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

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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.

Krakow: a play for radio

 

 Krakow

This went out last night on RTE Drama On One. Thanks to Owen Roe, Deirdre Donnelly, & Kathy Rose O'Brien, and to Aidan Mathews for producing.

The Now Slice

Poem of the week: The Now Slice 

A new work by Peter Sirr

 Irish Times, Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 06:00

Breakfast is over, you’ve gone to the hard world.
Ulysses struggles from a speaker, nearly dead.
He flails in the waves, a towering headland
staring him down. Where’s help here?
The floor turns stone, the kitchen Mycenaean.
The dog sprawls on the couch, lost in a dream
of toast and cats. A fruit fly climbs a jar
to dangerous honey. I lift my cup and a star
explodes, a meteor crashes into the moon.
A blue alien looks out along his slice of time.
He’s going to school, maybe. When he comes back
the future will already be over. Only Ulysses
will still be here. He’s found a riverbank now
and friendly leaves. Athena rains down sleep on his eyes.


Peter Sirr has published several collections, including The Rooms, Nonetheless and Bring Everything. Today’s poem is from his new collection, The Gravity Wave (Gallery Press)

The Gravity Wave

The Gravity Wave, the eleventh collection, a Poetry Book Society Autumn Recommendation, has just been published. The launch is next Thursday in Poetry Ireland, along with new books by Gerald Dawe, Medb mcGuckian and a John Montague Selected Poems.

Launch

Info about the book here

“I don’t want to count deer, I want/ to count in deer…” – Peter Sirr is as deliciously surprising as ever in Deer, Phoenix Park, one of the eight exceptionally fine sonnets which begin The Gravity Wave (Gallery €11.95). “Antler, Forest, Eyes,/ Stillness, Speed, Hide…I’d like/ this currency to fall between us/where we step invisibly from the car/slipped from ourselves to kneel/grass-lit and concentrated, close to a road/that keeps wobbling and clarifying/like the rim of the world or the end of speech.”

– Martina Evan, Irish Times review