Asking for Directions by Michael Farry

Michael Farry, retired teacher, poet and historian lives in Trim and is founder member of the Boyne Writers Group and editor of their magazine, Boyne Berries. Several of his poems have won prizes. Called Asking for Directions, this collection  of forty poems has a general theme of place names, travelling, foreign locations and people on journeys.


With many contemplative aspects these poems have lines that stand out for consideration. In 'Asking For Directions', the poem of the collection title, the speaker is in Florence and wishes to lose his look of familiarity with the surroundings; "I crave/ the look of knowing nothing worth asking for". 'When I Returned', a poem dealing with the teaching of the pronunciation of  'Auschwitz' to Irish children, is  affecting, especially when the speaker likens the 's-c-h' section to the word 'school'.
'Shackleton on South Georgia' is a wonderful cacophony of noises using assonance and alliteration; "shells shatter, blue whales moan and die, try-pots/ bubble, factories boom". The words just jump off the page and ring around the readers head. I particularly liked the imagery in 'Fuerteventura, 2008'; "we endured the thrum of convoys droning in/ from the north, across the irrigated coastal colony,/ delivering pale human cargo, tourist foot soldiers."
'Turlock, California' questions the thought pattern in naming the dry Californian town, founded in 1871 by John William Mitchell from Mayo and named for Turlough; 'Or was it homesickness/ for the squelch beneath his heels,/ drizzle on his face...'. Farry writes in 'Western Trilogy' of the generation who grew up watching westerns and the comfortable familiarity of the films. A  three-part poem; (i) High Noon, (ii) The Man Who Shot  Liberty Valance  and (iii) Vera Cruz, the speaker tells how "I could play Will Kane at the drop of a gun,/ I've perfected his expressions/ especially that disenchanted look." These lines were so affecting that I almost stopped reading to ape the look before I moved on.
'I Taught You To Drive' is a poem that hits you hard. On the death from cancer of one he taught to drive, the speaker loses the unthinking instinct, and finds that, "Driving to your funeral/ I found it necessary/ to plot each manoeuvre,". In 'If I Could Lay Down All The Clothes I Ever Wore' Farry uses a clever concept to address the passage of time, "by Longford laughed at the broad lapels,/the flares. The Shannon bridge festooned/ with floral shirts...", and also reveals in the poem the speaker as the third son born but the only one to survive.
Right or wrong, I'm hugely drawn to poems by their titles, and who could not be interested in a poem titled 'My Interest in Polish Poetry has Been Aroused', telling of the speakers journey as he "probed the Polish poetry enclave/ in the chain store bookshop'. The two closing poems contemplate the end. 'My Sycamore' is about the choice of coffin, "But no false handles please./ I abhor such gauds,/ prefer the plain functionality" and 'What time is My Funeral?', affecting in its question " - on the riverbank where I ask,/ Have I the correct change for the fare?/ Did I lock the back door before leaving?".

A thought-provoking collection, with a diverse range of subjects, I found this book of poetry brought forward many different emotions, causing one to stop and think on many occasions. Some clever visions of contemporary society, this is a very pleasing collection.
Published by Doghouse Books.
www.doghousebooks.ie

Bamboo Dreams: An Anthology of Haiku Poetry from Ireland ed. Anatoly Kudryavitsky

Doghouse Books down in Tralee have published  the first ever Irish national anthology of haiku poetry, so if you are a fan, this is the book for you!  The interest in haiku has blossomed recently and an increasing number of Irish writers are appearing in print worldwide. This book contains work by seventy-seven haiku writers.

The anthology has an excellent introduction by Anatoly Kudryavitsky, the editor of Shamrock Haiku Journal, where he discusses the development of haiku in Ireland from an unsuspecting Patrick Kavanagh around 1965-67 and Juanita Casey, a travelling woman in 1968. The first collection by an Irish poet was Michael Hartnett's Inchicore Haiku in 1985. The Internet has been instrumental in creative exchange, namely Shiku Internet Haiku Salon which was popular in the late nineties and World Kigo Database. The first Irish haiku magazine Haiku Spirit ran from 1995-2000 founded by James Norton. In more recent years there was online magazine Lishanu (www.lishanu.com) and Shamrock (www.shamrockhaiku.webs.com) which is the international online magazine of the Irish Haiku Society since 2007. There are two associations of English language haijins (haiku poets) in Ireland; Haiku Ireland (www.haiku-ireland.com) and the Irish Haiku Society (www.irishhaiku.webs.com) who conduct workshops. I include all this information because I found it very interesting, like a secret society nobody knows about!
Kudravitsky acknowledges that there is a 'celtic' haiku style. Many of the haiku in this anthology, as with the traditional Japanese haiku, have nature as a theme. I have pulled out certain verses that I particularly liked, some of them are a complete haiku in its three lines, others are selected verses from a longer haiku.
This verse from Sharon Burrell could only be an image from Dublin; "chilly morning - / geese in formation/ over the Dart line" and this philosophical verse from Juanita Casey; "why rage if the roof/ has holes?/ heaven is roof enough". I particularly liked this complete haiku from Michael Coady; "ravens from the height/ throw shapes above the belfry - / deep-croak  rituals". With that "deep-croak" in the last line you can hear the voice of the crow, and it is explained that throw shapes: dance (Hiberno-Engl.
Patrick Deeley perfectly records an event any cat-owner will recognise; "dead thrush on the doorstep/ the cat's way/ to my heart" while Gabriel Fitzmaurice captures life from death in his three line haiku; "a rotting tree stump/ in the middle of the woods/mushrooms with new life". In Maeve O'Sullivan's verse I can see the colours ; "Basque flower market/ an orange hibiscus/ trumpets its presence" and Thomas Powell captures a everyday joyful sight with new eyes; "communal bath/ in the blocked guttering/ a row of sparrows".
I liked the enigmatic words of Isabelle Prondzynski; "fog in the city - / now I cannot see/ those I do not know" and the hopelessness in the words of Eileen Sheehan; "home village/ nowhere to visit/ but the graveyard".
  editor Anatoly Kudryavitsky
I really enjoyed this anthology. The very refined discipline required to write haiku make their soundbites all the more intense. I hope that this particularly specialised style of poetry writing continues to gather strength in Ireland because from this collection it is obvious that there are a lot of talented haiku writers around.

Published by Doghouse Books.
www.doghousebooks.ie

Collected Poems by Macdara Woods

This is not so much a review of Macdara Wood's Collected Poems published by Dedalus Press in the poets' seventieth year, as a celebration and acknowledgement of his achievement. From his earliest poetry right up to his latest collection The Cotard Dimension (2011), what is really notable about this collection is that they have been chosen by Macdara Woods himself. In eight sections, reflecting the dates of publication of his previous collections, this layout allows the reader to reflect on the age of the poet when the poem was written and also what was going on not just in Ireland at the time but the world at large.

With his first book of poetry published in 1970, Woods recognises and comments in the preface that  'the I who wrote them is not the I who reads them today, but we have endless versions of a language in common. Dialects of the body cells, passed on from one lustrum to another, as stories and identities are passed from one generation to another.' Marvelous! the poetry even coming through in his language in this superb prologue to this new edition. It is even a beautiful book to look at , with the choice of Kerry artist Poppy Melia's Japanese style painting 'Heron and Trout' for the cover image.

The collection opens with seven undated poems, the first 'March 22nd Meant Love' speaks with a certainty of love, of adoration and also of politics; "I lay fallow before I dared to say/ the miracle of love to the riding light/ on the ships high stern." The first dated section, 1966-1977 covers Macdara Woods first two collections; Decimal D. Sec. Drinks in a Bar in Marrakesh (1970) and Early Morning Matins (1973). 'Decimal D. Sec. Drinks in a Bar in Marrakesh', the title poem of the first collection, written in 1969, is a long meandering poem of dialogue and description, tastes and sounds of the exotic city in Morocco; "Decimal moves through the cedar wood/ - red wool clacking on the loom - / and arm in arm they stroll among the souks." The assonance and alliteration all add to the atmosphere and music of the poetry.

1987-1994, a very productive period, takes in the poetry books Mizz Moon (1988), The Hanged Man Was Not Surrendering (1990) and Notes From The Countries of Blood Red Flowers (1994). with great titles in this period such as 'Street Scenes: The Perpetual Launderette' and 'Long Day Short Night She Dances' and who could not love the irresistible 'The Paradise Sexy Shop' named after a shop in Umbria. But it is the understated muted voice of  'Distance and Funeral: Meath, December 1991' that I particularly like, with its questions of identity and of belonging to place; 'I am no longer part of this/ but was I ever - did I ever fit/ into my memory of how it was'.
The final dated collection is 1995-2006 which includes poems from Selected Poems (1996) and 'Knowledge in the Blood: New and Selected Poems' (2001, 2007). In this section I was drawn to the thoughtful contemplation of age in 'Stephen's Green: February 1998' as the speaker sees himself there as a child, at twenty-one and today.

Selections from Macdara Woods last three poetry collections make up the final three sections bringing the reader up to date; The Nightingale Water (2001), Artichoke Wine (2006) and The Cotard Dimension (2011) to present. The Nightingale Water collection is very spare in style, short and sharp with sometimes one and two word lines putting across the message in the minimum of words - an intense and powerful discipline in the choice of words and no less, maybe even more, powerful for their brevity. 'Coffee at The Cafe Rimbaud' from Artichoke Wine is a memory of the Argentinian invasion and Margaret Thatcher, "Metal curls declaiming/ Down her barricaded nose/ That we are right and we will do" that occurred while the speaker was in Umbria, hardly able to believe the unfolding news and when told "There that's your Prime Minister" replies "Not my Prime Minister no/ Nor of any of mine alive or dead/ Sono Irlandese io Signora". This memory is set off by another invasion, this time involving Bush and Blair. Closing the collection with the poem 'We Have Given Up on Hills', Macdara Woods most recent contemplation on the effect of ageing, is touching, accepting, and not without humour, "all downhill from here/ it looks/ but downhill we can walk forever."
 
The beauty of this collection is, as stated, that they have been chosen by Macdara Woods himself. You can see the development of themes, the building of repeated subjects such as those poems set in Ranelagh and Umbria and the subject matter of Rimbaud, and the reader can follow the changes in his writing style. Readers new to Macdara Woods' poetry here get the benefit of the cream of the crop and for those who are already fans this is just a great collection to sink into, to re-read favourites and to discover new unpublished gems.
www.dedaluspress.com

A Gather of Shadow by Mark Roper

I've had a great run of newly published poetry books recently and I'm finding them so fulfilling. I've been reading a lot of them on the train and the way you can drop in and out of an imagined scenario, emotion or landscape is truly a great feeling. I'm sure my fellow commuters wonder what my constant knowing nods, muttered comments of "oh dear!" or deep sighs as I look of into the middle distance are all about but that's just what it does to you.

Mark Roper is originally from Derbyshire and has lived in Ireland for thirty years (still a blow-in then, like myself!). Former Ireland Review Editor and with five other poetry collections under his belt, A Gather of Shadow published by Dedalus Press is his sixth and this collection again shows his understanding of nature of which he is much admired and also draws on his feelings of grief over his mother's death.
The cover design is natural looking but slightly haunting. It is a painting (by Dutch painter Felice) but it looks like a rough weave of cloth and a bird design with a red surround that looks somewhat like a blood stain. The collection is in two parts; 'Keep-Net' consists of seventeen poems and 'A Gather of Shadow' which has twenty-six poems.
 
The collection opens marvelously. 'River at Night' is very much a living thing; "It's vegetable breath,/ its mucky olive, soaked khaki coat." Roper has repetition of words through this section; the word "metal" and also a "swallow" is present in 'Falling', 'The Forge', 'Just' and also in a couple of poems in the second collection. It reminded me of the frequent use of the sparrow in poetry to symbolise time, originating from the Bede's eighth century poem where he compares man's life to a sparrow's flight through the banqueting hall. But in 'Just' it is the lyrical yet also short and tight language that is so effective; "Just the grebe/ on the lake/ first thing."
Nature rears its head again in the creature the 'Black Bull', ominous in its hard title sounds. The strong creature is left out in all weathers, "The great roof of his neck/ starts to leak." But we are not to feel any pity for this almost prehistoric looking creature, because, come spring he's seen "flicking up his dainty feet,/ bellowing his raw joy." Magic!
Still in the animal world, 'This' is a heart-tugging poem. The abandoned, almost rabid looking terrier dog, "filthy teeth", "shitty coat", lifts up its head with a "look, such longing./ Such open unguarded need."
From the second collection, 'Sea Fret' is a tragic poem about a drowning and the thoughts of the drowning man. You immediately think of the famous Stevie Smith poem. This poem is powerful too, with a wrenching request for forgiveness from the drowning man in its closing. Caught in the fret again, twenty years after having been caught when he managed to make his way to shore, "this time no shore can be found/ and you're saying I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry to let you all down."
A dozen poems deal directly with Mark Roper's mother's death, beautifully, peacefully and so respectfully. But there is humour there too as he can hear his mother's voice in 'Last Look', "O do get on with it, for pity's sake!".
I particularly liked 'Damn', a memory of family holidays, bad weather in caravans and fraught parents where;
          "cooped up we fought and squabbled constantly.
           Near the end you dropped a glass jug.
           The word Damn broke from your lips, first time
           we'd ever heard you swear. It left us speechless."

A collection that reaches so many different emotions and feelings, and one that is first and foremost real and human. I really liked the clean, sharp language and will be returning to several of Mark Roper's poems again to dwell further on them.
www.dedaluspress.com

The Invisible Threshold by Catherine Phil MacCarthy

There's such a lot of great poetry coming out of Ireland at the moment- the scene is alive and strong! One of these great poets is Catherine Phil MacCarthy and this collection, Invisible Threshold is her fourth. Former editor of Poetry Ireland Review she recently won the Fish International Poetry Prize for 'Limbo'. Dedalus Press has published this collection of over fifty poems with a lovely muddy river and riverside trees oil painting cover 'River and bank, The Quays' by Bernadette Kiely.

The book notes tell us that this collection of poetry explores the idea of 'threshold' or 'liminal', the state of being in transition from one moment to the next. There is an extract from Saunter by John Hutchinson about the meaning of the word 'liminal', of how it is transformative and allows new ideas to be born and also an extract from Guy Davenport's The Geography of Imagination where  the word 'imagination' is tied with the word 'culture' in a humble and not a portentious sense.
With this really thought provoking introduction to her work we are ready to experience her poetry.  Catherine Phil Mac Carthy's poems deal with the ageing process, death, birth, nature and tragedy amongst other subjects.

'Migrant', a poem of questions, start each of them with the word "Will...?" with a line that causes you to ache;
     
       "Will you go from me as swiftly
         as you came, into the world one stormy

         September morning, hunger cries
         causing milk in my breast to leak"

'Desert Island', a poignant poem of drowning children tells of how, "When water lost its grip, they were washed up,/ miles from home, castaways, on a sandy shore." and 'Facing the Rise' is also about a death, but here we have the philosophical acknowledgement of for every death a life, starting with the lines "After your death in the small hours - / the sun came up, clouds rent and parted," and ends "and shifting cobalt veils crosslit the sky,/ a sense of first breath on the earth, of birth."

'Limbo', the poem that won the poetry prize, as mentioned above, has an interesting word layout on the page with extra spaces between the words as they too seem to float 'in limbo' and also has no full stops. It's tragically sad, with the opening lines; "The firstborn    was handed back to them/ in a small cask   not much bigger than/ a shoebox..." to the last lines which tell us what we surely know, "though she gave birth again/ she was often seen    alone    in that field". She uses this layout technique again in 'Maternity', maybe as heartbeat or breath effects.
'Time Out of Mind' is a terribly sad poem about a confused father after a year in a nursing home, "Have I been here before, he wonders/ eyeing the window, the wardrobe, the chair,".

I love 'Convention'. It's a convention of Brent geese gathered on a snowy cricket pitch like muttering businessmen; "massed gabbling heads,/ a black throng of consternation - ". The imagery in just five short lines is enough to conjure up the whole detailed scene.
"When the Dust Settles" beautifully evokes nature in the city, with the cherry blossom trees next to Lansdowne Road Stadium reminding us of what was there before ;
       " ...Mature Trees
         defy wonders of the boom, promise irretrievable Dublin.
         As if this were a first spring, damson, malus, plum,
         pink heads reach past the builders veneer."

This collection really touched me on several occasions. Catherine Phil MacCarthy has the gentle touch with words that make them ache with sorrow but she also has the ability to balance so many with the joy of life and what it brings.
www.dedaluspress.com

The Next Life- Pat Boran

Pat Boran has written five poetry collections and this, his sixth, with the title The Next Life is his first full-length collection in over ten years. With an almost dream-like cover of a painting 'Passeggero fiammirgo' by Gaetano Tranchino, reminiscent of a 'pilgrim' on his 'progress' along his path in a multicolour dream.

 In four parts and with a total of over seventy poems, this is a fine collection, with several poems recalling childhood In 'Snowman' we see the creation from the simple view of a child and 'The Island' is about children playing in builder's sand. Seeing himself when young with delightful imagery in 'Space Travel' he "stood on the launch pad like astronauts,/ ready for the journey to a better world,/ schoolbags heavy with oxygen on our backs." 'Let's Die' is just as lovely, a celebration of innocent childhood. 'Learning to Dive' is a simple clean poem as the boy tells the story. It's clear language would appeal to school children and there were several in this collection that made me have this thought.
'Faith' about his father learning to swim describes the tough love method, "Pushed out of the boat, my father/ like so many of his sibling learned to swim/ out of necessity".
There is nature poetry too. In 'To a Worm' Boran uses admiring short descriptive words, "O mindless worker,/ blind muck-raker,/ self-buried miner,". 'Touchdown' in Part II subtitled (The Brent Geese return to Bull Island) shows the beauty in the landing of a goose, "the relaxing of muscles, the folding/ of wing, and reach, the dip/ and careful drift down into touch".
Boran can also show great humour in his poetry, in particular in 'Corner Boys' which starts "The toughest man in town is now a granddad,/ and every morning, his teenage daughter back/ at secondary school,..."  and continues "he's out to push a Dora the Explorer pram"..."to stand his ground and share a grim-faced joke/ with another crew-cut granddad like himself". With a final snigger we read "comparing snapshots on their mobile phone". The tenderness in the tough character is beautifully conveyed.

There are others that are more enigmatic such as 'Godafoss'. Is it about a broken relationship, being helped to reconciliation? It's uncertainty of meaning adds to its appeal.
I particularly liked the imagery in 'The Apple Tree', seen as more than a tree on buying it "believing ourselves its liberators,/ like blacked-up intruders who release/ laboratory rats," it is then made human as "The thing stretched over the back seat/ a tree in name alone, a patient/ in the ambulance the car had become,".
Only one who knows and loves dogs could have written 'A Dog', with the recognition of its loyalty, "And there is nothing in its power/ a dog would not do, if it could/ for the one who shows it kindness", continuing "These damp smelling angels/ who suffer our moods and our scoldings". In his other dog poem 'A Man is only as Good' which is both touching and humorous, a man opening the door in the night to a dog barking outside is met with the look from the dog that says "for a minute there I thought/ there was no one awake but me/ in this goddamned town."
Boran is also a fan of the Haiku with four in this collection; 'Three Lines for Leland', 'Absence' and 'Haiku'. 'Lighthouse 1' is even more brief with just four beats in each of its three lines.
I thoroughly enjoyed and congratulate Boran on this collection with several standing out on early reading as favourites with others being appealing in their simplicity and clarity of message.

Published by Dedalus Press www.dedaluspress.com

The European Muse:Irish Poets Inspired by Europe

On Saturday afternoon at the Dublin Book Festival the poets Harry Clifton, Moya Cannon, Mary O'Donnell, Judith Mok and Michael O'Loughlin came together to discuss poets and poetry that had influenced and inspired them over the years.
The chairing of the discussion, in Peter Sirr's absence, was taken by Michael O'Loughlin. Explaining the origin of the idea, Michael O'Loughlin explained that with Peter Sirr he had been discussing the 'European muse' for years and felt that recent events had focused our minds more on our relationship with Europe. In asking how Europe was to be considered a 'muse', they felt that it was to be seen as a source of creativity and inspiration.

Michael O'Loughlin lived for many years in Europe before returning to Dublin and has translated the Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg. His choice of European poet to read from was the Polish poet Tadeusz Rosewicz, with the poem 'The Survivor' with it's opening and closing stanza "I am twenty-four/ led to slaughter/ I survived" and the honest factual line of "The way of killing men and beast is the same/ I've seen it". Rosewicz was not one of the great Polish poets O'Loughlin admitted, but as a youth he had been led to believe a poem looked different from this and should be about nature and landscape. On first seeing this poem with it's short line layout, he felt that it was addressed  to him and assuaged his imagination. He further added that in the late 70s/ early 80s he had felt like the 'eternal exile', as Dermot Bolger said, and this poem at this time spoke to him. He commented that there was a danger of obsession with European poetry and that, of course, translation mediated how we read it.

Harry Clifton, Ireland Professor of Poetry lived in Europe for sixteen years, ten of those in France. On the subject of what Europe meant to him, he explained that while he lived there he felt protective against his own language of European influences. As a student he had been taken with the influx of translated poetry organised by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort (co-founders of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation). At that time he was tired with English poets and felt ready for the sound of something else. He read the first two stanzas from 'The Song of Wandering Aengus' by William Butler Yeats, starting "I went out to the hazel wood,/ Because a fire was in my head,". Clifton commented how this poem encapsulated the school world of nationalism and folk and nature mysticism. It had he said wonderfully song-like metres and the individual words were clear to everybody as was its meaning. It was, he said, a beautiful poem, but not very useful.
Clifton said how many of the poets had come from an aural background and they wanted something tougher in the sound of the language. He stumbled upon this other world of poetry instigated by Ted Hughes and found it different to the ear and exciting. Talking of his choice of poet, the Italian Eugenio Montale, he said how his work was not stanzaic as regular Irish poetry was and that there was 'something quite muddy and obscure' about it. It was Hermetic poetry, poetry of the inner world. Reading 'The Arc' in his beautiful mellow voice, Clifton commented that Montale's poem was not understandable but emotionally exciting; it had something to do with domestic life blown away by a huge catastrophe but we are not sure. It was a piece of writing that gave a permission to write in an emotional logic and in this way he had found Irish poetry to be rather self-centred.

Mary O'Donnell said that it was the stories of Eastern Block football stadiums packed with people who had come to hear poets read that had attracted her to European poetry- there was obviously something very different going on. It was not better or more exotic, just different. At that time certain things were not acceptable to Irish poetry, and it had a need for concrete details. The Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, whom Mary O'Donnell had chosen as her European poet, did not need concrete detail. Bachmann had a background in philosophy and her experience was of invasion as Austria was taken over by Germany. She was, Mary explained, a Bohemian wandering poet and she carried this sense of invasion for life, being 'interested in the redemptive power of love but with a melancholic tone'. Reading 'Timelapse' with the first and last lines "Harder times are ahead", she commented that many years later she had picked up on this theme to write her own similarly structured poem 'Turn Season'. Mary said that Bachmann was a deadly serious poet and she was allowed to be, she was not required to be entertaining and her poems had given Mary a sense of affirmation and stopped her avoiding contemporary agendas.

Judith Mok, writer and classical singer explained to the audience that there had always been several languages in her house. Dutch born, her father was a poet and they moved to France when she was eight. Always familiar with poetry from her father and his friends she hardly ever read poetry in translation, always reading it in it's own language-Spanish, Russian, Dutch. Talking of Yeats, she said that it never occured to them that he was not a 'European' poet and had only discovered the concept of 'European poetry' when she moved to Ireland. In fact she never saw herself as 'European' until she went to America.
Her first influence in poetry was in French at school, Baudelaire, Verlaine for example. Reading 'L'Invitaion au Voyage' from 'Flowers of Evil' by Baudelaire in French and in St. Vincent Millay's translation she said how much nicer sounding this was for a romantic teenager than harsh Dutch poetry. She then read Friedrich Holderlin's 'Halfte des Lebens' (Half of Life), with the final line "Kirren die Fahnen" (Weather cocks clatter) which she so liked. She said how this was a poem to read for the sound in the original language and was not the same when translated, yet we have to and that was the paradox.

Moya Cannon felt that good poems travel in most mysterious ways. Recalling her introduction to European poetry at seventeen she said how she felt it was full of excitement and she commented on the permissions that you got from reading translations. Now we have access to so many translations but this was not always so. When she first came across Michael Smith's translations she said they 'blew my mind'. Talking of the Spanish poet Antoni Machado, she explained how he was a very interesting mix of influences. He moved from Spain to Paris and was influenced by Symbolism. He eventually died fleeing Franco's forces but he was profoundly political and philosophical, but not in an explicit way. There is music and cadences in his poetry but they are profoundly understated and yet still powerful. Moya explained that assonance in Spanish was very important and the recurring vowel sounds affect us in different ways. Machado, she said, wanted a 'deep stirring of the human spirit' and to her that was a great permission in the ecclesiastical Ireland of the 1970s. Moya added that when you are drawn to a poet or poem you can't say why and that it retains some mystery. Reading a Machado poem in Spanish she also read Michael Smith's translation ending with the powerful line "the story forgotten/ The sorrow told on." She also read 'Renacimiento' ('Rebirth') in Spanish and as translated by Robert Bly.

After a thoroughly interesting and enlightening talk, Michael O'Loughlin  concluded that we had certainly seen the muse in action but that it was hard to summarise it in a communique. The event was sponsored by Poetry Ireland.
  

All-Ireland Poetry day 2012

On this All-Ireland Poetry Day 2012 (see http://www.poetryireland.ie/poetryday/ ) I am recommending the reading of our delightful president's most recent poetry collection 'New and Selected Works'.
 
This slim volume of poetry by Michael D. Higgins is very accessible, and as a result of the prose passages preceding each set of poems, the poetry becomes self-explanatory. I felt on finishing this that it should become a school set text, but we would then fear putting kids off his poetry for life!
So buy  it and give it a go, even if you've never bought a poetry book before- you might just like it!

Natasha Trethewey Named U.S. Poet Laureate

From PBS;
Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey will be the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, the Library of Congress announced on Thursday.
Born in Gulfport, Miss., in 1966, Trethewey's work has chronicled the complicated history of her own family and that of the South. As the daughter of a black mother and white father, an interracial union that was still illegal in Mississippi at the time, "it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents," she told the NewsHour in 2006. Her hometown was later ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The shotgun houses in the neighborhood where she was born and raised were destroyed.
With the NewsHour, she returned home for the first time following the storm to discuss her third collection of poems, "Native Guard," which went on to win the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.

U.S. Poet Laureate

W.S. Merwin appointed 17th Poet Laureate of the United States.
Merwin has won the 2005 U.S. National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems and a Pulitzer Awards in 2009 for 'The Shadow of Sirius' .

New Ireland Professor of Poetry

Awarded to Harry Clifton.

Most recent collection Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004