Poems from ‘Of Dead Silences’ by Michael McAloran

Of The- Head of death The seasons dissipate as if they Had never collected tears A dissolving sky Soil sieved through fingers The silent laughter of the blood Nothing More- Ruins of the foreign sky From which point all are dead Smears of dying animals upon clear glass The flies will gather, nothing more Ignites- A blindfold of congealed earth The dead drown of inverted tears Lacking the light By which the night ignites the living Upon- Brute flesh shocks the nothing back Into resolve And is then pissed upon Silences- Heart of desolate In a vice of flesh Nowhere else/ nowhere/ nothing less The winds erased having tasted ashes Echoes of non-being Inexplicable silences Champion- Dark hollow The sky unearthed One final breath to champion the infinite Ever- Haven to begin from Scarlet striking out striking the dirt With liquid hands As if it could have ever begun otherwise II #9- Echo within echo within shadow of… Absence/ walls/ flames/ still breath alone Pantheon of carousel/ of vertigo/ of absences Night’s undoing was never night Hence the laughter forever ceases to be #14- Danse of polka winds…night undone/ Night flourishing… Silent retrace of bone/ vapours/ memories Immense sky of non-death/ nothing lessened Razor absences/ peeling away the bloodlessness #15- Hollowed tongue…winds dealt/ silenced Dread lest the fingers break/ (only the elapsed) Sing elixir of non-speech/ mouth full of dry sands Leaving behind the drapery of skinned tide #18- Adrift…a visage of mists…(dead unto breath)/ arbitrary Vault of wasps/ colours/ discoloured skin/ emptily Night of vague breathing/ unheard voices/ voices heard Stillness of forgotten sky/ there or here again/ cast aside Buried sun/ sky/ sun of ashen waste/ teeth of nothingness #19- Waste ground/ flies of haste/ silver voices/ decay Black tongue of…wasted wounds of…soundless again Arise dead/ so much the/ dread/ silenced/ birthed Evaporating tongue of/ erased/ better never/ never to have been

Lapwing Store link for Of Dead Silences All the images accompanying the poems from Of Dead Silences (Lapwing 2013) are © Michael McAloran (Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 2012)

Michael Mc Aloran was Belfast born, (1976). His work has appeared in various print and online zines, including Carcinogenic Poetry, Calliope Nerve, The Recusant, PMI, Sex & Murder Magazine, Full Of Crow, Media Virus, In Between Altered States, Horror, Sleaze & Trash, Negative Suck, Graffiti Kolkata, Pratishedhak, Prathamata, Danse Macabre, amphibi.us, The Plebian Rag, Full of Crow, Gloom Cupboard, Gutter Eloquence, 1000th Monkey, Fashion For Collapse, Fragile Arts Quarterly, Clockwise Cat, Sein Und Werden, Peripheral Surveys, Milk Sugar Literary Journal, Psychic Meatloaf, Cannoli Pie, The Medulla Review, Counterexample Poetics, Heavy Bear, Indigo Rising, Widowmoon Press, Nothing, No-one, Nowhere, Mastodon Dentist, Gobbet, Ink Sweat & Tears, Ygdrasil, Establishment, Stride, A New Ulster, Primal Urge Magazine, Can Can, etc.He has authored a number of chapbooks, including ‘The Gathered Bones’, (Calliope Nerve Media), ‘Final Fragments’, (Calliope Nerve Media), & ‘The Death-Streaked Air’ (Virgogray Press), ‘Debris’, (Erbacce-Press),‘The Rapacious Night‘, (Calliope Nerve Media),’, & ‘Unto Naught’, (Erbacce-Press). A full-length collection of poems, ‘Attributes’, was published by ‘Desperanto’, (NY), in May 2011, & ‘The Non Herein’ was published by Lapwing Publications in 2012. An ekphrastic text/ image book, ‘Machinations’ was published in 2013 by Knives, Forks & Spoons Press (U.K). More recently, two further collections, ‘In Damage Seasons’ & ‘All Stepped/ Undone’ were published by Oneiros Books. Lapwing Publications also recently published a collection of imagistic aphorisms, ‘Of Dead Silences’

Poems by Mary Guckian

Sandymount Strand   In the furrowed sand puddles fill the hollow spaces. the tide slowly overtakes the strollers, wandering out into the vast expanse of Sandymount Strand.   I recall the time we sat in the car near Sligo – tossing Atlantic waves bamboozling us, the sea circling our space, the car sinking in the sliding sand.   Working at out art, we take risks, move out into wider horizons and flourish, but the surrounding tide is waiting and swallows our masterpieces.   Furry Bees Swarming   Cracked by winter frost the old sealed chimney tempts swarming bees out of the wild flowers to locate in the tight space. Flying in with massive loads of pollen over several months they keep the Queen Bee happy.   As the narrow chimney swells with honeycombs and time comes for the colony to escape, moving down the chimney, they fill the kitchen, paper the walls, carpet the floor, seal the windows and cover the back of the door with a warm brown fur.   The local beekeeper visits wearing protective clothing. He coaxes the Queen Bee to enter the nucleus he takes along, the swarm follows, allowing light enter the cottage again, he removes two buckets of honey from a packed chimney, and feeds it back to the bees busy in his hives.   Sacred Tree   I love to stand in the graveyard, underneath the hanging branches of the old palm tree – its broad arms sheltering headstones that inform us – of lives who are now at peace   At funerals, I hide from showers under the sprawling limbs of this majestic icon – where earth is dry, protected from hailstones and hot sun : below this sacred tree tranquility reigns.   Sandymount Strand, Furry Bees Swarming , and Sacred Tree are © Mary Guckian

Mary Guckian was born at Kiltoghert, Co. Leitrim and has lived in Dublin since 1967 leaving to live in Sydney, Tasmania, Channel Islands and Oxford in between. Mary cut poems out of the local Leitrim Observer in her teenage years and got her first poem published in Oxford in 1983, she has gone on to publish three books of poetry, Perfume of the Soil, The Road to Gowel and Walking on Snow with Swan Press. Her books are available in most of the public libraries. She won the Leitrim Guardian Literary Award in 2003 and 2011 for her poems and has been short-listed for the Scottish Open International Poetry Award. She was given the Golden Pen Award for a selection of her published poetry on Art Arena website. Her poems have been widely published in literary magazines and newspapers. Mary has read her poetry in numerous places over the years, last year at the William Carlton Summer School at Clogher, Co. Tyrone and recently to celebrate 100 years of the Rathmines Public Library.

 

A note from Olivia Guest at Jonathan Clowes Ltd.

I am thrilled to have received the following note from Olivia Guest regarding my licence to carry Doris Lessing’s poems, here on Poethead. EDIT: 17/11/2013 I am sorry to hear of the passing of Doris Lessing today.

Dear Christine We’d be delighted for you to host the poems for longer especially if you’re getting such good reactions. Doris Lessing was never very keen on her poetry and didn’t think it was any good so I doubt we will see a re-issue but at least this way, they are available in an alternative form.   Many thanks and best wishes   Olivia

• Poems by Doris Lessing
• Index of Women poets
• Author and Poet Doris Lessing
• Open Salon

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Orphans from Poetry Ireland’s Forum

Some years ago poets and emergent writers used a forum on Poetry Ireland for discussion, testing poetry, and commenting on the work of others. The idea was good, although the tech wasn’t so hot. After some discussion with the then Admin it was decided to have a place (not online) where poems could be published with a view to later submissions. This was a generous extension of your basic discussion forum, and geared to the need of the emergent writer. Poems that appear online are not published by many magazines, so the space had to be a closed one.

Many at the Poetry Ireland Forum went on to publish these works. Unfortunately, the forum is to be closed and while there is no announcement on the forum pages, there is brief note there on the closure and deletion of the forum available to members. There was an email :

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Dear C Murray   Over the past few weeks, Poetry Ireland has been engaged in an in-depth review of all its online resources, including the Poetry Ireland Forum. After careful deliberation, we have decided to close down the Poetry Ireland Forum, with effect from Friday 8th November 2013. We strongly advise all members to make copies of their posts by midnight Thursday 7th November, as after this date the Forum and all its contents will be permanently deleted from our servers. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all Forum members for their participation over the past few years.

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I believe that this deadline for removal of works has been extended, though not indefinitely, and that an archive has been made available to members of the PI Forum. The type of tech used does not allow for portability, so files must be manually taken off and uploaded elsewhere. This is a huge and upsetting inconvenience.
 
I have been in and out removing drafts of poems, the majority of them later published. I am linking them below this brief post. The conversations and encouragement on a place dedicated to poetic interests is to be expediently dumped down the tubes and some of that loss is irretrievable for me (and others)
 
I hope when PI finish their deliberations on their online facilities that they will find a way to extend their space to emergent writers in a manner that includes data liberation tools and a stated ethos regarding intellectual rights.

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Dear C. Murray, There is an archive of the Forum, which is currently available to all registered Forum members at  http://www.poetryireland.ie/forum/archive/index.php Unfortunately, we no longer have the resources to host and moderate the Forum. We strongly recommend that members make copies of any posts/original work they wish to keep.

• Poems and drafts retrieved from the Poetry Ireland Forum (C. Murray) I.

• Poems and drafts retrieved from the Poetry Ireland Forum (C. Murray) II.

Previews of The Blind published in Ditch Poetry

The following poem is an excerpt from a sequence published by Ditch Poetry. The sequence is from my forthcoming collection, The Blind (Oneiros Books 2013). Part of the Sequence is published here. The first poem in the sequence, hunger, appears throughout the collection and was first published in A New Ulster Magazine.

suspend I   from the mirror architrave float down silken threads they are not blackened yet   from the ceiling hooks float down wisps of red thread – almost   cobweb light she is arched back unsure whether to suspend   burnt orange silks cover the shutters there are children in the street   she is nonetheless quite bound-up in red ropes   from loop at nape and length of torso it is peaceful   being spider-rolled webbed-in and arched as if a -   a bird swoops down behind the orange silks ….. shiftshape-in

Suspend I by C. Murray, is taken from The Blind (Oneiros Books 2013) and is published in part at Ditch Poetry.