Happy Christmas 2020

Happy Christmas to all the readers of the blog. I had After Narnia published by Dodging the Rain on Christmas Day for their 12 poems of Christmas, Dodging the Snow. Some lovely work included in this segment, including poems by Maurice Devitt and Maeve McKenna. Thanks to Neil Slevin, editor. 

20/12: Jorrell Watkins, Real Snow; Chris Pellizzari, Andalusian Christmas Noir

21/12: Ricky Ray, My Favorite Time of Day…

22/12: David Lohrey, A Charlie Brown Christmas

23/12: Al Mclimens, Anaconda

24/12: Christine Brooks, Eve

25/12: Orla Fay, After Narnia; Maurice Devitt, Christmas Day

26/12: Beth Brooke, The Draw of Winter

27/12: Maeve Bruce, The Weighing; Maeve McKenna, Grief That Swims

28/12: Olga Dermott-Bond, Christmas Lights

29/12: Robert Ford, First Overseas Christmas

30/12: Jessica Coleman, Irish Sea

31/12: Dave Stacey, Isle of Man; Sandra Fees, It Isn’t About the Flowers

1/1: Ricky Ray, Resolution

Review of Drawn to the Light by K.S. Moore

 

Thanks very much to poet K.S. Moore for her review of my chapbook Drawn to the Light on her YouTube channel. Karen does a wonderful job reading some of the included poems and her insights are also lovely. Karen's poem Child can be read in The Honest Ulsterman here. 

Drawn to the Light is available on Amazon and if anyone wants a signed copy they can contact me personally. 

The Colour Yellow & the Number 19, by Kevin Higgins

 

The Colour Yellow & the Number 19 , (Negative Thoughts That Helped One Man Mostly Retain His Sanity During 2020), by Kevin Higgins, has just been published by Nuacéalta. Kevin Higgins is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway, Ireland. He teaches poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre, Creative Writing at Galway Technical Institute, and is Creative Writing Director for the National University of Ireland – Galway Summer School. He is poetry critic of The Galway Advertiser. Kevin’s poetry has been translated into Greek, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, German, Serbian, Russian, & Portuguese. In 2016 The Stinging Fly magazine described Kevin as ‘likely the most read living poet in Ireland.’ He has published five full collections of poetry with Salmon: The Boy With No Face (2005), Time Gentlemen, Please (2008), Frightening New Furniture (2010), The Ghost In The Lobby (2014), and most recently Sex and Death at Merlin Park Hospital. 

What is touching about The Colour Yellow & the Number 19 (TCYATN19) is the bravery of Higgins in surmounting the chronic auto-immune disease, sarcoidosis, with good humour and vigour. In her introduction to the book, somatic therapist Aisling Richmond explains the work's title:

The title distils the essence of these times so well; where the normal and abnormal strangely co-exist. What should be casual and mundane – the colour yellow and the number 19 – refer instead to a world that has dramatically changed; with yellow as the colour of Ireland’s public Covid signs and 19 the number of a global pandemic.

The cover image resembling two trees on fire could be taken as the poet's lungs working with reduced oxygen intake capacity. The irony in this is how the trees provide us with oxygen. How connected we all are in this world. In his Irish Times essay Sarcoidosis and Me Higgins writes 'Most of my recent poems have been satires on the crazy state of the world at the moment' and in TCYATN19 he is certainly in satirical form again. In Of the Coming Plague he vows to go out and catch COVID in mortuaries, hospitals or nightclub toilets. Of death he writes 

For, Death, what do I know of you, 

never having died before?

You’ve had a terrible press,

but could be victim

of the smear campaign.

Higgins is never one to shy away from tackling the political events of the day. His poem The Shipping Forecast predicts an ominous future for the ships of 'Britannia, Eurasia, and Sweet Land of Liberty',  'if certain particulars aren’t fixed'. Waiting for Boris is a scathing reflection on the British PM, while Look What I Found at the Triangle in Ranelagh (after Frances Fitzgerald) and The Day Stephen Donnelly Joined Foster and Allen are wry comments on the Irish political scene. In an interview with Kate Dempsey (2011) on Writing.ie Kevin had said 'From the age of 15-27, I was an active member of Militant, the predecessor to Joe Higgins’s Socialist Party, both here in Galway and then later in London, where I was very involved in the anti-poll tax movement in the early nineties.' It is clear that politics is very close to his heart. 

Higgins' passion for Galway shines through in The Kind of City I want Galway to be After COVID-19, which also demonstrates his support of youth and the arts. In poems such as Death Bed Amends, The After Life and The Haunting the poet is unafraid to confront mortality. The excellent Today is Brought to You was written after the making of a will, and the poem is brilliantly explained in the collection. I found these notes about the poems in the book to be very insightful and helpful to the reader. Higgins says:

Today is brought to you,

and tomorrow is probable.

But next week

and the week after are dreams

in which only the monsters are real.

One final piece I will commend is the lovely, The Vulnerable. There is a sadness and a grace to the opening lines, 'I dream I’m watching the morning train/ rattle down the platform without me.' I'm thankful for spending the afternoon with Higgins' poetic voice in The Colour Yellow & the Number 19. I am enriched culturally and spiritually by the experience. Other readers would glean further observations, having richer political minds than mine. I have no hesitation in recommending the book as a real treasure of this year past. It speaks strongly of the times in an authentic way.

The Colour Yellow & the Number 19 is available here. 

Galway Then, Galway Now

 

Galway Then, Galway Now is a celebration of Galway writers published in Crannóg Magazine since its inception 18 years ago. The anthology also honours Galway's status as a European Capital of Culture in 2020. From Wordonthestreet the issue contains the work of 104 writers. The attractive cover features Long Walk by Patricia Burke Brogan and Quay Street by Wordonthestreet. Burke Brogan's cheerful poem November is included. President Michael D. Higgins commends Crannóg Magazine on its service to literature in a foreword message. Crannóg Magazine is edited by Sandra Bunting, Ger Burke, Jarlath Fahy and Tony O'Dwyer.

Nuala O'Connor's Napoli Abú is a very entertaining story, focusing on the conversation between two middle-aged women on a trip to Naples. Claire Loader's The Workhouse is a haunting and poetic description of the past. Moya Roddy's Poetic Justice is a portrait of a young woman on the fringe of poetry and society. Maureen Gallagher, Patrick Hewitt and Aoibheann McCann are just three of the many other fine fiction writers included.

Daedalus Speaks To Icarus, His Son is a re-imagining of the myth by Liz Quirke. Of the women who mourn the idol she writes 'they can cry for you and remember/your newborn skull warm in the palm of their hand.' Majella Kelly's beautiful Dragon Pearls finds romance in jasmine and a first meeting. Noelle Lynskey's Laughter Lines is a tribute to a loved one quoting Charlie Chaplin's line 'To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it!' Emily Cullen's The Innocent Cosmopolitan is a striking poem about a backhanded compliment and Rachel Coventry's Reunion at Ceannt Station is a singing villanelle. 

And this is just a glimpse between the covers. The creative spirit of the west is wide awake and stirring in these pages. Galway Then, Galway Now can be ordered in time for Christmas here. It would be a perfect book to read while curled up by the fire over the festive season, or to peruse with a cup of tea on a January morning. 

The Heart Uncut by Marian Kilcoyne

 

 

Exile clings to him like a smell

of damp yarn, a low growl of

pain shoots into the atmosphere. A

missile obliterating the pretty stars.

from Elba, Marian Kilcoyne

From Wordonthestreet Galway, The Heart Uncut is Marian Kilcoyne's debut collection. She is an Irish writer based on the west coast of Ireland. She has been a teacher at senior level, worked professionally in education and management for an Aids Organization, and reviewed fiction and non-fiction for the Sunday Business Post. She attended the Seamus Heaney Centre’s Poetry Summer School at Queen’s University Belfast in 2013. She was featured poet on Poethead – Contemporary Irish women poets, January 9th – 16th 2018. She was short-listed for the 2017 Dermot Healy International Poetry Award and placed on the long-list for the 2019 Fish Poetry Prize.

Opening with the dramatic Spectre, Kilcoyne draws one into her well observed inner world where images are sometimes startling in unexpected clarity. In her 'amaranthine garden' 'The breeze hushed and gulped into itself', and Auden-like 'the moon strangled the sun'. Similarly, in Collateral Damage the poet describes the death of a bird who has flown into a window in a pulsating way. On trying to reach the dead bird before her puppy, she writes 'I tiger to where it lies on cool stone.'

Antibes Reverie is a moveable feast where, while eating cherries the poet is 'dazed as a fool by/their sweet flesh and lip sting stain.' The druid guiding Graham Greene's pen in this poem returns in the wonderful The Significant Child. Here, Kilcoyne on a train journey, watches a sleeping child and swoons 'at his beauty and pristine druid-like presence as he trips across worlds'. 

The Heart Uncut itself, is a poem that signals the restorative power of words and the healing that is threaded through this collection. 'But listen, I want to know/if your spirit has healed?' she asks. Memento is a profound realisation of trauma in the souvenir of a broken cup, 'You can never go back.'

Mornings at Carrnowniskey is an exceptional piece. The poet, with courage, places her trust in 'the elemental cosmos' in the face 'of our thwarted humanity'. Kilcoyne's poems are intimate, exquisite and finely etched. The Paradox of You brought to mind E.E. Cumming's writing. Such delicacy of phrase as 'There is a reckoning too and it comes in/disguise' (There Are No Gods) will linger. 

The Heart Uncut is available here. 

 

The Pull of the Stars

 

Emma Donoghue's latest novel is set in a Dublin hospital in 1918. It follows the lives of three women over three days, Nurse Julia Power, Bridie Sweeney a boarder in the nun's motherhouse sent to help as a runner, Doctor Kathleen Lynn, and the patients of the Maternity/Fever ward. Dr. Lynn was an actual person who lived from 1874-1955. 

The Pull of the Stars is a timely book marking the centenary of the outbreak of the great flu/the Spanish flu. The novel draws striking parallels between that pandemic and COVID-19. I was impressed by the book's exploration of society, the plight of women bound to years of pregnancies without contraception, the consequences of World War 1 and the 1916 Rising, the harshness of industrial schools and mother and baby homes under the rod of the Catholic Church. 

The hospital scenes are full of detail and can be quite graphic but they must reflect the realities of childbirth. Donoghue does not hold back. Nurse Power, in conversation with Dr. Lynn as she performs a post mortem, learns that the word influenza derives from the medieval Italian thought that illness was written in the stars, influenza delle stelle - the influence of stars. The last quarter of the book is a romance and with tenderness and abandon to that genre we are swept away briefly. 

I enjoyed this offering but I would have loved learning more about the characters. Nevertheless, Donoghue is always a satisfying read, and one of my favourite authors. The Pull of the Stars was recently shortlisted for An Post Irish Book Awards Eason's Novel of the Year. Thanks to Meath County Library Service for sending it to me for review. 

Meath Writers' Circle 6th Annual Magazine

 

Congratulations to Meath Writers' Circle on the production of their magazine for the 6th year in a row. The journal of poetry and story is edited by Eugene Kane, Gabriel McDonnell, Seán Kane and Frank Murphy. Cover design is by Eugene Kane, with artwork and printing by Darby Print, Trim. 

Special thanks to Frank Murphy of  Tara Poetry Blog for taking my poem. A feature of this issue is a sport section, hence my ode of sorts to Faf de Klerk is included. The magazine features work from local writers and also includes pieces by Theo Dorgan and John B. Keane. There is a music section and a young writers' section. 

On a day when the Argentinian soccer great Diego Maradona has passed, Murphy's editorial comment that sport 'is something of a neglected form in writers' circles, even though it is often the first thing that people turn to when they purchase a newspaper or access the local media', seems apt. Don't cry for me Argentina...

'Bloody Amazing' Poetry Anthology

 

Cover image by Jane Burn

Bloody Amazing is a collection of 123 taboo smashing poems about periods, the menopause and more. It is a collaboration between Yaffle and Beautiful Dragons Press, Dragon Yaffle. It is edited by Gill Lambert and Rebecca Bilkau. In the editorial they write that women are 'accidentally colluding in a taboo that says we shouldn't talk about our periods or our menopause because we're nice girls. Heroines.' 

Opening with Doireann Ní Ghríofa's While Bleeding, a poem in which the writer tries on a red coat in a vintage boutique 'as a cramp curls again/where blood stirs and melts', the collection describes an array of situations in which women adjust to their bodies, its changes and needs. In Red Dragon, Yvonne Ugarte is only 10 when her period arrives 'causing panic and confusion' in her foster care home, 'staining sheets'. Ugarte is thankful 'for the menopause when the red dragon left my life for good.' A lot of the poets are glad to see the end of their periods. Finola Scott finds herself free to be herself when 'Those scarlet tsunamis' are gone in After The Hysterectomy. Similarly, in Sonnet For Women Of A Certain Age, Tonnie Richmond says 'Your shrivelled womb means happy days to come/of even-tempered mood, no monthly tears.' Mandy MacDonald feels 'bloody amazing' after The End Of Her Period Period. 

The arrival of menstruation is a common subject in the anthology, as it should, being a remarkable occasion in a young woman's life. For Sandra Burnett it is a frightening event when she even fears 'I'm on my way to Heaven.' Luckily a friend's sister passes her a book about 'how girls are transformed into women' in 1954 - A Period of Time. Luckily times have changed, somewhat! Jhilmil Breckenridge advises a welcoming attitude to, and an acceptance of,  the monthly cycle in her wise The Visitor Who Ends Up Staying Forever. 

Many women feel that their time of the month is like a curse, finding pain but a sense of power, communion and magic in its spell. Sue Hubbard writes in The Curse, 'We are joined in blood/by the slow pull of the moon's/waning' and in Cursed, Sarah Miles names her period 'the stain of womanhood'. In Eve's Punishment, Miranda Lynn Barnes is 'On all fours like a dog,/I'm crawling, crying,'. In Witch Club Izzy Brittain imagines 'Each month we grow a bit more wolf-like'. She calls on us to 'Sing songs about the potency of pussy'. 

There are 123 poems and reasons to get a copy of Bloody Amazing. Denni Turp's How Change Comes - and not in a good way is a thoughtful, reflective work, Pat Edwards writes cleverly and sadly about conception in Misconception, and Maeve McKenna touches on fertility too in A Meal for One. Regardless of one's age there will be a piece that speaks to the woman you currently are, in the book. I found some consolation within its pages and this is always a good thing to offer a reader. 

Congratulations to the editors and to all the women who contributed to Bloody Amazing. The variety of subject and personal account in its womb, are a gift to women. Men might also find these testimonies informative and enlightening. As Lambert and Bilkau write 'we're half the world, us women, more, and we've nothing to taboo about.' Bloody Amazing costs £10 plus postage and packing and this modern anthology of poetry can be  purchased here.

Massacre of the Birds, by Mary O'Donnell, Salmon Poetry 2020

In the winter garden

at full moon.

I watch the fields

turn to watered silk,

a chemise for the ghosts of me;

from Nocturnal, Mary O'Donnell

Massacre of the Birds is Mary O'Donnell's 4th poetry collection from Salmon Poetry. Reading the Sunflowers in September, Spiderwoman's Third Avenue Rhapsody and Unlegendary Heroes were all published in the 1990's. She is a novelist and The Light-Makers won The Sunday Tribune's Best New Irish Novel in 1992. She has won The William Allingham Award, The Listowel Writers’ Week Short Story Prize and The Fish International Short Story Award. Short story collections include Strong Pagans (Poolbeg, 1991), Storm Over Belfast (New Island Books, 2008), and Empire (Arlen House, 2018). She taught creative writing at Maynooth University and teaches poetry on Galway University's MA in Creative Writing. She is a member of the Irish Writers' Union, and a board member of the Irish Writers' Centre. She is a member of Aosdána. Her 2014 novel Where They Lie focuses on the 'Disappeared'. 

Hanging House in a Canal, the opening poem of Massacre of the Birds,  is dedicated to fellow writer Jean O'Brien and the collection is speckled with works in praise of, and defending women. Other poems are dedicated to Mary Guckian, Eileen Battersby, Mary O'Keefe and Bridget Flannery. It Wasn't a Woman is a list of violent crimes committed against the innocent by men and #MeToo, 12 Remembered Scenes and a Line remembers 12 incidents in which the writer was trespassed, the last line being 'I was never raped.' Finding 'Our Place' Heroic tackles the misogyny that found its way into  the drafting of the Irish constitution under De Valera. 

The plight of refugees from Syria is explored by the writer. In the beautiful The Little Waves, like Judgements, she admires the resilience of those who have found a place to stay in Sweden, they walk with dignity 'As if nothing had happened'. The poet finds a striking humility in their maintenance of an innocence, 'Their faces knowing only the future.' The displacement of the Syrian people though is like a judgement. Who is to blame? The Blackbird, God Almighty and Allah answers some of the poet's question. In the bird's song of nature she can find a peaceful faith that no organised religion can offer. 

In poems about her mother O'Donnell is sage and understanding. Travelling to see her, she ponders the nature of growing old and passing the Hill of Tara, from the motorway realises '...all that sunken ground,/what shifts beneath us/even as we live' in Mother, I am Crying. On Reading my Mother's Sorrow Diary reveals some of the inner thoughts of a mother, her unending love for her husband, her loyalty to her daughters and daily tittle-tattle. My Mother says No on Bloomsday is a reference to the power of saying 'no' and it describes a care shown in filial duty. 

From her very essence O'Donnell seeks to understand a broken and changing world. She tries to comprehend it as a voice of the Me Too movement, as a citizen of the world aghast at the refugee crisis in the Middle East, and as an observer of global warming. She is passionately involved in this life. The collection's titular poem A Husband's Lament for the Massacre of the Birds is a deeply felt lament for a destruction of the environment. This is a timely collection that deserves attention. It is current and insightful. The closing poem is as mysterious and prophetic as the closing lines of Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby. O'Donnell writes in The Future Wears a Yellow Hat that time to come 'greets us effortlessly,/waving its yellow hat/as we cross a high bridge/from opposite directions,/smiling'. Perhaps this is a calling to be more present!

Massacre of the Birds is now available here, from Salmon Poetry. The launch will take place this coming Thursday, November 12th at 7.30 pm online via zoom. Attendance can be booked here with Eventbrite.

Drawn to the Light Poetry Chapbook

 

My chapbook of 26 poems is now available on Amazon as a paperback, or e-book. It can be purchased from here. It can also be purchased and previewed to the right, by clicking on the sidebar image. ---> 

Nuda Veritas by Eugene Platt (Revival Press 2020)

Eugene Platt, an octogenarian, was born in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, a region that tends to engender in writers a strong sense of place and which continues to inform much of his work. After serving in the Army (11th Airborne and 24th Infantry Divisions, 1957-1960), he earned a BA in political science at the University of South Carolina, an MA in English (with creative thesis) at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and a  Diploma in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin. As a young poet, he was active on the reading circuit, giving over 100 public readings of his work at colleges, universities, and libraries across the nation. Nuda Veritas has been published by Revival Press (Limerick Writers Centre) and is available on the publisher's website. He lives in Charleston with his main muses: Montreal-born wife Judith, corgi Henry, and cat Keats. (Poets and Writers Directory).

Nuda Veritas is an attrctive collection. In the preface Platt explains the choice of Klimt's painting for the cover. In the painting Eve holds an outward facing hand mirror urging the onlooker to consider the naked truth about themselves rather than ogling her naked body. As a young man the poet studied at Trinity College (1969 - 1970) and while there he found appreciation for the works of Patrick Kavanagh. Kavanagh had written that "only in verse can one confess with dignity" (Self Portrait). Platt concludes that it is only through his poetry that he can convey his own truth. 

The collection opens with Folly Beach Hotdogs which is a lament for "Youth's gone now", and a seeking of something to satisfy the soul by the ocean, a place between the "fragile Edge of America" and "fabled America". Something of the exoticness of South Carolina and its neighbouring "Atlantic Coast Line" states, is described in Listen, Melontime, Ashley and Main Crops, South Carolina. I've never wanted strawberry shortbread more than now after reading Eat Strawberries and Seize the Day, "...on Summer Sundays...my salvation...was coming home...to feast on fried chicken...and my mother's renowned strawberry shortcake". Platt describes with sensitivity and honesty the death of his father in a series of poems, acknowledging "the fortune of having been his son" in Pennies from Heaven. 

Towards the end of the book the poet explores a love of Ireland. In Destination Dublin he is excited to be travelling "Eastward eastward..." and in At Trinity College he recalls "dreaming of Deirdres, Maeves,/and a Nuala I may never know" while realising he should have been "in the library reading the works of Kavanagh, Kennelly,". Platt visits the grave of Kavanagh in After Inniskeen and he explores Irish history in Great Britain (quoting Sean O'Casey's "...the fools, the fools, the fools! - They have left us our Fenian dead...") and in Waiting for the Train at Ballybrophy Junction.  These poems demonstrate Platt's awareness of Irish cultural motivations being rooted in the tragedy of the Great Famine and the painful quest for independence. 

Nuda Veritas is an ample read and it is peppered with many fine poems offering insight into man as son, student, poet, soldier, father, husband and citizen of the United States striving to "come home to the spirit/ which soars within me" (The Eagle Within). One piece that stands out is Musing at the Music Barn which the late Eavan Boland published in Poetry Ireland Review. In this Platt describes his attendance at a concert where a band (I'm assuming The Beatles) played. The poet vows to write some fan mail to the musicians and he uses John Donne's line, "more than kisses, letters mingle souls" to conclude the work. This is just one example of the erudition and attention to detail Eugene displays throughout the collection. 

Nuda Veritas is a big, bold, beautiful book full of heart. It is weighty with quality and information. The title poem is perhaps the magnum opus if Eve is the self we would, or should become, if Eve is the higher self, the self love we ought to give ourselves, or a spiritual attainment our souls long for in considering 

...the naked truth about myself,

the prototypical Adam inside each of us,

making excuses eternally for shortcomings

we know we can never disown. 

Drawn to the Light Press Poetry Magazine

 

Aurora Deirdre McKernan

My new online magazine of poetry Drawn to the Light Press has just published its first issue. It can be accessed here. Submissions for Issue 2 will open in December. 

Heart of Goodness / Du coeur à l'âme: The Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys in 30 Poems

Carolyne Van Der Meer has worked in corporate communications and public relations for most of her career. She has been a journalist, a university lecturer, an independent scholar and an author. Her journalistic and creative work has been featured in magazines and journals internationally. She has three published books, Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), Journeywoman (Inanna, 2017) and Heart of Goodness: The Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys in 30 Poems | Du coeur à l’âme : La vie de Marguerite Bourgeoys en 30 poèmes (Guernica Editions, 2020). She is from Canada. 

Coming to Van Der Meer's subject (Marguerite Bourgeoys) a complete novice (pardon the pun) it was a pleasant surprise to find the collection unputdownable. Each poem leads seamlessly to the next and a rich tapestry of the French nun's life is woven. The intricacies of Bourgeoys' steadfast faith, the challenges she faced as a missionary and the moments of doubt she experienced are all explored. The book is a wonderful channel to what life was like in the mid seventeenth century. 

One is never disinterested or burdened in reading Heart of Goodness. While the poems explore the thinking of a woman who lived over four hundred years ago I found much to relate to in her struggles, which must be testament to the talent of Van Der Meer in bringing Bourgeoys' spirit to life. Not since learning of the trials of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz have I been so captivated by the whys and wherefores of such a calling to serve.

Rejected by several orders but determined to honour Our Lady, Bourgeoys left France and founded the Congregation of Notre Dame of Montreal in the Colony of New France, now Quebec. She reached Fort Ville-Marie (Montreal) in 1653 where she educated young girls and the poor while developing the convent. She is the first female saint of Canada, having been canonized in 1982 by the Catholic Church. 

Those Carmelites / didn't want me / I won't give up / my gift to God / my only mission / If it's not in the cloister / it'll be somewhere else / He'll take me / even if they won't (Poem #4)

Available from Guernica Editions Heart of Goodness is for anyone seeking a spiritual top up, or a quiet, yet enthralling read away from the headline busy world. It is of course for those interested in missionary life, the New World and History. The thirty poems appear in both English and French which is a great boon to students of language. Congratulation to Carolyne on a finely crafted and ecumenically valuable work. 

The Giant's Footsteps at the Rock of Dunamaise, by Arthur Broomfield

 

Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet and Beckett scholar from County Laois. Among his publications are The Poetry Reading at Semple Stadium (Lapwing 2011), Mice at the Threshing (Lapwing 2015), Cold Coffee at Emo Court  (Revival Press 2016) and his critical study on the works of Samuel Beckett The Empty Too: Language and Philosophy in the Works of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014). His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in Ireland, the UK, the USA, and India. He holds a PhD degree in English literature from Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.

Broomfield leads me down a rabbit hole of surrealism in The Giant's Footsteps... (Revival Press 2019) and therefore Alice's first task is to get a grasp of what surrealism is. And thank you Arthur for reminding me of Breton's Always for the First Time.

Surrealism was an artistic, intellectual, and literary movement led by poet André Breton from 1924 through World War II. The Surrealists sought to overthrow the oppressive rules of modern society by demolishing its backbone of rational thought. To do so, they attempted to tap into the “superior reality” of the subconscious mind. “Completely against the tide,” said Breton, “in a violent reaction against the impoverishment and sterility of thought processes that resulted from centuries of rationalism, we turned toward the marvellous and advocated it unconditionally. (MOMA Learning) 

Broomfield dedicates the book to the memory of André Breton who pictured the roses as “blue” and the wood as “glass” as he flitted between “living and ceasing to live” in the epigraph. The opening poem Bloom 2016 visits a prize-winning exhibition (Bridging the Gap) at the annual gardening festival in Dublin, and the poet might be walking this bridge himself between reality and fantasy, “The arch carries me from the escapable/to a notion of reality that mystifies the senses/I at first avert;”. 

The Bee Woman Works At Her Hive describes a scene in a painting by Mansfield in detail with language both rich and energetic. The Bee Woman maintains the hive as caretaker “During lulls in the natural order,/when the dead have been buried/and the laws of seed time and harvest/are reinstated,”. This omnipotent presence is much like the writer himself, in charge of his eclectic, wordy world. “I am here in the hum and whirr/of these zips and zooms,”. October Evening Clonreher is another beautiful piece, evoking the spirit of Kavanagh from A Christmas Childhood. Broomfield recalls “the silent moon”, the radio, “the beet train” and “a backdrop of glittered stars”. In Costa Coffee Shop is a light hearted re-enactment of an ordinary day's eavesdropping I imagine. 

I was taken with In The Beginning Was The Word, a poem written after Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ. I have written a poem about this painting myself. Here Christ appears as an unwanted actor, a has been who has “lost the dressing room”. This delight in subversion and shock can be found throughout the collection, not least in Eamonn De Valera Had A Twenty-Four-Inch Cock and The Archbishop. The poet perhaps expresses his disdain for those two pillars of the formation of the Republic, Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church.

Broomfield sees himself as an outsider in He Ponders His Own Reality. "It wasn't an easy decision/to fit in with the crowd," he says comparing the pressure to conform to an ant "navigating a block of margarine up the Rock of Dunamaise." This rock is an outcrop in Laois hosting the ruins of a castle built in the 12th c. Yet one is left with the awareness that the poet is no ant but the giant of the collection's title, saved and elevated by his art. 

The Giant's Footsteps at the Rock of Dunamaise can be purchased from Revival Press, Limerick and from Arthur himself. 

Skylight 47 Issue 13 Summer 2020

I'm delighted to be back in print this week with a poem called Passover included in Skylight 47, edited by Nicki Griffin, Bernie Crawford and Ruth Quinlan. This issue features artwork by Pauline Flynn and is a great read with poems by many fine poets. 

There will be a Zoom launch of the issue tonight, Thursday 23rd July, at 6.30. The details of which you can find here. The launch will be performed by Jane Robinson with MC Susan Millar DuMars and is in association with Over The Edge Literary Events.

Boyne Berries Updates

Boyne Berries is currently closed to submissions. The magazine will now be published annually. The submission period for Boyne Berries 29 will open in November. 

Boyne Berries 28 was a special issue to mark Poetry Day, Ireland and it was also made due to the exceptional circumstance of the lockdown. Boyne Berries 28 will be included in UCD library's Special Collections as part of their Poetry in Lockdown collection.  This will be part of the Irish Poetry Reading archive in UCD Special Collections.

Thanks to all who participated in Trim Poetry Festival online. We hope to be back next year in the flesh for Trim Poetry Festival 2021. 

The Woman with an Owl Tattoo, by Anne Walsh Donnelly

From Fly on the Wall Press, The Woman with an Owl Tattoo was published in 2019. A single mother of two teenagers, Anne Walsh Donnelly lives in the West of Ireland. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Hennessy Literary Award for her poetry. She won the Spring 2018 Blue Nib poetry chapbook competition and was joint runner up in the Poems for Patience competition 2019. She was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series 2019 and read at the International Festival of Literature Dublin in May 2019. She has also been shortlisted for the Fish International Prize and the RTE Radio One Francis MacManus Short Story Competition. Her short story collection, The Demise of the Undertaker's Wife, was also published in 2019. 

This chapbook deals mainly with the process of coming out as a middle-aged woman. There are poems on 'Coming Out to to My Therapist', 'Coming Out to Myself', 'Coming Out to My Son', 'Coming Out to My Daughter', 'Coming Out to My My Mother' and 'Coming Out to My Father'. As a gay woman, I found 'Coming Out to Myself' very amusing. It's refreshing how open and honest the poet is about these experiences. Indeed there is much to relate to in the book on the experience of growing up as a lesbian, the idea of throwing 'Barbie into the slurry tank', friends telling your adolescent self that a boy is 'a ride', that pressure to conform described in 'It's Not Easy Being a Woman'. 

While this coming out is explored with gusto and a throwing of caution to the wind, the act of becoming a writer too is somewhat an act of rebellion. The work opens on 'Guide to Becoming a Writer', where Walsh Donnelly has lived a full, hectic life up to this moment of becoming the writer. It is at this juncture that the poet can say in 'Cúchulainn', 'In mid-life I grew into my childhood hero'.  

There are many sensual poems describing the pleasures of love-making, the satisfaction of the connection one feels in the acceptance and exploration of their sexuality. Walsh Donnelly says in 'I Have Lived', 'In her body/Grasped her bleached marram grass/Surfed her peaks and troughs'. 'Her Hug' too is full of desire and 'Being in Love at Fifty' speaks of its own magical significance. 'No More Fairy Tales' was published in Boyne Berries and what I loved about that was that the girl saves the girl, the subversion of the traditional, 'In my story I save the princess'. Of course the real truth of any fairy tale or quest is that you must save yourself, which the poet addresses in 'Self-love'. 

The collection is a wonderful romp through a woman's struggle to become authentic. The poems are sad, shocking, raw, courageous, comical, lusty and tender. They are always cleverly written and on point. Rural Ireland and the poet's love for her family are celebrated. Anne Walsh Donnelly has a great deal of natural talent and I look forward to her next work. In this Pride month it is a timely honour to review and recommend The Woman with an Owl Tattoo to those reading. 

Raven Mothers, by Breda Wall Ryan

Raven Mothers, published by Doire Press (2018) is Breda Wall Ryan's second poetry collection. Her debut, In a Hare's Eye (2015), was awarded the Shine/Strong Poetry Award. A Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee, she won the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, 2015 for Self Portrait in the Convex Bulge of a Hare’s Eye, which is the title poem of her first collection. In 2013, she won the iYeats Poetry Contest, Poets Meet Painters, Dromineer Poetry Competition and Over the Edge New Writer of the Year. She was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions Series 2014 and was awarded second place in the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Breda grew up on a farm in Co. Waterford and now lives in Co. Wicklow. 

The cover art of Raven Mothers (Weight of Wings by Jeanie Tomanek) and the opening poem Oneironaut, a sequence of three, set the tone for this collection. An oneironaut is one who travels through dreams, a lucid dreamer, a daydreamer. The cover image mirrors an image from Wall Ryan's Tender Loving Care in which is written 'a flock of opal wings swooping over a grave./Some say a devil exists; some say angels'. The title poem Raven Mother explains what such a parent is. She is a woman of many pieces: daughter, orphan, partner, mother, empty-nester, and widow. Yet there are other mothers, mother courage or the monster, the Raven Mother, 'one who abandons her brood' and the mother whose child dies, perhaps prematurely, 'But the raven whose chick dies first,/dies twice'. 

Wall Ryan's imagination can be an unsettling place. Strange creatures such as a bat in Intruder and the child of Merbaby are painted lovingly and of course could be metaphors for loss and abandonment. The Gate Clangs is full of loss, 'Your pillow is dented/where no head will nestle again'. Because Roses, where the scent of late November roses is appreciated, is juxtaposed against the violence of the rose which is 'shredded' in Debut.

One feels that the poem Medea Syndrome is one key to the work. It describes the not unfamiliar, though rare, scene of the death of children by the hand of the mother. Wall Ryan references Medea from Greek mythology and once again shows compassion for the other side of the tale, the reasoning of the woman. I find this admirable. (Those Greeks knew the human condition, didn't they?) I really enjoyed Firestealers in that it turns patriarchy on its head and reminds us of what we all know of course, that women are the stronger sex, 'their fire/died in the kitchen range/without a woman to tend it'. 

The book is divided into two section, Raven Mothers and Epiphanies. The opening poem of Epiphanies, Epiphany at Jamaica Plain is striking in being so relative to the current climate of civil unrest in the US and beyond. Wall Ryan describes feeling uneasy when she is an area of Boston where there have been no white people for a time on a journey. Later she realises 'this fear/is race-coloured. I have sleepwalked/my whole life, thinking myself untainted'. Wryly the poet tackles issues such as mental health in Punchline, excess and addiction in On Doing Fourteen Lines (the poem is fourteen lines long), consumerism in All Day Sunday and war in Go Ask Your Own. There is devastation in the lines 

Go ask your ancestors if breaking glass

was the music that drove them to disperse

across a hostile earth.

Playing God in the Orchard frames the saving of a pear tree that is rotting but thankfully 'a tuft of tender leaves erupts' and 'that pale green generates hope'. Prayer is a depiction of an idyllic rural scene, a praising of an Indian Summer. Irish Hare: An Assay is a gorgeous piece of writing and worth buying the collection alone for. It is against death the poet is battling in Counterhex: Against Death and the Raven, echoing the question asked in The Woman who Toasted the Owl, 'Who is the raptor?' Starveling shows a father's compassion for a starving fox in winter. I read this poem with bated breath, so thankful for kindness instead of cruelty. 

I found the line 'She wished on the Codex to be aerodynamic' wonderful in Hope is the Deadliest Sin where a bird-woman is captured. The recurring imagery of the bird in the collection cannot be ignored. While different birds are symbolic of different things the chief association I have with the bird is freedom. Of course a bird can be caged and freedom taken away.

Let Death Not Come is a moving and courageous poem. The poet asks for death to come 'at dusk when the eaves sing'. I cannot help thinking of those who have lost their lives to COVID-19 when Wall Ryan writes 'Let death not come in a white room under harsh lights'. I much prefer her heralding of death than Thomas' Do No Go Gentle Into That Good Night.

There is so much to admire in Raven Mothers that I am sure that I have only glimpsed the surface of its depth. Breda Wall Ryan writes with a fearlessness and an economy of language that must only come to those who are truly skilled. Even in the last poems the tempo is accelerated and you might find yourself breathless on reading Questions that Keep me Awake and Now that the White Bear is Gone, both chilling contemplations of the future. 

Determined to continue on her meaning-making of the dream voyage she embarked on as an oneironaut Wall Ryan says in the final poem, Poetry is, 'A hand-drawn, pictorial map of the dreamscape./We walk always into the dark, whistling'. I am thankful for having travelled at least some part of this journey now too. 

Trim Poetry Festival Online 2020, 5th-7th June

This weekend Trim Poetry Festival will be held online as a Facebook event, at Trim Poetry Festival blog, via Twitter @BoyneBerries and on Zoom. This event is the culmination of some great work by members of Boyne Writers Group, poet in residence Anne Tannam, and contibutors to Boyne Berries. 

Meath Writers' Circle, The Bull's Arse Navan Writing Group and Cavan/Meath LitLab will also participate. Those shortlisted in Trim Poetry Competition 2020 will read their poems. Anne Tannam will present a workshop and writing clinic. Rachel Coventry will MC a Zoom Open Mic event. There will be a video presentation of the cover designs of Boyne Berries from 2007 to 2020. Michael Farry will launch his poetry collection Troubles (Revival Press). Join us if you can!

The Complete Moon

Ahead of the upcoming strawberry full moon I've made The Complete Moon into a video poem. It has just been published in the June issue of Snakeskin Poetry Webzine along with A Lotus Position. Thanks to editor George Simmers.

All the Barbaric Glass, by David Butler

All the Barbaric Glass by David Butler (Doire Press) was published in 2017. David is a novelist, poet and playwright. His novel City of Dis (New Island) was shortlisted for the 2015 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. His first collection, Via Crucis, was published by Doghouse Books in 2011. David Butler's writing has won several prestigious awards. Most recently he was shortlisted in Trim Poetry Competition 2020 and he won The Maria Edgeworth Poetry Prize 2020. He lives in Bray with his wife and fellow author, Tanya Farrelly. 

The collection could be divided into three sections, partitioned by 'Ten Miniatures', ten poems in which the eye or sight feature strongly. 'Only the lover and the artist/have such Medusa eyes' Butler says in Of Love and Language while in Harbour Miniature as the sun sets 'Everything wet or metal has been fired/and winks red-eyed at the dark'. Psyche states that 'We don't see what colours our lives have' in that we may not always see (see again) or recognise our souls, my interpretation at least. Death, or the trying to come to terms with the weight of living in its shadow or light features strongly in this book.

Rilke's quote '...man den Tod in sich hatte wie die Frucht den Kern' (you had your death inside you as a fruit has its core) is added beneath the title of the poem Family Album in the last section of the collection. On looking at a photograph of his mother and sister the poet wonders about the shadowy 'ghost-eye' of death. Death Watch describes the alienation and loneliness of dying, 'Mornings, solitude rises with him...Friends shy away'. In Restless, the final poem, Butler is not sure if he can see a body out on the sea or not, 'It's not, I say again, less sure...with sea and wind and world enormous about us'. This piece reminded me of Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowing in the way that poems sometimes answer each other. 

Butler visits his parents in the first section of All the Barbaric Glass. In These are the Dead Days he finds 'your father a child again', belonging now to Alzheimer's, a 'Man of sand'. In Watcher  he describes his mother 'ghosted in the pane' watching birds feed in the winter, 'the coal-tits, a robin/round as a bauble'. Throughout the book there are references to Greek myth. In 'Father', for example the failing mind is described as a maze, the Aegean appears in Exodus and in Minatory the Minotaur is conjured. Icarus appears in Icarus, a clever re-imaging of the ancient tale. 

The Dogfish is my favourite poem in the volume. It looks unflinchingly at a fish washed up on the beach (this fish too becomes eyeless) and imagines the innocence of a child hearing for the first time 'the song of the sand;/the whisper in the hourglass'. I was reminded here of W.B. Yeat's To A Child Dancing in the Wind which is my favourite Yeat's poem. I also love Oghma's Gift where Butler imagines how the Ogham alphabet came into being. 

Butler is at once a sailor on an ancient and a modern sea. His odyssey is epic in the sense that 'This is how it is to live' as he writes in And then the sun broke through. I like to think the voyage is worth 'sudden ochre out of a sullen ocean'. It is what the explorers and mariners hoped for, the 'hunger' that 'impelled them/to cast fortune to the winds' described in Cartographers. Yet the poet has no interest in unseeing reality, the 'spores' left behind, perhaps this is why the eye features so strongly in the collection. He does though realise in the first poem Breaking, from which the title of the collection is taken that 'There are times you need/to step outside the colloquy;/to mute the looping newsfeed'. Hell yeah, I say to that!

The poet's ability to weave the minutiae of concepts with precise words into verse is formidable as demonstrated in Mellifont Abbey where a hive of bees become a monastic order, and the poet's mind again questions faith. Butler is a powerful commander of language. In Wordplay he says 'Sometimes, stark as a wood-cut, a word/stamps the world...and a poem hits its mark'. It is certainly true that Butler is no average archer. All the Barbaric Glass is an ambitious, admirable, carefully cut work which has given me a lot to think about.

Dinner in the Fields, by Attracta Fahy

  

Dinner in the Fields (Fly On The Wall Press, UK) is a recent chapbook publication from Attracta Fahy. Attracta is a Galway based poet with a background in Nursing and Social Care. She currently works as a Psychotherapist and she is a mother of three. In 2017 she completed a MA in Writing at NUIG. Her poetry has been widely published and she has been shortlisted for the Over The Edge New Writer of The Year competition 2018, and the Allingham Poetry Prize 2019. 

The poem 'Dinner in the Fields' appreciates making hay while the sun shines in that it frames a memory of being brought dinner and tea in the fields while tending a meadow, 'Finally, the sunset took us home,/before another long day,/bodies stretched in the light,/making hay.' I have comparable memories of packing dinner in the boot of my mother's car and heading off to where the silage was being cut, or to where the hay or straw was being collected (1980s style). Similarly, 'Picking Potatoes' returns to the poet's rural upbringing. This poem was published in Boyne Berries and it explores a simple way of life, the gravity again of the fields where 'our young backs arched, aching,/from spreading slits'. Fahy believes in other fields or realms outside the physical world. 'Longing connects us to fields/beyond our world' and perhaps this is the battle between staying and going, the sweet tension of youth.

Tension arises in 'Etchings (IHS)' where it is described sagely and fascinatingly as something that 'cannot hear,/it cannot bear even its own silence'. This piece describes the graveyard which 'cradled' the poet's house. It is a place of solace where headstones are 'Tall slabs like brothers'. What holds the child's interest are the ancient, faded etchings of words on the stones which she traces. In 'Vigil' such tracings are described as 'time's watermark'. Fahy is interested in uncovering the past and in naming it, 'Speaking in silence, walls tell our history'. 'The Tuam Mother and Baby Home' seeks to understand a dark period of such history which was brought to light by Catherine Corless. It is a beautiful, meticulous work. 

While 'The Priest Said' is almost unsayable, 'Fall on Me' is a gorgeous poem about a son leaving home which has an exquisite ending. 'Nesting' too has a lovely ending where there is a play on the word 'hearth'. 'Red' is an education on the colour. I never knew so many shades of it, crafted into lovely description here, 'Not jasper, fire opal or sard'. In 'Each Other's Opposite' I love how the poet pronounces a bird feeder a peaceful Jerusalem. 

If you are looking for a book on themes of nature, rural Ireland, societal change, motherhood and ageing then Dinner in the Fields is for you. This is a lovely first offering from the poet. The poems have a wisdom and compassion that ruffle on a gentle, yet deep level. I would say that you could call them a spirit level. Seer-like, Fahy always has one eye in another realm, the place of poetry, the essence of life.  In 'Sensual Nature' she asks

'What if Eros

was also a tender leaf

falling in autumn,

or a marigold,

striking light,

decomposing in soil?'

Live Encounters Poetry and Writing June 2020

Thanks to poet Jack Grady for recommending me to Live Encounter's editor Mark Ulyseas for this issue. I have 5 poems included. This is a stellar gathering of poets and well worth reading from start to finish. 

Tides Shifting Across My Sitting Room Floor, by Anne Tannam

From Salmon Poetry Tides Shifting Across My Sitting Room Floor is Anne Tannam's second poetry collection (her third is imminent from Salmon too). A spoken word artist, Anne's work has widely featured in poetry journals in Ireland and abroad. She is an experienced and accredited creative writing coach and offers support to writers through her business Anne Tannam Creative Coaching. She is the poet in residence at this year's online Trim Poetry Festival.

Tides Shifting Across My Sitting Room Floor is a brilliant title for a collection of poetry, it immediately lures the reader into wanting to know more and it gives a sense of change in time and space. There is the notion that this will be no stagnant collection, you better buckle up and enjoy the ride. I did. I read the book from start to finish this morning in an hour and it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I felt the sea on my face reflecting an array of emotions. 

The title of the collection can be found in the closing lines of the first poem 'Airborne' in which the poet smells the sea on the wind, full of the fates. In her second poem Tannam considers what it means to be 'At Sea', to be middle-aged, to wonder what the meaning of life is, 'acknowledging the sadness/of continents and planets unexplored', and other women 'who speak of emptiness and longing'. Of course life is no scripted, existing-in-itself movie scene, and the grass is always greener.

In 'Thanksgiving' which I think I published in Boyne Berries, if not it's definitely a favourite piece, the poet bounces back in typical style to praise all the wonderful things in life, 'the small things that blue our horizon'. If you think poetry doesn't matter then read this poem if you are feeling down. It is a buoy. Tannam is again sailing, giving thanks 'for our ocean crossing'. And just what seas has she crossed?

I would recommend this collection to anyone who is grief stricken and especially to someone who has recently lost a parent. The poet's mother and father are lovingly recalled. In 'Mobile Library' she recalls how her father would 'perch his large frame/at the end of my bed/pull out books/hidden in coat pockets' offering a route to a wider world of imagination comparable to flying on a magic carpet. I do love Tannam's poems about her mother, how their relationship changed over time as the child became the adult. I had to chuckle when reading 'When We Go Shopping' as I can relate very much to the scenario of shopping with my own mother. 'Testament' is an ambitious and carefully executed poem chronicling the poet's love for and understanding of, her mother, 'sometimes the word mammy simply translates as love', she states.

Tides Shifting Across My Sitting Room Floor also takes on the perspective of now being a mother to her own children. Wisely she realises that 'Your Children Are Not Your Children', they grow up and begin their own lives. In 'Listen Here Australia!' Tannam trys to make a deal with the continent to return her child in a year, it's the stuff of fairytale. 'Final Addition'  describes the birth of a son, 'and there he is/breathing us in'.

As the title suggested this was going to be a bit of a roller coaster, and I am more refreshed for the spin in knowledge of the vitality of life when we become fully aware of it, 'of open, painful, joyful living'. This is poetry at its best, reflective, examining, lyrical, primitive and joyous. Tannam leaves us with a challenge in 'Rise'.

'Dare we let go/of all the things/we lost in the fire?'

Indeed, do we dare?

Growing Up in Colour, by Maurice Devitt

Maurice Devitt’s debut collection Growing Up in Colour was published by Doire Press in 2018. Maurice is the curator of The Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site. He was selected for Poetry Ireland Introduction Series 2016 and won the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition. He is a member of Hiberian Writers. 

The titular poem explores the uniformity of school days 'lost in a sea of slate' made better by a dash of lipstick and the thrill of a first tattoo. The sacredness of family arises in 'A Football Dynasty' when a young boy discusses soccer with an older relative. Memories of early years arise in 'Truth or Dare' and 'A Caravan in Kilkee'. In both poems Devitt surprises with delicate imagery, 'a scarf of rain' spoils the dangerous game and the caravan is a 'metal cow'. These poems offer an almost surreal, or dreamlike atmosphere so it is no surprise to see that 'Sixteenth of September' is written after Rene Magritte. It is a poem about a run where 'The oak tree marks the mid-point'. Devitt dwells on Magritte's painting and its 'nascent moon'. 

'Sinister' is a wonderful poem about wanting to be left-handed and the wormhole of lying and being caught out as a child by their parent. The poet becomes a magician travelling down a rope ladder into the 'O' he has learned to form as citeog. This poem is a great lead into Devitt's well known 'The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work' where a lion tamer absurdly heads off to work in the office. 

Devitt is conscious of difficulties in the world about him, as reflected in 'Homeless', problematic global warming arises in 'Inuit' and the painful loss that can be emigration is explored in 'Letters from Australia'. The human condition plays on the poet's mind, the secrecies of our inner lives, in 'Trajectory' for example when a man retires and wonders what to do with his time, and indeed 'The Human Condition' is a poem that seeks 'to paint the past'.

This is a book that merits reading and rereading and each poem is well crafted, painting-like in the sense that something new can be found or seen on each looking. 'Poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen', a quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, could certainly be applied here. This is an intellectual and mature collection full of appreciation for culture and with a deep respect and love for family and the past. 

Spoken Label Podcast

AndyN Spoken Label

I recorded a podcast with Manchester based poet AndyN, for his series Spoken Label. I had met Andy about a decade ago through a mutual friend. Andy was visiting Dublin at the time. In the podcast I speak a little about my poetry and read four poems. You can listen here.

Villanelle

I'm a big fan of Killing Eve at the moment. One of the characters is called Villanelle and she's an assassin. I thought it would be cool to write a villanelle (poem) about Villanelle (the character). I'm also drawing her a bit (as above), just for fun.

“Keep your friends close…”

-          after Killing Eve

She said the paintings were very boring

whilst casing the ‘dam with “pal” Konstantin.

Keep your friends close and enemies closer.

The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers she

sent to Eve as a postcard valentine.

The other paintings had been very boring.

In Paris she broached a tentative “we”

and was stabbed, her bed the scene of the crime.

Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.

Never one to welcome orders, when he

told her to sit still, Peel ran out of line.

To her, such dead things were very boring.

Before the shooting in Rome they were free

to be together. She said, “You are mine!”

Keep your friends close and enemies closer.

Did she love or despise Eve Polastri?

Would this artful obsession prove sublime?

She found caricatures very boring,

knew to keep friends close, enemies closer.

Orla Fay

* the ‘dam refers to Amsterdam