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Sunday, December 27, 2020

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


Friday, December 18, 2020

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. 

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

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



Friday, December 11, 2020

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. 

Thursday, December 10, 2020

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