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Poem of the Week: “Matt Kiernan” by Gerard Fanning
He tries to explain
How a gift emerges
Singing from the shadows,
How holding the reamer like a baton
Conducts receding melodies…
Poem of the Week: “The Previous Owner” by Seán Lysaght
The locals talk when they see the agent’s sign
‘FOR SALE’, translating life into hearsay,
how he never really tamed the garden,
all that travelling, all those weeks away.
Poem of the Week: “Boy Bathing” by Denis Devlin
On the edge of the springboard
A boy poses, columned light
Poised.
Seagulls crying wrinkles
The brown parchment cliffs.
Poem of the Week: “Newton’s Apple” by Harry Clifton
You return, bewildered,
To a world where everyone is always young
And you alone have aged.
Poem of the Week: “Awaiting Burial” by Sinéad Morrissey
Being born was as painful as this—
The crusade of the heart to bloom in mist,
The pull of blood
On everything the body had
To pump in a new direction…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Sea Holly” by Richard Murphy
Thrives upon sand where no other plant can live
Close to high water mark on haggard shores,
And crops up briefly in summer wearing stiff
Armour embossed with mauve and sapphire flowers.
Poem of the Week: The Horses of Meaning by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Let their hooves print the next bit of the story:
release them, roughmaned
from the dark stable where
they rolled their dark eyes, shifted and stamped—
let them out, and follow the sound, a regular clattering
on the cobbles of the yard, a pouring round the corner
into the big field, a booming canter.
Guinn Batten on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s new COLLECTED POEMS
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin may be the contemporary Irish poet most relevant today, as we continue to enlarge the shifting contours and diverse embodiments of Irish legacies and identities, and the poet who most rewards our keen and sustained attention. Indeed, she may also be of her contemporaries the least indebted to Yeats, or to any…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “For Piero Di Cosimo” by David Wheatley
Canvas is expensive and one who wastes
canvas on paintings not of the Bishop
of Bobo or the Countess of Caca
is an irresponsible person and you
are that person…
Poem of the Week: “The Exact Moment I Became a Poet” by Paula Meehan
was in 1963 when Miss Shannon
rapping the duster on the easel’s peg
half-obscured by a cloud of chalk