Semibreve E-Book

John F. Deane

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

John F. Deane is a vital presence in contemporary Irish poetry. The poems in Semibreve combine lyric grace with a fiercely questing intelligence, pushing against the mysteries of faith in a fractured world, paying tribute to the value of human life and love. Running through the book is a thread of elegy for the poet's brother, who died of cancer in 2010. Throughout, Deane gives poetic voice to the paradox of human existence as simultaneously blessed and broken.

Leseprobe

JOHN F. DEANE

Semibreve

for

Thomas Kinsella

and in memory of

Declan Deane (1942–2010)

Acknowledgements

Agenda Magazine; Bliza (Poland); Boulevard Magenta Magazine; Clifden 35: The Clifden Anthology 2012 (ed. Brendan Flynn); The Christian Century (USA); The Furrow; Image (USA); Irish Times; PN Review; Poetry International Web; Poetry Review; Riddle Fence (Canada); Shine On Anthology (Dedalus Press); The SHOp; Stony Thursday Book (ed. Paddy Bushe); Sunday Miscellany, RTE Radio; The Tablet; Temenos; Visions International (USA); Warwick Review; The Works of Love (Columba Press, 2010); The Yellow Nib; a selection of poems was published on the website www.molossus.co (ed. Sudeep Sen); ‘Night Prayer’ was written to a commission from the National Gallery of Ireland and published in Lines of Vision (Thames & Hudson, 2014); ‘Museum of Country Life’ was published in the anthology What We Found There (Dedalus Press, ed. Theo Dorgan). The sequence ‘Blessed and Broken’ is dedicated to Brendan McConvery C.Ss.R.

Contents

I

Semibreve

Viola d’amore

Black and White

The Living-Room

Playing on the White Notes

Tuning

Theme and Variations

Pipe Organ

II

Great Northern Diver

Nora

Hydrangeas

High Tide

Dolores

Dancing the Dance

Midwife

Blueberries

Egg-Woman

III

The Workhouse

IV

Rain Falling in the Far West

November

Release

Workshop

Museum of Country Life

Still Life

Night Prayer

Paul, the Apostle, Told

Guardian

The Swallow

In the Margins

Driftwood

John Clare’s Bedlam

Tracks

Genova, Italia

V

The Summer of 2010

The Shower

Heron

Burial

Seán Gaunt Heron

Wherefore art thou Romeo?

Eucalyptus

The Seal

VI

Dead Weight

A Fledgling Saint

The Pride of Life

The Rose Window

Leftovers

Before the Crib

A Birth

Butcher

Name and Nature

Late in the Season

Clew Bay, 1894, 2010

Nocturne

Reasons of the Heart

Muir Woods, California

Bunnacurry Pier

Brother

Unfinished Symphony

VII

Blessed and Broken

I

Semibreve

I sat, in the island chapel, moor’s edge, winter;

winds groaned and chistled round the walls outside,

the timbers creaked in the afterwarmth,

ghosts from the quenching slipped up through the rafters;

there was a souring emptiness though I sat entranced

by sacrament and my own minuscule being – when the walls

whispered – Listen! There was no-one. There was nothing.

Even the winds had died. And the chill winterlight

had dimmed. But a tiny chime had happened, vibrated

on my inner listening. The tiniest hint of spittle

tipped against my brow but there was nothing when I wiped

my hand across it. The door moaned again, a sudden breeze

forcing it and I stood, watchful, and shaken. That

was the first semibreve sounded of a gifted music.

I am day and night now, listening. Tuned for it, and waiting.

Viola d’Amore

I had been playing Bach on the great organ –

‘A mighty fortress is our God’ –

the church below me empty in the nowhere afternoon,

bombarde, clarion, celeste

and when I lifted fingers from the keys

it was, for a moment, eternity, and the walls of the world

contained nothing but the lingering breadth of the harmony,

rafters of the loft had lifted while the whole sky

trembled in a breeze that rippled slow across it

till all I knew was the touch of the fingers of Jesus

soft on my fingertips, my body

consciously drawing breath, my bones

refusing their earthy weight, and my soul

ringing with immortality.

Black and White

A hush will settle in about you, even in the ruck

of crowds and traffic, an expectation

building (from within, without) and the words

like a flock of redwing in the winter scutch-grass

shifting to be noised up into movement, some

ghosting memory, some vivifying stone

or rainfall, finger-touch or weeping to take

the long-forgotten back into treasury: like the Mercy

sister, in constraining black and white, who comes scarily

in through the music-room door, shoes knocking a hard

rhythm on the wooden floor, books of scales and finger-exercises

tight against the starched guimpe over her breasts

as if Bach could never rise like larks out of the white

notes, or Palestrina break in surf out of the black.

The Living-Room

for Raymond Deane

We worked to learn the notes, the sharps, the flats,

we tried the underlying harmonies;

remember how the piano pedal stuck?

and favourite drawing-room pieces (The Robin’s

Return, The Maiden’s Prayer) became such mush,

like re-rolled plasticine. There was that sheen on the grand

mahogany table, how our lemonade glasses

left rings that would not come off and oh! the blame!

Remember how we hid, watching the adults play

their money-games, how an inner light from the whiskey

glimmered, and firelight sent sparkles gambolling

from glass decanters on the sideboard? How perfect

in memory it all was. On the parlour floor, remember?

just there, before the hearth, the river-otter pelt, sleek

golden fur through the underhair, silk-feel and death-grin,

how it brought into the room the stealth of water-dog,

high-jinks and romping, teeth sunk in trout-flesh,

secrecy of den and holt, the chill, the sliming… We

held to the basics, arpeggios, chords and scales;

you mastered them, remember? They have eluded me.

Playing on the White Notes

For days now, white butterflies are a storm

low over the meadow; they come to rest awhile

on the white clover, their wings, for a moment, folded;

the early purity of the lambs is a little sullied

while over against the fence line, Michaelmas daisies

are gathering to themselves the light of the sun,

hoarding the white heat of summer to their roots

as if the autumn colourings, waiting in the wings,

might be absorbed into the slow white dirge

the winter plays, when the black of night

will take its loveliness only from the white

splintering of stars, white fullness of the moon.

Tuning

He was up in the choir-loft, tuning the pipes

of the old century’s wind-pump organ; I heard

taps and bangs on metal, strange half-throated off-

notes, near-notes, puffs, sighs and cough-blasts;

and then he was playing – Bach, Buxtehude, Peters –

it was a young Jehovah’s making, a bright hands-full

soaring over oceans of soul-light, filling the chill of the chapel

with a lush of breathing. Now, in my everyday listening,

for the poem, the music, I am Mary before the ash-soft fall

of the messenger, I am John after the disappearance

beyond the clouds; I listen to the silence beyond the thuck

and thudding of a day’s importance, to hear the hum that figures

a countryside of darkness, the sounds of April

whispering over into May, the thunder of apple blossoms

dropping from the tree; I listen for the tune that my days make

in the works of love, in the notes’ approximations to a symphony.

Theme and Variations

I

A fledgling goldfinch – that furze-blossom light

on the wings, that blood-cherry blush on the face –

lay on the driveway in its char of death; worms

had devoured the eyes, a hole in its breast

was lidded with flies, and all the help I could offer

was to lay it in grass under the dogwood hedge;

II

on the road a badger, overrun in the night,

lay tossed in dust, our brock, our secretive

low-tangled grey-within-grey and black-white

prowler, in a wet mess of itself; our hearts

III

are not of lead nor our bone-built scaffolding

of steel rods. Evening sunlight came shining clear

through the stained windows where we knelt

in penitential exercise; above us the saints in glory,

the angel tiers, the Christ enthroned, and over all

IV

the radiant spirit-dove; emeralds, scarlets,

the lapis lazuli, the gold, the story held

in bright magnificence. Gradually, in the light’s

failing, the windows dulled, silver to grey-within-grey

then black, till all stood pale like photographic

negatives, the artistry still there, though as if

much more than light had abandoned it. Night

V

came dark; I stood by the Atlantic breakers, saw

the grey glint of the waves, all else vastness,

the breadth of the unknown; like tides the world

gives, and takes, but the spirit – willing order – holds

through the captivating watches of the night. Today

VI

there is late spring chaos across the valley,

reed-music of the wind sounds its three

sorrow-songs through the famine-abandoned village;

sheep browse on the high slopes, the skylark

lifts from heather tufts in a sustained

generosity of song, while over all the cuckoo,

back from its winter absence, calls out

the names of its countless generations

and a soft rain falls. I sit alone, listening;

VII

Andras Schiff on the car radio plays the Goldberg

Variations, the music of stream and steeple

strung in arithmetical certainties, the spirit’s dance –

of Saraband, of Passepieds and Passacaglia –

keeping the day, the hope, the modulations

in the heart’s control and the spirit holding

through the slow counterpoint and the unravelling.