Category Archives: Images

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

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.

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The Thief of Fire: A celebration of Arthur Rimbaud at the Dublin Writer’s Festival

IMRAM and Dublin Writer’s Festival request the pleasure of your company when the newly commissioned translations of Arthur Rimbaud and Jack Kerouac will be presented in two special bilingual events, The Thief of Fire: A Celebration of Arthur Rimbaud and La Nuit est Ma Femme: Jack Kerouac’s Search for a Language and Identity. The bilingual collection, sioc maidine/morning frost, translations by Gabriel Rosenstock on the haiku of Jack Kerouac, will also be launched.

The Thief of Fire: A celebration of Arthur Rimbaud

The Thief of Fire celebrates Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Ciaran Carson has just published his stunning new English versions, In the Light Of, published by Gallery Press. Liam Ó Muirthile will read newly commissioned Irish versions. The reading will feature on-screen projections by Margaret Lonergan, and commissioned music by Seán Mac Erlaine.

Venue: The Sugar Club, 8 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2

Date: Wednesday May 22

Time: 8.30pm

Tickets: €10/€8 Special group price or individual student price of €5 available. Just use the code scribhenoir when booking.

 

Ernest Pignon-Ernest - Arthur Rimbaud dans Paris 1978

Ernest Pignon-Ernest – Arthur Rimbaud dans Paris 1978

La Nuit est ma Femme: Jack Kerouac’s search for a Language and Identity

La nuit est ma femme will construct a literary exploration of Kerouac’s relationship to French, to Catholicism and Buddhism; of his bi-lingual identity; and of his fraught relationship with America. The selections will draw on his letters, poems, haiku and novels.

Two writers – Gabriel Rosenstock and Gearóid Mac Lochlainn – will both translate and respond to Kerouac’s work. The texts will be read to improvised jazz accompaniment by The Dirty Jazz Band and on-screen projections created by Margaret Lonergan.

Launch: sioc maidine/morning frost, which presents a generous selection of Kerouac’s haiku, will also be launched on the night.

 

The collection has been published in Irish for the first time – and translated by Ireland’s doyen of the haiku, Gabriel Rosenstock. He unerringly finds Irish registers that reveal the beauty of these haiku anew. Like Kerouac, Rosenstock makes the haiku sing.

 

Venue: The Workman’s Club, 10 Wellington Quay, Dublin 2

Date: Thursday May 23

Time: 20:30

Tickets: €10/€8 Special group price or individual student price of €5 available. Just use the code scribhenoir when booking.

 

Festival Box Office, Filmbase, Curved St., Temple Bar, Dublin 2
Opening Hours: Mon – Sat 11am–7pm & Sun 12 – 5pm
T +353 (0) 1 687 7977
E boxoffice@dublinwritersfestival.com

Bruise

I’d rather it were a muse dangling above my head in her purple cloud dress
than a crystal chandelier of gaudy pattern floating in the many-coloured sky

floating in the many-coloured sky

a painted backdrop is between the vanished bookcase and wall
each breeze brings the noise of tea-cup-clatter a loud tea room

separator of light

I am scraping my bare foot on a bright tiger claw
and I am agitated down to my bruised flesh

give me the muse
the reed song
song of the bones
a hollow bone a
twin reeds’ tune

anything but this
            noise

by C. Murray

The Purple Dress , by William Glackens
The Purple Dress , by William Glackens

a reed song, by C. Murray

a reed song

whistle-in
      sing the hollow-pipes
of bird-bone     or leg-tube
jointed to.
 
 
leech into soil’s black trauma
a double-reed will always carry down
 
 
its muffled tune
from contort of leaf to nub of root
 
 
there is bone substance to
the fallen bough as
there is to the winged-bird
      both perfume.

 
a maerl of
      barely encloses both
      the feathered and
      the not,

a shell maybe -
 
a reed-song is © C. Murray (2013)

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First published, A New Ulster #7

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.