Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation This is a book of wonderings and wanderings. Many of the wanderings are on familiar territory explored on foot, the hills of Wicklow and of the Burren in Co. Clare, the shorelines of Dublin Bay, of North West Donegal, of Galway, Achill and the Aran Islands. Other poems bring us farther afield, to a French village on the banks of the Saône, to the Venetian Island of Torcello, to a sacred mountain lake in China. In these poems there is an alertness to the palimpsest of lives, human and non-human, lived in these places and the mystery of each individual life. The poems bear witness to our primal kinship with the natural world, a source of nourishment, joy and solace, but also to our disastrous, onrushing human conquest of that same earth and seas. The poem 'Bunting's Honey' is a tribute not only to those who composed and played early Irish harp music but also to those who collected the music and who, long after their own deaths, made possible a most remarkable renaissance of that same musical tradition. Similarly, 'The Glance', a meditation on Giovanni Bellini's astonishing painting of a Madonna in the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, is a gasp of wonder at how tenderness and trepidation can be conveyed by pigment and brush across five centuries. 'A Technology' explores the quantum leap of literacy in allowing us, after so many millennia of human existence, to communicate details, not only of our outer lives, but also of our inner thoughts to those not immediately in our presence. 'Girls Trained in Beautiful Writing' considers the empowerments of literacy and the limitations imposed on that empowerment. There are other wonderings, not least the horrors of the wars of the twenty-first century, and the need to find a way to somehow set aside fear and difference and to give peace and tenderness a chance.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 45
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
123
BUNTING’S HONEY
MOYA CANNON
CARCANET POETRY4
Contents
7for Brendan and Ursula Flynn8
9
‘we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us… It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.’
—Rainer Maria Rilke
‘Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.’
—Mahmoud Darwish10
Bunting’s Honey
I
Monet in Árann
for Kathleen Loughnane
Over the sunstruck, drystone wall
we were ambushed by the sway
and scent of a July meadow—
whites of tall daisy and yarrow,
purples of scabious and cranesbill,
the bitten yellow of cat’s ear,
the blue tremble of harebells,
and far more we couldn’t name,
but we were caught, are caught still,
in the blurry, summery sway of it.
A Quarrel with the Lexicographers
The dictionary is unambiguous.
It says the word comes
from ‘coire’, cauldron,
but the lexicographers haven’t climbed
Croaghan on Achill and looked down
from its northern flank
into silver-rimmed Loch Bunnafreva,
or trudged up Tonlegee’s
brown, soggy shoulder
and seen that high sliver of light
as the mountain begins to unveil its treasure
or, as a child, scrambled up the skree skirt
of Eachla Beag, to be astounded
by a great lake hung between three peaks.
It’s not just the closeness of the name
to coeur, croí, or corazón which persuades
me it’s a cognate, a word-cousin,
it’s the way my own heart leaps
every time I find a corrie lake, away up
in skree and heather, at the core
of a glacier-sculpted mountain.
And again the mountains…
for Richard Wall
white and glittering in May sunlight,
as they fly down to Lough Inagh—
the three great buttresses of Doire an Chláir,
Binn Chorr and Binn an Choire Beag.
The mountains are indifferent
to us who love them
and don’t answer to their names:
Peak by the Oak Grove Plain,
Sharp Peak,
Peak of the Small Corrie.
No medieval master builder drew up plans,
by rule of thumb, by counted cubits,
to raise this singing edifice
along the indigo lake;
no architect calculated the slants
of winter light across its tall, rough coombes
but an old ocean leaned heavily down
upon the weather-milled, river-drifted
debris of vanished mountain ranges,
pressing it to sandstone.
Aeons later, a hot, shifting earth lifted
and pinched the sandstone into a long,
crooked fold, then forged it
into a shining quartzite range
to be storm-flayed into beauty.
Wicklow Diamonds
for Isabelle Vallet-Dunne
Bright as April hail, it glitters
beside the brown bog path
all the way around Loch Bray—
two lakes, and today,
two calm blue eyes, regarding heaven.
Our heads are light as cirrus clouds
our hearts bright as those
of this year’s kid goats
who scramble over scree
at the lake’s far edge.
After three weeks of sun
the bog path springs under our feet;
after months of fearful confinement
we are restored to friendship,
to our companionship of the hills;
four hundred million years
after it cooled in darkness
granite is frost-shattered into diamonds.
23/04/2021
For the Birds
‘You must change your life’
Rainer Maria Rilke
And how we resist it, as though all change
had designs on us, yet for the birds too,
as for insects and glaciers,
for leverets and children,
change we must:
for blackbird, whose yellow, up-flung notes
and triplets fill back yards and skies,
who has sung this April week for love or lust
all morning and again at dusk
from a neighbour’s blocked-off chimney pot;
