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When I first encountered the entity that appears on the towpath I was afraid for She seemed hardly human to me. I had gone little by little into this dreaming place over the course of twenty years, and I had explored it almost wholly. I do not know what my encounter with this lady means, I intend to find out.” With She Christine Murray explores the spaces between waking and dreaming, that we all inhabit yet are so rarely revealed to us in this day and age. Part shaman part Sybil,she takes us on a Jungian odyssey to meet the archetype that stands at the crossroads of birth and death, one whom we are all destined to encounter sooner or later. Thanks to Dave Mitchell at Oneiros Books, To Michael McAloran, and to Anastasia Kashian who painted her beautiful cover.
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Tag: oneiros books
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The first edition of SHE was published by Oneiros Books in 2014.
82 Pages
Perfect-bound Paperback.
The cover painting image is © Anastasia Kashian, with great thanks to David Mitchell for design, and to Michael McAloran for accepting the book on behalf of Oneiros Books.
Two poems from The Island Sequence of ‘She’
sea is a womb
sea is a womb
dip and flow the small boatrock and rock,
rock the black blackgold lace a-glitter
and rocks – the
rocks scrape her timbersbeneath the carved wave
lie monsters clawing at her base
black the inky waves lap to
black the inky waves lap to and black they suck the shale and if birds swoop they are the mere shadows of birds there are hands there to disembark you to hold you over the rocky black those hands that will arc you onto the comfort of stone this is the sea/ this inky black it does not smell of sea the gap between the boat and the shore is awesome the wood laps the water dragging it out / and bobbing it back again the chasm at the heel and one step forward to land to stone comfort.Poems from The Island Sequence of ‘She‘ are © C. Murray
black the inky waves lap to was published in The Burning Bush VIContents Page
(i) A letter found in the box that contained this narrative, being addressed to the cousin of a former patient, Miss Constance Byrne.
(ii) A note attached to the file of Miss Constance Byrne (now deceased).
Part I
Standing Stones
Grove
Lake
Serpentine The Alleyway
A Ruined Church at the Precipice
Burnt Hill
DescentPart II
The Island
She
Cousin -, The narrative that follows here is a faithful rendering of my wanderings from the time of my retirement to the dawn. It is always the same. I do not expect anyone will believe me, but I know that my dreaming life is as real as my waking life.
Indeed, I have learned not to call these sleeping narratives anything other than a different part of my reality. When I first encountered the entity that appears on the towpath I was afraid for She seemed hardly human to me. I had gone little by little into this dreaming place over the course of twenty years, and I had explored it wholly in her company. I do not know what my encounter with this lady means, I intend to find out. In my exploratory times there I have never yet met another person. Although there were signs of life (or of creaturely habitation).This landscape seemed to me to be ruined by war and by heat. What else could make marble of glass shards?
It is bleak there. At every dawn, there occurs a throb of colour and I know that somehow I am back here in this world. I do not believe that my nightly explorations are a dream, for I have found tears upon my slippers, and a rend in the lace of my dress. She wants to show me something. She has indicated for me a bridge. I intend to cross over it, and thereby to continue to explore the geography of its unknown terrain.
I travel now alone. I am unencumbered by family, nor by tradition. I leave to you this letter and some small tokens of my esteem. Know that I am safe, and although I undertake this journey with trepidation, I remain always yours,
Constance.
Cover image by Anastasia Kashian. Cover design by David Mitchell at Oneiros Books. -
Crown of Thorns by Bethany W. Pope
Oneiros Books 2013Crown Of Thorns by Bethany W. Pope is published under the Oneiros Books imprint. This is not an easy book to read. Ultimately it is a tale of triumph against war, where war is child sexual abuse, rejection, and alienation. Throughout Crown Of Thorns there is a sense of profound hope and strong unshakeable faith.
Bethany Pope uses an imagery and symbolism in Crown of Thorns that is bloody, battered, estranged, and sometimes terrifying. Corridors, umbilici, and torn flesh form the vast part of the imagery, with water and earth less spoken but always present. Crown Of Thorns is a testament of survival and endurance sited in a complex construction that requires some explanation.
Divisions in Crown Of Thorns
There are four major divisions in Crown Of Thorns, Crown of Thorns, House Of Masks, Rabbit Trap, and Bloodlines: An Emperor’s Crown. Within each division are series of poems excavating both familial and personal history. The series are broken into sonnet groups, some of which are acrostic.
The opening section of the book eponymously titled Crown Of Thorns comprises two separate threads (or cords) Joy and John. The section is 15 sonnets long, alternating between two groups of seven sonnets under each heading that become entwined in Sonnet #15. Crown Of Thorns forms the foundation of the book proper. The major themes of survival and abuse are herein introduced.
The themes of this opening section of the book are taken up throughout the other previously named divisions, House of Masks, Rabbit Trap and Bloodlines. Pope maintains a careful balance in the foundational and introductory parts of her book. She explores and ultimately accepts the damage of war on the body, and its survival in the final part of the book Bloodlines: An Emperor’s Crown.
Pope has intricately embroidered her major themes throughout the fabric of the book. She will pick up and repeat phrases in different sonnets, most especially in Bloodlines: An Emperor’s Crown, which is more assured and deftly handled than the earlier sections. Bloodlines is cumulative, thus the most difficult set of themes to render poetically.
The achievement of this book is for the writer, who has honed her craft to attain her mature poetic voice. This, she achieves through her use of structure, structural underpinning in the form of acrostic sonnets, and a developed use of symbolism that interweaves its way through each titled or numbered section. The use of the symbolism of the umbilicus, the corridor, the tunnel, the eye , and water is very evident in the final section of the book through Crown 2: The Ancestors, Crown 3: Alchemy, and Blood Jewels. These named sections form the final part of the book, titled Bloodlines, An Emperor’s Crown.
Symbols In Crown of Thorns
Crown Of Thorns is set out as a Bildungsroman, or more properly a pilgrimage. The book is confessional, as it is a testament of victory over war. War is the torn body and soul of the victim of child abuse, war in the experience of neglect and poverty. The deepest victory is in Pope’s admittance to herself that the battle is never entirely won. It begins anew each day with the ‘Dream that bursts when eyelids open.’
Some of Pope’s material is traumatic to read and to think about. Her most intense victory therefore is in how she has achieved compression of her traumatic themes through her use of poetic form, and in how she has explored and set out those themes through sure use of symbol.
Soil, earth, water and the dark blood of birthing mingle their acids into an existence that is always questing for right and truth. The umbilicus, that dark binding cord of ancestry binds the victims of family through change of place and of time,
13.
‘The corridors run, binding us together
out of glistening blue and red wires.’Crown 3: Alchemy (Bloodlines)
Bloodlines makes liberal use of the acrostic form spelling out a history, which I read as an SOS. Bethany is born, only purity is my tough refusal to, sell my poor soul, and so on. It is a morse-code of distress hammered into sonnets of sure structure and strong voice. I found myself trying to avoid the acrostics as much as possible to get to the meat of the work, although the acrostic sonnets form the tough outer skin of the poetry- the rind.
Joy: Thorns
Growing flesh around the darkened hole death springs from,
the bark hardens around the hollow in the bole,
the secret place you love for no known reason.
Dressed in a chiton, playing the role of nymphic
servant to unseen Pan, you slide into the loamy darkness,
your wood-rot scented hide. Adolescent haunches
squat in soft soil. You have a shepherd’s pie you bought
with two week’s allowance. Treated bamboo and garish
dyed bands, producing a sound your mind makes melodious.
The tree speaks with the borrowed breath of a wounded girl.
Saturday is for hiding, drawing strength from the earth.
Sundays still belong to grampy, his evil, elderly
entitlement; right of patriarchy to penetrate
beyond the heart of innocence, which grows no armor-bark.by Bethany W Pope
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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 :(after Marc Chagall)
Dew drops into jade a three-quarter moon.
Love, love! Your uprooted flower dissipatesIts 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 – -
Thanks to David Mitchell , publisher at Oneiros Books and to poetry editor Michael McAloran, who guided me through publishing my second poetry collection, The Blind.
The Blind is a contemporary poem-tale about The Furies. The themes and symbols of The Blind are entirely interdependent from beginning to end. The book is set out as a tale and employs experimental poetic methods throughout, including cut-up, repetition, symbol and internal rhyme. I did not make use of poetic prose , as I felt that it would be a challenge to tell a tale poetically. I am delighted that the book is now available. I have found it easier to employ these methods in conceiving book-length poem-tales since I began working in this manner, and to this end I have initiated another project in a similar vein.
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Thanks to Amos Gideon Grieg , publisher at A New Ulster Magazine, who previewed some of the poems from The Blind this past summer. The series published at A New Ulster was entitled Hooks, Ceremony and Hunger.
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Thanks to Ditch Poetry, who featured Suspend I from The Blind in their magazine.
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Thank you to the editor of Southword Literary Journal (Munster Literature Centre) who will publish poems from The Blind in the Winter 2013 issue of Southword.
- I am adding here the Poetry Catalogue for Oneiros Books , which I recommend . I have reviewed some of the books. They are a growing outfit with a talented team of editors, specialising is prose, poetry and comics.
- I am adding here the purchase link for The Blind; a tale of
I am delighted with The Blind, for me it was an opportunity to tell a story that I have not been afforded within the Irish Publication system , which is narrowly conceived and not open to experimentalism, save in few independent presses. Poetry as form is vital in Ireland, yet there are few opportunities to develop as a poet. I hope that this changes and that editors see the value of opening out more platforms for experimentation for our writers.
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The following poem is an excerpt from a sequence published by Ditch Poetry. The sequence is from my forthcoming collection, The Blind (Oneiros Books 2013). Part of the Sequence is published here. The first poem in the sequence, hunger, appears throughout the collection and was first published in A New Ulster Magazine. suspend I
from the mirror architrave
float down silken threads
they are not blackened yet
from the ceiling hooks
float down wisps of
red thread – almost
cobweb light she is
arched back unsure
whether to suspend
burnt orange silks
cover the shutters
there are children in the street
she is nonetheless
quite bound-up
in red ropes
from loop at nape
and length of torso
it is peaceful
being spider-rolled
webbed-in and arched
as if a –
a bird swoops down
behind the orange silks….. shiftshape-in
Suspend I by C. Murray, is taken from The Blind (Oneiros Books 2013) and is published in part at Ditch Poetry.
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…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
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shadows
the three are shadows
silken spider-weavers
hidden close by a laurel tree
they cast out their silvers like fishing line with baited
hooks / food for worms
they cast out their silver threads they draw them back in
red and frayed / time weary
some say that they sit behind mirrors watching lives
pass through a room :
that they spindle their thread/ that they are blind /that
they are simply bent to the work that they were given
and never a stitch is dropped /
that is not picked up and brought clean again / for they
simply do their job
by touch by hand by long and patient experience with
the vagaries of man
.and woman,
.unleash the skein
red thread the open wound
and from it a thin red rivulet
will drain into a metal dish
and curl into water
no more now
it is just a stitch
stitches
wound gash is drawn to and threaded
dust of glass in the wound ground in
round the heel and spiral down to
blue glass pummelled beyond crystal
a useless moon dust
pounded to glass
the red thread lets
no light in.the shards are so small,
Shadows and Unleash The Skein are from a forthcoming book, The Blind. © C. Murray
Unleash The Skein was first published in Three Red Things, Smithereens Press, June 2013 -
Do Not Censor
by Craig Podmore
Published Oneiros Books 2013
Jonestown
In the name of television,
The crucifix
And the glossy magazines
(The deflowered dead that we are.)A-fucking-men.
Jonestown, by Craig Podmore
Do Not Censor is divided into two sections, Fiction and Reality. Craig Podmore investigates the blurred line between the two in a manner that reflects how reality operates in a post-millenarist culture of movie snuff and sex consumption. It reveals its hard edges much in the way drunken starlets upload their sex tapes to feed a cannibalising machine that will have their blood..
The Ghosts in the Machine of Fiction parade their post-mortem selves as desired objects that have burnt their image into our irises. Distracting icons who hid a multitude whilst revealing generous acres of flesh. These are the abbatoir-hung victims of a real masochistic need for adulation, and they are in the hands of the sadist advertiser.
from, The Polemic
‘The Crenshawgrave
Where Beth Short lay
Cut like a perfect film clip-
Her body edited and framed.
The raven dreamer
Took the murder scene stage;
The world shocked, bereaved-
Death performance, a media sensation.’Marilyn, Elizabeth Short, Betty Page, icons of the industrial non-culture of post-WWII and Hiroshima, huge projected fellatrices and suicides, whose addictions fed (and feeds) psychotic addiction to non-reality. They are the very real reality of the undead icon. Here is the underbelly of vocalisation that Tom Waits sang in Sweet Little Bullet From A Pretty Blue Gun. Save now the underbelly is writ large across an abattoir of ghastly smiles in every newsagent across western civilisation. A trickle down of Hollywood snuff culture into every home that bothers to buy it. Turn away from it :
Hollywood Is A Correctional Facility
‘The teenage girl
Etching ‘Destroy’ onto her
Book of Revelations.
Shoplifting make-up
That Greta Garbo wears’.from Fiction.
The Reality section of Do Not Censor is not problematic, it is emblematic. Here celluloid snuff is played out on shopping streets and in motel rooms. Here the sociopath or psychopath whose head is filled with Hollywood BDSM victimization gets their kicks in a two dimensional world. The type of psychopathy that leads to massacres at premieres, or robot warfare in suburban neighbourhoods.
Gunmen On The High Street
‘Morality is absent in consumerism
As the gunmen shoot the shoppers down
But the shoppers are numb to the bullets
As they arise and continue to shop.’from Reality
The reader needn’t assume the role of judge given the toxicity of post-milleniarism. The screen plays out Hollywood-snuff in the blurred lines between how a reality is perceived, and how it is writ large onto that tarnished screen where audiences are umbilically fed a diet of 50 ft buttocks and botoxed faces.
Daily Masturbation and Internal bleeding
‘Porn star dialogue
For the menial tasks
Of pro-creationAnd biblical passages
For the erotically charged
Acts of Murder.’from Reality.
Again the undead advertising execs have burned their irrationality into mass consciousness, with reality a fine thread plucked and fucked by the advertisers who have people caring about stars weight increase, who is fucking who and why starlets do radical things to their bodies, whether implant or removal of glands to the point of nauseating microscopy. One wonders who guardians Jolie’s breasts ? Or why we should care about this level of personal revelation. But there it is in huge writing , in endless rote.
This is the culture of nadir – a nadir of cultural expression where flesh is the oldest currency. Its underbelly brought to the level of entertainment where entertainment aspires to cultural voice.
Purchase Link for Do Not Censor
Chris Murray 