Gathering Evidence E-Book

Caoilinn Hughes

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

With pinpoint accuracy, virtuosity and humour, Caoilinn Hughes aligns scientific and poetic venturing. In this striking debut collection she focuses on moments of discovery, from the first controlled nuclear reaction to the shape of an avalanche as witnessed from its catchment area. These are epiphanies with consequences.

Leseprobe

CAOILINN HUGHES

Gathering Evidence

for my folks

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the following journals and magazines, where some of these poems have appeared: Aesthetica, The Cúirt Review, Fortnight, The Irish Times, JAAM, Landfall, New Zealand Books, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Proper, Poetry Wales, Southword, The Ulster Tattler, and The Yellow Nib. Some poems from the collection were anthologised in Incertus (Netherlea Press, 2006) and Tide Lines (Queen’s University Press, 2005).

‘Bolivian Children’ won the 2013 Poetry Ireland/Trócaire Poetry Competition. ‘Rational Dress’, ‘Two Roundelets’ and ‘Airbowing in Second Violins’ won the 2013 Cúirt New Writing Prize. ‘A Peruvian Blockade According to Bolivia’ won the 2012 STA Travel Writing Prize.

A selection of twenty of the poems from this book won the 2012 Patrick Kavanagh Award.

Contents

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgementsAvalancheGathering EvidenceThe Transit of VenusPacific RimThe Moon Should Be TurnedKing of the CastleThis Is What Makes It Go BangCatechismRational DressOn the Content of BracketsLooting RosesVagabond MonologueSnake Creeps through the GrassThe Shell ManSomatic CellsImpressions of IrelandTo the ElementsWe Are Experiencing DelayTwo RoundeletsEvery Body Continues In Its State Of RestLuckyMarblesCommunion AfternoonCynophobiaPlaying HouseDublin Can Be HeavenHames of a HaikuSoldiers in the Battle for HedonismAtmospheric Physicist vs Poetic AtmosphericistEstuaryBruisewortBolivian ChildrenA Peruvian Blockade, According to BoliviaAltitudeGod Always GeometrisesHarmony of the SpheresAirbowing in Second ViolinsWatershedIs It A Kind Of Bell Toll?LegacyAbout the AuthorCopyright

Avalanche

When the avalanche came down on us

it did not come down on us in a holy light,

flickering between this dimension and another

ultraviolet one. It did not shower its sermon upon us

in meaning-ful, vowel-less sounds like stalactites.

It did not come down on us at all. It came up, up, over

and around us; all around us in a pall. It met our bodies

in a hail, hail, hail, not a wall but heavier than water

if we were sitting at the bottom of the sea. We heard it crack

and sizzle on the ground. It filled the valley like a steam engine;

its clotted vapour urging forward to some terminus beyond us.

We watched it soar and could not inhale enough air between

the screams. Our lungs made fists. I thought of lips freezing shut

once and for all, the uncommon cold, no human fingers to close

the lids nor chance of rescuing the bodies, stiff as candy canes

striped red, white, red, white, grey. Your hands were fifty feet away,

your mind another hundred. My cries could not contend with this parade

of physics. You were wordless, as if the snow were slow motion surf

or a weir devouring its atmosphere. Was it fluid dynamics, glaciology

or meteorology you surveyed? There was something of the shock

wave about it, no doubt about that. The space between us

prolonged. I should never have collapsed in love with a physicist.

I saw the fort my brother built from bales of hay, whose tunnel

should never have been trusted. Oh, to make a hay citadel!

‘When the fields are white with daisies,’ my father would have said.

The ice wave rose and darkness fell. I doubted how well my elbows

would act as pick-axes, if it were to be a catacomb. I had once been told

that knowing which way is up is key: that the whiteness is homogeneous;

that people dig madly, burying themselves in the immortal white. I panicked:

would he have a better chance than I, with his gall; his practicality?

No, the snow was nothing like confetti. It would not applaud any small boys

or any small girls, no matter how insolent. We braced ourselves, finally.

Later, you described the form of a loose snow avalanche as a teardrop;

born of some great disparity between the tensile gift of snow layers

and their compressive heft. The angle of repose was soft, you allowed,

as we stood in the catchment area, making observations and vowel sounds.