tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56920883588151402482024-03-18T15:41:06.774-07:00AmpersandNoel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-13447917141118372672020-08-17T05:50:00.007-07:002020-10-19T06:51:58.255-07:00Street Light Amber print edition now available<p>I'm delighted to report that the print edition of my new collection <i>Street Light Amber </i>is now available. Given the current fluid circumstances surrounding Covid and the ever-changing guidance, I have decided to not launch the collection. This is a great disappointment and nothing compares to the excitement of a launch night. I do hope, though, that you might consider buying a copy. All a writer wants, above all else, is for their work to reach an audience. The rest is just a bonus.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q-IbeRu6PZI/Xzp5fXTqBJI/AAAAAAAAA6c/3yTxCtnAnHktncKzZMBLcevhzevkqvGBwCLcBGAsYHQ/s500/Street%2BLight%2BAmber%2B-%2Bcover%2Blarge.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="313" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q-IbeRu6PZI/Xzp5fXTqBJI/AAAAAAAAA6c/3yTxCtnAnHktncKzZMBLcevhzevkqvGBwCLcBGAsYHQ/w250-h400/Street%2BLight%2BAmber%2B-%2Bcover%2Blarge.jpg" width="250" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>After an absence of three years, the
narrator's lover returns. The two slowly begin the tentative </i><i>process of
regaining trust against the backdrop of the city streets of their past. </i>Street
Light Amber<i> is a chamber piece, a study in obsession and the
metaphysical state of disorientation it leaves in its wake, haunted at its core
by love lost and the hope that it might yet be restored.</i> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></p><p> </p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-large;">*</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Street Light Amber </i>can be ordered from <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Street-Light-Amber-Noel-Duffy/9781908742742?ref=grid-view&qid=1597667988923&sr=1-4" target="_blank">The Book Depository</a> (with free worldwide delivery), <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1908742747/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i1" target="_blank">Amazon UK</a> and <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/street-light-amber/noel-duffy/9781908742742" target="_blank">Waterstones</a>. The Kindle edition of the book can also be found at <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Street-Light-Amber-Noel-Duffy-ebook/dp/B08773ZK94" target="_blank">Amazon</a>.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">I am very proud of the work in this narrative collection and I really hope some of you may be tempted to buy the collection and if you do you have my heartfelt gratitude.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">For now, I'm just so pleased to have the print edition now available. My thanks to my publisher Ward Wood for making it happen during these difficult times.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></p>Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-85270797226385924692020-04-19T04:29:00.003-07:002020-10-19T06:49:57.850-07:00David Butler 'launches' Street Light Amber (Kindle)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Imaginary Bookshop</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Welcome
to my blog for the ‘launch’ of my fourth poetry collection <i>Street Light
Amber. </i>Obviously, I would’ve loved to have done this is a personal setting but
given the nature of the times – which puts everything else in perspective, of course – I have
had to improvise to make some small happening for the birthing of the Kindle
edition of this collection (a print copy not being viable right now, again due
to our present circumstance). I asked the poet David Butler if he might be
willing to introduce the book and I’m delighted that he accepted that invitation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">David
is a very talented man. He is an accomplished novelist and playwright and has
been known to take to the footlights on occasion. He is also a
multi-linguist and has translated the selected poems of Portuguese poet <a href="https://www.dedaluspress.com/product/selected-poems-pessoa/" target="_blank">Fernando Pessoa</a>. Above all else though, I love his poetry which manages to
achieve the high-wire act of being both highly wrought and virtuoso,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>while managing to remain immediate and felt. He has published two full collections, <i>Via Crucis </i>in 2011 and <i><a href="https://www.doirepress.com/writers/a_f/david_butler/" target="_blank">All the Barbaric Glass</a> </i>in 2017, which I had the great pleasure and honour to
launch in the Irish Writers' Centre. Truly, both these collections reveal a deeply committed and extraordinary talent.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Naturally,
I am thrilled that David returned the compliment in agreeing to launch this
book for me. It was initially assumed that the launch would take the form of a
bookshop event, but the very difficult events we are living through have made creating a print edition impossible, for now at least, as
my publisher’s printer and distributor are closed during this period and
understandably so. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">However,
I’m delighted that we can publish the book as a Kindle edition (links below) and
while publishing a book online like this will never replicate the excitement of
a launch night, I’m so happy to be able to mark this occasion in some small way. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">David
has been a soldier and written up his launch notes at short notice and I
sincerely thank him for that. I will say a little more after them, for now, I
want to sincerely thank him and express my appreciation for the hard work and
lucidity he brought to bear on them. So here is what he has to say:</span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">David Butler</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Dating back certainly as far as his 2011 debut
collection, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In the Library of Lost
Objects, </i>Noel Duffy has a long-standing interest in the past – how we shape
it as much as how it shapes us; how memories are lost or retrieved; how
individual moments may be ‘snatched from the passionate transitory’, in Patrick
Kavanagh’s memorable phrase. After two intervening collections that drew more
heavily on his scientific background and interests, Duffy’s fourth collection, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Street</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Light</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Amber</i>, marks a
return to this fertile territory.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The collection is framed by an evocative, identically repeated poem whose
protagonist might be taken as an objective correlative for the poetic persona –
a solitary figure working in the Post Office’s Department of Dead Letters who nightly
undertakes his duty ‘to piece together the clues / and runes of misspelt
addresses, the half-remembered / names, the scrawling handwriting,’ while, of
the figure himself, ‘everything in his life is late or lost’. Like the unnamed
nocturnal worker, the poet of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Street
Light Amber </i>has left somewhere behind him ‘the outline of a woman’s body, a
question mark / against the sheets.’</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">What
differentiates the poet from the night-worker is that the clues and runes he
must sort through and decipher relate to fragments of his own past, as
memorably captured in the poem ‘Triage’. Here, the poet discharges the contents
of pockets and wallet onto the kitchen table, then examines ‘the debris of a
life like some hidden message, / caution to the man who seeks redemption / in
the triage of lost things laid out before him.’ Among these items (note the
aptness of the enjambment) is: ‘a passport booth snapshot photo of you / and
me’. Indeed it is noteworthy that the majority of the poems, (I count 21 out of
33), take the form of an apostrophe to this lost love, fragments of a shared
past addressed directly to ‘you’, or incorporating ‘we’. Only in ‘Snapshot’ has
this directly addressed ‘you’ finally become a ‘she’, perhaps suggesting some
sort of distance has finally been achieved.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Photography
is a repeated trope by which the poet addresses the collection’s overriding
concern with time and memory. ‘Darkroom Notes’ describes with beautiful
precision </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">the image of
an old hotel ‘emerging in the red gloom of the darkroom, / the filigree of the
ironwork window boxes painted over / in the double-exposure of memory’s
flashbulb / and the rust of time passing.’</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> ‘Night Walking’ is an account of the poet’s Kinsella-like peregrinations through the sleeping city
carrying a camera with which to capture ‘life stilled and recycled’; while
‘Girl in Window’ suggests how both colour and motion are ‘frozen to a moment in
the monochrome film.’ Is there a parallel between a photo’s relationship to a
living moment and a poem’s? (c.f. Wordsworth’s origin of poetry as emotion
recollected in tranquillity). The poem ‘The Last Day of Summer’ would seem to
suggest as much, beginning: ‘Life must stop for an instant / before it
continues, the moment / lived a second time in the room of memory, / a ghost
image in the mind.’</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Noel
Duffy has a talent for capturing images with photographic precision. There is
‘the smoke fluttering away / with the delicacy of silk turning / in a beam of
light,’ (‘The Last Day of Summer); ‘the vaulting glass of the Victorian palm
house, / the slam of humid heat that meets us as we enter,’ (‘The Botanical
Gardens’); while in ‘Touch’, within a glass of mint tea, the poet describes
‘the sun brought down and contained in the liquid.’ But what if the memories,
the repeated encounters with ghost images, are painful and unwanted? The
unbidden past appears to haunt the poet in ‘Reflection in Darkness’ in which a
sideward glance catches ‘the shadow / of my face in the mirror, the sockets
sunk, the skull /and bone-house that traps and cradles the mind / in its
sleeping library of half-forgotten scenes.’ These aren’t necessarily the most
emotionally charged memories, for as the collection’s title poem warns, ‘the
most casual things are what / ambush the mind.’ If you are looking for a
manifesto for the effectiveness of art, you might do worse than take this last
idea to heart.</span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Paul Malone</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I’m
so pleased to receive David’s astute and sharply keen observations on my work. He
really is one of the finest poet writing today in Ireland and I’m so honoured
to have him mark the occasion of the publication of this book with such
generous and perceptive remarks. He has my profound thanks and I,
for one, greatly look forward to his next collection, which I understand is in
the pipeline, though won’t be out in the world for a while yet. It will, no
doubt, be worth the wait.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">I just thought I would lead on from here by making some small remarks
on <i>Street Light Amber. </i>The collection could also be considered
as a cycle of narrative love poems albeit ones that operate rather more like a
photo collage or mood-piece (as David alluded to) than an explicitly
straightforward story. Given this, I really recommend you don’t just dip and
skip around it. It is best served in chronology. Also, it is a short collection (though no easier to write for
that) so you could read it in a single sitting, but then hopefully a second
time and earn double your money’s worth from it. The poems chart and attempt to
rebuild a relationship after a break of several years. Rather like Euridice
returned unexpectedly from the underworld the two lovers try to give
things another go against the red-brick houses, canals and Georgian houses of
an unnamed city. Perhaps, in a reversal to that famous myth, the book asks the question
is it love itself that will return us to the light of the cedar grove or
destined to descend again to the shadowlands of that dark kingdom below
it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />
I sincerely hope you enjoy these poems and I would be so pleased if you might
be willing to buy the Kindle edition of collection and see what you make of it.
I’m very proud of this work and I can say, despite its relatively short length,
that it was a book that was very hard-won by, though no less enjoyable to write for that.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br />To end, here are four poems to try to whet the appetite. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Touch</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Noticed in the stray moment,
your hand </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">resting by the glass of mint tea
on the table, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">the sun brought down and
contained in the liquid, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">the green of its leaves
reflected on your fingers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Nothing then to disturb the
composition </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">as my eye discovers again the
contour of your touch, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">its invisible look leaving no
mark on your skin</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">as your hand moves and you reach
for the glass,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">raise it to your mouth, drink
again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Botanical Gardens </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">You lean
down close to the blossom, inhale deeply;</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">the stem
straight, the perfect contours of the stamen,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">the tight,
precise folds of containing petals. There is</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">a sadness
in the opulent grace of such things whose </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">season is
passing. The August sunshine suddenly </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">darkens,
the cloud thickening to rain. I take your hand </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">as we run
to take cover, passing beneath the creepers </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">that climb
the arching ironwork trellis of the entrance </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">to the
rose garden. You pull tight your yellow overcoat </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">and we
hurriedly make our way towards the shelter</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">of the
vaulting glass of the Victorian palm house, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">the slam
of humid heat that meets us as we enter, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">the
intense odour of sweat reminding us of ourselves. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">You shake
away the rain and laugh as an old couple </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">walk slowly
past, arm in arm, carrying each other along, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">like the
century flower that blooms only once in its lifetime, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">but endures
so many seasons to continue so. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Last Day of Summer </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">before it continues, the moment<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">lived a second time in the room of memory, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">a ghost image in the mind.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The sunlight shifts in the curtain lace, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">your face framed by the window <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">as you raise your cigarette to your mouth, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">with the delicacy of silk turning <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">in a beam of light, the ash straining <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">backwards by the weight of its own gravity,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">then falling down onto your dress<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">without you noticing.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Lunation</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The cycle is complete. I look
down at you, the silver </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">cross on your neck rising and
falling as you sleep, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">the blood moon’s crimson in the
curtainless window </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">tangled in the autumn detail of
bare branches. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">A dog barks as if sensing the
sky’s disturbance </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">and my own. I leave you there to
my lingering mistake, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">sneak quietly down the dimly lit
landing</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">to the staircase and the hallway
that leads to the kitchen, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">the whiskey that waits in the
cupboard,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">falling again by trapdoors in
every choice I make, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">the promises I made to you but
could not keep.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I
just wish to end with a few thank yous and try not to make it sound it like an
Oscar speech (you can find that in the acknowledgements in the book itself!).
This collection went through many variations over several years and I want to
sincerely thank Beth Phillips for always being available to discuss and critique it and to act as a sounding board and
guide as I proceeded with it. Thanks also to James W. Wood for his keen
interest and advice throughout and to Shauna Gilligan for her astute suggestion at a key juncture. I’d like to make a special thank you
to my editor at Ward Wood Adele Ward. We
have been working together for almost ten years over five books now and I’m always
grateful to her for the loyalty and support, and above all the belief she has shown in my work throughout. </span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">Finally,</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;"> my gratitude to Mike Wood for preparing this Kindle edition for publication and for all the other good work he does at the press.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">On
that note I will end. I hope you will like this collection and that it might
pass a few hours in these difficult times and transport you from it for an hour
or two. Unfortunately, there is no wine to be served at this ‘paperless’ launch.
I wish we could have done this in person but I promise to buy you all one when
the day comes! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iII7dRqLsKM/Xo8N_fY6UhI/AAAAAAAAA3Q/nUeFp2sUTrAGZGLoJX101VRaT0ZtNb0HQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Street%2BLight%2BAmber%2BCOVER%2B%252313%2BThumb.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="801" data-original-width="1054" height="242" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iII7dRqLsKM/Xo8N_fY6UhI/AAAAAAAAA3Q/nUeFp2sUTrAGZGLoJX101VRaT0ZtNb0HQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Street%2BLight%2BAmber%2BCOVER%2B%252313%2BThumb.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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It just leaves me to say that I hope, if you buy this collection, it will reward the investment. The Kindle edition is available from today for £4.99 at <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08773ZK94/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1" target="_blank">Amazon</a> in the UK.<br />
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I thank you all for coming along to this 'virtual' launch and I hope you will all keep safe and well in the coming times.<br />
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<br />Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-56532715191647861362019-03-09T04:32:00.000-08:002019-03-09T10:36:39.733-08:00Interview with Shauna Gilligan, autumn 2013<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US">I have decided to repost this interview </span>on the publication of my collection <i>On Light & Carbon</i> with the novelist Shauna Gilligan from autumn 2013. Shauna has reconstructed her website since then so the link to this very worthwhile conversation is no longer available. Shauna is an author of great courage and curiosity and I urge you to visit her new site <a href="https://shaunagilliganwriter.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">A Girl's Writing is Never Done</a>. So here is our chat. I was particularly pleased to talk about the long centrepiece poem in the book 'Timepieces'. Hope you find it interesting.</div>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt;"><b><span lang="EN-US">Noel, congratulations on your second poetry collection <i>On Carbon & Light. </i>This first question has two parts – tell me a little about the title and cover, they are both intriguing and, in what way do you feel your second collection links to your first, which was nominated for the Strong Award?</span></b></li>
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<span lang="EN-US">Well, I had the title for a poem called ‘On Light & Carbon’ for maybe ten years. I imagined it would be a kind of technical poem about photosynthesis and while it would crop up every now and then, I never managed to write it. When I started this collection in summer 2010, I finally approached it and the poem that resulted was totally different than one I envisaged, written in counterpoint and a naïve voice. That said, photosynthesis still made it in there. It struck me as I went on with the book and wrote quite a few science poems about light, as well as another about carbon, that this would be a good title for the whole book. In a way, the poem also poses the central question of the collection, as it moves between religious notions of the nature of life and scientific ones that sometimes seem to override those. So, it may seem like a strange title, but it suits somehow. The cover idea really came from talking to an artist friend and he had planned to do the cover image by organically imposing the equation for photosynthesis onto actual leaves. In the end, we didn’t get around to it, but when I spoke to Mike at Ward Wood about the cover, I suggested we try to do something along those lines. So the leaves in sunlight and the equation came from that discussion. I think it’s quite striking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">To answer the second part of the question, this book connects in some ways to <i>In the Library of Lost Objects</i>, exploring the intimate dramas of life against the backdrop of science. Here though, I’ve replaced Natural History with human history and anthropology, for the most part, also exploring the role and meaning of myth and art in all this. So there is some cross-over, but I feel the tone is less lyrical and more metaphysical. I’ve also tried to push deeper into certain scientific ideas, but hopefully in a way that I bring the reader with me – whether they know much about science or not. That was part of the challenge. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt;"><b><span lang="EN-US">What was your general approach to writing poems in the book?<o:p></o:p></span></b></li>
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<i><span lang="EN-US">In the Library of Lost Objects</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> had taken a long time to write as I often wrote fragments of poems and would add a bit and then leave it for months and then add something more. It was a very slow process, though oddly the three longer poems were written quite quickly in a kind of sprint over three or four days, and didn’t change that much after that. So, with this collection, it struck me to try that approach and see what might come out of it. One thing I found was when an idea or mood came it would immediately seem to suggest a title, but I also quickly realized I had to write a few lines down. This acted as a kind of key and a way back into the poem. Then, often the next day, I just riffed on the idea and wrote fragments down in a notebook. At a certain point, when I felt a poem was beginning to suggest itself, I would move all this onto the computer and generally very quickly find the shape and structure for the piece. I would then try to complete a decent draft on that day. Working this fast somehow led to the poems being not over-thought and often the results took me by surprise. I discovered that once I started this process, other ideas presented themselves and I would gather momentum. So I wrote like this for, say, three months at a time and would then stand back. Over three such (intense) spells of writing over a three year period, I produced the poems in the book – and a good deal more, I should add, that just didn’t quite fit the themes that came through most strongly over that time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt;"><b><span lang="EN-US">I am interested, in particular, in ‘Timepieces’. Tell me about the genesis of this epic? <o:p></o:p></span></b></li>
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<span lang="EN-US">You know, there are a lot of poems about love or death or other subjects (I’ve written about them myself, of course) but very few about friendship, which is a bit odd when you consider the importance of friends in our lives. So this piece is about a friendship my dad struck up with a labourer at Dublin Bus, then known as CIE, where he worked in the late 70s. This man, PJ, turned out to be a respected amateur antiquarian and coin collector and drew my dad into his interests and they formed a great friendship through this, going to coin fares at the weekend or PJ coming over to teach my dad Ogham, which I explore in one section. Another crucial element to the poem is my perspective. It is really an initiation into both the adult world of male friendship, as well as how it awoke in me the excitement of the imagined past. I think it’s ultimately saying something about the power of art – both in terms of my dad and PJs story and my attempt to tell it.<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So, I wanted this poem to be, in a sense, a kind of intimate epic, playing the ‘everyday’ notion of friendship against seemingly grand historical backdrops, such as Viking Dublin, or Imperial Rome. I’m reminded of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘Epic’, which centres on a dispute between two farmers over a land boundary and how Homer’s ghosts whispers to him</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span>“I made the <i>Iliad</i> from such<span class="apple-converted-space"> / </span>A local row...<span lang="EN-US">”. This sentiment is central to the poem and is echoed in the final lines of the Viking section where my dad and PJ had found a Viking child’s leather shoe in the waste ground where the city council were dumping the soil removed from the Wood Quay site as they dug the foundations for new civic offices:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> It was to me as this frail object found, opened<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> a clearing in my mind: the prow of a longship<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> approached from the horizon with its cargo<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> of stories. I leaned down close and listened. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So the events are first real-life ones, made epic in the telling – even if the language, in this case, is not what you might expect in an ‘epic’. So it is a narrative poem, certainly, but a fractured narrative reflecting the nature of memory, both personal and collective.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Well, this was the one poem in the collection not written in the way I describe above. For a start it’s a long piece of 300 lines, so that put it on a different footing. In a way, the approach was similar to two long poems in sections from my first collection. I tried to come at the subject matter in a non-linear way and attack it from several angles, with jumps in perspective across sections. I found the shape of the poem came quite quickly, say within three or four weeks. This poem does something similar to those earlier long pieces, creating a fractured narrative of sorts that moves backwards and forward in time – both in the historical settings and the timeframe of the friendship itself. So its jumps and shimmies about us, mixing the history and the story of the friendship. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">But by attempting to create this intimacy between the local and the historical, I also tried to use a quite casual, yet intimate, tone and the nature of the poetry had to reflect that. So much of the poem is written in a relaxed conversational and invitational voice. So is that poetry or prose? Some would say the latter, but I’d argue that I’m using a – let’s call it – flat-footed line, where the rhythm isn’t strident (for the most part) and the music of the piece is quiet and muted, though certainly poetry, I would argue. The challenge of rewriting this kind of ‘casual’ line, is that it is extremely tricky to get just right and, indeed, for it not to drift into prose. So, it actually took a long time to achieve that effect, massaging the music rather than imposing it. That really was quite a challenge. The other major issue was that with such rich subject-matter, there was so much more detail I included early on but had to cut in rewriting so that the poem didn’t get weighed down with too much narrative information. It’s long, but I knew I needed to keep it moving also. So, it took time to get that balance right also. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt;"><b><span lang="EN-US">When you were placing ‘Timepieces’ in <i>On Carbon & Light</i>, why did you place it where you did and did the editorial process effect how you put the collection together.<o:p></o:p></span></b></li>
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<span lang="EN-US">At about the mid-way point in writing the collection I had a lot of poems and started gathering them into some kind of coherent collection, which gave writing after that point a clearer focus. ‘Timepieces’ was actually one of the last poems to be written and accounts for nearly a quarter of the entire collection. So where I placed it was important. Rather like the poem itself, the narrative of the whole book shifts around in time, though generally drifts forward. The opening section deals with my university years studying physics, a time of both intellectual and emotional excitement. So the opening thirteen or so poems explore this part of my life. Then I shift back in time with two pieces about family and then ‘Timepieces’, which takes us basically to the mid-point of the collection. As I said earlier, this collection is less lyrical than my first and more metaphysical, but I realized this poem grounds the book. It is key in that sense, so I wanted that grounding at that juncture in the collection, before moving into the second half of the book, which mostly deals with hitting forty and the questions that asks of you, both personally and philosophically. It strikes me now, that a lot of the collection deals in different types of initiatory experience – those key moments of transition, and insight, in life. So perhaps that connects much of the material.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><i>Thanks so much, Shauna, for asking such interesting questions. It was especially nice to get to talk at length about ‘Timepieces’. I really hope you, and others will enjoy that poem and the collection as a whole when it comes out in the coming weeks. </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-48362534706280580962018-05-17T02:15:00.004-07:002020-07-29T16:10:26.050-07:00Stillness, Movement - the Line-Break in Poetry <span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I have noticed when talking to friends who are interested in poetry but perhaps not dedicated readers of it, that the use of the line-break in modern poetry often confuses, or even confounds, them. So I decided, as a challenge, to tackle the problem head-on and write this short essay to explain why (and how) poets use this device in their work. </span>I also think it is very helpful for poets starting out to have a very clear grasp of why they are using 'the break' and the wide possibilities it presents to them. I hope, then, that this piece might be of help and interest to both groups: readers and purveyors of poetry. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">This essay first appeared in Poetry Ireland's literary pamphlet <i>Trumpet, </i>issue 7, late last year. My gratitude to editor Paul Lenehan for including it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: large;">Stillness, Movement - the Line-Break in Poetry</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">When discussing the
‘line-break’ in poetry it is first necessary to talk about the difference
between the ‘sentence’ and the ‘line’ itself. For the prose writer, the
‘sentence’ is their cornerstone. Through varying the sentence length, and
manipulating it by adding cadence and pause, they create a complex craft from
it as its unit of meaning. However, for the poet there is one added technique
which is the line-break – the way a poem measures itself out in lines rather
than sentences, most often to convey ‘movement’ through the poem. This gives
rise to many intriguing and unique possibilities.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">To begin, though, I will
start with a ‘counter-example’: a poem that eschews the use of the line-break
to convey its meaning and doesn’t rely on it for its movement. In the well-known
poem ‘Gift’ by Czesław Miłosz, the poet simply uses nine simple statements
ranging from the visual, the abstract and the emotional, with each line in the
poem matching the sentence precisely and therefore shunning the obvious aspect
of the ‘break’. Here are the four opening lines:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">A day so happy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Fog lifted early,
I worked in the garden. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Hummingbirds were
stopping over honeysuckle flowers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">There was no thing
on earth I wanted to possess.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The absence of
line-breaks here creates a sense of ‘stillness’, of tranquility, yet the poem
continues to move (subtly) forward due to the variation in the length of the
line/sentence, an effect sometimes referred to by prose writers as
‘modulation’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">A sense of harmony and
stillness in a poem can proceed also, of course, by using a sentence that
extends beyond one line. In Anne Sexton’s ‘The Truth the Dead Know’, written
after her mother’s death, the piece opens with these lines:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Gone, I say and
walk from the church, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">refusing the stiff
procession to the grave, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">letting the dead
ride alone in the hearse. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">It is June. I am
tired of being brave.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The statement of her
‘refusing’ the procession ‘to the grave’ is mirrored in the tightly controlled
processional feeling of the lines, the effect somehow heightening the
restrained grief. The first three lines ‘run-on’ but in such a way as there is
a balance between the clauses and speech rhythms contained within each. Each
line-break has a ‘soft’ quality until, quite brilliantly, Sexton uses the two
short sentences embedded in one line to create a sense of deflated closure.
Modulation can be a useful tool in poetry also, as proven here, as an inversion
of our expectation that poetry mainly utilises the run-on line.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The line-break can also
be used to enable a sense of strong movement through the lines of a poem,
acting as a propulsive force, offering tension and then resolution with an
‘end-stopped line’. The Romantic poets often stretched the limits of the
line-break to employ momentum through and across ‘the line’. An instructive
example, from William Wordsworth, show us, in these lines, the ‘new’ expansion
of the language of poetry:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">It is a beauteous
Evening, calm and free, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">The holy time is
quiet as a Nun <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Breathless with
adoration; the broad sun <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Is sinking down in
its tranquillity…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Enjambment (as run-on is
technically called) essentially changes the balance between the sentence and
the line, establishing a tension and forward movement that forces the reader
not to pause at the end of the line but to move expectantly to the next, the
line-break encouraging a semi-pause or, sometimes, no pause at all. Yet, when it
comes to the various effects of the line-break we can’t fully itemise these
unless we consider also the added aspect of ‘music’ in poetry that serves to
emphasise its impact and meaning. In such cases, music reinforces the effect of
‘the break’, the run-on line, in a sense, keeping us off-balance and acting as
a kind of regulatory valve as we move through the lines of a piece: such a
dramatic idea, that we take for granted today.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">An example of this effect
can be further heightened by ‘internal rhyme’, which intensifies the ‘swing’
over the musical line to the next line as a musical echo. A similar, if more
immediate, effect is to look at what I call ‘swing-rhyme’. Here, the rhyme at
the end of one line is immediately followed by a rhyme at the start of the next.
This is a stanza from the poem ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ (which translates as
‘Forget-me-not’) by the Second World War poet, Keith Douglas:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Three weeks gone
and the combatants gone <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">returning over the
nightmare ground <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">we found the place
again, and found <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">the soldier
sprawling in the sun.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I love this poem, despite
its difficult subject matter. The ‘swing rhyme’ from line 2 to 3, coupled with
a general rhyme scheme, serves to amplify the action expressed, exploiting the
line-break to dramatic, almost explosive, impact.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">For me, one of the most
interesting uses of the line-break is how it enacts (or should enact) the
meaning of a poem, its rhythms perfectly matching the movement and subject. A
great example of this are the hesitant, off-balance, lines of Paula Meehan’s
piece ‘Take a breath. Hold it. Let it go.’ The young poet is about to leave the
family home but watches as her sister make-pretends a circus act on the
boundary wall in the garden. She views it with a sense of foreboding:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">She
steps out <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">on the narrow
breeze block fence. If I shout, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">I’ll startle her.
She’ll fall …<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Then: <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">She falls anyway.
I could not save her.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The movement and sense of
the lines here make for an off-kilter feeling. It’s interesting also how the
short sentences punctuate the line (rather like Anne Sexton’s use of
modulation), giving us the ‘high-wire’ act of her sister, enacting both form
and meaning to achieve this by utilising the line and line-break to brilliant
effect.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Finally, one of the most
powerful effects of the line-break is that it can be used to place ‘heavy’
emphasis on the last word of a given line. A compelling example of this can be
found in Derek Mahon’s poem ‘After the Titanic’. Here are a few lines as the
liner sinks and the speaker says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: 144pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">...
my poor soul <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Screams out in the starlight, heart <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Breaks
loose and rolls down like a stone.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The phrase ‘heart breaks
loose’ is a powerful one, but more powerful still by breaking on the word
‘heart’. It intensifies the meaning of that word and, added to this, the
absence of a pronoun before ‘heart’ further develops the sentiment: in a way,
it is the heart of everyone on that sinking ship that is captured at that
moment. Not ‘my’ or ‘your’ heart, but simply ‘heart’. It’s a powerful
expression of communality, powerfully expressed in the poem’s extreme context.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The line-break is perhaps
the quintessential aspect of poetry, defining it as a distinct form in
literature. It allows the poet to manipulate language in a way that no other technique
can quite achieve. Being in control of it, is as close as we come in poetry to
realising the careful rhythm of a master film editor’s hands, or a great
painter’s articulated brushstroke; the line break is as characteristic as both
in generating the pace, energy and signature of a given work.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<br />Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-49773481949836617232018-04-27T02:59:00.001-07:002018-06-11T17:08:46.993-07:00The Poetry of Science - essay This piece first appeared in <i>Poetry Ireland News </i>in summer 2012. I write from a personal perspective here on how I moved from the world of science to the world of poetry, reflecting on what I see as the relationship between science and art and their necessary functions as different approaches to knowledge in contemporary society <span style="font-family: "skolar" , "georgia" , serif; font-size: 16px;">– </span>an increasingly relevant question, I feel. In any case, I hope you find it interesting.<br />
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For more essays from Poetry Ireland's archive, you can find a full index <a href="http://www.poetryireland.ie/writers/articles/" target="_blank">here</a>. Well worth a visit!<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Poetry of Science</span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;">Look into the cup: the tissue of order</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Forms under your stare. The living surfaces</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Mirror each other, gather everything</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Into their crystalline world...</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-weight: normal;">- Thomas Kinsella, 'Phoenix Park'</span><br />
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The first poem that filled me with a genuine excitement was encountered one day in a stuffy classroom in my final year in secondary school. It was Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Mirror in February’. I enjoyed poetry but this poem seemed different and more immediate. It was written by someone not distant from me in time and language, but a poet still writing as I read it – Kinsella then being the only such living poet on the English syllabus.</div>
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I faced a dilemma as I approached my Leaving Cert exams. As well as English and History I was also passionate about Maths and Physics. The question was which would I prefer to study at University? In the end, I chose Natural Sciences and found myself in Trinity College, daunted at first by the transition to higher mathematics, chemistry and physics. Thankfully, after the terror of the first term, I settled in and was an eager student, choosing to major in Experimental Physics under the guidance of my supervisor, one Prof Iggy McGovern – known to many of you now as the author of two excellent poetry collections.</div>
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At that time neither Iggy nor I talked about poetry, though I had continued to read it as I headed towards my finals, with friends in the English Department recommending poets like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and other modernists. Whilst I was sometimes baffled by these poets, I enjoyed the challenge such work provided. After graduation, I worked for about a year as a research assistant at the Department, but found I had no stomach for the often repetitive and slow nature of research physics. Despite my passion for the subject I didn’t see a direct future in it, and after a period of crisis decided to revisit that earlier moment of reflected encounter in ‘Mirror in February’ and try my own hand at writing poetry. My progress was reasonably quick and within a few years my first published poem, ‘Apple’, appeared in <i>Poetry Ireland Review 47</i>, edited by Moya Cannon, in autumn 1995. It was a piece about Newton.</div>
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I had no concept of myself at that point as a ‘scientist-poet’. It just seemed natural to me that with a background in physics – and a passion for all the sciences – that this world-view would seep its way into what I was writing as subject matter, explored in the unique vocabularies that science also provided me with. For example, in an early poem, ‘Dragonflies’, I describe the dragonflies as ‘they dart from one point to another / plotting the water’s surface / with their ghost geometries’. For me, nature poetry after Darwin had to somehow reflect this altered view of the natural world. I also found in scientific figures rich material for poems, writing pieces about Einstein (‘Einstein’s Compass’) and Galileo (‘The Moons’) as well as Newton. I also became quite fascinated with natural history and a series of poems followed about paleontology, geology, insects, astronomy and even mathematics.</div>
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At the same time, I naturally also wrote about more immediate and personal concerns: family, lovers, friendship, loss and grief. The type of material that perhaps we expect to see in a contemporary poetry collection. The difficulty I faced was how to make these different types of subject-matter work in some unified way to form a collection itself. It took me some time to achieve this, but eventually I realised that these subjects- the philosophical and the personal - could exist side by side, the intimate, personal dramas placed against the grand backdrop of geological and even cosmological time, perhaps in the way the gods provided the epic context for the lives of mortals in classical literature. For me, the fleeting moments of lived experience are placed against the vista of what we might call ‘deep’ time.<br />
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Inevitably, I faced the question in doing this: what is poetry’s relationship to science? I think we have to be clear here and say that the arts and the sciences serve different, though no less important, functions. Science’s job is to examine disparate phenomena and find a law or theory that shows how they are connected. This hypothesis is then tested and if proven true gives us an ‘objective’ truth. Poetry also tries to find patterns of connections and draw unexpected material together to form a coherent poem, but it can never aspire to the empiricism of science, nor should it. In the end, a poem can only persuade rather than prove. It captures something of the ‘subjective’ experience of living, though by means that make such an experience recognisable or comprehensible to another person. We might borrow an important concept from science and call this a form of ‘resonance’.</div>
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And perhaps by writing about science I’m attempting to bring these seemingly abstract and even distant ideas into some kind of imaginative resonance with the nature of our lived lives, so that they too may form part of the fabric of our experience in the process; that such ‘ideas’ may also be felt as the ‘tissue of order’ that Kinsella speaks of in ‘Phoenix Park’ – an order that both disciplines search for, albeit in very different fashions. That is, at least, something of what I hope to achieve in my work.</div>
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June 2012</div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 16.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Apple </span></i></h4>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Red of course.
The colour<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">of blood.
Shining and smooth,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB">its form
perfected and round.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB">An emblem of the
human <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">mind, nestled up
there<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">among the leaves
innocent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB">of its fate,
swaying<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB">in a green dream
about<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB">to waken. Ripe
and <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB">waiting for the
final <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB">nudge, the soft
slap<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"> of
the breeze, to fall<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"> down
to the ground <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"> with
a thud beside<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"> the
place he sits, to<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"> start
again the ancient act<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"> of
the naming of parts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"> from <i>In the Library of Lost Objects </i>(Ward Wood Publishing, 2011)</span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></i></h1>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></i></h1>
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Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-13547479090149517012018-03-03T07:03:00.000-08:002018-04-22T16:20:14.953-07:00My intro to 'All the Barbaric Glass' by David Butler (2017)I was flattered when David Butler asked me to launch his latest collection <i>All the Barbaric Glass </i>last spring. David really is a marvelous poet and I am also a huge admirer of his debut collection <i>Via Crucis - </i>so much so that I wrote to his publisher to congratulate him for publishing it. David manages in his poetry a delicate mix of verbal dexterity, vivid imagery and heartfelt feeling. I recommend his work highly to you if you've not encountered it yet.<br />
<br />
For now, here are my introductory remarks on the collection. It can be purchased directly from his publisher <a href="https://www.doirepress.com/writers/a_f/david_butler/" target="_blank">Doire Press</a>, who are doing great work in finding - and publishing - original voices in contemporary Irish poetry - including, of course, David Butler himself.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%;">A Question at the Shoreline: ‘All the
Barbaric Glass’ by David Butler<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All the Barbaric Glass </i>was launched at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, on 23<sup>rd</sup> March 2017.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The opening lines of the first
poem, ‘Breaking’, of David Butler’s second collection, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All the Barbaric Glass,</i> acts as a statement of intent for the work,
one which he steadfastly adheres to throughout:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>There
are times you need<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>to
step outside of colloquy;<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>to
mute the looping newsfeed,<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the
tinnitus of the immediate.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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This is a collection that
consciously steps beyond ‘the newsfeed’, the constant information thrown at us both
in daily life and in the online sphere. That world occasional encroaches on
this mission in certain stray moments, but David resolutely stays the course to
give us something beyond mere reportage or internet chatter.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The striking imagery of the
collection reminds us that this work exists at a boundary, most obviously, that
of the physical landscape of the shoreline, the place <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">between </i>land and sea. The shoreline is a very real and concrete
location throughout the poems, but subtly reaches the level of metaphor also,
representing as it does so the space between life and death, loss and love
found, the solid ground of the present and the less certain waters of past and future.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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This notion of the blurring of
boundaries is heightened also by the fact that many poems take place in the gloaming,
the dusk-light, that liminal space between day and night, becoming the
shadowland of the poets inner, self-questioning thoughts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The passage of time is marked out through these
scenes as when a young child finds a dogfish washed up on the beach and the
poet observes: <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>...Small
wonder<o:p></o:p></div>
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the child with bucket stands and stares<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>and
starts to hear the song of sand;<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the
whisper in the hourglass.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Such philosophical
preoccupations are threaded throughout the work but there are also more
emotionally direct pieces, most particularly those about his father and late
mother, such as ‘Death Watch’, ‘Watcher’, and ‘Family Album’. His father’s
descent into Alzheimer’s is not just observed, but observed closely and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">felt</i> to the core. In the poem ‘Father’, David
takes us far beyond cold statistics or even, indeed, the powerful testimony of
loved ones seen on a segment on the TV news, to a fully articulated statement
that captures the heart-breaking reality of the condition as experienced by
both the father suffering it and the son’s efforts to try to understand it:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>What
unsigned city is it you wake in,<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>featureless,
or with such altered features<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the
streets are not familiar, or if, with<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>shifting
familiarity, like dreamscapes<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>you
wake from? <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The autumnal/wintry setting that
pervades the collection also seems to suggest that the work exists in the wake
of such loss and questioning, where we view the shoreline differently again – not
just as haunting but as one now ‘haunted’ by personal grief.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It should be obvious by now how
beautifully written these poems are. However, this isn’t achieved through a
relaxed, easy lyricism but rather a starkly elegant one. There is an exactness
and precision to these poems, an angular beauty, we might say, somewhat
reminiscent of the that most descriptively rigorous of Irish poets, Thomas Kinsella.
Take these lines from ‘Correspondence’:</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>There
are more<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>tongues
here than in a metropolis<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>gorse
and cowslip and insect<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>all
flash their intimate semaphore;<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>a
corncrake croaks Morse; while a skylark<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>hoisted
high as radio-mast,<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>is
twittering its incessant machine-code<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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It is this sense of rigour which offers a controlled, formal elegance to the language, the
observational accuracy perhaps reflecting David’s studies in engineering at
university. There is an eye to detail, as ‘Correspondence’ shows, that other
writers may well miss.<o:p></o:p></div>
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However, there are also moments
of counterpoint placed in the lattice of such a grief-work, where splashes of
colour interrupt the wintry shoreline scenes and present their own vivid
reality. In ‘Grand Bizarre, Istanbul’ <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Suddenly
the senses are ablaze: scent<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>has
tumbled into an Aladdin’s cave<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>that
illuminates the throve of memory...<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
while in ‘Mellifont Abbey’, bees
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 36.0pt; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
...fumble inside auricular lilies <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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drunk on summer’s insistent song.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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At the same time, the contemporary
world of the ‘looping newsfeed’ and internet babble breaks through on occasion
(as it must), impinging on the other reflections of natural setting. Yet found
amid this ‘tinnitus’ is more important news, news that matters and captured in the
vision of “all the suitcases, empty as grief / that bob on the Aegean...”
bringing us closer to the scene, however briefly, of distant calamity.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To end, I just wanted to note
something I only fully appreciated on a second reading of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All the Barbaric Glass </i>and one that strikes me as important and
central to this books appeal. That thing is<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
</i>the presence of the question mark throughout these poems. So often when
poets ‘question’ (especially these days) they are questioning others in
accusatory tones for their social or political ineptitude, their incompetence, faults
and lack. The ‘other’, in this sense, is always an easy target for lazy vitriol.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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Here, though, the questions are
those asked of oneself, offering a form of self-reflection and self-questioning
that, in the end, is a method of self-interrogation that leaves no place to
hide for the poet in these poems. This is not, in the end, a collection that
offers easy resolution or explicit consolation, though nor is it one lacking in
humanity or tentative hope. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The last two poems of the book demonstrate
this unerring honesty. In ‘The Injunction’, the poet remembers the Deutsche
Grammophon records his father would play on the old record player in the living
room when he was a child, and how: “Still it reverberates / like a paternal
caveat: /the cough of the stylus defluffed; / the circuitry clearing its
throat; / the expectant static...” In the beautifully strange, and slightly
chilling, final poem ‘Restless’ two lovers look out onto the sea as they walk
the shoreline. She imagines she spies a body bobbing in the surf, just beyond
the rocks. They peer out together, more alert now. He questions her assertion, then
responds:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It’s not</i>, I say again, less sure.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Less
sure of myself, too<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>and
of us,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>with
the sea and wind and world enormous about us.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<br />
March 2017</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-70549621750877133252018-02-06T06:56:00.003-08:002021-12-23T10:34:32.499-08:00Meeting the Poet (Thomas Kinsella) - memoir In late 1999 I co-edited (with Theo Dorgan) the anthology <i>Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry. </i>In part, we funded the book by making available a limited edition of copies signed by the ten section editors. In January 2000, I was fortunate enough to go to Thomas Kinsella's home in County Wicklow to get him to sign these copies. It is always difficult to say who your favourite poet is, but in my case Kinsella - at his best - always comes top of that list. As you might expect, I decided to detail our encounter though with no sense that this meeting was as special to Kinsella as it was to me. Here is the piece I wrote, a few years after the fact. I'm happy to say that at nearly 90, Tom Kinsella is still going strong and creating wonderful work and is receiving much deserved (extra) attention in recent years.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<h1>
Meeting the Poet<o:p></o:p></h1>
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Love, it is certain,
continues till we fail,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Whenever (with your forgiveness) that may be...</span></i></div>
<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></i>–<i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">‘Phoenix
Park’</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
As we bumped over a pothole
the car made a sudden adjustment veering momentarily off the road. I turned
away from the window. My girlfriend, Paola, was driving. She licked the paper
of a roll-up which she held in her left hand, then glanced at me, a smile
flickering across her lips. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
“So, what’s he like? This
Thomas what’s-his-name?” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
I recovered the lighter
from the floor and leaned over to light her cigarette. “Very intimidating by
all accounts.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
Paola inhaled, held the
smoke in her lungs for a moment, then exhaled. “Great. At least he lives
somewhere remote.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
We drove deeper into the
mountains. Beyond the rain-streaked window, I saw a burnt-out car rusting on
the hillside. The sky had grown heavy with rain cloud, the slate bowl of the
sky fringed by bronze that was reflected on the surface of the lake down below
us in the valley. It seemed like the perfect stage for a Kinsella poem: an
ancient landscape with its primal weather; the ochre of the decaying car lying
amongst the granite boulders scattered on the mountainside by retreating
glaciers. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
In the boot of the Daihatsu
Charade, bubble-wrapped and boxed, were special editions of a poetry anthology on
which I had worked – with Theo Dorgan – as general editor. We had managed to
get the signatures of the nine other section editors, but Thomas Kinsella had
proved elusive. He had recently returned from a visit to America and was
reluctant to travel to Dublin. I volunteered to go to his house in Wicklow to
make the task as painless as possible – or, perhaps more truthfully, that I
would get to meet him.<o:p></o:p></div>
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*<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Kinsellas’ house was hidden
from the narrow country road by a wall of oak and hazel and pinned in from
behind by the steep incline of a large hill, rainwater spilling down its side
in white threads that gathered in a stream at its base. As I lifted the dead
weight of the box of books from the boot of the car, a woman in her early
seventies emerged from the porch with a wry smile. She introduced herself to us
as Eleanor. It was a peculiar feeling seeing her standing there in front of the
old farmhouse in flesh and blood. She had been frozen in my imagination as the
younger woman in the poem ‘Phoenix Park’<i> </i>who lay “brilliant with
illness, behind glass”.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
That poem had
been written long before, but I had heard she had been ill again for many
years. I was surprised by her skittery vitality as she darted to the boot and
lifted the smaller, second box. I followed her into the large, open-plan living
room and placed the box onto the mahogany table at its centre. She joked that
Tom was in his garret and would be down shortly, then whisked Paola away to
help her make lunch.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
I stood in the
room for a time alone in the gloom of rain-light that seeped in from a window,
which stretched almost the entire length of the gable. Above me were exposed
rafters and the vault of the ceiling. Along the walls bookcases, and a stark
ink drawing of a black crow, an illustration by Louis le Brocquy from <i>The</i>
<i>Táin.</i> On the opposite wall there was a Navaho wall hanging, its
intricate pattern of earthen-coloured lines reminding me, strangely, of a
schematic for an electronic circuit board.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d8pjKHyQYjM/Wx1I5nenIII/AAAAAAAAAwk/Lw9EIeC0_WkrYgDo26rjMKnB9HTxHAwuQCLcBGAs/s1600/the-tain%2BCrow.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="215" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d8pjKHyQYjM/Wx1I5nenIII/AAAAAAAAAwk/Lw9EIeC0_WkrYgDo26rjMKnB9HTxHAwuQCLcBGAs/s1600/the-tain%2BCrow.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'The Tain' illustration Louis le Broquay</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
As I began to
take the books from the boxes a man appeared in the doorway, instantly
recognisable from the photograph on the back of the <i>Collected Poems</i>: the
thick glasses and grey beard, “the dry, down-turning mouth” on which one could
never imagine a smile forming. I was surprised, though, by Kinsella’s physical
size as he stood there in a leather waistcoat. The rumours of his decline
seemed premature. He held out his hand and simply introduced himself as Tom,
then sat down at the table. It appeared he wasn’t a man interested in small
talk. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
I opened the
first book on the title page. He took an elegant silver-nibbed pen from his
inside pocket and signed, with total concentration, in a spiky hand. There was
an awkward pause before I opened the next one and he signed again. We continued
in this ritual for perhaps half an hour, the silence of the room punctured only
by the sound of rain tapping on the window and the occasional laughter that
echoed down the hallway from the kitchen.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
Just as Tom had
finished signing the last book, Eleanor craned her head around the doorframe
and announced cheerily that lunch was ready. Tom seemed a little surprised that
I was being invited to stay. As I gathered up the books and put them back into
the box, I was overcome with the need to tell him that it was reading his poem
‘Mirror in February’ in school that really got me interested in poetry. I
realised I may not have another chance so I said, “If it hadn’t been for
‘Mirror in February’ I’d probably be doing something different with my life.
It’s the poem that made me want to write.”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
After the
minutes of rain measured silence I thought my confession must have sounded
ridiculous, all the practiced eloquence in the car on the way to this encounter
falling apart into a blurted platitude. He stood back with what seemed like
genuine surprise, and smiled, “Go way. Really. Tell me.” He waited expectant
for me to provide a bigger explanation. Despite having read most of his work, I
suddenly felt self-conscious and tongue-tied, as though the weight of posterity
on me was too great in that room. I could only muster, “It was the first poem I
encountered that was written from a world I recognised.” <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
As we stood
there beside the imposing table, he seemed to relax a little, began to discuss
the choices certain editors had made. This had been a difficult part of the
process of putting the book together. Theo and I had wanted all the editors to
meet up but because the logistical difficulties involved, we decided to send
lists around to each so there was no overlap in poems, or over-representation
of a given poet. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
Tom had chosen
to make his selection from the 1930s. He spoke about the failure of Irish poets
to grasp modernism. Despite his abrasiveness, at times, on the subject, I
detected a sense of isolation on his behalf. No Irish poet had embraced
elements of the Modernists more than Kinsella and his profile, it seemed to me
at least, had suffered as a consequence due to his work's apparent
experimentalism and ‘difficulty’. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
He grew silent
for a moment, then mentioned how he had grappled with whether to select
anything by Brian Coffey. He put it to me bluntly: “Do you think I should’ve
included him?” <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
I hadn’t
expected that. Again, I had a chance to say something incisive, make an
impression on my poetic mentor. But I’d never read Coffey and knew for some
reason that to admit as much would meet with his disappointment, or perhaps
even disapproval. I answered with an attempt at authority: “Well, some of his
work is quite interesting, but I think your choice of Devlin was better.” <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
He nodded. I
suspected my opinion didn’t matter to him, but it was surprisingly generous
gesture to pretend that it did. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 36pt;">
At that moment
Eleanor reappeared in the doorway. I was relieved that my knowledge would not
be tested any further through more discussion. Tom and I followed her into the
kitchen where we found Paola sitting at the pine table with a relaxed smile,
and a mug of tea in her hand.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
*<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
As we drove home in the darkness, Paola and I
were quiet. I thought of the car out there somewhere in the darkness, rusting a
little more in the rain, the boulders still fixed where they had come to rest
so long ago, infinitesimally more weathered and rounded. In a way, it was an
apt image for the encounter with the poet; his solemn work with the hint of
something ancient and immoveable; my dislocation in such a landscape; my
fumbling in his formidable presence.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
There
was the poem I wished I had talked to him about: a poem about Eleanor, sick in
a hospital in the Phoenix Park. Over lunch all four of us had talked for
several hours about their time in America and, at Tom’s insistence, religion, a
topic that seemed to fascinate him despite his own equivocations on the subject. (I was a practicing Buddhist at the
time which he seemed to find curious.) Then, sitting around the table by the bright pink Aga stove, Eleanor
then told us about an illness which left her in a state of near-paralysis for
several years. After a time, she had recovered unexpectedly and completely. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
I thought of all Tom’s
probings and doubts as we sat there in the bright, airy space drinking tea. I
remembered the Navaho rug in the dark living room, its coloured grids and
pattern of connections – that phrase in ‘Phoenix Park’ about “the tissue of
order”. But the poem was about more than order. It attempts to answer the
question: “What was in your thoughts… saying, after a while, / I write you
nothing, no love songs, anymore?” <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
As we left the Kinsella’s house in the
twilight, Eleanor and Tom stood in the bell of porch-light waving us off.
Eleanor had told us to call in again if we were in the area. I knew we wouldn’t
– or I wouldn’t have the courage.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
The lights of Dublin spread
out before us as Paola and I descended from the foothills towards the city, the
bay a dark entrance scooped out of the grid of streetlights and housing
estates. In the boot of the car, two boxes of books signed and ready to be
delivered into the world. I had finally met the poet who first gave me the
shock of excitement that words on the page can make as they struggle to “elicit
order from experience.” </div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<o:p></o:p>But it was the question in
the poem that drew my attention again. Like the poet and his wife in ‘Phoenix
Park’, Paola and I had also made a journey before a departure. As we pulled up
outside our flat in Mountpleasant Square, the rain finally eased. Paola opened
the hall door for me as I carried the boxes up the narrow staircase, then
placed them on the floor beside all the other boxes that were stacked about the
room – separately labelled and divided in piles.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
Soon, Tom and Eleanor would
also pack up their life in Wicklow and leave that primal place to return to their second home in Philadelphia, both now seeming to exist as real people in my memory, but also, somehow, mythic figures frozen in a frieze in the porchlight - 'brilliant behind glass'.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tUagtSD7fYU/Wx1JCFpdZ3I/AAAAAAAAAwo/Ne_AGezOLFQo76jAXcql6uGVpoFal8jfQCLcBGAs/s1600/thomas-kinsella.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="347" data-original-width="750" height="148" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tUagtSD7fYU/Wx1JCFpdZ3I/AAAAAAAAAwo/Ne_AGezOLFQo76jAXcql6uGVpoFal8jfQCLcBGAs/s320/thomas-kinsella.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Kinsella</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;">
Galway, 2004<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-41370486869377305782017-05-17T03:41:00.002-07:002017-10-28T11:26:42.214-07:00'Summer Rain' Review - Books Ireland<i>Books Ireland </i>has been a mainstay of the Irish publishing scene for many years. It is a subscription based magazine (print and digital) and is always worth the price of admission. I encourage you, therefore, to support this enterprise if you have the means to do so. You can find out all about it at: <a href="http://www.booksirelandmagazine.com/">Books Ireland Magazine</a><br />
<br />
I was delighted to learn that my collection <i>Summer Rain </i>is reviewed in the current (May/June) issue and reproduce here for those interested. I should say, it is a very thoughtful and considered piece on the collection by poet and children's writer Catherine Ann Cullen, whose own work is well worth seeking out.<br />
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For now, here's the review:<br />
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<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Summer
Rain.</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> Noel Duffy, Ward Wood Publishing, <i>87pp<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 36pt;">"Closely
observed trifles"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Duffy has studied
experimental physics, and one of the pleasures of his work is the way it
reflects the connections between science and poetry. This collection is a
trilogy of sequences that help the reader appreciate the life of the eminent
physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, the father of atomic theory, with stunning poems
about stars, water and snow; and of ten individuals united by the presence of
rain and human frailty. From the cover photograph of electric light on puddles
to the last poem, ‘Autumn Almanac’, with its<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> water
dripping<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> into
the empty basin –<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> full
by morning<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">this is a book of
perpetual motion, of ripples constantly extending outwards.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Duffy explains in the preface that Boltzmann’s theories show ‘how the complexity of
life (an ordered state) could arise without defying this fundamental law of
entropy as he had proposed it’. The length of this preface, two and half pages,
was my one quibble – a short paragraph about Boltzmann would have sufficed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Boltzmann’s
struggles with depression, with other scientists and with philosophy are
foregrounded in ‘Games of Chance & Reason’, a series of eight poems, many
subdivided into sections, named for the years between 1895 and 1907. The sparse
narrative allows the drama of the story to unfold quietly. We observe
Boltzmann’s moods, from buoyant to manic to depressed, as his theories fail to
convince many of his contemporaries. In the opening poem, ‘1895’, he tells his
students that, in return for their attention, trust and affection, he<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> will give everything I have of
myself,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> my entire way of thinking and feeling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">By ‘1905’ he is repeating
this to another group but, ten years on, we feel his sense of desperation as a
student dares to challenge his authority.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Each of the ten poems in the final sequence, ‘Summer
Rain’, is a monologue in the voice of a character on whom the rain impinges. But
from Sophie, who gets soaked as she waits for a bus, to Gerard, the blind
pianist, who reaches for the black umbrella his son tells him is ‘pink with
yellow gorillas’, to Muriel, a nun who has lost her faith but prays ‘that it
may wash away my sin, that I may believe in him again’, rain is not all that
these characters experience in common: they also share a sense of movement,
like Boltzmann’s atoms. Muriel’s anxiety for change is echoed in Sophie’s
imagining how she might dare make physical contact with a woman she loves:
‘Will people stare if I reach for her hand?’ Ailish, who has just reconciled
with her husband, feels ‘the pebble of what once was pass between us / beady and
hard and durable’. Richard, the embalmer, presides over ‘the natural order, to
pass from this state to another.’ Christine, the haematologist, declares that
‘most bloods are as they should be…’, but tries to dismiss mental images of
those close to her as she examines the slides, and ‘to be as dispassionate as
the lens’ stare’ when she sees that all is not well for a woman patient.
Gerard, who lost his sight in a rugby game, asks ‘who can ever know anything
for certain?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> For me, it is the middle section of this book that is
most satisfying. Its title, ‘Into the Recesses’, is a quote from Wordsworth’s
‘Guide to the Lakes’ (‘A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise
impenetrable’). In a review of the ‘Guide’ in 1906, Virginia Woolf praised
Wordsworth’s facility in giving us<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> these
closely-observed trifles which only a very penetrating<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> eye
after long search could have selected and described… all<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> through
this minute and scrupulous catalogue there runs a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> purpose
which solves it into one coherent and increasingly<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> impressive
picture… he sees them all as living parts of a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> vast
and exquisitely ordered system.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Woolf’s words could
almost have been written about Duffy’s collection, which echoes Wordsworth
especially in the middle section, with poems that reference his Lake District
haunts of Rydal, Beacon Tarn and Skiddaw. Duffy’s ‘Snow Over Grasmere’, set in
the place Wordsworth called home for fourteen years, typifies the beauty of
this sequence. Duffy describes the snowflakes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> dissolving
in clusters on the water’s brim<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> returning
to their element in a different form,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> the
singular structure of each untangling<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> into
the molecules of their making, melting to<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> a
common unity before forever fading within it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This precise description
has Duffy the scientist looking at snowflakes through a microscope, seeing
their ‘singular structure’ and their ‘molecules’, while the ‘common unity’
echoes the snowfall as unifying force in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Duffy earns our trust as both scientist and poet in this
collection. His ability to blend the two makes his poems echo long after they
are read. He sees into the life of things, and allows us to look through the
microscope with him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"><i>Catherine Ann Cullen is A&L Goodbody Writer in Residence at St Joseph's School, East Wall, Dublin, and works on the Trinity College Access Programmes. Her most recent poetry collection </i>The Other Now <i>was published by Dedalus Press in autumn 2016.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 24px;">
<br /></div>
Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-12895477723045787592017-01-19T06:21:00.001-08:002017-05-05T11:46:56.601-07:00Review of 'Summer Rain' - Dublin Review of BooksI will publish posts in the coming weeks about poetry in general (I'm very keen to share a wonderful video interpretation of a W.S Merwin poem) but for now, I thought to focus on my own recent collection and reproduce this very substantial review of <i>Summer Rain </i>by poet Enda Wyley in <i>The Dublin Review of Books. </i><br />
<br />
Before that though, I will add that the <i>DRB</i> is a wonderful resource regarding Irish literature and culture, in all forms, and you can visit their homepage and read many excellent articles at: <a href="http://www.drb.ie/home">http://www.drb.ie/home</a><br />
<br />
So, here's the review.<br />
<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">'The Kingdom of Water' </span><br />
<br />
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Noel Duffy’s third collection, <em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;">Summer Rain</em>, is structured into three different parts – each exhibiting a poetic range, an experimentation in form and theme which mark a departure from the more lyrical, autobiographical work of his previous volumes, <em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;">In the Library of Lost Objects</em> (2011) and <em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;">On Light and Carbon</em> (2013).</div>
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These are new sequences from a poet eager to take chances in subject matter and to push forward the boundaries of his craft. At the same time these poems protect what has been a striking feature of Duffy’s work to date – a fascination with the sciences, stemming from his studies in experimental physics at Trinity College, Dublin.</div>
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In the light of this interest, it seems entirely fitting that <em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;">Summer Rain</em> begins with a section “Games of Chance & Reason”. Here, eight poems, dated 1895–1907, follow the final years of the brilliant Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. This is an unusual choice of subject for poetry – one better suited to a physics lecture or a scientific journal, you might think. And yet it is a measure of Duffy’s development as a poet that he has created a convincing verse drama infused with a dialogue that would work as well on radio as it does on the page.</div>
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In a compact preface, he explains the importance of Boltzmann’s theories. “Using a deceptively simple starting point, he posited that atoms existed and if we measure their behavior in vast numbers using statistical methods, all the laws of classical thermodynamics could be fully understood.” Boltzmann also believed that pockets of order existed within disorder. Duffy explains how this “gave a working foundation for how the complexity of life itself (an ordered state) could arise without defying the fundamental law of entropy as he had proposed it”.</div>
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These are challenging ideas and ones which today have defined Boltzmann as one of the most gifted physicists of the nineteenth century. But in his own lifetime he encountered much opposition to his ideas, most especially from the positivists – scientists who only believed what evidence could actually prove. Chief amongst these was the forceful proponent of positivist philosophy Ernst Mach.</div>
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It is out of the conflict between Boltzmann and Mach that Duffy develops an intriguing poetic argument. Ideas and counter-ideas battle for the truth.</div>
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<div style="background: transparent; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 8px 0px; vertical-align: top;">
Ludwig stands in the small wood-panelled<br />
lecture room, a dozen or so students facing him<br />
in rows. ‘I ask you to place your faith in me,<br />
for there are those who say I am a charlatan<br />
or a fool. And some who say I am both!</div>
</blockquote>
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Of course, he was neither a charlatan nor a fool. And ultimately, it is his genius that Duffy celebrates, in poems which expose the thrill of Boltzmann’s discoveries, the excitement of his ideas – as well as the disillusionment and ultimate tragedy of his story.</div>
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<div style="background: transparent; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 8px 0px; vertical-align: top;">
Now all seems lost; lost to him in dispute<br />
and the over-labour of duties. He knows<br />
this cannot go on, that he falters more<br />
with every step he tries to take, each ending,<br />
it seems, in failure and regret.’</div>
</blockquote>
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“Into the Recesses”, the second section of <em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;">Summer Rain</em>, moves us into a new imaginative zone, with an epigraph from Wordsworth as our guide. “A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.”</div>
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Sixteen observational nature poems follow, using twenty-first century knowledge as a means to reimagine pantheism. The poems succeed because of their powerful attention to detail and their allegiance to Duffy’s interest in physics.</div>
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In “Surface Tension” carefully chosen words like “membrane” and “meniscus” are subtly scientific, helping this small poem to lodge itself memorably in the reader’s imagination.</div>
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<div style="background: transparent; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 8px 0px; vertical-align: top;">
Water too has a skin,<br />
that membrane that separates<br />
its world from our own, the meniscus<br />
that trembles in the light<br />
late evening breeze, not breaking it<br />
but forming small rivulets<br />
upon its surface, a flickering<br />
of light playing on the eye<br />
separating our world from theirs;<br />
the kingdom of water;<br />
the kingdom of air.</div>
</blockquote>
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Water flows purposefully throughout the poems in this section. In “Storm over Skiddaw” sheep huddle together while “rain falls down / heavily about them”. A waterfall is wonderfully described as a “cascade of quicksilver/ force”, finally slowing down to a “cantering measure” in the poem “Tyneware Waterfall”, while in “Molecules in Motion”, waters are “flowing downriver towards the lake / and the human scale of the waiting landscape”. These are poems which skilfully celebrate the cycle of water in a diversity of natural settings. They are carefully honed, complement each other and make for an arresting second part of an intriguing collection.</div>
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Duffy concludes his third collection with a series of ten intimate monologues, set in contemporary Dublin – although the city is secondary to the voices of each speaker, all specifically named and all very different in their concerns and experiences. Broken marriages, drugs, emotional problems, disappointments are the fabric of these poems as we are introduced to the troubled and disaffected of the poet’s making. And yet there is an overriding humanity flowing like the rain through the days of each speaker, which offers some consolation for the future.</div>
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Muriel, though devastated by her loss of faith, tightens her coat about her, walks out onto the streets, hoping the rain will wash away her sin “that I may believe in Him again / Jesus who no longer lives with me / Pray for me …”. Richard’s job is to clean dead bodies and yet he ponders how “there is a tenderness, in the end, in this work I do”. “Caroline”, the final poem of the collection, encapsulates the humane, enquiring voice which flows as consistently as water throughout the three sequences of <em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;">Summer Rain</em> – a collection, which for all its exactness of structure, should ultimately be enjoyed for its great empathy and craft.</div>
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<div style="background: transparent; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 8px 0px; vertical-align: top;">
I pick another canvas<br />
from the pile stacked along<br />
the studio wall, blank and waiting<br />
for a truer mood. I will paint<br />
the smell of rain instead and start<br />
with earthen brown and red.</div>
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1/1/2017</div>
</blockquote>
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<em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;">Enda Wyley is a poet and children’s author. She has published five collections of poetry with Dedalus Press – most recently </em>Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems<em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;"> (2014). She was the recipient of The Vincent Buckley Prize for Poetry and the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for Poetry (2014). She is a member of Aosdána.</em></div>
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<em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;"><br /></em></div>
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Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-74627204976600596042016-12-23T05:45:00.000-08:002017-04-26T10:32:35.661-07:00Wild Cherries - poemI never knew my maternal grandfather. When I try think of him the image that comes to mind is that of his namesake, my Uncle Dinny. I was so delighted my uncle made it to my launch in September but saddened to say now that he died a few weeks ago. So, I'm not sure if this poem is about him (indirectly as a guiding character) or my granddad himself, but either way I thought I might share at this time. I also can see no immediate place for this poem in terms of work I am currently writing but am still proud of it and hope it captures something of both men.<br />
<br />
This, then, to Denis and Dinny O'Brien, great traditional musicians and great characters both.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt;">Wild Cherries <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>In Memory of Denis
O’Brien</i> </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">i. Prelude<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
You were a man I never knew</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
and never will – one whose life </div>
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mine depends upon, yet you are ghost </div>
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to me, grandfather, dying far away </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
across the sea before I was born, </div>
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fading like all others to an imagined past </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
that I will never understand or fully grasp.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">ii. Kilsallaghan <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
O’Brien’s Bridge and the stony fields, </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
the lands your father and his brothers ploughed, </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
their lasting mark upon the landscape </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
of their birth to leave their old life behind </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
with the promise of a better future</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
in this newly-minted Nation: a good holding </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
far from the wild Atlantic shore</div>
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and the winding roads of County Clare, </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
a farm in north county Dublin, Kilsallaghan, </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
as much <i>country</i>
back then as the lands </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
your father had come from, its soil </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
dark and rich and good, but too little of it, </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
in the end, for all his sons to prosper by.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Young you left and went to the city.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">iii. Uniform<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
My mam said you looked as smart </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
as a policeman in your dark navy uniform, </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
the JJ&S insignia on your cap marking you </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
employee of John Jameson & Sons, </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Whiskey Makers since 1781, a good job </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
by any measure as you led your dray horses </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
down along the banks of the Liffey and on </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
to the docklands where the barges waited</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
with their cargo of amber, ready to move </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
this seemingly inexhaustible bounty </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
to the four corners of town and country.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">iv. Music <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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I will never know your gait or manner</div>
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or how you held yourself as you walked </div>
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into a room or pub, though I heard once </div>
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that you could set the place alight with talk </div>
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or your playing on the fiddle, a Woodbine </div>
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browning your fingers at the tips as it burnt </div>
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down to a butt, a pint of Guinness and a Jemmie </div>
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on the table before you as you played reels</div>
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and jigs at the barroom or kitchen session, </div>
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these places where happiness found you, music </div>
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your one true gift to those you tried to love</div>
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though sometimes failed, you sliding then into the well </div>
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of drink and the sinking regret that fell over you, </div>
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stumbling home late below the Harvest Moon </div>
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rising above the rooftops of these regimented streets,</div>
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no crops to be gathered in this over-filled place, </div>
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just to walk and walk and never reach home, </div>
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the darkness and the dark thoughts descending again</div>
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as if the very stars had died and dimmed to silence. </div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">v. Wild Cherries<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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So I give you this memory now as passed to me</div>
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by my mother: how on the first Sunday </div>
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of summer months you were given the task to take </div>
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the dray horses out to Kilsallaghan for pasture, </div>
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a place you came now to only half-think your own, </div>
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better here though than in the maze of streets of Cabra, </div>
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chatting instead to farmers in hedge-lined fields </div>
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discussing the high price of barley and wheat</div>
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and the burden of Independence on the farming life </div>
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– though at least
the British had started to trade </div>
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in our beef again, the war forcing them to depend on us; </div>
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and all the while the farmers’ wives fussing in kitchens,
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giving you punnets of wild cherries and apples </div>
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to take home with you as a treat for the children, </div>
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so many the family could feast on for a month, </div>
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grandmother making jams, sweet tarts and cakes. </div>
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A time when happiness reigned in the house.</div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">vi. Memory<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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I try to fill the gap with fragments, anecdotes </div>
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and clues, though no concluding image comes </div>
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to mind to complete my rag-tag picture of you. </div>
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How we each pass with our dying breath into </div>
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the foreverness of forgetfulness – like the land </div>
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you once walked with your brothers so many years before, </div>
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the hope you felt out there in the wide open fields </div>
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fading now to a monochrome photograph </div>
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of another time, a different place; and the stories </div>
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that may yet still await to add again your human face </div>
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to those gathered around the family fireplace: </div>
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this partial and imagined portrait I try make for you </div>
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– grandfather I never knew.</div>
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<br />Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-32980201192978439872016-10-08T06:16:00.000-07:002016-10-08T08:11:52.450-07:00'Summer Rain' - Launch Photos<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Well, I had a great launch for my collection <i>Summer Rain </i>at Books Upstairs in Dublin at the end of September. Here is some photographic evidence!<br />
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Old friends gather, including Sarah Douglas and Greg O'Brien<br />
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Poet and novelist David Butler sets the formal proceedings going by welcoming the audience and introducing the wonderful poet Peter Sirr to say some words about the collection. </div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-o8r10Yt3m98/V_jkN9t9UZI/AAAAAAAAAiE/c682zs1WSPY15HpncrfIcz1U_061hm10wCEw/s1600/14445930_1164477813627634_5208488008243676080_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-o8r10Yt3m98/V_jkN9t9UZI/AAAAAAAAAiE/c682zs1WSPY15HpncrfIcz1U_061hm10wCEw/s320/14445930_1164477813627634_5208488008243676080_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Peter spoke to the gathered audience<i> </i>with his extremely lucid (as ever), close reading of the work. It was a true honour to have him there on the evening.</div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-T3Bn0XQmH0A/V_jlR2GkyqI/AAAAAAAAAic/-ScelwCVlko9b8erIf9DcqD1eFa0VUClwCEw/s1600/14484870_1164476873627728_7297067882371750128_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-T3Bn0XQmH0A/V_jlR2GkyqI/AAAAAAAAAic/-ScelwCVlko9b8erIf9DcqD1eFa0VUClwCEw/s320/14484870_1164476873627728_7297067882371750128_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Peter's summary of the collection as 'a book in three movements, symphonic in its breadth' was extremely humbling to hear... </div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tg4nvQQji4M/V_j72I90s1I/AAAAAAAAAjE/2GQoDOQ9dJcwjQ2D7VGdJiXeD5xuREbvQCLcB/s1600/14441055_1164476870294395_433108143930103624_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tg4nvQQji4M/V_j72I90s1I/AAAAAAAAAjE/2GQoDOQ9dJcwjQ2D7VGdJiXeD5xuREbvQCLcB/s320/14441055_1164476870294395_433108143930103624_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Finally, I face my nerves - and the audience - to say some words of thanks to the many who have helped me along the way with this one.</div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cCs6G7aBr7M/V_jj_ZuRFYI/AAAAAAAAAh0/Rwkgh8DDTxY25Q81OwWdotzMpOqToSdBACEw/s1600/14433177_1164477356961013_5465426612781794355_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cCs6G7aBr7M/V_jj_ZuRFYI/AAAAAAAAAh0/Rwkgh8DDTxY25Q81OwWdotzMpOqToSdBACEw/s320/14433177_1164477356961013_5465426612781794355_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Physics corner: Poets Iggy McGovern, Kate Dempsey and Ross Hattaway read as I read - from my own collection, mind. Otherwise, that would be just rude...</div>
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I finish my short(ish) reading from the book with the monologue 'Ailish', one of my favourite pieces from the collection. </div>
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The Host with the most, D Butler, returns to the floor and wraps up the speechifying, inducing folk to have (another) glass of wine and buy the wares on offer!</div>
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Old pals, Brian Walsh and Greg O'Brien chatting afterwards...</div>
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...while, thankfully, I had some books to sign.</div>
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My great friend from New York, Beth Phillips, chats with my mam.</div>
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The rest of the family had come in numbers also. My uncle Dinser and aunt Margaret, with my brother Paddy and his partner Valerie.</div>
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Still signing books, thankfully, when ambushed with a man-hug by my old pal and neighbour, Mick Cregan. </div>
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My uncle Frank, original toubadour of the family, talking to my brother Aidan.</div>
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To finish, a shot of me - book in hands - ruminating afterwards... Naturally, we all then headed to the nearest tavern...</div>
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<br />
My profound thanks to all who came along to make the launch such a special occasion. Massive thanks also to Books Upstairs for hosting the event and their long and enduring support of contemporary Irish writing and my publisher Ward Wood for their continued support in publishing my work. And finally, special mention for my good friend Steve Wilson who took the wonderfully atmospheric photographs on the night.<br />
<br />
<br />
Till the next one!<br />
<br />
<br />Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-63907930632108370722015-10-19T03:34:00.001-07:002017-03-02T05:32:21.224-08:00'Rock Ammonite' at the 'Poetry & Science Hub'<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.55em; margin-bottom: 15px;">
This poem and commentary first appeared on the University of Liverpool's 'Centre for Poetry & Science' website, edited by poet Deryn Rees-Jones. More content on this very fascinating marriage of ideas can be found at the <a href="https://www.liv.ac.uk/poetry-and-science/" target="_blank">Poetry & Science Hub</a>.<br />
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Rock Ammonite</h2>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.55em; margin-bottom: 15px;">
The surprising simplicity of it<br />
there among the shoal:<br />
little earth-memory,<br />
spiralling palimpsest.</div>
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It is the alpha and omega<br />
of necessity, the first word<br />
and the last of all<br />
argument. And if the eye</div>
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is steady retrace the slow-<br />
turning of centuries<br />
and descend step-wise,<br />
down the tight curve</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.55em; margin-bottom: 15px;">
of its spine to the centre<br />
about which all appears<br />
to turn. And there,<br />
to close your eyes</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.55em; margin-bottom: 15px;">
and push one step further,<br />
past language and origins<br />
into the dark beginnings<br />
of it all.</div>
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<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.55em; margin-bottom: 15px;">
from <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">In the Library of Lost Objects </em><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">(Ward Wood Publishing, London, 2011)</span> </div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vMthUjvHzjQ/UaCltM_4fYI/AAAAAAAAAF0/ke0hKXZWLF0/s1600/ammonite.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vMthUjvHzjQ/UaCltM_4fYI/AAAAAAAAAF0/ke0hKXZWLF0/s1600/ammonite.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.55em;">As the French theorist Gaston Bachelard points out in </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.55em;">The Poetics of Space</em><span style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.55em;">, stones represent a special place in our imagination. They are symbols of permanence, at least to everyone except a geologist, who would view them undoubtedly as dynamic. It is no surprise that the grand monuments of any great society – from the Neolithic ‘time chamber’ at Newgrange to the Arc de Triomphe – are made of stone. They are there to endure, to suggest power over time; to defy time for as long as possible.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.55em; margin-bottom: 15px;">
We often think of ourselves as being in possession of a Self, as Jung would put it, or an Ego and Id as Freud claimed. In a way though, we have many selves. There is the weight of personal memory and the biographical self; there is the social self, which is probably the one that doesn’t make it into poems; there is also the set of ideas we have encountered and assimilated giving us, what we might call, a philosophical self. In my collection <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">In the Library of Lost Objects</em> I have tried to explore these different ‘selves’ in a way that they become interconnected and necessary to each other, the small or large personal dramas played out against the backdrop of an impersonal canvas: deep time as well as lived time.</div>
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If stones signify permanence, fossils represent a special case. They are life preserved in rock. As such they are a kind of double-image of the notion of permanence, giving us both a glimpse of what they were as living things, and their concrete existence in the present as “little earth-memories”. Their lives are short-lived, but through the process of petrifaction, they possess an after-life, surviving across vast tracts of time to present themselves to us behind glass in display cases.</div>
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This poem is based around a simple conceit: that the spiral form of the ammonite represents both its own cause and the spiral of evolution itself. We push back in time and “descend step-wise / down the tight curve / of its spine”. This brings us to the origins of life itself and beyond to the point of unknowing before “the dark beginnings of it all.”</div>
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In an earlier draft, that phrase “of it all” read “of the world”. The word <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">world</em> is one of most powerful in the language, yet here it seemed too abstract and general. The more casual “of it all” seemed to suggest something broader and bigger, yet more mysterious: life itself.</div>
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*</div>
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When CP Snow delivered his famous lecture in 1959 on the “two cultures” – the sciences and the humanities – they seemed to him at that time to be growing ever further apart. It is an observation that is probably even more true now. I think to resolve this we need to understand that the sciences and the arts can live side by side and both serve a function, though it would be simplistic to say it is the same function. Science gives us objective knowledge whereas a poem can never be verifiable in the same way as a scientific argument is. It is not a theorem and its proof.</div>
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Yet, at the same time, I believe the best poems endure because they represents a different type of truth, though one that is more persuasive than empirical. It gives us a sense of the subjective and emotional nature of our daily existence. In other words, where science excels at giving us definitive, objective knowledge, poetry and the arts are the instruments of expressing the experiential nature of our lives – even when encountering something as seemingly abstract as a fossil, as I try to show in this poem. I very much hope that poetry can engage with and be informed by the rich insights, vocabularies, and discoveries of science. As someone with a background in natural sciences, I draw on these subjects not just for effect but because they feel integral to the way in which I respond to, and write about, both the personal and philosophical aspects of life. In the end, all these things can connect and inform each other. That is my hope, at least.</div>
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Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-76041656212470025602014-07-15T06:02:00.000-07:002017-04-26T05:45:38.793-07:00The Line of the Known & Unknown - essay<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Essay commissioned for the exhibition ‘The Infinite Line [The Search for the Unknown]', </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Tactic Gallery, Cork City: 9</span><sup style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">th</sup><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">-22</span><sup style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">nd</sup><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> May, 2014. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> *</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">In 1819, John Keats
wrote these famous lines in his long narrative poem, ‘Lamia’:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"> Conquer all mystery by rule and line,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"> Empty the haunted air and gnomèd mine –<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"> Unweave the rainbow, as it erstwhile made<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"> The
tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">Keats was, of course,
referring in those last lines to that towering figure of science Isaac Newton and
how, for him, the rainbow demonstrated the reflection and refraction of light
through moisture in the atmosphere to reveal the full glory of the visible
spectrum. For Keats, such a description of this natural phenomenon robbed it of
its former mystery, reducing it to mere explanation. It should be said, of
course, that Romanticism was, in many ways, a retreat from 18<sup>th</sup>
century rationalism and the rise in elevation of the importance of science
during that era. Romantics such as Keats built their founding philosophy on the
notion that it was more important to write of the <i>feeling </i>generated by encountering nature in all its wonder rather than
by simply setting out to measure it by “rule and line”. However, the Romantics,
by raising our experience of nature to the level of pure emotion, robbed it, in
turn, of its necessary ambiguity and sometimes harsh modalities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KdVpdVk6lIY/U7_ezBnn6lI/AAAAAAAAAQY/OEEXq_u6aRs/s1600/John_Keats_by_William_Hilton.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="262" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Keats</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps it is most
surprising then, that it was that pillar of Victorian taste, Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, who first recognized that such an ecstatic view of nature (or ‘the pathetic
fallacy’ as the critic John Ruskin also spoke of) didn’t quite coincide with
the reality that presented itself to our discerning eye. He was right to be
disturbed in what he saw as “nature red in tooth and claw.” We could no longer
view the natural world as being there to serve us: it is indifferent to what we
think of it and functions by its own laws. Clearly, this shift in perspective
caused great shock, as well as the intellectual necessity to engage with an awareness
of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as it grew ever more prominent. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">With the rise of
modernism in the early 20</span><sup style="line-height: 150%;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 150%;"> century artists made a clear and abrupt fracture
with the past and some of the quaint notion discussed above, striving instead
for an accuracy of perception, which the American poet Wallace Stevens
described as an “accuracy with respect to the structure of reality”. While all
modernists were preoccupied with this notion, the interpretation of what this
meant was often quite varied and even divergent. For Ezra Pound, the unit of
such a reality was the Image, a truer basis he believed for art to build itself
upon over the neat rhetorical devices and tidiness of old current (Edwardian)
forms. T.S. Eliot took this further with explorations of fractured
psychological states, recorded in works (such as </span><i style="line-height: 150%;">The Wasteland</i><span style="line-height: 150%;">) that shift from one fragmentary experience to
another, searching for some form of order in the confusion of experience. And for
others, like Stevens (again), reality was the product of the imagination as it
encounters and, in turn, shapes the world. Only with this form of imaginative and
constant engagement, he argued, could the dynamic order of the universe be revealed.
These are hardly notions of accuracy that a scientist would recognise, even those
faced by the New Physics of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics in the
opening decades of the 20</span><sup style="line-height: 150%;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 150%;"> century. The “rule and line” of art was
still a somewhat different enterprise than that of the </span><span style="line-height: 24px;">caliper</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"> and telescope.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wallace Stevens</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JGKOa1MW5ek/U7_dGm2yvTI/AAAAAAAAAQA/xa9ERR5QmDE/s1600/Wallace_Stevens.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">But we may come to the
question as artists: What are we being accurate toward in the end: the
objective facts of the world, or our experience of being <i>in</i> that world? In recent times, we have come increasingly to think
of accuracy as being synonymous with the precise, reproducible certainties of
scientific truth, with </span><span style="color: #222222; line-height: 150%;">Stephen Hawking stating lately that
“science has made philosophy redundant”. One wonders what he thinks of the
contribution of the arts to human knowledge. </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">The great
search, now, in science is for what is
popularly called a Theory of Everything. It is a deeply important undertaking
and, should it ever be achieved, would be of unimaginable significance, both
for science and society.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-c1dBxXr7s6w/U7_eKkS5eEI/AAAAAAAAAQI/suiBhO70DRw/s1600/atlas_event.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-c1dBxXr7s6w/U7_eKkS5eEI/AAAAAAAAAQI/suiBhO70DRw/s1600/atlas_event.gif" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Having said that,
should we not challenge such a grand – if not grandiose – term, the Theory of <i>Everything</i>. It seems to take a limited
view of what we mean by that all encompassing word. Such an explanation would,
in the end, simply be one of the material universe and the aspects of
that universe described by physics alone. It wouldn’t help us decipher the
genome, for example, or indeed, untangle the nature of consciousness. As such, it
would ultimately have very little to say about the experience of living; that
deeply subjective narrative in which we live out each of our lives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">For me, science is not
just a steady procession of unassailable facts, produced dispassionately by
purely rational means. It is also a process of trial and error, instinct and
hunches, driven often by profound curiosity. The story of the history of our
understanding of light itself, demonstrates this point well. Perception is so
crucial to living everyday life as we all know yet, when used more precisely,
it can become also an instrument of scientific inquiry as well as artistic
scrutiny, as the three artists in this exhibit demonstrate in very different
ways. But we cannot have perception without light and our ideas about light has
had a long and interesting history. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wSkbbnYo_2A/U7_eZAHKQfI/AAAAAAAAAQQ/txO9SwX-FME/s1600/alhazen.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="230" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ibn Al-Haytham</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">The standard version
tells us that in antiquity, Plato among others, proposed what is called the
‘Emission Theory’, arguing that light travelled from the <i>eye</i> to the object it perceived in a direct line. We clearly now
know this to be wrong. What may come as a surprise was how long Emission Theory
persisted, but also that it wasn’t, in fact, that giant Newton (again) who
first overthrew it, though this is taken as the standard narrative in the
history of science. No, this notion of light was proposed six centuries earlier
by the Persian scholar Ibn Al-Haytham (popularly known as Alhazen) who
conducted a series of experiments on light while under house arrest, proving
irrefutably that light travels in straight lines from the object of observation
to the eye, demonstrating this fact by creating (most probably the first) <i>camera obscura</i> in his small room by
placing a heavy black curtain across it and making a small aperture at its
centre, the rooftops and spiking minarets of Cairo projected upside down onto
the wall opposite. It is this last detail - upside-down - that proves the assertion. Alhazen
also first explained refraction, reflection, spherical aberration and the
magnifying power of lenses, though sadly little of his work and findings were
disseminated in Europe, and Newton certainly wasn’t aware of his forerunner.
This is not to reduce Newton’s claim also on these ideas and he was, indeed,
the first to explain the spectrum of light that Keats found so anathema to his
sensibility and feeling for the natural world. For me, this history alone
becomes a fascination in itself. It reminds us that science doesn’t always
proceed linearly and is, in the end, also a very human undertaking. In short, there
is a story to science that goes beyond a mere ledger of facts and falsities.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">And where then does art
stand in such a schema? It’s hard to know what possible direct function it may
provide to science, at least within the realms of its own methodology. Some
would say, I’m sure, it has nothing to offer at all. And for art’s part, does
science unweave the rainbow as Keats’ suggested and rob nature of its direct
power over our imaginations? Can artists exploit the insights of science and
yet bestow on it to the quality of imaginative encounter?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EvEouEaFG9w/U8UeaXHNwiI/AAAAAAAAARc/cWGc3g-wHMY/s1600/2_Cassandra_Eustace.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EvEouEaFG9w/U8UeaXHNwiI/AAAAAAAAARc/cWGc3g-wHMY/s1600/2_Cassandra_Eustace.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cassandra Eustace 'What Lies Between Repeated Differences'</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">I think it is fair to
argue that while science offers no criticism of the arts, it also offers no
real meaningful place for it in its own enterprise and perhaps this is at the
peril of potential <i>hubris</i>. It is
certain in recent years, that there is a kind of slippage going on in science towards an attitude of all-knowingness
– or, at least a quest and belief to reach such a point in the future. However,
it does sometimes seem that this quest is pursued at the expense of (and
respect for) other modes of knowledge such as art, myth and experience itself, furtively
moving towards a general disenchantment
through explanation, both in terms of the natural world and our place within
it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This then,
inevitably leads to the question: what is arts relationship to science and can
it have a meaningful discourse with it? I think we have to be clear here and
say that the arts and the sciences serve different, though no less important,
functions. Science’s job is to examine disparate phenomena and find a law or
theory that shows how they are connected. This hypothesis is then tested and if
proven true gives us an ‘objective’ truth. Art also tries to find patterns of
connections and draw unexpected material together to form a coherent work, but
it can never aspire to the empiricism of science, nor should it. In the end, a poem
or any art-work can only persuade rather than prove. It captures something of
the ‘subjective’ experience of living (even as it wrestles, at times, with
abstraction), though by means that make such an experience recognisable or
comprehensible to another person. We might borrow an important concept from
science and call this a form of ‘resonance’. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z22ekiO9qAY/U8Ue4haGlQI/AAAAAAAAARk/Of5kVUjqI7s/s1600/6.Richard_Forrest_InfiniteLine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z22ekiO9qAY/U8Ue4haGlQI/AAAAAAAAARk/Of5kVUjqI7s/s1600/6.Richard_Forrest_InfiniteLine.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Richard Forrest 'Truncated Tetrahedron'</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I would suggest
that art that engages with scientific ideas helps us to explore and <i>see </i>(in a sense) both the wonder and
insight that science has provided us with and in the process we may humanise
such ‘objective’ knowledge as we try weave it into the fabric of lived
experience. Art is uniquely placed to help us to make sense of our relationship
to it, as well as asking the question: how
do you live in such a world with such knowledge? A poem, for example, can
be said to exist in a fictional space. Yet, it is accurate of something. The
truth of imagination is just as important as the bare nature of the facts. The
places we create in the imagination feel just as real as the concrete places we
inhabit in our lives, yet imaginative accuracy is judged, as such, by a
different set of criteria than the scientific connotation of that word. It
deals with the contradictory nature of our inner lives, not just the outer one.</span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LDLMxkiGszE/U8UfV6DQJOI/AAAAAAAAARs/Cv5Ej3-fsD8/s1600/RoseanneLynch_Exposures1_7_Detail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LDLMxkiGszE/U8UfV6DQJOI/AAAAAAAAARs/Cv5Ej3-fsD8/s1600/RoseanneLynch_Exposures1_7_Detail.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Roseanne Lynch <i>from</i> 'Exposures 1-7'</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">And perhaps by creating
work that draws on science, as in this exhibit, we – as artists in different
forms – are attempting, through such an engagement, to bring these seemingly
abstract and even distant ideas into some form of imaginative resonance, so that they too may form part of the fabric of
our reality in the process; that such ‘ideas’ may also be </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;">experienced</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"> as well as understood. Science brings us new and deep
knowledge of how the universe functions through theory and law, but as human beings
we have a deep desire and need to feel
connected to both place and our place within it. It seems to me that science
does not unweave the rainbow as Keats suggested all those years ago, but
offers us both new knowledge and perspectives regarding nature that artists can
examine and engage with at the level of the imagination as well as the cerebral
cortex; and that in doing so, the two disciplines can create a meaningful
exchange of perspectives and a balanced view of life, one that is accurate to
the facts but also, crucially, felt.</span></div>
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The Infinite Line [A Search for the Unknown]<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">Curators: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">Maeve Lynch </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://www.maevelynch.com/">http://www.maevelynch.com/</a></span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">Sophie Behal </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://www.sophiebehal.com/">http://www.sophiebehal.com/</a></span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">Artists: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">Cassandra Eustace </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://crawfordexhibitions.com/exxit/?portfolio=cassandra-eustace">http://crawfordexhibitions.com/exxit/?portfolio=cassandra-eustace</a></span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">Richard Forrest <o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://www.richardforrest.info/">http://www.richardforrest.info/</a></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 150%;">Roseanne Lynch </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://roseannelynch.wordpress.com/about/">http://roseannelynch.wordpress.com/about/</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Art Photo Credit: </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Roseanne Lynch</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-25799288818534856302014-04-02T02:34:00.000-07:002017-04-03T07:19:07.251-07:00'Reykjavik' - video-poemHere is a short film based on my poem 'Reykjavik' from my new collection <i>On Light & Carbon.</i><br />
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A very special thanks to film-maker Bill Bulmer for all his hard work and creative insight in putting it together. I've always thought that putting poetry to images is an interesting, but worthwhile, challenge and I'm really delighted with the results. <br />
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So here it is then. Hope you enjoy it.<br />
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You can also find a higher quality, large screen format, version of the piece on Vimeo at the following link: <a href="http://vimeo.com/90634312/">Reykjavik</a>.<br />
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<br />Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-66500280994640312232013-11-19T05:11:00.001-08:002014-02-01T05:58:32.111-08:00Launch of On Light & CarbonI just wanted to make a quick post to thank all those who made it along to my launch last week in the Teachers' Club, Dublin, as well as those who couldn't be there and sent kind messages.<br />
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Here are a few pictures from the evening!<br />
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Having a quick cig before starting when my cousin Owen O'Connor caught me on film - or I guess, pixels. A massive thanks to him for all the wonderful shots from the night.<br />
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Inside, I introduce Theo Dorgan. Naturally, I was extremely grateful to have him taking the time to read the collection and coming along to say some words about it.<br />
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Theo spoke with his usual wicked charm, not to mention his deeply lucid and sharp observations about the work. He made a better summary of it, and its themes, than I could have managed. I was truly honoured to have him there to launch the vessel.<br />
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After the fantastic intro, I read a selection of poems from the book.<br />
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One thank you I forgot to make on the night was to my great friend and artist Brian Walsh who conceived the cover design for this one; and to Mike Fortune-Wood for doing such a lovely job developing it!</div>
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Then there were copies to be signed, thankfully...<br />
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And we finished the evening - as we started it - with some beautiful music by my cousin Mick O'Brien on uileann pipes and his daughter, Ciara, on fiddle. It was a real pleasure to have them there and play so well.<br />
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And to end, a final pic of a happy poet!<br />
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Again, thanks to all who made it along on a chilly but clear November evening, and to those who couldn't but I know would've like to, if they could've made it.<br />
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So the book is launched and only now feels properly published. Which brings me to a final, massive, thank you to my publishers Adele Ward and Mike Fortune-Wood, of Ward Wood Publishing, for getting my words out there into the world.Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-49026835385626203582012-12-12T03:35:00.001-08:002015-09-17T06:38:51.738-07:00On Light & Carbon - My 'Next Big Thing'<br />
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So ‘The Next Big Thing’ is a chain-letter of sorts,
though hopefully one worth reading, were one writer asks another to answer
some questions on their current project. The questions are clearly designed for
prose-writing folk as everyone knows that the next big thing will most probably
<i>not </i>be a book of poetry! That said, I’m
very happy to take part and my thanks to Colin Bell for passing the baton to
me. Colin discussed his forthcoming novel <i>Stephen
Dearsley’s Summer of Love, </i>in his blog last week. It’s both very
enter-taining and insightful and has certainly piqued my interest in the novel,
which I really look forward to reading. You can find what Colin had to say
about it at: </div>
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<a href="http://www.wolfiewolfgang.com/2012/12/stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love-my.html">http://www.wolfiewolfgang.com/2012/12/stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love-my.html</a></div>
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Now for my answers!</div>
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<b>1) What is the
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The working title, for the last two years, has been <i>On Light & Carbon. </i>I should say that
my first collection had a different title until about a month before it went to
print, so things can change! In this case I’m pretty sure this title is a good
summary of the concerns of the collection and will be on the cover.</div>
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In a way, by finishing my first collection, which had
roughly taken fifteen years to write due to some missteps and misadventures
along the way. I recognised, once it was completed, that I had been locked into
the sensibility of that book since my late twenties, so I was certain that my
next collection would be different, both in terms of imagery and tone. I
started this book as I turned forty and naturally that had a bearing. One thing
I really like in poetry is the power of the concrete and lucid image. In the
new book I employ this strategy again, though I hope the new poems are a little
less lyrical and have a more philosophical edge. My first collection drew quite
heavily from science – particularly from the natural world with a number of poems
about insects, for example – alongside more personal material. While this book
does something broadly similar, this time I've tried to push deeper into the
science (and bring the reader with me, hopefully) exploring the physics of
light, in its many wondrous guises, as well as the carbon of the title: the
basis for all life. Really, what I’m
trying to do is connect science to life in some way – and vice versa. It’s also
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We don’t tend to talk of poetry in terms of genre, though
that’s not to say that there aren’t very different traditions and schools
within poetry. I hope my work falls somewhere between the metaphysical and the
lyrical.</div>
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<b>4) What actors would
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Well, this is a tricky one for poetry, isn’t it! It’s almost
like asking who I would I like to see play myself! That said, there are a
number of portraits in the collection. I’m most proud of the one about the 11<sup>th</sup>
Century (in what we call now the Common Era) Islamic scientist Ibn al-Haytham, popularly
known as Alhazen, who wrote his masterwork on optics while under house-arrest. In
real terms, he was the first person to employ the scientific method. And all
this happened six centuries before Newton, I should point out. I’d love to see
that story told more fully. I’d cast the brilliant actor Saïd Taghmaoui (first
seen in <i>La Haine</i>) to play Alhazen.
But to twist the question into a more meaningful one: who would I like to read
the audio book? John Hurt or Ralph Fiennes would do very nicely!</div>
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<b>5) What is a one-line
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To try to show the deepest aspect of our humanity and
curiosity against the canvas and backdrop that science has provided us with.</div>
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Neither. An agent who took on a poet would have to be one
who had taken a vow of poverty. In my experience they are not the kind of
people attracted to that particular business. Then again, the absence of agents
is perhaps what keeps poetry poor and pure. The book will be published by Ward
Wood Publishing (without a go-between) in September 2013.</div>
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<b>7) How long did it
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Well, I feel I’m nearly there, but a book isn’t finished
till it goes to the printer. The book was written in three distinct phases so I
could say I had a first draft after about a year, but so much has been cut and
added since then it doesn’t seem like a meaningful answer. To get to the point of
having what I’d call a good ‘working draft’ has taken about two and half years.
By my standards that’s been very quick! Partly this has been down to employing
a new approach to writing poetry. I tried (though didn’t always conform) to the
idea of writing a decent draft of a poem in one day. This seemed to help keep
the general intent behind a piece in a clearer focus, as well as leaving room
for unexpected shifts of perspective. That said, writing this way later leads
to lots of finessing and rewriting and there is one very long piece based
around archaeological artefacts that took months to write... and then more
months to revise!</div>
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I’m not sure. There are a number of poets who are scientists
or have a background in science. I really admire the work of undoubtedly the most
famous of these in Miroslav Holub, though I think I write about science in a
very different way, and from a very different tradition<b>.</b> Perhaps a bigger influence would be the work of the Irish poet
Thomas Kinsella – particularly his poetry from the early sixties to the mid-seventies. I hope, in
some way, that I have emulated the movement between abstract
thought to iron-cast images that you find in his collections such as<i>
Downstream</i> and <i>Nightwalker &
other poems</i>. I’ve always loved his work, though its presence is felt more
in this collection than my first. Having said that, I’d be loathe to even suggest
I’m in the same league as the great man.</div>
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Partly it was the tenor of the debate around science and
religion of recent years. It seems to me that we are creeping towards a notion
that science is the <i>only</i> form of reliable knowledge, with Stephen Hawking stating recently that “science has made philosophy
redundant”. I think this is a far more complex and interesting question than such
statements suggest, so I wanted to explore the <i>different </i>ways we comprehend the world and put them together to
create a bigger picture of ourselves – whether it be through science, art, myth
or personal experience. </div>
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Well, you will encounter such figures as August Kekulé who is said to have discovered the structure of benzene (the base of all organic life, not just petroleum) in a dream. Then there is the curious figure of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch merchant
draper who was one of the key pioneers
of the optical microscope. The fact he was a draper isn’t incidental as they were one of the first trades to exploit lenses, here using them to examine the quality of stitching in fabric. Having realised that using two of these
lenses would massively increase magnification, van Leeuwenhoek used his new instrument to first peer
into water, naturally enough. So excited was he by what he’d seen, he then
looked at his own urine and excrement. Never has a trip to the privy been so giddily
anticipated, I’ll wager!</div>
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August Kekulé</div>
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Having done my best to convince you to check out my
collection when it appears, I’m delighted to introduce two fine writers who I
have chosen to tag and who will post next Wednesday about their latest work. They
are the poet Nessa O’Mahony and fictioner Valerie Sirr. Here’s a little more
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<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nessa O’Mahony was born and lives in Dublin. Her poetry has
appeared in a number of Irish, UK, and North American periodicals, has been
translated into several European languages. She won the National Women’s Poetry
Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and
Hennessy Literature Awards. Her second poetry collection,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Trapping a
Ghost</span></em>, was published by bluechrome publishing in 2005. A verse
novel,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><em><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In Sight of Home</span></em>, was published
by Salmon Poetry in May 2009. She was awarded an Irish Arts Council literature
bursary in 2004. She completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the
University of Wales, Bangor, in 2007. She was also artist in residence at the
John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at University College Dublin and Assistant
Editor of UK literary journal <i>Orbis</i>.</span><span style="background: white; color: #61636a;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://nessaomahony.blogspot.ie/">http://nessaomahony.blogspot.ie/</a></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">Valerie
Sirr has published short fiction and flash fiction in Ireland, UK, US,
Australia and Asia. Publications include <i>The
Irish Times, The Sunday Tribune, The New Writer, The Stinging Fly</i>. Some
poems are forthcoming in anthologies from Revival Press (Ireland) and Poetry
Lostock (UK). Awards include 2007 Hennessy New Irish Writer Award, two Arts
Council of Ireland bursaries and other national and international literature
prizes, most recently a flash fiction award (2011) from <i>The New Writer Magazine</i> (UK), judged by British poet and writer
Catherine Smith. She holds an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College,
Dublin. She teaches creative writing and blogs on writing at:<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><a href="http://www.valeriesirr.wordpress.com/">www.valeriesirr.wordpress.com</a></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">. She</span></span><span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"> hopes to publish her short story collection soon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-84112749703841302672011-07-21T09:03:00.000-07:002015-12-06T02:43:01.264-08:00Intelligent Artifice - a history of sci-fi cinema<div style="text-align: justify;">
I wrote the following article shortly after I'd written a science fiction screenplay (never made alas) in the philosophical tradition of that genre<i>. </i>The piece was<i> </i>to be published in <i>Film Ireland</i>, in spring 2002, but for purely logistical reasons had to be cut, so never saw the light of day. It goes some way to explaining my interest in the genre. So, here it goes:</div>
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Science Fiction and the search for the immaterial</div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">In his book of essays, <i>The Art of the Novel</i>, Milan Kundera argues that the famous scene in <i>Don Quixote</i> where Quixote attempts to fight the windmills with his sword, is the first expression in literature of man’s discomfort with his own technology. The Age of Reason had arrived and with it the greatest explosion of technological innovation since the Upper Paleolithic. The universe had become a clockwork, a gargantuan machine governed by fixed and immutable laws and God was, in the end, a logician. When Quixote raises his sword he is waving it as his own insignificance in the shadow of such a world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Film, more than any other art form, owes its very existence to the advancement of the technological and from the beginning film-makers have had a preoccupation with the dual nature of the medium as the mechanical eye that mirrors the eye of direct experience. It’s no surprise then that the first moving image recorded by the Lumiere brothers was of a locomotive – one of the most potent symbols of the industrial – entering the station at La Ciotat. The shadowplay of light on the cave wall had become something precise and reproducible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Science Fiction as a genre is, by its very nature, dedicated to the exploration of scientific concepts and their consequences to human life and the life of human society. It’s surprising to find, though, that for a genre so preoccupied by the scientific and the symbols of science the message of science fiction films so often comes out in favour of the imprecise and contradictory world of human emotion over the cold exactitudes of scientific reductionism. Few films within the genre can be seen as pure celebration of scientific discovery (or possible future discoveries) and those that do – such as <i>Contact</i> or <i>2001 </i>– seem to call for an expanded view of science that takes into account the peculiarities of human experience and its search for extra meaning beyond the measurable and seen. In short, they attempt to reconstitute a context in which scientific knowledge exists in that which is beyond science.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Although science fiction as a rule is not committed to revealing science as it stands but as it might be in the future, more often than not futurist dramas say more about the time they were conceived than they do about the future they predict. From this point of view, Fritz Lang’s seminal masterpiece <i>Metropolis</i> can be seen as a quasi-religious appraisal of the plight of the worker in a mechanized world at a time when the Trade Union movement was growing in power. In the central figure of Maria, Lang presents a symbol of the harmony between the “brain and the hand”, a balancing principle regulating the relationship between the industrialist and his workforce. Of course, the industrialist Fredersen attempts to destroy Maria’s message by replacing her with a robot designed to ferment worker unrest – a clear comment on Communism – but in the end he is reconciled to Maria’s cause through the marriage of his son (his conscience) to Maria.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Although <i>Metropolis</i> had appeared in 1926 science fiction film-making in the proper sense only emerged in the 1950s and then largely as a response to the lingering memory of the atom bomb and its legacy of fear played out in the politics of the Cold War. In Robert Wise’s <i>The Day the Earth Stood Still</i> (1951) the alien visitor Klaatu warns that humanity’s entry into the atomic age poses a threat to the whole universe. The film’s cautionary, though optimistic, message is also echoed in the Edenic parable <i>Forbidden Planet</i> (1956) were Dr Morbius, confronted with the vast superiority of a now extinct alien civilization, believes that the human race is not ready for such knowledge. In a clever (if not very dramatic) Freudian twist, the film argues that it is our primitive instinct or “unconscious monster” that makes such knowledge perilous. It’s probably the correct conclusion but in reality society rarely withholds its technology for fear of it being abused.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Another rich period for science fiction film-making was the 1970s when a number of films where produced which spoke directly to the issues of the time. In Douglas Thumbull’s ecological drama <i>Silent Running</i> (1971) the Earth’s forests have disappeared and the only remaining vegetation exists on spaceships floating quietly through the void of space. When Bruce Dern’s character Freeman Lowell is ordered to destroy his cargo he refuses and in an act of desperation kills his shipmates and leaves – in one of the most poignant images found in science fiction – two robots Huey and Dewey to tend to the garden as it drifts away into the darkness. <i>Soylent Green</i> (1973), though marred by a wooden performance from Charlton Heston, is another interesting meditation on the problem of over-population and the ecological and social decay resulting from it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">If the notion of a mechanical universe asks a question of philosophy and religion, a mechanized society asks a question of everyone who lives in it. And the ultimate expression of the mechanization of human society is the totalitarian state. In Michael Radford’s suitable grim retelling of Orwell’s <i>1984</i> (1984) we are presented with a kind of retro-futurism, Oceania most closely resembling war-time Britain but one were fascism has prevailed over democracy. History is the key to the present as the opening credits declare: “He who controls the Past controls the Future. He who controls the Present controls the Past.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Under the ever-watchful eye of Big Brother John Hurt’s character, Winston Smith, attempts to conduct a sexual relationship in secret, an act banned as a “thought and sex crime” by the State. Like Terry Gilliam’s <i>Brazil,</i> also made in 1984, the film explores the limits of human resistance within such a society and finds – in an outcome not dictated to by the demands of Hollywood – that everyone has a breaking point, the film’s bleak message summarised in the devastatingly simple refrain uttered by Winston about his lover: “Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold me.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Another film that mines dystopian themes, though this time in a completely minimalist futuristic setting, is George Lucas’s excellent and underrated first feature <i>THX1138</i> (1971). In a twist on the notion of mechanical societies being based entirely on materialistic principles, the leader of this unnamed underground city speaks to the citizens – who are denoted merely by a serial number – via confessional booths from behind a Christ-like image instructing them to “work hard, be more productive, prevent accidents, be happy.” Of course, in a world where everything is regulated and drugs are administered to keep the population permanently sedated, there is no such thing as happiness only perhaps hope. The closing scene where THX1138 (Robert Duvall) escapes from the city and emerges into the idyllic landscape above is a truly lyrical finale to a film that makes no concessions to the terrible nature of such a vision. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps though the most audacious variation on the subject has been the Wachowski brothers’ film <i>The Matrix </i>with the idea that the ultimate form of subjugation is to not know that you are subjugated – to believe that you are free when you are not. As Morpheus tells Neo, “[you were] born into a prison that you cannot smell, or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.” And metaphorically the most interesting prisons are the ones we cannot see. You can't help but feeling that this prison might be that of material gain above all other values.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">The Matrix</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;"> also expresses one of our deepest fears about our own technology: that it has become so advanced that it can begin to think and out-think us, that our machines may, in the end, make machines of us. Or as Davis Cronenberg would see it in films such as <i>Videodrome</i> (1983) and <i>eXistenZ</i> (1999) our machines are destined to outgrow us and it is the future of mankind to merge in some way with technology by way of some kind of biomechanical interface, and if our computers outsmart us so be it – Darwinian evolution would simply have entered a new and exciting conclusion, though one that may ultimately spell our own extinction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">The most striking symbol of the machine, though, is one that is indistinguishable from us: the android. And the question must be asked: is there anything that truly separates us from such an intelligent machine?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">In many ways the image of the android gives rise to our deepest suspicion and fear. In <i>The Terminator </i>(1984), James Cameron gives us a cyborg that embodies our worst nightmare: a machine that is almost indestructible, unwavering in its mission to destroy and totally lacking in empathy. This also serves as a good description of the alien species in Ridley Scott’s landmark film <i>Alien</i> (1979) and perhaps the alien is terrifying precisely because it embodies such machine-like qualities coupled with a kind of brute Darwinian ferocity. </span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Alien</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">, of course, also has its own android in Ash (Ian Holm), the science officer on the <i>Nostromo</i> spacecraft. Ash represents another version of our disquiet about intelligent machines: he may look and act like us, but he is by design an extension of corporate enterprise and will always choose what is best for the company, or state, over his fellow workers. In an interesting inversion of this idea the android in <i>Alien Resurrection</i> (1997) Call (Winona Ryder) is programmed to care and is revealed to be an android precisely because of her unwavering empathy. As Ripley points out: “No human is that humane.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Although the idea of artificial intelligence may be seen as another instance were science fiction might anticipate the scientific outcome, the genre’s ongoing fascination with androids may be have more to with their metaphorical charge as representation of ourselves in a post industrial world, than they do about possible scientific advancements. The power of the film <i>Bladerunner</i> (1982) is not that replicants such as Roy (Rutger Hauer) are androids but that they are androids coming into awareness of their own mortality marking and, as such, making a key transition from something merely mechanical to something that resembles life. When Roy confronts his maker Tyrell he says what we might all say given the chance: “I want more life, father.” And if Roy has come into knowledge of fear he also demonstrates in his death-speech (written as it turns out by Hauer himself) that he has also experienced the very human emotion of awe. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;">Science fiction, like films in any genre, is often guilty of producing trite and formulaic narratives appealing more to the marketability of the genre than the vast possibilities it offers. At its best though, science fiction has produced some of the most intellectually stimulating stories of any kind about the present nature of our lives as well as the future possibilities they occupy in the imagination. If science fiction is on some level fascinated by the windmills of Cervantes novel, it is also like the book’s central character searching for the meaning beyond that landscape. Like the Monolith in Kubrick’s <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>, or Solaris - the intelliegent planet that presents us with our own deepest desires, in Tarkovsky’s film of the same title -</span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 150%;"> science fiction often describes an encounter between the known and the unknowable, between what is seen and what is beyond the visible. It may not attempt like science to offer final solutions to its questions, but in their place it often delivers enduring visions of what might be true of the past, the present as well as the future of our society. </span></div>
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Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-9966644732885585852011-06-29T08:59:00.000-07:002015-09-15T04:17:38.409-07:00Launch of 'In the Library of Lost Objects'Just wanted to make a quick post about the launch of my debut poetry collection 'In the Library of Lost Objects' last week in the Damer Hall, Dublin. A very special thanks to Poetry Ireland for hosting the event. A really great crowd turned out for the occasion and Niall MacMonagle made a very thoughtful and generous introduction to the work. I know some of you couldn't make it along but I really appreciated the messages of support I received. A big up also to Shauna Gilligan who helped out on the night with the book stall.<br />
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Here are some images from the night. A big thank you to my good friend Brian Walsh for taking the photos.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small; text-align: start;">Niall MacMonagle making his introduction</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Signing a copy of the book for poet Aifric Mac Aodha</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small; text-align: start;">With Niall MacMonagle and Prof Salah D Hassan</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Centre: Joseph Woods, Director of Poetry Ireland, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">With artist Gemma Mc Guigan, who took the beautiful </span></div>
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'In the Library of Lost Objects' is available in Books Upstairs, D'Olier Street, Dublin; The Winding Stair Bookshop & Cafe, Ormond Quay, Dublin; Alan Hanna's Bookshop, Rathmines, Dublin; and the Rathgar Bookshop, Rathgar, Dublin. My thanks to them all for the support.<br />
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It can also be ordered directly from the Ward Wood website at: <a href="http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-poetry-nd-itlolo.htm">http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-poetry-nd-itlolo.htm</a><br />
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It can also be found at Amazon.co.uk and The Book Depository (who offer free worldwide delivery): <a href="http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Library-Lost-Objects-Noel-Duffy/9780956660282">http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Library-Lost-Objects-Noel-Duffy/9780956660282</a>Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5692088358815140248.post-63531319363726637402011-06-07T09:27:00.000-07:002011-06-07T09:27:25.706-07:00In the Library of Lost Objects - published<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gkhMJS85WFs/Te5PleqYHAI/AAAAAAAAACQ/vKelb4-iA9o/s1600/itlolo+cover+6+Hi+Res.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div>Just a quick note to let you all know that my debut poetry collection <i>In the Library of Lost Objects </i>has just been published by Ward Wood Publishing. I'm really delighted with the book and excited to finally have it in my hands. My thanks to Adele Ward for her thoughtful edit of the poems included and Mike Fortune Wood for the cover design and all the other many tasks he fulfils at the press. I'd also like to thank Gemma Mc Guigan for the striking cover image.<br />
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The collection can be ordered directly from Ward Wood's website at: <a href="http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-poetry-nd-itlolo.htm">http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-poetry-nd-itlolo.htm</a><br />
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It can also be found at the Book Depository: <a href="http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/-Library-Lost-Objects-Noel-Duffy/9780956660282">http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/-Library-Lost-Objects-Noel-Duffy/9780956660282</a><br />
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The Book Depository are currently offering a 25% discount. Won't last for long.<br />
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For members of the Poetry Book Society the collection is also available at the same discount.<br />
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The book will be launched by Niall MacMonagle in Dublin on Wednesday, June 22nd. I'll post again closer to the date with more information.Noel Duffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11048529680568708117noreply@blogger.com3