Eye of the Hare E-Book

John F. Deane

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Eye of the Hare affirms a spirituality for healing a shattered world. In a richly textured collection, layered with Biblical echoes and the music of the Psalms, John F. Deane explores the possibilities of poetry to redress the failures of care towards the planet and the needs of society. Deane revives the language of sacrament and celebration with raw and tender grace; in sonnets, narratives and lyrics Eye of the Hare advances towards redemption. In the book's final section, Deane honours the places and landscapes of Achill, that beautiful, demanding island off the west coast of Ireland.

Leseprobe

JOHN F. DEANE

Eye of the Hare

For Laura,

Catherine & Mary

Acknowledgements

The Furrow, The SHOp, RTÉ Sunday Miscellany, Poetry Review (UK), PN Review (UK), World Literature Today (USA), The Warwick Review (UK), Harvard Divinity Bulletin (USA), RTÉ Living Word, Image Magazine (USA), The Irish Times, Southword, Temenos (UK), La traductière (France), The Forward Book of Poetry 2010 (Faber, 2009), From the Marrow-Bone (Columba Press, 2008).

A limited edition book, ‘Achill: The Island’, was published by Red Fox Press (www.redfoxpress.com) in 2009.

The Poem ‘Shoemaker’ was awarded the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize 2009.

Some of the poems appeared in The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Volume 2 (Wake Forest University Press, 2009).

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

One

Travelling Man

Public House

Shelf Life

The Marble Rail

The Tombs

On the Edge

Still Life

Bats

Eye of the Hare

Cedar

The Disappointed

Who Have Gone Before

Song of the Suffering Servant

Chewing on Stones

Lives of the Minor Poets

Abundance

Two

Edge of the Known World

Paris

The Colours

The Colliers

The Colliery

Words of the Unknown Soldier

Down to the Shore

Sissie

Roots

Shoemaker

Almost

The Garden, Waiting

Shorewards

The Hare

Birds, Beasts and Buttercups

World, Flesh and Devil

Three

Between Worlds

Mayo Theology

The Great Skellig

Sheets

Riddle

Weeds and Wilderness

Piano

Well-Tempered Clavier

Bikes

Ever This Night

Footfalls

Midsummer Poem

Mimizan Plage

More

Body Parts

In the Dark Wood

Sketch for the Statue of a Slave

Body Parts

The Caves

Wings

Snow

Dusk

Four

Achill: The Island

Gob an Choire: The Sound

The Major

Sraheens: na Sraithníní: Small Holms

Derreens: Small Woods

Cloghmore: Big Stone

Bunafahy: Lower Grassland

Bunnacurry

The Monastery

Purteen Harbour

Inishgalloon

Trawmore: Big Strand

An Caol: Keel

Slievemore: Big Mountain

The Heinrich Böll Cottage

Also by John F. Deane from Carcanet Press

About the Author

Copyright

One

Travelling Man

I was sitting in the waiting lounge, watching out onto the apron.

There were, as usual, works,

men in hard hats, yellow orange blue, with trucks and JCBs and such

chaos everywhere you would wonder if there could be

anyone in charge.

An Exxon Mobil aviation-fuel truck went by;

I heard its thundering through the thick-glass window,

felt the floor

shuddering and I thought

of the earthedness of islands, of grandmother kneading dough

for her apple and blackberry tart,

a small flouring through the hairs on her arms. Thought, too,

of the island crossroads on a Fair day, loud voices greeting,

animals skittering, the agreeable

racketing of hooves and cart-wheels across the tarred road;

left, to Keel, right to Achill Sound, long silences between passings,

and the sea, in the near distance, sounding.

Here, in Heathrow, Terminal 2, an organised confusion, an all-ways

drift and hurrying, chattering, baby-cries; alarming

head-shapes and body-forms,

children calling out in babelish grunts and noises;

left, to Athens, Düsseldorf, Algiers, right

to Munich, Sibiu and – later – home.

Then I was thirty thousand feet above the fields and towns of

Europe,

on a pitted and upflung untarred highway of air, the craft

pitched to left, to right,

like the twig I floated down the drain after a heavy

summer shower, and I thought once more of the hold,

the bold solidity, of islands

for how can you forget the sea

sounding perpetually within you, its lift

and fall, its lift

and fall, for I have come from far from such earthedness

where you may go down through layer and layer of man-bone,

of fish-bone, fish-clay, shale and scale,

from the washed-out dust of mountains, down to original molluscs

and the shaking fingers of the God.

Public House

It stood, discreet, amongst honest houses,

porter barrels tolling by the wall outside; within,

a flagstone floor, a fudge of smoke and hawking,

the round man behind the bar taciturn, graceless;

mother said it was the heaving weather of original sin

drew him in, for we are transients, pilgrims, falling

to our knees at times before unholy shrines. Began,

for him, as a faltering of resolution and he ducked,

disarmed, into the darkness, as the will falls

like a green bottle smashing itself against the flags.

But there were times, countering it, he crossed

the highest furrows of the mountainside, hunting

for goat, its wild slithering, its grazing; the bullet

in the flesh-flank of the beast was a love-song

and a gesture of despair. He stood to watch

the richening gold-light on the corrie hill,

a heaven-beam, Genesis-feet, that moved across

the mountain-side; and stood to listen to the gulls

in the next-door harbour at their disputations

speak the week’s histories of calamitous events:

the tarnished china of a sheepskull and the windy

acres of its eyes, the battling through against harsh days.

Thislife, say the gulls, is that unstable province

where we scavenge behind the trawlers’ arabesques,

while the human dead are taken down

into the heaving, unlit corrie

of the waves, where they fall, disarmed and slow,

down, down out of all weathers, down, like seeds.