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Poem of the Week: “Circe” by Michael Longley
Originally published in Michael Longley’s debut collection, No Continuing City (1969), “Circe” meditates on Homer’s Odyssey. The poem reflects on Circe’s relationship to the shipwrecked sailors who crashed into the shores of her island in a contemporary context. The poem reads, “At first in rock pools I become their wife / Under the dunes at last they lie…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Tortoise Poem” by Leontia Flynn
With one of our favorite opening stanzas in recent years, “Tortoise Poem” by Leontia Flynn presents a terrarium as world. Whether the solitary tortoise represents the cultivation of a rich inner life or the increasing isolation caused by the contemporary digital age is up to the reader, however. “Tortoise Poem” belongs to a series of…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “A Sign” by John McAuliffe
“A Sign” by Jonn McAuliffe fits well in the poetic tradition of mushrooms—Emily Dickinson and Slyvia Plath also wrote poems about them, and so have Paul Muldoon and David Wheatley. Somewhat surprisingly, however, “A Sign” begins with an un-poetic assertion, “Nothing fanciful in their welling up from the black earth.” Almost in spite of itself, the…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “In Her Silent Cloister” by Leontia Flynn
“In Her Silent Cloister” by Leontia Flynn imagines the 12th-Century nun, writer, and philosopher Héloïse du Paraclet, possibly alluding in the final stanza to her correspondence and affair with the theologian Peter Abelard. Written from Flynn’s experience as a new mother, this poem explores a common theme in the collection Taking Liberties, asking where inner…
Continue ReadingPoems to Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day
With over fifty years of Irish poetry in the WFU Press catalog, you could argue that any poem we’ve published is perfect for celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. But here are several of our favorites that respond to the holiday directly and indirectly, from Frank Ormsby listing “Forty Shades of Green” to Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh describing the “taste…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Windharp” by John Montague
Windharp for Patrick Collins The sounds of Ireland, that restless whispering you never get away from, seeping out of low bushes and grass, heatherbells and fern, wrinkling bog pools, scraping tree branches, light hunting cloud, sound hounding sight, a hand ceaselessly combing and stroking the landscape, till the valley gleams like the pile upon a…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Whin” by Alan Gillis
“Whin,” the opening poem from Over Here by Alan Gillis, is an evocative experiment in atmospheric language and natural imagery. In this textured inventory of a perhaps moody and mercurial, perhaps spectacularly bright, landscape, the poet places a speaker in the tension between the light and the dark, between wild living and looming ends: “Aye,…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Remind Me How Often” by Frank Ormsby
Memory is a needle’s eye in Frank Ormsby’s poem “Remind Me How Often.” What’s known in the needle’s thread becomes slippery, lost in silences, lost in darkness, as the day passes by. Ormsby ponders what’s lost, asking: “How much of what I knew / has been deflected already / into the darkness / from which…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Seasons of the Lemon House” by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
In her poem “Seasons of the Lemon House,” Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin explores the deep connection between the natural world, human experience, and language. The ebb and flow of light and darkness, warmth and frost, mirror the rhythms that shape our lives. With a keen eye for the interplay of interior, natural, and spiritual landscapes, Ní…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Mischief at the Globe” by Gerard Fanning
In “Mischief at the Globe,” Gerard Fanning explores themes of mortality, the passage of time, and the ephemeral nature of human life through theatrical and natural imagery. The poem reflects on the vulnerability of the body—symbolized by a freckle—while simultaneously observing the flow of life outside the confines of the theatre. By weaving the world…
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