poet

near everything

new_poet_modern

Maybe the air is vertebra
only you walk home
bending the muscle
of time,
a drunk man leaves

on the pub’s counter
the fire of thought
nothing changes

we can amass anguish
into a dragon
and see it writhe in
its halo

find a way knower
comb a molecule at a time
to be handsome

for destiny
that now dissolves in your honey-
dripping cupped hands

perhaps we hang immense
with city at our roots
what matters to be
draped in cloud

when age has a swollen
idea buried like a spine on
the morning soft

earth
step on pure grass
who leaves this animal
to sow in structure

the dream the
struggle
the science

of being such
near everything.

Contemporary Poetry

the moment

nonsense_poetry

The lens capturing ache, a spot left to blind around nobody’s serial zipper. Afar while ignorant by her purpose a sigh rehearsed black blink the tune is closing the drumming aperture. Zoom aerially alongside sensation my mirror coldly awakening after rebellion shoots truth like arrow shorn of wings. Meanwhile a little closer my love carefully and hairy the machine makes appointment between moons and bus stops. Shift dimension because the rule has carved rust on laughter and soil drips sardines, hungry small animalcules and vulgar drunk remarks. The visitor FLASH awesome teeth while zones of legs remember the long overhaul and missionary status. Lately a fly meditates on the heavy scent of sums, mean chasms calibrating the here and now; an owl overflies the morning damned. The events captured logistically by nature’s circumference white underpants exposed within the thick fog of human greed. Sex wonderfully colored, centrally in the mind because a flower is pure in the mind better than an orgy of doubts sweating paradoxes. Buildings always poured with honey and served at midnight with a television smile. Mystically our school shrank from situation to circumstance to coincidence like fish, schools of fish diving deeper into unknown coordination with night above bowing as strange concave dark banana. The birds tiny church angels motes of dust leave individually one by one consciousness a door with the figure of a feminine sound. The animal buys a ticket to catharsis calmly the wine rhymes the trees are sharp silent sticks. The animal fenced in irony learns the catechism of turning on its own axis. The animal takes the arm of the herd expecting nothing less than the wave of feasting on echoes. The animal stores sunlight in its radio, tissues of right and wrong, the effort is its monastery. The animal against animal but bubbles merge with soap bubbles like families holding hands forever against the backdrop of mountains forever, terrible shadow-drenched mountains forever that rise toward the pinnacle and forever pierce the dead corpse of night with their tips of white melting gold, forever captured in ache.

Contemporary Poetry

a bibliography

poetry_of_death

People breathe. Struggle. Write.
Talk. Read. Write. Publish.
Die.

While most will never even
know his name.

And will die as well.

Poetry: main collections
1966: Death of a Naturalist, Faber & Faber
1969: Door into the Dark, Faber & Faber
1972: Wintering Out, Faber & Faber
1975: Stations, Ulsterman
1975: North, Faber & Faber
1979: Field Work, Faber & Faber
1984: Station Island, Faber & Faber
1987: The Haw Lantern, Faber & Faber
1991: Seeing Things, Faber & Faber
1996: The Spirit Level, Faber & Faber
2001: Electric Light, Faber & Faber
2006: District and Circle, Faber & Faber
2010: Human Chain, Faber & Faber

Poetry: collected editions

1980: Selected Poems 1965-1975, Faber & Faber
1990: New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Faber & Faber
1998: Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, Faber & Faber

Prose: main collections
1980: Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978, Faber & Faber
1988: The Government of the Tongue, Faber & Faber
1995: The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures, Faber & Faber
2002: Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001, Faber & Faber

Plays
1990: The Cure at Troy A version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Field Day
2004: The Burial at Thebes A version of Sophocles’ Antigone, Faber & Faber

Translations
1983: Sweeney Astray: A version from the Irish, Field Day
1992: Sweeney’s Flight (with Rachel Giese, photographer), Faber & Faber
1993: The Midnight Verdict: Translations from the Irish of Brian Merriman and from the Metamorphoses of Ovid, Gallery Press
1995: Laments, a cycle of Polish Renaissance elegies by Jan Kochanowski, translated with Stanisław Barańczak, Faber & Faber
1999: Beowulf, Faber & Faber
1999: Diary of One Who Vanished, a song cycle by Leoš Janáček of poems by Ozef Kalda, Faber & Faber
2002: Hallaig, Sorley MacLean Trust
2002: Arion, a poem by Alexander Pushkin, translated from the Russian, with a note by Olga Carlisle, Arion Press
2004: The Testament of Cresseid, Enitharmon Press
2004: Columcille The Scribe, The Royal Irish Academy
2009: The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables, Faber & Faber

Limited editions and booklets (poetry and prose)
1965: Eleven Poems, Queen’s University
1968: The Island People, BBC
1968: Room to Rhyme, Arts Council N.I.
1969: A Lough Neagh Sequence, Phoenix
1970: Night Drive, Gilbertson
1970: A Boy Driving His Father to Confession, Sceptre Press
1973: Explorations, BBC
1975: Stations, Ulsterman Publications
1975: Bog Poems, Rainbow Press
1975: The Fire i’ the Flint, Oxford University Press
1976: Four Poems, Crannog Press
1977: Glanmore Sonnets, Editions Monika Beck
1977: In Their Element, Arts Council N.I.
1978: Robert Lowell: A Memorial Address and an Elegy, Faber & Faber
1978: The Makings of a Music, University of Liverpool
1978: After Summer, Gallery Press
1979: Hedge School, Janus Press
1979: Ugolino, Carpenter Press
1979: Gravities, Charlotte Press
1979: A Family Album, Byron Press
1980: Toome, National College of Art and Design
1981: Sweeney Praises the Trees, Henry Pearson
1982: A Personal Selection, Ulster Museum
1982: Poems and a Memoir, Limited Editions Club
1983: An Open Letter, Field Day
1983: Among Schoolchildren, Queen’s University
1984: Verses for a Fordham Commencement, Nadja Press
1984: Hailstones, Gallery Press
1985: From the Republic of Conscience, Amnesty International
1985: Place and Displacement, Dove Cottage
1985: Towards a Collaboration, Arts Council N.I.
1986: Clearances, Cornamona Press
1988: Readings in Contemporary Poetry, DIA Art Foundation
1988: The Sounds of Rain, Emory University
1989: An Upstairs Outlook, Linen Hall Library
1989: The Place of Writing, Emory University
1990: The Tree Clock, Linen Hall Library
1991: Squarings, Hieroglyph Editions
1992: Dylan the Durable, Bennington College
1992: The Gravel Walks, Lenoir Rhyne College
1992: The Golden Bough, Bonnefant Press
1993: Keeping Going, Bow and Arrow Press
1993: Joy or Night, University of Swansea
1994: Extending the Alphabet, Memorial University of Newfoundland
1994: Speranza in Reading, University of Tasmania
1995: Oscar Wilde Dedication, Westminster Abbey
1995: Charles Montgomery Monteith, All Souls College
1995: Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture, Gallery Press
1997: Poet to Blacksmith, Pim Witteveen
1998: Commencement Address, UNC Chapel Hill
1998: Audenesque, Maeght
1999: The Light of the Leaves, Bonnefant Press
2001: Something to Write Home About, Flying Fox
2002: Hope and History, Rhodes University
2002: Ecologues in Extremis, Royal Irish Academy
2002: A Keen for the Coins, Lenoir Rhyne College
2003: Squarings, Arion Press
2003: Singing School / Poems 1966 – 2002, Rudomino, Moscow
2004: Anything can Happen, Town House Publishers
2005: The Door Stands Open, Irish Writers Centre
2005: A Shiver, Clutag Press
2007: The Riverbank Field, Gallery Press
2008: Articulations, Royal Irish Academy
2008: One on a Side, Robert Frost Foundation
2009: Spelling It Out, Gallery Press
2010: “Writer & Righter”, Irish Human Rights Commission

 

 

21st century Poetry

Miserere mei, Deus

poetry_of_solitude

You sit
by the bus stop
and study the event
it’s a place
where you’ve cycled
innumerably     a place
where you sit
and watch the light
dissolve in the liquid
of your eye
you’re there because
you don’t know where to be
you’re there because
you’d like to witness
the event
and you see things happening
once and units of behavior
he was speaking to me
through a cloud of thought
through a wind of misery
through a vapor of memory
through a rain of laughter
he was another
man far away from everything
another or other man
another star failing in the dark
another strand of conscious throe
a man from denmark
in the glow of streetlight
toasting and talking spanish
transmitting his monad of sadness
and everything being faraway
like a flash above
our private picture of
solitude.

21st century Poetry

 

nocturnalist

poetry_of_time

There like a bolt
like a stone amidst
a dust beyond
deep in shine
a pocket w/noon
and no shadow
a golden fury
himself mad
speaking loudly
and evening
with lawlessness
into rivulets a feather
nobody wings
possibility’s a stream
hours whirl
he types ‘whiteness
merge with tear
and this earth
trickled like spark
upon memory’
he listens
apparently
the wind has a mouth
and the same questions
about time.

Contemporary Poetry

they’ll know what to do

weird_poetry-blog

 

help
poets
my voice
a big blot or blob or block of black
terror
is stuck
like a burning whisper

in my throat
the rust
leaves a bitter
shadow
in the melody
of the silence

and sleep
the narrative of time
condensed
like magic
in the empty fire
of death

dust with
elegance
like the echoes
in a dream

Contemporary Poetry

my eyes and shiver

poetry_of_Shadows

There will be no more.
I will close my eyes
and shiver
as a wriggle in timelessness.

No tomorrow.

From the table
we put in our mouths
the last lesson of the bread,
we close the door
and the familiar unknown
disappears together with the
city noise.

There was no explanation
for this history of glimmers.

There will be no more:
injustice – no more form
and ideas will be lost
against the sounds of the bells.

The eyes will become simple silences,
clouded by the color of the music.

Everything will be resting
at last
under the warmth
& patience of the shadows.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry