Lines for a Lockdown: ‘I write in order to comprehend not to express myself’

The Lamp

I write in order to comprehend not to express myself
I don’t grasp anything I’m not ashamed to admit it
sharing this not knowing with a maple leaf
So I turn with questions to words wiser than myself
to things that will endure long after us
I wait to gain wisdom from chance
I expect sense from silence
Perhaps something will suddenly happen
and pulse with hidden truth
like the spirit of the flame in the oil lamp
under which we bowed our heads
when we were very young
and grandmas crossed the bread with a knife
and we believed in everything
So now I yearn for nothing so much
as for that faith.

                          by Anna Kamieńska

from Astonishments, Selected Poems of Anna Kamieńska, edited and translated by Grażyna Drabik and David Carson, Paraclete Press, 2007.

Poetry Day Ireland: Peter Sirr interviewed by Ailbhe Darcy

Interview

Lines for a Lockdown: ‘The seconds fall and scatter into thousands/Of tiny saints’

Cranborne Woods (17 May, 1994)
(for my mother)

We stopped the car, ducked below the fence
Felt time unravelling in a revelation
The seconds fall and scatter into thousands

Of tiny saints, a reborn multitude
Flowing past the trees, through pools of sun,
Each earthly form a spirit flame, pure blue.

They watched us drift among them, large as gods,
As if we’d come as part of their parousia
To stay with them forever in these woods.

As time grew darker we slipped away like ghosts
And slowly drove...towards your death next May
When once again I saw the risen host

Could watch you walking weightlessly among
The welcomers, the gently swaying throng.

                                                 by James Harpur


from Oracle Bones (Anvil Press, 2001)

James can be heard reading this poem here

Lines for a Lockdown: in memory of Eavan Boland

Energies

This is my time:
the twilight closing in,
a hissing on the ring,
stove noises, kettle steam

and children’s kisses.

But the energy of flowers!
Their faces are so white –
my garden daisies –
they are so tight-fisted,
such economies of light.

In the dusk they have made hay:
in a banked radiance,
in an acreage of brightness
they are misering the day
while mine delays away

in chores left to do:
the soup, the bath, the fire
then bed-time,
up the stairs –
and there, there

the buttery curls,
the light,
the bran-fur of the teddy bear,
the fist like a night-time daisy,
damp and tight.

by Eavan Boland

from New Collected Poems, Carcanet, 2005.

Lines for a Lockdown: 'When I was still a horse in a meadow'

Self-portrait as a horse

When I was still a horse in a meadow

I must have lived in his body
have seen in his eyes what he saw

that life would never begin nor
would ever end, nor be repeated

I must have left his body and my memories
must have remained behind in him

you are standing by the fence round a meadow
on the other side a horse is standing

look it in the eyes – it will look in yours

by Rutger Kopland

translated by James Brockway

from: Memories of the Unknown, Rutger Kopland, translated by James Brockway, foreword by J.M. Coetzee. The Harvill Press, London, 2001.

Lines for a Lockdown: ‘Her face was white paper on which I scattered my alphabet’

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Lines for a Lockdown: 'Fís dheireanach Eoghain Rua Uí Shúilleabhéain/The last vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin'

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Lines for a Lockdown: 'Carrying the songs'

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Lines for a Lockdown: ‘Can dentists be trusted?’

Can Dentists Be Trusted? 
(for Tatiana and Peter)

There are the ones you only visit once,
like the fellow in Phibsboro, Dublin
who roared ‘Jesus Fucking Christ’
his leg up on the dentist’s chair
as he pulled out
my embarrassed tooth.

Or the one who told me to lie
about being pregnant
so I could have crowns
that I never said
I wanted
free on the NHS.

The man in Kensington
who told me he loved
the Irish, really
then died five years later
leaving me the legacy
of an HIV test.

Others, you have to stay with.
But if they are private
they may want all your teeth
in the end.
You could find yourself
opening wide
while laid out on the chair
like a corpse
with a coin in its mouth
travelling
towards the underworld.
By Martina Evans

from Can Dentists Be Trusted?, Anvil Press, 2004. Reproduced here by permission of Carcanet Press.

Lines for a Lockdown:’Polyphony was yesterday's song’

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Lines for a Lockdown: ‘Now that’s what I call a table!’

Table

A man filled with the gladness of living
Put his keys on the table,
Put flowers in a copper bowl there.
He put his eggs and milk on the table.
He put there the light that came in through the window,
Sounds of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel.
The softness of bread and weather he put there.
On the table the man put
Things that happened in his mind.
What he wanted to do in life,
He put that there.
Those he loved, those he didn't love,
The man put them on the table too.
Three times three make nine:
The man put nine on the table.
He was next to the window next to the sky;
He reached out and placed on the table endlessness.
So many days he had wanted to drink a beer!
He put on the table the pouring of that beer.
He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness;
His hunger and his fullness he placed there.
Now that’s what I call a table!
It didn’t complain at all about the load.
It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm.
The man kept piling things on.

by Edip Cansever

Translated from the Turkish by Richard Tillinghast

from The Stonecutter’s Hand: Poems by Richard Tillinghast, David R. Godine, 1995.

Lines for a Lockdown: ‘your vast/library of the unsaid’

From Blackrock

Here’s to you, ghost father, alive or dead, 

your surname’s reserved seat, your vast 

library of the unsaid;

to your one image, slip of the past

in blurred grey and white;

a soldier, sitting with my mother, 

your smile sleepy, hers bright

as the ghostlight blowing your cover;

to the curse or gift you bestow:

abstraction, my soft spot for absences; 

cloudwatcher, seawatcher, open to the slow 

shift of light, the waves’ always present tenses;

to the given, darkening, Dublin Bay almost black 

except, nearby, where a wave splits a rock.

by Mark Granier

from Ghostlight: New and Selected Poems, Salmon Poetry, 2017.

Lines for a Lockdown: 'time for past present and future'

Ecclesiastes

there is a time for opening the eye and closing the bed
time for donning a shirt and shedding sleep
time for drowsy soap and half-awaked skin
time for the hair-brush and for sparks in the hair
time for trouser legs time for shoe-laces for buttons
for laddered stockings for the slipper’s blindness
time for the fork and for the knife times for sausages and boiled eggs
time for the tram time for the conductress time for the policeman
time for good morning and time for goodbye
time for carrots peas and parsley
for tomato soup and shepherd’s pie
time for trussing chicken and releasing forbidden speeds of thought
time for a cinema ticket or a ticket to nowhere
to a river perhaps perhaps perhaps to a cloud
there is finally a time of closed eyelids and the open bed
time for the past present and future
praesans historicum and pluaquamperfectum
time perfect and imperfect
time from wall to wall

by Tymoteusz Karpowicz


translated by Adam Czerniawski, from The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, Ecco, 2010.

Lines for a Lockdown: ‘Spring in the West’ #lockdownpoetry

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By Máirtín Ó Direáin
Translated by Peter Sirr, from Leabhar na hAthghabhála/Poems of Repossession, edited by Louis de Paor, Bloodaxe, 2016

Lines for a Lockdown: ‘How are your cousins, the centaur and the unicorn?’

from Jerusalem the Golden

17

Rails in the subway,
what did you know of happiness,
when you were ore in the earth;
now the electric lights shine upon you.

39

What are you doing in our street among the automobiles, horse?
How are your cousins, the centaur and the unicorn?

40

Rooted among roofs, their smoke among the clouds,
factory chimneys – our cedars of Lebanon.

59

All day the pavement has been black
with rain, but in our warm brightly-lit
room, Praise God,
I kept saying to myself,
and saying not a word,
Amen, you answered.

by Charles Reznikoff,

from The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918-1975, edited by Seamus Cooney, Black Sparrow Book, 2005.

Lines for a Lockdown: 'the life that is born every day/the death that is born every life'

Madrugada al raso

Los labios y las manos del viento

el corazón del agua

                                      un eucalipto

el campamento de las nubes

la vida que nace cada día

la muerte que nace cada vida

Froto mis párpados:

el cielo anda en la tierra

Daybreak

Hands and lips of wind

heart of water

                         eucalyptus

campground of the clouds

the life that is born every day

the death that is born every life

I rub my eyes:

the sky walks the land

                                      by Octavio Paz

translated by Eliot Weinberger

from The Collected Poems 1957-1987, New Directions, 1991.

Lines for a Lockdown: 'Go lightly, soul ...' #lockdownpoetry

Preghiera

a mia madre, Anna Picchi
Anima mia
va’ a Livorno, ti prego.
E con la tua candela
timida, di nottetempo
fa’ un giro; e, se ne hai il tempo,
perlustra e scruta, e scrivi
se per caso Anna Picchi
è ancora viva tra i vivi.

Proprio quest’oggi torno,
deluso, da Livorno.
Ma tu, tanto più netta
di me, la camicetta
ricorderai, e il rubino
di sangue, sul serpentino
d’oro che lei portava
sul petto, dove si appannava.

Anima mia, sii brava
e va in cerca di lei.
tu sai cosa darei
se la incontrassi per strada.

Prayer

to my mother, Anna Picchi
Go lightly, soul, go
to Livorno
with flickering
candle, at night time
and look around
and if you have time
search high and low,
let me know
if by any chance
Anna Picchi
is among the living still.

Only today,
disappointed
I returned from Livorno
but you, so
much sharper than me,
you’ll remember
the blouse she’d wear
with the ruby set
in the little gold snake
and how it seemed to blur
as you looked at it.

Be clever, my soul,
and go
in search of her.
You know what I’d give
to meet her on the street.

By Giorgio Caproni

Translated by Peter Sirr, from Tutte le poesie, Garzanti, 2016.

Lines in memory: ‘Free in the oriental streets of talk’

In Memory Of My Mother

I do not think of you lying in the wet clay
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see
You walking down a lane among the poplars
On your way to the station, or happily

Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday -
You meet me and you say:
'Don't forget to see about the cattle - '
Among your earthiest words the angels stray.

And I think of you walking along a headland
Of green oats in June,
So full of repose, so rich with life -
And I see us meeting at the end of a town

On a fair day by accident, after
The bargains are all made and we can walk
Together through the shops and stalls and markets
Free in the oriental streets of thought.

O you are not lying in the wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you smile up at us - eternally.

by Patrick Kavanagh
reproduced here with permission of the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Trust.

Lines for a Lockdown: ‘think of the word for “thunder” in seven languages’ #lockdownpoetry

Three Poems by Judas Roquín

Insomnia

In that wordless limbo before sleep falls,
when ancient fears come back
to eat away the smooth facade of silence,
think of the word for ‘thunder’ in seven languages,
then seven more,
and when you arrive at ukkonen in Finnish,
the silence which will consume you
will be, I promise you,
deeper than sleep, deeper than any dark.

Intersection

At the crossroads, I direct the road traffic
which comes at me from seventeen directions.
There are breakdowns, there are incidents, there are
accidents, the terrible crash, silence.

Only Seven To Remain Standing
    (sign on a bus)

Boarding the bus, I find myself hoping
that wherever  it goes, to Helsingfors or home,
across black fields, bare estuaries,
across the frozen wastes of the Sahara,
or into space, like a greenhouse on fire,
that I will be among
the seven to remain standing.

Translated by Alastair Reid

from The Collected Poems, edited by Tom Pow, Galileo Publishers, 2018.

Lines for a Lockdown: 'Blessed are those who carry'

Those Who Carry

Those who carry grand pianos

to the tenth floor wardrobes and coffins

the old man with a bundle of wood hobbling toward the horizon

the lady with a hump of nettles

the madwoman pushing her baby carriage

full of empty vodka bottles

they will all be raised up

like a seagull’s feather like a dry leaf

Blessed are those who carry

for they will be raised

                             by Anna Kamieńska

from Astonishments, Selected Poems of Anna Kamieńska, edited and translated by Grażyna Drabik and David Curzon, Paraclete Press, 2007.

Lines for a Lockdown: 'Everyone has/a wild goose//in the head'

Lines for a Lockdown: 'That they are there!' #lockdownpoetry

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Lines for a Lockdown: 'a bucket in the well ...'

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Lines for a Lockdown: ‘All'alba siamo coraggiosi./At dawn we are full of courage’

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Lines for a Lockdown: 'love grows/in the quiet house ...'

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Home, a film poem by Anita Groener and Enda Wyley

Home

Ciaran Carson, Claude Monet, Artist's Garden at Vétheuil, 1880

With permission by The Gallery Press. You can hear Tom French read this poem here.

The End of the Questionnaire

Dan Pagis

The End of the Questionnaire

Your housing conditions: the number
of the galaxy and star, the number
of the grave. Whether
you are alone or not. Detail
the grasses that grow above
and where they come from
(e.g. stomach, eyes, mouth or elsewhere)

You have the right to appeal

In the box below indicate
how long you have been awake

and why exactly
you seem surprised

Books Upstairs Reading

Books Upstairs Facebook page

John Burnside: The Music of Time

The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century, by John Burnside, Profile Books, 508 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1781255612

A prolific poet, fiction writer and memoirist, John Burnside began this book with a large ambition: to write a personal history of twentieth century poetry. If what emerged is, by his own admission, “digressive and idiosyncratic”, it’s not because the ambition was reduced but because the project evolved into something less academically analytical and more urgent and personal. There are essays on a host of poets in multiple languages but the reflections on poetry are linked to personal narratives, placed in the poet’s own life and often growing out of physical journeys. Underlying it all is an argument for the importance of poetry, nothing less than “the central pillar of any nurturing culture”. In an essay on Spanish poetry he remembers an observation by Stephen Spender which he has carried around for many years:

Poets and poetry have played a considerable part in the Spanish Republic, because to so many people the struggle of the Republicans has seemed a struggle for the conditions without which the writing and reading of poetry are almost impossible in modern society.

For Burnside “the struggle of any society … is a struggle for the conditions in which the writing and reading of poetry are not only possible, but also prized”. That might seem like a utopian ambition but placing such an emphasis on the centrality of poetry allows Burnside to give himself a wider reach than a purely academic reflection would allow. This is no wide-eyed idealism either: Burnside’s belief in and commitment to the possibility of poetry is hard-headed. it’s all about close attention and hard-won craft, but it begins with hope: “Hope is of the essence for all poets. We might even say that to make a poem at all is an act of hope.” It’s a good place to start in what is at its core a defence of poetry, and a refusal to allow it to be consigned to the edges of culture:

I would still make the claim that poetry has a significant role in our communal life …all poetry is political, because it insists on the centrality of the imagination in daily life and on the necessity of rejecting the misuse of language practised by politicians, advertisers and the sorts of people who think that by calling a civilian massacre “collateral damage” they can disguise its criminal nature.

Appropriately for a book that features so much European poetry it begins in Berlin in a summer storm. Part of the reason he’s there is to register John F Kennedy’s 1963 visit and his famous if grammatically skewed declaration that he was, in spirit at least, a Berliner. Many of the poets Burnside most values are American and a byproduct of that interest is a fascination with the relationship between poetry and politics as he thinks of Frost reading at Kennedy’s inauguration or Kennedy himself declaring at the poet’s memorial service that the poet “saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself” and that “When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.”

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Books Upstairs Sunday 1 March

Books Upstairs

  17 D’Olier Street
Sunday, 1 March, 3.00 pm

Christine Dwyer Hickey, Mary O’Donnell

and Enda Wyley

Christine Dwyer Hickey has published eight novels, one collection of short stories and a full-length play. Tatty, New (2004) and Vintage UK (2005), is the 2020 Dublin One City One Book Choice. It was shortlisted for Irish Novel of The Year and was nominated for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Fiction Prize). Her other Dublin works include the Dublin Trilogy, the story of a Dublin family from 1918-1960 (New Island 2006); the short story collection Parkgate Street and other Dublin Stories (New Island 2013) and The Cold Eye of Heaven (Atlantic UK 2011) which won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2012 and was nominated for the IMPAC Award 2013 (now the International Dublin Literary Award). Last Train from Liguria (Atlantic UK 2009) was nominated for the Prix L’Européen de Littérature . Her latest novel is The Narrow Land (Atlantic UK 2019. She is a member of Aosdána.

Enda Wyley has published six collections of poetry with Dedalus Press, most recently The Painter on his Bike ( November 2019 ) and Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems, (2014). She was the inaugural winner of the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, twice a winner in The British National Poetry Competition and was the recipient of a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for her poetry. Her poetry has been widely broadcast, translated and anthologised including in The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, If Ever You Go, One City, One Book. Enda Wyley lives in Dublin. She is a member of Aosdána.

Mary O’Donnell’s seven poetry collections include Unlegendary Heroes and Those April Fevers (Ark Publications). Four novels include Where They Lie (2014) and the best-selling debut novel The Light Makers, reissued last year after by 451 Editions. In 2018 Arlen House also published her third collection of stories, Empire. Her new poetry collection Massacre of the Birds will be published by Salmon next autumn. She is a member of Aosdana, and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from University College Cork.