All posts filed under: A Saturday Woman Poet

bind; a waking book by C. Murray

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Originally posted on Poethead:
They and I, O how far we have fallen! Just to burn here. ? You can now order bind via Turas Press bind cover photograph is © Christian Caller, original artwork Bound / Boundless © Salma Ahmad Caller bind (Turas Press, 2018) was launched in Dublin on October the 8th 2018. I include here, with thanks, some details from artist Salma Caller’s response to the text. This is a note of thanks and appreciation to those people who have supported the book from the outset. Liz McSkeane, at Turas Press has written an introduction here  She has taken me through the process beautifully, including a visit to the type-setter, discussions on the visual art aspect of the book, and at all times she has kept me up to speed with the process. Turas is a new press, I urge poets to explore the possibility of publishing there. Eavan Boland very kindly read the text and provided an endorsement for me, I am very grateful to her for responding to the text. I have…

bind; a waking book by C. Murray

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They and I, O how far we have fallen! Just to burn here.  You can now order bind via Turas Press bind cover photograph is © Christian Caller, original artwork Bound / Boundless © Salma Ahmad Caller from the Irish Times I am a poet without a landscape, a woman poet without a narrative heritage. I began tracing the huge startling landscape of US and European women’s poetry while in college. I could not find its equivalent here in Ireland. bind reflects the facts of absence and fragmentation in my poetry landscape, and the absence of women poets in our cultural narrative. bind is a book-length poem loosely divided into chapters. These chapters act as boundaries within the action of the poem and provide gateways to differing aspects of the processes inherent in bind. The title of the book takes its name from the triple hyphenation that occurs irregularly within the first chapter. bind explores movement, objects and colours that occur in a no-place or a stasis, the fragmented landscape,   bind   if there are birds …

‘Fire relies on the leaves of gum trees’ and other poems by Dominique Hecq

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Hushed   Light pours down the unrelenting sky to earth ribbed and ridged with the tough stroke of Drysdale’s brush I track down words for hues and shades in books envy the skill of artist-explorers who forged new ways of seeing The cries of crows fall Through blues onto rusty ochres pulsing with raven dust This place stills my tongue   Pulse   1   Somewhere in this night lives a light that turns in the open throat of time.  2   When the sky waits for rain birds squat in silence and longing is but one great sweeping movement that makes the earth quake.   3   The clock stands still in the heat, and I fear the mimicry of clichés— like a comma usurping all punctuation.   4   No, I don’t believe in the silence drying up on your lips.   5   I dream the wish that inhabits you is a space opening up a gap into the night.   6   What I write gleams like the moon pulsing in …

‘The Fold’ and other poems by Alison Driscoll

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The 22nd Minute   The inners of the ash tree twirl fibres up Cú Chulainn’s stick Splintering out like a cut open stomach in centre-forward line The bas is hugged by black steel rods no match in a clash of the ash Which sees your elbow crack it like an egg in one quick blow As you wave your calloused hand to catch the leather bound wine cork It hooks in the L of your fingers and bends thumb like an Allen key You are laid out in black and yellow still like a fragile bee in October I bring you two halves of one ash root, the third one this season They drill screws into ivory phalange as if it was a notice board And your floppy hand is strapped in a headlock waiting for me to sign   Forbidden Fruit   Eden’s apples were the sweetest, full of wet juicy flesh That pools between teeth and bottom lip in each bite. Was it worth it Eve, to break that red fibrous skin And …

‘Prime’ and other poems by Peggie Gallagher

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Parlour   A bolthole, a room half elsewhere adrift in distant grandeur, where breath condenses between damask drapes and the wing of a mahogany table. Where an ear might catch the scratch of a pen, a girl trawling the depths of an inkwell pouring words, slippery as a river of fish spilling loose of their net, slapping their wet tails on the brocade.   What to do with such riches — feed them to her mother’s wedding gifts, pile them into fluted dessert dishes, fling their blue-black panic into the belly of the lamp ravening on the sideboard, the soft spill of innards silvering her fingers cracking their verbs and consonants the way her mother cracks the necks of chickens.   The Three Card Trick Man   After a line by Tom Duddy   The reason I come here is not the horses, though bookie shops abound and a litter of crushed slips. It is always sunny and work is over for the weekend and the girl in the red dress has just stepped out …