Return of the Gift E-Book

Michael O'Neill

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 56

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Michael O'Neill's Return of the Gift is a volume about what is given and what is lost. Writing unsentimentally and with insight about powerful subjects such as the death of his mother, caring for his father, and his own recent diagnosis of cancer, the poet speaks of and to his personal and historical life and also explores themes of elegy and friendship. Memories are woven vividly throughout a thematically varied yet coherent collection, in which a witty and moving pleasure in living and language is always to the fore.

Leseprobe

RETURN OF THE GIFT

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road,

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Michael O’Neill, 2018

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2018

Design by Tony Ward

978 1911469 46 9 (pbk)

978 1911469 48 3 (ebk)

978 1911469 47 6 (hbk)

Cover image:

VASILY KANDINSKY, Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2

(Landschaft mit roten Flecken, Nr. 2), 1913.

Oil on canvas, 117,5 x 140 cm.

By permission of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venezia.

(Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems have appeared:

Blackbox Manifold, Eborakon, Keats-Shelley Review, London Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Prac Crit, The Reader and The Wordsworth Circle. ‘Not That Only’ was first printed in Prac Crit with a brief essay by the author, not reproduced here, but available via the electronic pages of the journal.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.

Editor for the UK and Ireland:

John Wedgwood Clarke

Michael O’Neill

Return of the Gift

2018

For Posy, Daniel, Melanie and Millie,

and in memory of my mother

Margaret O’Neill

(1924-2016)

Contents

Dazzle

Porthmeor Beach

Scene

Reverie

Janus

Not That Only

Canareggio

Ibridismo

Pruritus

Trios

To Do List

Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2

(Peggy Guggenheim Collection)

Chapel

Postcard

Care

Revisiting

Show

Maze

The Trick

Fantasia

Values

Variations

Echoes

First Light

Stalker

Calling

Turbulence

Two for Friendship

1 Ash-Wednesday

2 Acrostic

Return of the Gift

Endings

The Swan (after Baudelaire)

Prefix

Hodegetria

The Coronation of Poppea

Earthly Paradise (from Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 28)

Celestia

Far

Nothing More

Bit by Bit

In an Hour

Help

The Thought

Hint

Bookshop

Two Rooms

February

The Missionary

I was walking

To the Moon (after Leopardi)

History

In that city

Station

German City Songs

1 Muenster

2 Wuppertal

Criss-Cross

Roman Fountain (after Rilke)

From the Cancer Diary

i Scope

ii Just as

iii Ironies

iv On Hold

v Wine and Roses

vi Mists

vii Paths

viii Diet

ix Medical Physics

x Those days

xi Case Review

xii Sunday

xiii Company

Biographical Note

Dazzle

Dazzle when headbeam after headbeam crosses.

Cessation of laughter in the back seat.

He presses his foot down, hard, then harder. The car squeezes

through a wind tunnel charged with darkened heat

that flanks the flying metal till they come

out the other side of what had the air

of high-speed death and, mercifully, the same

is true of each too close for comfort neighbour.

And the summer hurtles on: New York apartments,

eyes ‘like glass ready to smash’, drugged smiles, the Doors…

I travel back this evening to that hill

between the city and the forest, pause

beside the tarmac, awaiting myself, tense

and careless, deaf to any ageing call.

Porthmeor Beach

The waves could get to haunt you,

growing longer and whiter,

greener and bluer,

driven in more strongly

past the Island, chapel

exposed on the top,

or urged this side of

the spur of headland

where a path

climbs towards Zennor

and a gull or two flicker

only to swing back

across boarders

in wetsuits, flailing

a limp front crawl or if

more practised riding

foothills of surf as

people dawdle, some

looking through lenses

for kittiwake or chough

– one at least on

the track of Woolf

and her primal memories,

waves breaking, filling

the ‘bowl that one fills’;

others trailing the painters,

thermals, windows, jumbled

perspectives, worlds ready

to be drowned, masts

jutting their verticals…

The waves would get to haunt you,

drawing you back

to the sands and the sky,

to the blue and the green,

to the wet and whiteness

of crests you’d watch

lapsing into foam, lost

soul-essences in

quest of God knows what

past the horizon.

Scene

The Adriatic spreads to the horizon.

Our balcony gives on to the latest dawn.

It’s very early, yet a boy is up and curving

into wet sparkle from a pier-like spit.

It’s well under way again, this ordinary

wonder, rotated curvature of light,

event the previous lot kept witnessing

when they were the ones who loved, who thought they sought…

There’s a low clap from where the waves collapse,

and yet a silence can be heard.

When, as I do these days, I let them catch

up on me, inklings of a final lapse,

I set them wish-fulfillingly in such a scene,

people turning sleepily or waking up,

waters extending for miles, a boy diving,

the looker on no longer looking on.

Reverie

I was leaning on a rail

at the bottom of steps

where two streets converge –

one heading towards

stone and sanctity,

the other towards

lecture theatres and pubs.

I was waiting and waiting

and no one showed

(the wrong day),

until I drifted off, fell

into a reverie,

‘a brown study’,

and seemed to slide

outside allotted

purposes as body

after body scurried,

pressed and hurried

towards the next stage.

Music began to play

beside me; a young busker

with harmonica

and guitar hummed

some Bowie, strumming

shyly at first, though deftly,

then stopped, then riffed

chords of a lost song

that took me right back –shall I

tell you about my life?…

no one I’d rather be,

but I just wish that I’d never –

languorous, electronic

swoops, lifts and licks

that dropped and left me

in the dismal, pure

palace-vacuum of teenage

sehnsucht, waiting for

it to unfurl, waiting.

Janus

1

Scimitar in the January sky –

it starts again,

the moon as resurgent emblem.

‘Renewal’, so its tacit lunar hum

might be saying with mirthless irony,

‘beckons’.

Well, why not wax as well as wane?

2

…Scimitar in the frost-clear sky

seeming to cut its own shape stroke by stroke

until it hangs there, above

us, staring down like

a painting by a cold-eyed master-monster

who has foreseen more

than we can, without flinching, bear

to contemplate the thought of.

Not That Only

‘Don’t like the Italian poems so much’

the email growled. The nerve it tried to touch

just slumbered on, but later he’d to ask,

‘Why write about Venetian scene or masque

when there is plenty enough misery

for you to shape a simile

from in the street: cemented shore

wealth’s tides have ebbed from?’ And, yes, the raw

faces that turn up for cutback benefits

– they drag out pity as they lower spirits.

Dante would have put it better! Yet to write

about his now, the Florentine had to fight

through throngs of shadows on the ghastly river,