turf needed to be stacked
And all the talk of our youth
Would be said
In whispers and secrets, or written on postage stamps

Because light was the ruler as it was closing in around us,
Beating us, like the dark on the workmen
Deep in the channel tunnel that night.

The black light killed the purple heather
Yet I danced on the crackle in the dust
I crackled on the dust in the heather
My dance on the heather turned to dust.

Pity the Mothers

Pity the mothers
who weathered their skin
to raise their sons to die.

Pity the routine,
the daily stretching table
ferociously making meet ends.

Pity the mothers who told
sons the world was tough and wild-

To have them sold out in the early hours
of mornings’ immutable stage
fresh and stung.

Brave the world
They should have said
Brave its bold beauty
Brave the world my brave sons
And be beautiful
Because fear is a choking kite string in a storm.

Fear is a punctuating dictator

Fear will drive you half insane
and there’s no spirit in half a cup of anything.

Fear will wake your sleep and damn your
first born nerves.

There is no fertility in fear
no function, no performance.

Be a kite
Be yellow
Be bold
Be mad

Don’t step at the edge of it
all and send your body half-way
forward to the sea-froth.

For there you will find the headwinds.

Pity the bags, shoes, boots,
hurls mothers left
by the door.

The endless soups and syrups
The forever effort
The long lasting kisses they left on young jaws

To send them to the world fearful
And then feared.
To send them to the world with pity
And then pitied.

Pity the mothers
with their strong
elbows worn from effort.

Struggling against headwinds-

sanding the grain
in the wrong direction.

Pity the mothers
Who weathered their skin
just to raise sons to die.

Sylvia Plath You Are Dead

Sylvia Plath you are dead.
Your tanned legs are dead.

Your smile is dead, and
Massachusetts will mourn her

Girl on lemonady days
on sunshiny days

She will mourn her on dark days
when screaming girls go mad

In maternity wards
and scream in domestic wards,

And cry handfuls of slathery salty water
in kitchens over ironing boards.

Sylvia Plath you are dead,
and girls try rubbing out stretched marks

on their olive silver skin, until they
bleed. Their tiny babies cry in the halls

until windows framed with candy
colours, fog over their minds, their aprons, their skirts

their college ways, where there were no lessons on
crying. Silvery Plath the moon howls at them

taunted by strong winds, out the garden paths
gusts blow heads off the ivy shoulders,

but heather keeps her low profile
her head down, smiling.

Mass

Mass will be said for no more bad language and gambling and wanking that the Athenry boys are doing, down the back of the castle, down the back of the couch, all the punching and hitting and groaning, moaning at the Turlough boys, the Clarinbridge boys, the boys from Killimordaly, down the back of the Presentation grounds.

There will be mass when you lose at the Galway Races  and for the saving of your soul if you take the boat to Cheltenham.

There will be a mass for when the horse runs, and when the horse dies, and for the bookies who win and the punters who win,

and the bookies who lose and the punters who lose.

There will be mass for hare coursing and flask-filling.

There will be mass for your Inter Cert and your twenty-first,

There will be a filling-out-your-CAO-form mass.

Mass will be held in the morning before the exams, mass will be held in the evening for your bath.

There’ll be a special mass on Saturday afternoon for your Granny. There will be a mass for your Granny’s boils and aches and black lungs and ulcers and spots and diabetes and psychosis.

There’ll be a mass for the anointing of the bollix of the bull above in the field near the closh over the railway bridge.

Mass will be held before the College’s Junior B Hurling Final, it will be held for the Connaught Cup Junior A Regional Final in wizardry and sarcasm.

Mass will be held on top of the reek for the arrogant and meek, and the bishop will arrive by eurocopter. There will be a mass to get him up in one piece and back in one piece.

Masses will be held in the outhouse.

Mass will be held for the safe arrival of new lambs and the birthing of ass foals.

Mass will be held in your uncle’s sitting room but his neighbours will be envious and later stage a finer mass.

There will be a mass to find you a husband, and a few masses to pray he stays.

There will be a good intentions mass. Your intentions if they’re good will come true. Mass will be held for your weddings and wakes and when you wake up.

Mass will be held for the Muslim conversion.

Mass will be held for George Bush.

Mass will be held for the war on terror.

Mass will be held for black babies and yellow babies and the yellowy black babies.

Mass will not be held for red babies. They have upset Pope John Paul.

Mass will be held for your brother when he gets the meningitis from picking his nose. Mass will be held for your cousins when they stop going to mass.

Mass will be held for the harvest and the sun and the moon and a frost and a snow  and for a healthy spring and red autumn, for a good wind and no wind, and for a good shower and a dry spell, and for the silage and the hay and the grass and the turf.

There will be a saving-of-the-turf day. There will be a saving-of-the-hay day. There will
be a saving-my-soul day.

There will a mass for the fishing fishermen.

There will be multiple masses for Mary around August when she did all the appearing.

There will be a good mass when the statue cries rusty tears. There will be a good mass and a great collection.

Mass will be held for the cloud people.

Mass will be held for apparitions and anniversaries and weddings and baptisms.

Mass will be held to church your sinned body after giving birth, there will be mass to wash your unclean feet.

Mass will be held for all your decisions so you don’t have to blame yourself.

There will be mass for the poor dead Clares. There will be mass for the Black Protestants if Paisley allows it. Mass will be held for the De Valera’s and the Croke Park goers.

There will be a mass for the conversion of the Jews (and their collection).

There will be a mass for the communion class, there will be a mass for the no-name club non-drinkers. There will be a giving-up-smoking-the-Christian-way mass.

There will be a mass for the Christian Angels, only Christian ones.

There will be no mass for your freedom, but the air will be pea sweet and the sky will clear.

Mass will not be held for the souls of your gay sons.

Mass will not be held for victims, for cynics, anti-clerics, the song-and-dance makers, the antagonising atheists, the upsetting-the-apple-cart persons.

There will be no women’s mass.

There will be no mass solely by women for women. Your daughters will not hold mass.
There are strict rules for the masses.

The above poems are © Elaine Feeney and have been published by The Stinging Fly, Once Upon Reflection, and The Radio was Gospel (Salmon Poetry 2013)

“Elaine Feeney is the freshest, most engaging and certainly the most provocative female poet to come out of Ireland in the last decade. Her poem ” Mass”, is both gloriously funny, bitter-sweet in the astuteness of its observations and a brilliant, sly window into the Irish female Catholic experience. Her use of irony is delicious. Her comments on the human condition, which run throughout her lines, are in the tradition of Dean Swift and she rightfully takes her place alongside Eavan Boland and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill is a very, very important Irish voice.” Fionnuala Flanagan, California 2013 (Praise for The Radio was Gospel, 2013, Salmon)

“A choice collection of poetry, one not to be overlooked, 5 Stars” Midwest Book Review, USA, (Praise for Where’s Katie? 2010, Salmon Poetry).

Elaine Feeney saying Mass