In The Poetry

Shantung

It’s true that anyone can fall
in love with anyone at all
Later, they can’t. Ouf, ouf.

How much mascara washes away each day
and internationally, making the blue one black.
Come on everybody. Especially you girls.

Each day I think of something about dying.
Does everybody? do they think that, I mean.
My friends! some answers. Gently
unstrap my wristwatch. Lay it face [...]

I don’t speak English. I don’t even speak the French I was taught. Shoes aren’t les chaussures here. They’re les goddesses, l’eau is la flotte, le vin is le pinard. My head is inside out; English used to be in deep and French outside. I’ve stopped translating. I don’t think ‘let’s go’ and turn it [...]

Between Hovers

And not even when we ran over the badger
Did he tell me he had cancer, Joe O’Toole
Who was psychic about carburettor and clutch
And knew a folk cure for the starter-engine.
Backing into the dark we floodlit each hair
Like a filament of light our lights had put out
Somewhere between Kinnadoohy and Thallabaun.
I dragged it by two [...]

This poem is a love poem about a room and it’s called ‘We Are Living’.

We Are Living

What is this room
But the moments we have lived in it?
When all due has been paid
To gods of wood and stone
And recognition has been made
Of those who’ll breathe here when we are gone
Does it not take its worth from [...]

The poet John Clare, I think, although his reputation has risen in recent years, but certainly for a long time it was much higher among Irish poets than it was among English poets. People know “Poor John Clare” is what he’s often called: an early success, and later madness, but I was reading [...]

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on- on- and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away… O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and [...]

I had the good fortune to visit Antarctica some years ago, and I wrote one or two poems down there. I imagined, for example, a polar explorer dying of hypothermia, and then it occurred to me that ‘hypothermia’ sounded like the name of a Greek goddess, so I wrote this poem.

The Polar Explorer’s Love Song

The [...]

Swimming in the Woods

Her long body in the spangled shade of the wood
was a swimmer moving through a pool:
fractal, finned by leaf and light;
the loose plates of lozenge and rhombus
wobbling coins of sunlight.
When she stopped, the water stopped,
and the sun re-made her as a tree,
banded and freckled and foxed.

Besieged by symmetries, condemned
to these patterns of [...]

Something About

A poem set in Dublin, St Stephen’s Green

Something About

those huge black canvases in Newman’s
church, St Stephen’s Green — restoration
botched perhaps — Raphael Cartoons,
copies, loved by Newman, quite gone out.

Something about,
outside, Joyce’s head, too silver sharp,
too shrunk, facing stone steps he argued up
of the house where Hopkins sweated, found [...]