Brent
What then is the signal to go?
The sun low in its arc, the yellowing moss
Or the drift of downy white,
A scrim of ice on tundra pools?
Reviews in brief: new from Benjamin Myers, James Kakalios and Lissa Evans
Caitlin Moran’s novel is bubbling with pop culture, featuring a hero every girl needs
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Tim Winton: The Shepherd’s Hut review – a man on the run in the outback
Do you shuffle forward, seaward
Ruffle feathers, ruk ruk, stretch your wings
Out, up? Is it the pull of go,
The push of fly, the open sky
That leads to this, beat on beat,
Over the seas of Baffin Bay
Coasting the fjords of Greenland
Soaring over icecaps, heart pumping
To push, push to three thousand metres
Find the current, to bring you down
The Denmark Strait, to Iceland, a time
At least to feed on eel grass,
Then gather the last reserves,
Fly low, follow the stars? Or is it the sun
That spurs you on, through Atlantic gales
To land at last at Strangford Lough
Or a stretch of Darndale wasteland
To graze with Travellers’ piebalds?
So what went wrong, that brings just one
to Coulagh Bay, in September?
Were your fellows prey to kestrels,
Or hunters’ guns in Iceland
Or did your compass point you here
For a solitary journey’s end?
Mum and Jasper in the Morning
She rises before eight to oversee his peeing, no matter what the season, weather,
or her own inclination –
Downstairs, she ignores her damn knee, and while he leaps and circles, she makes a cup of tea
Takes an old rain coat, slung over her dressing gown, and opens the door onto the garden.
Onto darkness or lemon dawn or barley sugar skies or low slung cloud
and seeping rains or
The trickle drip from last night’s storm, the pots tossed on windblown grass,
or soaring birdsong,
Or onto stillness, a hush of frost, a slip of muffled snow. Or the grey heron
unfolding from the dark pond.
While he snuffles through soil or poppies or sodden leaves, she pauses –
To lift a drooping hellebore
Scour her hostas, pluck and crush a snail underfoot, brush past a salvia,
deadhead a rosebush,
Pickpocket seed pods, water saplings in the greenhouse.
Though why she bothers she doesn’t know
Having no more space
to grow anything.
And yet –
She turns back up the garden again, calling for Jasper,
carrying inside
Earth on her feet, scent of salvia
on her hands.
Laura McKenna lives in Cork where she is completing a novel as part of a Creative Writing PhD at UCC. Her poems have been published in New Irish Writing, The SHOp, and the Irish Examiner among others. She is a past Hennessy Award and Forward Prize nominee and this year she received a commendation in the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize. Her first (unpublished) novel was a winner at the Irish Novel Fair, and longlisted in 2016 for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and Bath Novel Award. Her short stories have been published in The Litro Anthology of New Fiction, Southword and Banshee and she is a past winner of the Penguin/RTÉ Guide short story competition.
Out-takes
to the memory of
Pier Paolo Pasolini
This is no meek communion of the saints –
The boys are rough: they take what we will not give,
Kill, cure, or spare us; then the tricks are turned
That tame the streets to gold. We are bought and sold.
The entrances that open let them in
To solitudes in which we love and grow;
They occupy us (boys will not be boys).
Look up! The tower clock begins to groan
With expectations: Time will answer back,
The past come back – nothing is ever new.
Step backwards down the stairs: come up, go down –
Unless we dance between the past and now,
Between the future and the present dance,
The image bursts into its flower of flame,
Breaks from its chain, and we are men of air.
Father of Waters, rain down upon your sons on fire,
Drown us or buoy us in the depths of our desire.
Piazza Navona, Rome
Tide
From the beached boats
on Sappho’s island,
past the nude men at play,
row on row
of Syrian women
veiled in shields of hijab
carry their cargo of flesh
saved from the fires,
saved from the rough sea,
on their journey to nowhere.
Dizzied by languages
their children will learn,
what will they call home
if peace return?
William Leo Coakley
