Bloomsday; A Celebration of Irish Women Poets 2013

Rebecca O’Connor Domestic Bliss   ‘I place a jug of lavender on the table to mask the smell of mould from under the fridge   while you draw nails to hammer with your fist. Then I draw a hammer , and watch   as you try to lift it from the page. by day it’s Mr Men, Mad Men, by night,   your father and I wishing we could be so bold. you have no such wants, though sometimes I wonder   as you try to peer into Jack and Jill’s well or climb the tiny ladder of your toy farm to mend the roof of your miniature barn.’   -  Rebecca O’Connor Rebecca O’Connor edits The Moth Magazine and organises the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize. She worked as a commissioning editor of literary fiction at Telegram Books in London before returning to Ireland with her family in 2008. She won a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2004 and her chapbook Poems was published by the Wordsworth Trust, where she was a writer in residence in 2005. Her poetry has been published in, among other places, The Guardian, Poetry Review and The Spectator.

Kelly Creighton World Put to Rights   “The dream that burst riverbanks held you; blackstrap molasses, antidote for your poison.   Your plummets spraying wetness like a coin in a cascade woke no-one, not even us.   The church spire grew legs, scaled bricks, ran to your side, spotlighted. I put glass over that glow.   Quiet-huff of your refuge, flailing arms, spluttering snores. Ungainly crooning tunes   to the realms of purity; I found too sickly-sweet. You fought the humdrum, from your seat.   You would sleep outside, would sing, stand on ledges mollified. I won’t sing, no matter what.   Float on, keep your whistles of booze-hounds. When I awaken I will join you, watch for me.”   World Put to Rights is © Kelly Creighton , all rights reserved. Kelly Creighton Kelly Creighton is a poet and writer with work currently and forthcoming in literary journals Ranfurly Review, A New Ulster, Electric Windmill Press, Inkspill Magazine, The Galway Review, Saudade Review, PEN Austria’s Time to Say: No! e-book, Recours au Poeme and other numerous other publications. She has recently finished editing her historical fiction novel Yielding Fruit. Kelly is working on her second poetry collection.

Moya Cannon Viola D’Amore   ” Sometimes, love does die, but sometimes , a stream on porous rock, it slips down into the inner dark of a hill, joins with other hidden streams to travel blind as the white fish that live in it. It forsakes one underground streambed for the cave that runs under it. Unseen , it informs the hill and , like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore, makes the hill reverberate, so that people who wander there wonder why the hill sings, wonder why they find wells.”   Viola D’Amore is ©  Moya Cannon   Bio (source Wikipedia) Moya Cannon was born in 1956 in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal. She studied History and Politics at University College Dublin, and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She has taught in the Gaelscoil in Inchicore, in a school for adolescent travellers in Galway, and at the National University of Ireland in Galway. She served as editor of Poetry Ireland in 1995. Her work has appeared in a number of international anthologies and she has held writer-in-residence posts for Kerry County Council and Trent University Ontario (1994–95). Cannon became a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, in 2004. Her first book, Oar, (Salmon 1990, revised edition Gallery Press 2000) won the 1991 Brendan Behan Memorial Prize. It was followed by The Parchment Boat in 1997. Carrying the Songs: New and Selected Poems was published by Carcanet Press in 2007.

Dorothea Herbert The Rights Of Woman, Or Fashions for the Year 93 – being the Era of Women’s literally wearing the Breeches. – Health and Fraternity!   “Whilst man is so busy asserting his Rights Shall Woman lie still without gaining new lights Our sex have been surely restrain’d enough By stiff prudish Dress and such old fahion’d stuff Too long have been fetter’d and tramelld I wot With Cumbersome Trains and the Strict petticoat Yet should a poor Wife dare her Tyrant to chide Oh she wears the Breeches they tauntingly cried But now we’re enlighten’d they’ll find to their Shame We’ll have the reality not the bare Name No longer will Woman to Satire be Dupe For she is determin’d to figure Sans Jupe And once she is rouzed she will not be outdone Nor stop at this one Reformation alone For mark me proud Man she’ll not yield thee a Jot But soon will become e’en a true Sans-Culote And flourish away e’er the Ending of Spring Sans Jupe, Sans Culote , in short – sans any thing   – Ca va et ca…ira –Liberty and Equality for ever ! “   © by Dorothea Herbert   from, Introspections, the Poetry and Private World of Dorothea Herbert by Frances Finnegan , Congrave Press 2011.   from Congrave Press The “lost” poetry of the celebrated Irish writer Dorothea Herbert, whose Retrospections, first published in 1929-30 more than a century after her death, continues to captivate readers.  By turns amusing and melancholic, the recently recovered poems – and particularly her astonishing mock-heroic epic The Buckiad - are an important contribution to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Irish literature.

Paula Meehan Seed   ” The first warm day of spring and I step out into the garden from the gloom of a house where hope had died to tally the storm damage, to seek what may have survived. And finding some forgotten lupins I’d sown from seed last autumn holding in their fingers a raindrop each like a peace offering, or a promise, I am suddenly grateful and would offer a prayer if I believed in God. But not believing, I bless the power of seed, its casual, useful persistence, and bless the power of sun, its conspiracy with the underground, and thank my stars the winter’s ended.”   ‘Seed’ is © Paula Meehan, all rights reserved. Paula Meehan Image from Imagine Ireland Paula Meehan has published five collections of poetry, the most recent being Painting Rain (Carcanet, 2009). A selected volume, entitled Mysteries of the Home, was published in 1996. Her writing for stage includes the plays Mrs Sweeney (1997), Cell (1999), and, for children, Kirkle (1995), The Voyage (1997) and The Wolf of Winter (2003/2004). Her poetry has been set to music by artists as diverse as the avant-garde composer John Wolf Brennan and the folksinger Christy Moore.

Eileen Sheehan All About Climbing   “After he slaughtered her he dumped her body in the market square   where merchants and citizens continued their trading   averting their eyes from the sight of her broken corpse; the limbs skewed at grotesque angles.   A fly alighted on her eyelid its blue-green body gleaming like a jewel.   A mouse nibbled flour from under a fingernail.   A goat strayed from its pen sniffed at her body lay down beside her.   Her house cat navigated the alleyways of the rural town till he found her.   A rat curled to sleep in her armpit.   Then the last slice of moon slid down from the sky, lodged in the small of her back.   From high in the hay loft an owl let out it’s long note across the dark   and that was the sound she heard as she woke; the sound that led her to walk to the foot of the mountain.   Now she carries the moon on her back and she climbs.   Her days are all about climbing; all about purpose;   committed to restore the moon to the sky: hang it aloft.   So she climbs in her blood-red shoes, her tattered garments:   there is no slipping back.”   © Eileen Sheehan   from the collection Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books) Eileen Sheehan Eileen Sheehan Eileen Sheehan is from Killarney, Co Kerry. Her collections are Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books). Anthology publications include The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (ed Joan McBreen/Salmon Poetry) and TEXT: A Transition Year English Reader (ed Niall MacMonagle/ Celtic Press). She has worked as Poet in Residence with Limerick Co Council Arts Office and is on the organizing committee for Éigse Michael Hartnett Literary & Arts Festival. Her third collection, The Narrow Place of Souls, is forthcoming.

Mary O’ Donnell Hungary   came to me in stamps. “Magyar Posta” ice-skaters, delicate as Empire porcelain, a fish, an astronaut and rocket, a silvery boy on 1960s skis. I understood only difference. Now, flying home from Budapest, I touch the pages of my poems, freshly minted in translation. Now I really don’t get them, but did I ever? The words will make me briefly native to a coffee-slugging morning reader on the Vaci Ut, who may not understand, even in his own tongue. The lines shimmer as night slips through the tilting crowded cabin. Again I press fingers to page, blind, as if by touch I could capture a fish, an astronaut, a rocket, or those elegant, ice-cutting skaters. Outside, clouds I cannot see busily translate country to country.” Hungary is ©  Mary O’ Donnell   Mary O’ Donnell Mary O’Donnell is the author of eleven books, both poetry and fiction, and has also co-edited a book of translations from the Galician. Her titles include the best-selling literary novel “The Light-Makers”, “Virgin and the Boy”, and “The Elysium Testament”, as well as poetry such as “The Place of Miracles”, “Unlegendary Heroes”, and her most recent critically acclaimed sixth collection “The Ark Builders” (Arc Publications UK, 2009). She has been a teacher and has worked intermittently in journalism, especially theatre criticism. Her essays on contemporary literary issues are widely published. She also presented and scripted three series of poetry programmes for the national broadcaster RTE Radio, including a successful series on poetry in translation during 2005 and 2006 called ‘Crossing the Lines‘. Today, she teaches creative writing in a part time capacity at NUI Maynooth, and has worked on the faculty of Carlow University Pittsburgh’s MFA programme in creative writing, as well as on the faculty of the University of Iowa’s summer writing programme at Trinity College Dublin.

• Bloomsday 2012

Poems by Eileen Sheehan

an elegy of sorts   for want of an ash-tray I rest my cigarette on this grey plate, a remnant from some depleted set, now serving as candle-holder   the cigarette tip sizzles as it hits a pat of wax   I inhale and taste the tallow as red seeps down the paper stains the filter   a last molten drop from a crimson candle, lit as votive for an injured cat   the cat now buried in a sunny spot by the back wall   a favoured place of his for grooming   somewhere there was a point to all of this which now evades me   like that raw evening, placing his still-warm body in the grave, how everything but the weeping failed me   © Eileen Sheehan , from the collection Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books)

What She Sings Of   Once in a time he was the sky clothing me, the warm earth supporting me, the all-in-all of every night and day to me.   He was salt waves washing me, he was wind caressing me, fire igniting me, the first and last of every cause that moved me.   He was fish that jumped for me, bird that sang for me, beast that nourished me, the craving and cure of every need inside of me.   Now he is a bright ship pulling away from me, white sail gone from me, his rough wake drowning me, he is shimmer of scales growing out of me;   soon I will sing to him, comb out my hair for him, draw him back to me, lure him down to me.   © Eileen Sheehan   first published in The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (ed Joan McBreen/Salmon Poetry)

Eileen Sheehan Eileen Sheehan is from Killarney, Co Kerry. Her collections are Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books). Anthology publications include The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (ed Joan McBreen/Salmon Poetry) and TEXT: A Transition Year English Reader (ed Niall MacMonagle/ Celtic Press). She has worked as Poet in Residence with Limerick Co Council Arts Office and is on the organizing committee for Éigse Michael Hartnett Literary & Arts Festival. Her third collection, The Narrow Place of Souls, is forthcoming.

 

Poems by Michèle Vassal

Drunk as Brendan Behan “Lovers    lovers their empty skins hang limp in opiate closets pulsing between insinuations of naphthalene and the barbitural scent of forgetting, they swing embittered and toxic, mothy costumes of a play that lingers only on faded posters and skin. On the wrong side of midnight drunk as Brendan Behan I scooped up a last high king kneeling on Clontarf road          battled out knees sanded to the bone by the wet grit of ancient wars         singing         something about not worrying about a thing amongst Viking corpses on the steps of the Bank of Ireland where Wood Quay used to be we kissed ourselves an island.   I clinched a burned out arsonist        hands shaking      climbing railings in Stephens Green      ..fucking left an aftertaste of phosphorus         reeking red        like inhaling the soul of a cracked match.   I chased a light eyed dragon heart caving in to the count of nine elliptic filigree of sins I kept twitching inside a reliquary of abalone dreams whilst the rosary of Chopin’s Polonaise undid itself in silver beads. I slashed my defeats in the wrists of actors snorted stars on the mercurial mirrors of their well rehearsed eyes and DT-ed on night’s poitín when I drank neat the distilled dew glistening on the mouths of girls.”   © Michèle Vassal, published in A Taste of Hemlock, Salmon 2011

Dublin 75   Nineteen seventy five and Mary worked Fitzwilliam square genuflecting at closing time for wretched men in nylon shirts too drunk to know too drunk to care that whilst on bended knees she thought only of communion.   From the Liberties to the Green   Dublin vomited poets and patriots under the gassy glare of streetlights leaning on convoluted shadows and not quite balladed out saints and scholars spewed up Spancil Hill and Dirty Old Town, like a bad pint In nineteen seventy five love smelled of stout and vinegared chips.”   © Michèle Vassal, published in A Taste of Hemlock, Salmon 2011

Michèle Vassal Michèle Vassal is from Barcelonnette, a small town in the French Alps. She moved to Ireland, aged seventeen, to learn English and stayed there for thirty years. Her collection, Sandgames (Salmon 2000), received first prize at Listowel Writers’ Week and some of her poems were short-listed for the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Awards. She has been widely published internationally, in both French and English. Michèle currently lives and writes in France. Youtube Salmon Amazon Amazon

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Poems from ‘We’ll Sing Blackbird’, by Rebecca O’Connor

Domestic Bliss   ‘I place a jug of lavender on the table to mask the smell of mould from under the fridge   while you draw nails to hammer with your fist. Then I draw a hammer , and watch   as you try to lift it from the page. by day it’s Mr Men, Mad Men, by night,   your father and I wishing we could be so bold. you have no such wants, though sometimes I wonder   as you try to peer into Jack and Jill’s well or climb the tiny ladder of your toy farm to mend the roof of your miniature barn.’   Life After Death   My thoughts are all opposed to that streak of red fox in the field, black clods of thought that cling to the spade that lifts them to throw them back into the hole they made.   The fox is an apposite thing, lived in without reluctance, as is the greenfinch, even as it hits the window and knocks itself out cold.   My child knows this. He won’t allow himself forget his father warming the bird’s wings with his breath, its sudden swift flight as two foxes   .trot through Fayre’s Field ahead of the hearse.   Domestic Bliss and Life After Death are © Rebecca O’Connor. Published in We’ll Sing Blackbird A Moth Edition 2012.

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Rebecca O’Connor edits The Moth Magazine and organises the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize. She worked as a commissioning editor of literary fiction at Telegram Books in London before returning to Ireland with her family in 2008. She won a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2004 and her chapbook Poems was published by the Wordsworth Trust, where she was a writer in residence in 2005. Her poetry has been published in, among other places, The Guardian, Poetry Review and The Spectator.

•  www.rebeccaoconnor.net
• Bio from www.writing.ie

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Sanctus by Kimberly Campanello

Sanctus And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or yours or my own? – James Joyce I. At the English pub in Indianapolis, we discuss technology. He says he can already hear the robot’s footsteps on his grave. In the worst neighborhoods, the prairie is coming back. Cattails are pushing up through old sidewalks and nearly all the important species of sparrows have returned. A Future Farmer of America—in other words, a 14-year-old white kid from the pesticide-drenched heartland—slips backwards from a mall railing and falls to his death among the Super Pretzels and Dippin’ Dots down in the food court. I get reminded of incest dreams and the two I’ve had, one for each parent. My mother calls and gives me the run-down on which of her friends is on a morphine drip and which is in remission, and she tells me that when I get back to Miami I should get a job and always keep a full tank of gas. The homilitic style of evangelical Christianity is the same in Ghana, San Diego, Little Havana, and on Ellettsville, Indiana’s Hart Strait Road where in the abortion scene of the Halloween morality play she yanks a skinned squirrel soaked in beet juice from the screaming girl’s crotch and holds it up with food-service tongs before tossing it on a cookie sheet. You’ll have a clean slate if you accept Jesus, right now. We’ll all have a clean slate, if you accept Jesus, now. The body of Christ. Amen. The body of Christ. Amen. The body of Christ. Amen. Don’t drop it. Use a metal plate with a handle that could guillotine a communicant’s neck. And on the third day, I drank poitín at an Irish pub in Bloomington, Indiana, in fulfillment of the scriptures. Take this, all of you, and drink it. This is the bloodshine of the newest and most everlasting covenant. Don’t drop it. II. Death is a real bummer. We live through and for our parents and still Freud was wrong. You should hurry up and put your face right in it for an hour and that is definitely a sacrament, more so than that night in Garrucha at the misa flamenca, though the music was nice. Even the Sanctus didn’t offend me. Finally, I would add that the world is falling apart, always has been, ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent, etc., and that my favorite sounds are when you say things like, Everything is fine, or, That cunt is mine. I hear them and I clench and unclench and I. love. you. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Let us kneel down facing each other, holding razors. Lather up my head and I will lather yours. I am worthy to receive you. I am your mirror. On which a razor lay crossed. We’ll shave it all off. If our knees can handle it, let’s stay like this until it grows back, softer than before. If they can’t, let’s make love, and say, These are our bodies, which will not be given up for any of you. Let us say our own word and we shall be healed. Sanctus is © Kimberly Campanello, from Consent. Published Doire Press, 2013

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Kimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart, Indiana. She now lives in Dublin and London. She was the featured poet in the Summer 2010 issue of The Stinging Fly, and her pamphlet Spinning Cities was published by Wurm Press in 2011 . Her poems have appeared in magazines in the US, UK, and Ireland, including  nthposition , Burning Bush II, Abridged , and The Irish Left Review .

Pic by Brian Kavanagh