It is not often that I refer to political issues on this blog, indeed
I do the commentating (or critique) elsewhere on a politics blog;
but today in the stead of my Saturday Woman Writer snippets
( both Poetic and literary) I wish to refer to the case of Ms Ndiaye
and the situation in Paris. All morning there have been alerts regarding
the situation wherein a 42 year old mother of two has left France and
moved to Berlin because of increasing surveillance , which she detailed
in an Interview (August 2009) with Inrockuptiples magazine.

The issues of surveillance and repression always being an interest to me as a writer.

Ms Ndiaye’s book : Trois femmes puissantes is based in the migration issue.
So, I will consider this post a short note on the problems in Paris and indeed in Calais.

“Three Strong Women”, by Marie Ndiaye.

Marie Ndiaye and Three Strong Women.
Interview with Ndiaye.

The edition that the Lost Quatrains (Stances Perdues) are derived from
is a Dedalus (Dublin) one, from the Poetry Europe Series No.6:

Stances Perdues, Alain Bosquet, Trans, Roger Little.1999

I have published one from this edition before now on Poethead;
and of course referred in brief to Anatoly Bisk (Alain Bosquet) in brief,
I will add in a brief bio link at the end of this small Post.

(i).

“My world is simple: an armchair , a mirror,
a ceiling that comes down at my commanding,
a book where everything occurs at hope’s
margins. I’m happy sketching larks ascending.”

(ii).

“I’ve learnt to perish several days a week.
A simple exercise : you ask your heart
to stop awhile. You don’t feel any pain:
you simply live, arise and then depart.”

(iii).

” I prize the elements of which I’m made:
nitrate and quicksand, pepper there for taste.
I greet the devil and caress the rose.
When I get up, a crystal is displaced.”

This is a bilungual edition with short biographies on Translator and
Poet. I put in the Max Ernst print because he is quite a favourite of
mine and I have used him before to show poetic/artistic collaboration
in the post of Rene Crevel’s Babylon:

Babylon : Art and Image.

Alain Bosquet Books.

When I published the three links yesterday, I accidently tied together
my html (it happens) so I deleted that and am Instead just putting
up the banner (as I like to do) and adding one link :

Campaign For Arts Petition in Ireland.

Tools ‹ poethead — WordPress.

'After Possession' by the Great Leonard Baskin

Abundance by C Murray (poethead).

Those images I had trashed sing now their separation

I.

An Arch forms beneath the new Forsythia leaf

enter the moorhen in her emerald stockings,

She shakes away the water drops.

II.

A wood-pigeon lumbers through egg-laden,

she threads a path through wet grasses

veined in blue weed, these mesmerise me.

III.

My daisy-chain is a fragmented treasure,

that primrose is lone,

Lit against her iron post,

IV.

She dreams of banked loam,

inky mountain scenes.

False Backdrop! But she is sweeter for her dreams.

C Murray

The Leonard Baskin image is from his collection of Women images:

Baskin’s Women .

This is related to a prose piece about finding the golden net of poetry in a noisy
school room aged 15. I have not the guts to publish that one….

This wee poem (one of 17 from Eithne Strong’s book, Sarah in Passing)
is one of my favourites, thus I am publishing it today in my Book of Days. The
book is published via Dolmen Press 1974, I found it on a book stall in George’s
Street Arcade some few years ago; and along with Mark My Words,by Eilís
Ní Dhuibhne (Illustrated by Alice Maher), it’s one of my favourite poetic
and illustrative collaborations:

Regeneration

“Let me out. I’m rising out of death’s skull.
Aha, old devil’s dower I have victoried.
I leave you in the morning: it deals
with every death and spring defeats the catafalque.

You see I must believe in resurrection.
This is it. Now. I was dead and am alive.
Hello eternity. I can die no more horrific
death than I have died. No hell beyond

the horrors of myself that murdered
every life; saw death in every pregnancy
of dog and nut and man. Found death
the ever death. Come bomb,come

my most killing hate, life lives outside
the blasting skull. Computer is not final.
I cannot give you proof of course,
I merely have arisen.”

Regeneration, from Sarah in Passing, by Eithne Strong, Dolmen Press 1974, illustrated by John Hodge.

The Hare Arch by Ní Dhuibhne

I am placing herein a link to the Index page of the Irish Writer’s Centre
in Parnell Square who have been running a series of Benefit evenings
to increase core funding as a result of cutting by The Irish Arts Council,
(along with fund cutting to the Western Writer’s Centre). The Cuts
occurred just after the Minister Martin Cullen appointed a New Irish
Art’s Council Board (Linked at base of this piece/Politics.ie).

The Benefits have been running Oct > Dec 2009 and are chaired by
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and John F Deane, I hope to get out to one
or two of them also. The Index page of the IWC is here:

IWC Index of Events for Oct-Dec 2009

WWC/IWC fundcuts. (Cullen’s Adventures with the Scissors)

I have discussed here on Poethead before now the effects of a bad
approach to arts, indeed compared this current Government’s paucity
in funding to the first government in this state which underfunded,
censored and failed at every level in arts development , leading to
the evolution of such groups as The Irish exhibition of Living Art, The
White Stag group, the friends of the Hugh Lane Gallery and many more.
Most of these comments are noted in the threads about Blasphemy
and the funding cuts to the Irish and Western Writer’s Centres.
I spent a considerable amount of time listening to similar stories
in Music development in Mayo (theres a facebook going there too).

I expect that it is a lack of cultural understanding about how art
develops that plagues this government, not to mention a sense
of propiety which belies an almost lunatic ignorance (which most of
the growing Irish generation has witnessed in the approach to
the destruction of Tara by Dick Roche, John Gormley and Bertie
Ahern). Ireland needs a viable Art’s Council and a Minister capable
of intellectual integrity .:. Sign the Petition here ‘:’

National Campaign for the Arts Petition.
Western Writers

It’s Monday and it’s cold in Dublin, am so glad I got a new all-weather
but mostly Mountain-climbing Jacket on the Mayo Sojourn (Post-flu
and dental recovery). Since I am unpacked and having done the school
run where the little one was welcomed back with much happiness, I
thought to publish some Bronte (Brunty) poems and whilst adoring
Emily’s amazing poetry , I think Anne mostly neglected. Poethead
is about women writers , the whole idea of the blog was sited in the
Penelopiad , the woman in exile and the community of women who are
sometimes nodded to in serious writer’s chorus’, choruslines or indeed
hymn sheets, though most of the time critique is poetry and
weekend supplements tends to the male voice and academic fields.
I still have not learnt how to do an Umlaut,{ apologies}:

The North Wind

That wind is from the North: I know it well;
No other breeze could have so wild a swell.
Now deep and loud it thunders round my cell,
The faintly dies, and softly sighs,
And moans and murmurs mournfully.
I know it’s language: thus it speaks to me:

‘I have passed over thy own mountains dear,
Thy northern mountains, and they still are free;
still lonely, wild, majestic,bleak and drear,
And stern, and lovely , as they used to be

‘When thou a young enthusiast,
As wild and free as they,
O’er rocks and glens, and snowy heights,
Didst thou love to stray.

‘I’ve blown the pure, untrodden snows
in whirling eddies from their brows;
And I have howled in cavern’s wild,
Where thou, a joyous mountain-child,
didst dearly love to be.
The sweet world is not changed, but thou
art pining in a dungeon now,
Where thou must ever be.

‘No voice but mine can reach thy ear,
And heaven has kindly sent me here
to mourn and sigh with thee,
And tell thee of the cherished land
of thy nativity.’

Blow on wild wind; thy solemn voice,
However sad and drear,
is nothing to the gloomy silence
I have had to bear.

Hot tears are streaming from my eyes,
But these are better far
Than that dull, gnawing , tearless time,
The stupor of despair.

Confined and hopeless as I am,
Oh, speak of liberty!
Oh, tell me of my mountain home,
And I will welcome thee!

The edition the Poem was taken from is an Everyman: Everyman : Selected Poems, The Brontes, Ed, Juliet RV Barker, 1993 .

Margaret Atwood list.
25 Pins in a Packet
Julian of Norwich

I shall be linking to an internet link to this poem at the end of the piece:

Verse the second: “A prayer for My daughter”.

“I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour

And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

And under the arches of the bridge, and scream

In the elms above the flooded stream;

Imagining in excited reverie

That the future years had come,

dancing to a frenzied drum,

Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.”

~

There really is nowhere in Ireland for a storm to Play better than the
exposed North-Western sea-board. Down here in Dublin we experience
storms as bad weather and if we are lucky enough to live near a
park or field then we can see the patterns of crazy that the rain makes.

There are times when I do not appreciate Yeats’ power and again
there are times that I do; and find myself going back into the books
to read him again. Last week this poem had the most powerful
significance for me as we lay battered by high winds and incessant
rain. I could not leave the house because of a very ill child who
is now mostly recovered. Nature seemed to reflect the helpless.
Thanks to my pals who wrote and sent wishes. I found myself saying
the poem (with gaps) , I never learned the whole thing by heart.

I am looking forward to the weather up in the North-West over the
next few days: When it’s dark , it is completely wildly dark and when
it storms…. it’s good to have the house round you as you listen to
the wild and fraught winds wreaking their havoc outside.

A Prayer for My daughter. WB Yeats.