“The Bellmouth” and other poems by Gráinne Tobin

Internal Exile   It was all too much. He took to his bed, and stayed there for ten years, begetting, however, several more children. She carried trays up and down the stairs and he lay hidden, staring out to sea. At night he watched the lighthouse winking through his shuttered window. All the money was gone. It didn’t matter. They picked a living from their children’s labour at this salty edge of earth, where there was always fishing, chickens, a smallholding of sorts, some barter.   What got him up and dressed at last was this. One afternoon from under his eiderdown he gazed beyond the glass panes, as the waves framed by floral curtains, silently rose, and gulped his two sons in their boat – corpses never found, skiff washed ashore in pieces, the coastal searches just as futile as that warm sanctuary where the need to witness woke him in the end.   From The Nervous Flyer’s Companion   Happy Days in Sunny Newcastle   The air’s washed now, last night’s sad leavings swept up and away. Van drivers park outside the bakery with fried eggs held in breakfast soda farls.   Arcades of slot machines lie berthed between streams that slip downhill to a tideline flagged with pebbles, faded wood, wrecked loot, rubber gloves, broken glass abraded to droplets by the tumbling waves.   The daily walker on his coatless course between youth and age, observing wading birds and children’s games.   Up for a trip, out for a drive, dandering down the promenade.   Loudhailer hymns, crusaders’ tracts warn of strange temptations offered to ice-cream lickers, candy-floss lovers.   In the chip-shops’ wake the street opens to the sea which is the reason for everything, shingle bank, shops and houses, foundations sunk in marsh, confined by a shadowed arm where mountains lift out of the water, growing darkness like moss over the forest where the young roost with beer and campfires.   Heron pacing the harbour at twilight stiff-collared in clerical grey, squinting at coloured lights edging the bay.   Far out, the lighthouse signalling, Good – night chil – dren.   From The Nervous Flyer’s Companion   What Did You Say?   Asda, Downpatrick   While the till extrudes my coiled receipt I’m making small talk for the checkout man penned in his hatch by the conveyor belt.   Getting busy now? is all I’m asking, but he responds The building is sinking into the marshes as if the two of us   are conspirators with codes and passwords, exchanging news of dangers met or planned. He smiles, he nods, he shrugs, he sweeps   a hand towards the dipping car-park in a gesture from an opera’s revelation, to the orange barriers and repair signs   shoring up the ground of all our commerce against stirrings of the earth in peaty reed-beds. Under the paving, the beach. Under the tarmac, the bog.   Counting Children   The little boy is counting in clear-voiced German eucalyptus cones that drop, pock pock, on the café tables by the coach trip basilica, as up and down the half-mile staircase to the hilltop chapel with its cold-drink stall and cats, every child that passed was counting, in the languages of Europe, how many steps.   An idle afternoon is stored, recessive, a hundred aromatic seed-bells saved in a bag. Picking the crayfish off his plate for a puppet, speaking its words, snapping its claws for his dad, he lays down love in his bones like calcium.   From Banjaxed   The Bellmouth   Silent Valley Reservoir, Kilkeel   Come on, we’ll take a spin up to the valley, cross the sentry’s palm with silver at red gates in Water Commission walls, admire mown lawns and plaques on benches, tread new tarmac to the bellmouth – time a spillaway that swallows all.   Here, around the whirlpool of partition, when engineering was godliness, and the doctrine of the city was the purity of its water, they walled the heather slopes with granite blocks, trimmed the plughole of the reservoir in Protestant-looking burnt-blue brick, smoothed to the curve of a brass-band horn, a vortex fed by reeling mountain streams.   Granite, laid on puddled clay by giants whose folk-tale graves lie deep in stony fields, who drank their tea from sooty cans, ate their cold hard porridge sliced, worked the hills for a boss with a voice like rifle fire. I smell blood, one said, stopped halfway in the overflow tunnel when the hooter sounded a fatal fall. Stone men who wore starched shirts to dances in the recreation hall, watched Chaplin at the valley picture house, grown men who’d give a push-up to schoolgirls climbing the Mourne Wall in polished shoes, dropping down to leave the mountain roughness to walk the road to Mass in Attical –   girls of twelve who fastened wood-shavings as ringlets in their hair, whose uncle, one quiet Sunday, lowered them from the derrick down the hole half-dug for the dam, standing in a metal bucket, up to their necks, to look out on a hundred feet of dark, at grit and water leaking between cast-iron plates that lined the trench and held the walls apart –   living with Bignian in front of them and Pov-rty behind, spelt out in scree on the slope of Pig Mountain.

 

A Deconsecrated Furniture Showroom

 
Fultons Fine Furnishings

The glass hall’s empty except for a sellotaped notice
to show the pilgrim to the upstairs cafe,
where a waitress tells me
the place was shut down months ago,
and we say the words to each other –
receivership, jobs, recession,
antiphon, call and response.

The restaurant will continue to trade
in spite of the recklessness of their banking partners
and their agents.

The Private Dining Room’s a locked royal chapel,
and the nave a funnel of celestial light
within the shadowy void
as the escalator carries you upwards,
a ladder of souls,
to vacant room-sets, side-chapels,
frescoes, marble and parquet altars
sealed off with swags of tape.
Shaded lanterns burn on their chains
as in Toledo of the captives

and the faithful still meet for conversation,
broccoli bake and apple tart,
in their breaks from the industrial estate,
retail park, car dealership, warehouses,
hospital wards across the roundabout.

The Bell Mouth & other poems are © Grainne Tobin
 

Gráinne Tobin grew up in Armagh and lives in Newcastle, Co Down with her husband. She taught for many years, in further and adult education and in Shimna Integrated College. She is interested in keeping poetry open to its audience, including people without long years of schooling. Her books are Banjaxed and The Nervous Flyer’s Companion (Summer Palace Press) and a third collection is due soon from Arlen House. She was a founder-member of the Word of Mouth Poetry Collective, which met monthly for 25 years in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, and she contributed to Word of Mouth (Blackstaff Press) which was translated into Russian, and to the Russian-English parallel text anthology of members’ translations from five St Petersburg women poets, When the Neva Rushes Backwards (Lagan Press). Some of her poems are available in online archives, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Troubles Archive and the Poetry Ireland archive. Some have been exhibited in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast and Derry’s Central Library. One was made into a sculpture and is on permanent display in Down Arts Centre, Downpatrick. She has had poems in anthologies – The Stony Thursday Book, Aesthetica Creative Writing, Washing Windows, On the Grass When I Arrive, Something About Home – in magazines such as Abridged, Poetry Ireland, The Dickens, Mslexia, Irish Feminist Review, Boyne Berries, Skylight 47, Crannog, Banshee, Acumen, North West Words, Ulla’s Nib, Fortnight, the South Bank Magazine, and also online, in Four X Four and on a website for psychotherapists. She has won the Down Arts, Mourne Observer and Segora poetry prizes and has been listed in competitions.

“The Surrealist ” by Csilla Toldy

The Surrealist – honouring Leonora Carrington –   A young lady, treated as merchandise.   Society made no sense for Leonora, and her best friend the hyena.   She fell in love with a surrealist painting and sought out its creator to take him, too, on a free fall.   Life was real in France, married to their work of art, (and his wife) till the Gestapo took over the city and Max was arrested –   Leonora broke down, now fully. She fled to Spain, But not from family and pain. (After being sanctioned to electroshock therapy for three years), She ran   from the care of an Irish nun to the Mexican embassy in Lisbon, where united with Max and their entourage: his wife, his new lover and saviour, her own saviour ambassador, stand-in-husband – they held wake – over the corpse of Love.   Travelling together on the same boat, towards New York, in two distinctly different directions, she found herself in a weird future, alive and sane, in the company of livid creatures.   The Surrealist – honouring Leonora Carrington – is © Csilla Toldy

Photo by Alistair Livingstone Csilla Toldy was born in Budapest. After a long odyssey in Europe she entered the UK with a writer’s visa to work on films and ended up living in Northern Ireland in 1998. Her prose appeared in Southword, Black Mountain Review and anthology, Fortnight, The Incubator Journal, Strictly Writing and Cutalongstory. Her poetry was published online and in print literary magazines, such as Snakeskin and Poetry24, Savitri, Lagan Online, Headstuff, Visible Verse, A New Ulster and in two chapbooks published by Lapwing Belfast: Red Roots – Orange Sky and The Emigrant Woman’s Tale. Csilla makes videopoems, available on her website: www.csillatoldy.co.uk & https://soundcloud.com/ctoldy

“Morning in the Garden” in Şiirden 37

My thanks to Müesser Yeniay who is editor of Şiirden Magazine (of Poetry) and who translated “Morning in the Garden” for issue 37 of the magazine. The poem first appeared in ANU 48 (Editor, Amos Grieg). You can read some of Müesser Yeniay’s work at the following links, Three Poems, Phoenix and other poems, and Kafes (The Cage) and other poems. For me, poetry  can be about cross-cultural pollination (translation) and it can occur at very simple levels, without the trumpets and big budgets. Ekphrasis need not be limited to the image, nor need it be static. The issue is always quite simply about the poet’s response to the poetry of another. I am very grateful to Müesser for her translation of my work.

“Colour” and Other Poems by Paul Casey

Colour for T.S.Eliot and after fourteen poets The purple stole away from the skins of plums Everywhere we turned became a maze of colour I protect you with an indigo coloured whisper You curve the ends of my black and white day Coffee brown, is mole, dying leaves, dry earth But smell led me here, the smell of yellow The blue, white and red stripes of exotic confusion Moving over the green gravel of a formal grave I wet my lips and a blackbird flies out of my mouth Faces in the front row, silvered in screenlight, focus I thought everyone knew what was meant by sugar-paper blue Tyrian dyes and flax and peacock plumes Gold and yellow where the clouds crack and break away Anemone-blue mountains outlined against the pearl-grey morning Colour was first published in Live Encounters Fishapod out of Watercolour The Spring sea arrives in flailing sage, clutches lime-white soles with the early hunger of sand. Seeping, air-bound, caught on the cusp of an inner eclipse I turn to olive water. Nothing can be at rest beneath this marble ichor moon of all things opaque and aquamarine. In stone-pale, heaving waves tik-taa-lik struggle to reach the shore – to shift an ageing jade spell for the sea to cast wide her turquoise daydreams helpless crashing raging at the thirsty white sun, the untempered one as ocean sighs find all that crawl from her murky womb to stand and gaze uncertain at ice slowly gleaming teal or a fern vapour of dream. – first published in home more or less (Salmon Poetry, 2012) An Béal Corcra Delightful aftertaste this river of kingly colour Ocular delight this stream of purpoesy vein-aortic mix of spirit liquid as even evolved vampires overdose on blends of rich-thick contradiction, of unravelled breaths expired even as seasoned muses pilgrim-seasoned muses each leave a trail of purple dripping from tongue and teeth a new harvest of mystery and even as starved poets sip the mountain manna purple poem wine, dream-drunk poets pulse-deafened descend purply their seasoned lips – first published in the chapbook It’s Not all Bad (Heaventree Press, 2009) Blue Roses for Rosie And then there are uncertain nights when she blushes a sudden lavender as I first remember, or darkens to a violet sleep. Sometimes, she shimmers from the tranquil deep of a burgundy world, dreaming and I witness her water to a pale coral dawn I’ve seen her shine as light as pear tethered still and clear by the anchors of warm mid-morning daydreams, turn sepal green as if petal less or glow amber as the fallen leaves from a bouquet of autumn operas. And on each blue moon, without fail fold into the calm of origami white. Usually my rose is a full flaming-red cardinal weekend in a time made only of roses. Is a wild flowering rambler, a climber, a rosebush of scarlet matadors, urging the shy and tormented to dance in the showers of abundant daily joy. If on certain days I could breathe for her, roses of only breath, they would each live as blessed as a momentary labour of thorn-less blood a singly purposed mist of quartz, two thousand tender dozens per day all shed before her footsteps and dewed, tinted finely, with the scent of blue roses. – first published in The Stony Thursday Book and then in home more or less (Salmon Poetry, 2012) In the Shade ash green lakes aquamarine memory beryl tears cambium skin celadon mist chartreuse touch clover-sprung harp copper green temper coral turquoise tongue emerald green heart fern green sleep forest green winter grass green bed gravel-green lullabies grey-green wink hawthorn essence hazel green gaze island green iris jade green mouth lime green aura marble green poitín lips midnight shade of green mint green sight moss green sex myrtle green palms olive green age opal green seas pea green ire peacock-green visions pine green bones reed green waters sage green fires sap green toes seaweed green thighs spring green dawn Tara green rain tea green calm teal sorrow-pools thyme green dusk viridian storms – first published in home more or less (Salmon Poetry, 2012) . Colour & other poems are © Paul Casey

Image: Shane Vaughan (2016) Paul Casey was born in Cork, Ireland in 1968. His poetry collections are home more or less (Cliffs of Moher, Salmon Poetry, 2012); and Virtual Tides (Salmon Poetry, 2015). His chapbook of longer poems is It’s Not all Bad (Coventry, Heaventree Press, 2009) In October 2010 his poetry-film The Lammas Hireling, after the poem by Ian Duhig, premièred at the Zebra poetry-film festival in Berlin and has been screened at StanZa in Edinburgh and Sadho in New Delhi. He grew up in various stages between Ireland, Zambia and South Africa, working mostly in film, multimedia and teaching. He lectured screen writing at the Nelson Mandela University, where he convened the greater Port Elizabeth Poetry Competition in three languages and four age groups. He is the founder and organiser of the Ó Bhéal reading series in Cork, where he lives. (Source: Irish Writers Online) . Audio and Film Poetry by Paul Casey: “Anginyamalalanga” (Salmon Poetry) / from Home More Or Less “International Citizen” (Salmon Poetry) / from Virtual Tides Anginyamalalanga https://vimeo.com/163938364 The Lammas Hireling

“Kafes” (The Cage) and other poems by Müesser Yeniay

Carvansarai of Night Tonight here should be dance of words -in the carvansarai of your glory- tonight I am as joyful as the grasses that saw the sun and full with the existence of my dream.   Kafes (The Cage) Like a bird looking for its cage, I am flying around time In my chest, human voices… Then an army of ants dissolving -an ant is eating another- They call it a proverb as they pound on the country   Menstruation Postfeminismus Silence becomes word drop by drop I am a woman, a poet in this nothingness that batters my body egg that leaves my womb every month has a legend in my body it has a trace my womenhood my Achilles toe my dog that barks every month a man can't be a poet a man can be a pen for a poet Kafes (The Cage) and other poems are © Müesser Yeniay, translated by the poet.

MÜESSER YENİAY was born in İzmir, 1984; she graduated from Ege University, with a degree in English Language and Literature. She took her M.A on Turkish Literature at Bilkent University. She has won several prizes in Turkey including Yunus Emre (2006), Homeros Attila İlhan (2007), Ali Riza Ertan (2009), Enver Gökçe (2013) poetry prizes. She was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Muse Pie Press in USA.   Her first book Darkness Also Falls Ground was published in 2009 and her second book I Founded My Home in the Mountains, a collection of translation from world poetry. Her second poetry book I Drew the Sky Again was published in 2011. She has translated the poems of Persian poet Behruz Kia as Requiem to Tulips. She has translated the Selected Poems of Gerard Augustin together with Eray Canberk, Başak Aydınalp, Metin Cengiz (2011). She has also translated the Personal Anthology of Michel Cassir together with Eray Canberk and Metin Cengiz (2011). Lately, she has published a Contemporary Spanish Anthology with Metin Cengiz and Jaime B. Rosa. She also translated the poetry of Israeli poet Ronny Someck (2014) and Hungarian poet Attila F. Balazs (2015). She has published a book on modern Turkish Avant-garde poetry The Other Consciousness: Surrealism and The Second New (2013). Her latest poetry book Before Me There Were Deserts was published in 2014 in İstanbul. Her poems were published in Hungarian by AB-Art Press by the name A Rozsaszedes Szertartasa (2015).   Her poems have appeared in the following magazines abroad: Actualitatea Literară (Romania), The Voices Project, The Bakery, Sentinel Poetry, Yellow Medicine Review, Shot Glass Journal, Poesy, Shampoo, Los Angeles Review of Books, Apalachee Review (USA&England); Kritya, Shaikshik Dakhal (India); Casa Della Poesia, Libere Luci, I poeti di Europe in Versi e il lago di Como (Italy); Poeticanet, Poiein (Greece); Revue Ayna, Souffle, L’oiseau de feu du Garlaban (France); Al Doha (Qatar); Tema (Croatia); Dargah (Persia). Her work appears in the following anthologies: With Our Eyes Wide Open; Aspiring to Inspire, 2014 Women Writers Anthology; 2014 Poetry Anthology- Words of Fire and Ice (USA) Poesia Contemporanea de la Republica de Turquie (Spain); Voix Vives de Mediterranee en Mediterranee, Anthologie Sete 2013 ve Poetique Insurrection 2015 (France); One Yet Many- The Cadence of Diversity ve ayrıca Shaikshik Dakhal (India); Come Cerchi Sull’acqua (Italy).   Her poems have been translated into Vietnamese, Hungarian, Croatian, English, Persian, French, Serbian, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, Greek, Hindi, Spanish and Romanian. Her book in Hungarian was published in 2015 by AB-Art Publishing by the name “A Rozsaszedes Szertartasa” She has participated in the poetry festivals like Sarajevo International Poetry Festival, September 2010 (Bosnia-Herzegovina); Nisan International Poetry Festival, May 2011 (Israel); Belgrad International Poetry Festival, September 2012 (Serbia); Voix Vives International Poetry Festival (Sete), July 2013 (France); Kritya International Poetry Festival, September 2013 (India), Galati/Antares International Poetry Festival, June 2014 (Romania), Medellin International Poetry Festival, July 2014 (Colombia); 2nd Asia Pacific Poetry Festival 2015 (Vietnam).   Müesser is the editor of the literature magazine Şiirden (of Poetry). She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Turkish literature at Bilkent University, Ankara, and is also a member of PEN and the Writers Syndicate of Turkey.   “Phoenix” and other poems by by Müesser Yeniay An Index of Women Poets