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“Mostly dark, with a chink of light”: Alan Gillis reflects on Scapegoat and Other Poems

Alan Gillis’s Scapegoat and Other Poems launched on October 1st. To celebrate, WFU Press interns Fahad Rahmat and Rachel Stewart asked Gillis about his influences, religion’s redemptive impulse, how he sees current society and pop culture, and plenty more. WFU Press: Throughout Scapegoat, the reader encounters words like “fugging” and “pizz-popping, jingle-jangle”—sounds which you’ve incorporated into the…

Poem of the Week: from “In Whose Blent Air All Our Compulsions Meet” by Alan Gillis

My love is a mansion with many rooms to see.
I’m asbestos.
My love’s a glittering surface, scrubbed spotlessly.

Poem of the Week: “The Swimming Pool” by Conor O’Callaghan

It goes under, the cursor, whenever I place my finger
on the space bar and hold it like this for a minute.
The blue screen shimmers the way a pool’s sunlit
floor moves after the splash of a lone swimmer.

Poem of the Week: “A Visit to Croom, 1745” by Michael Hartnett

The thatch dripped soot,
the sun was silver
because the sky
from ruts of mud to high blaze
was water.

Poem of the Week: “Circe” by Louis MacNeice

“… vitreamque Circen”

Something of glass about her, of dead water,
Chills and holds us,
Far more fatal than painted flesh or the lodestone of live hair

Poem of the Week: “Morte la nuit / When night has died” by Claire Malroux

Today we’ve selected a poem by French poet and translator Claire Malroux, alongside the translation by Marilyn Hacker. As Hacker points out in the preface to this volume, these poems are “on the boundary” in many ways. “Perhaps one crucial boundary, sacrosanct and taboo, on which they stand,” she continues, “is that between languages, and their…

Video Highlights from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Reading at Wake Forest

We began this glorious National Poetry Month with a visit from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, who gave a reading at Wake Forest on April 4, 2016. As we near the end of April, we wanted to share some of the joys of that evening with you. Today we feature one of her poems from The Boys of Bluehill, a…

Poem of the Week: “Coda: Payne’s Grey” by Paula Meehan

Happy spring and happy National Poetry Month! As we begin a month known for its showers, Paula Meehan’s poem “Coda: Payne’s Grey” came to mind. The final poem in her collection, Painting Rain, it celebrates what poetry can capture and preserve, even as everything changes, like trying to capture an image of falling rain. Coda: Payne’s Grey I am trying to…

St. Patrick’s Day Poem of the Week

Forty Shades of Green

A Crown/Dulux/Farrow and Ball Poem

I
Tunsgate Green
Green Ground
Cooking Apple Green
Churlish Green

“Where language fades into cries or whispers”: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian

Medbh McGuckian’s new selected, The Unfixed Horizon, contains over 130 poems from 13 collections. In honor of its publication, McGuckian talked to WFU Press interns Alex Muller and Shannon Magee about the concoction of angels, controlling the flow of time, and the virtue of poetry’s gentle intellect.