The Lonesome Road E-Book

Gabriel Fitzmaurice

• Herausgeber: Liberties Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Whittled down by 'time and the road', this fantastic collection celebrates both the local and the universal. Gabriel Fitzmaurice gives thoughtful consideration to every facet of life as he has known it; from religion to sport, music to politics, love to community and family - all are here. His career as a primary school teacher and principal is at the forefront to many of his observations as he reflects on the world of education and childhood, and indeed a child's youthful perspective. Deeper personal reflections are conveyed as Gabriel expounds on the town he grew up in. Local characters, events and traditions are documented and his admiration for his native town is evident in his words. The poet clearly holds the role of the family in high regard and writes on becoming a father and, in turn, a grandfather for the first time. Sincere, honest reflections are immortalised in many of his poems, juxtaposed by lighter, more humorous works. Gabriel's voice is notable in its sustained clarity and emotional depth, offering up a celebration of experience that make up one's life.

Leseprobe

Praise for Gabriel Fitzmaurice

‘[T]he best contemporary, traditional, popular poet in English.’

Ray Olson, Booklist (US)

‘Fitzmaurice is a wonderful poet.’

Giles Foden, The Guardian

‘Fitzmaurice is one of Ireland’s leading poets … a master of his art.’

Books Ireland

‘Ireland, particularly the South … finds its local bard in Gabriel Fitzmaurice … thereby making such “singing” socially responsible in a way Wordsworth would have endorsed.’

Francis O’Hare, HU (The Honest Ulsterman)

‘[Fitzmaurice] is poetry’s answer to John B. Keane.’

Fred Johnston, Books Ireland

‘We need poets who can probe reality like this, and Fitzmaurice is doing it in style.’

Gerard Quinn, The Kerryman

‘He has a gift for making the quotidian interesting and investing the ordinary with extraordinary significance’.

Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, The Celtic Pen

‘Gabriel Fitzmaurice finds truths that speak to us all’.

Moyra Donaldson, Figments (Belfast)

‘[Fitzmaurice] has…attained a folk-song-like charm and memorability that Yeats and Frost, for example, found only in old age … Fitzmaurice is one of the most thoroughgoing poets of place, the brother in conviction of Kentucky patriot Wendell Berry and the great Orkneyman George Mackay Brown.’

Ray Olson, Booklist (US)

‘Not unlike those of Goldsmith and Burns, these poems are endowed with charm, wit and generosity of spirit … He transcends sentimentality to effect what that redoubtable school inspector Matthew Arnold would recognise as ‘a criticism of life’ … His elegies and lovepoems are direct, moving evocations; his poems to and about friends and neighbours will make you wish you were among them.’

James J. McAuley, The Irish Times

‘Gabriel Fitzmaurice has demonstrated time and again that Moyvane, County Kerry, his heartland, is one of the global villages of our day … [T]he language act follows the contours of a mind meditating on the revelatory nature of the precious yet fleeting quanta of daily life … There is a deceptive ease to much of Fitzmaurice’s work. This volume shows a spirited voice at work that is able to preserve the grain of Irish folklore in modern verse, to translate in a clear, rhythmic idiom and to look with a wise eye at the local harmonies we make of our heroes, daily routines, moments of vision, family and village life.’

Brian Coates, Poetry Ireland Review

‘[T]he poetry of Gabriel Fitzmaurice is salutary … This is poetry of the felt experience as D. H. Lawrence would have advocated … Fitzmaurice’s elevation of Moyvane has resonances with Oliver Goldsmith’s Auburn, and Patrick Kavanagh’s Shancoduff. The eternal verities of place, character, and local colour are frozen like a Vermeer … Gabriel Fitzmaurice’s poetry is visionary and durable, unforced and deceptively simple.’

Brendan Hamill, Fortnight

The Lonesome Road

Collected and New Poems 1984–2014

Gabriel Fitzmaurice

For Brenda with love

Contents

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgementsfrom Rainsong (1984)Portaireacht BhéilLoversEelDerelictsHayEpitaphThe Skald CrowWildernessBecause we LoveStale PorterReading Kinsella in the Brasserie while the Wife Is Doing her HairGardenRainfrom Road to the Horizon (1987)Poem for BrendaA Game of Forty-OnePartingHunting the WrenKeeperThe Poet’s Gardenfrom Dancing Through (1990)PredatorThe Spider and the FlyVirgin Rock, BallybunionIn the Midst of PossibilityThe Pregnant Earthfrom The Father’s Part (1992)PresentationTiesEdenArtAn Only Child No Longerfrom The Village Sings (1996)Hence the SongsGaeilgeThe Common TouchOde to a BluebottleWillie DoreThe Village HallFireplacePort na bPúcaíMary‘I Thirst’Good FridayIn Memoriam Danny Cunningham 1912–1995Oisín’s Farewell to NiamhA Bedtime StoryMay DaltonTo Martin Hayes, Fiddlerfrom A Wrenboy’s Carnival (2000)Sonnet to BrendaGaeltachtA Parent’s LoveIn the AtticListening to Desperados Waiting for a TrainA Wrenboy’s FarewellBatt MannonThe WellGeronimoOde to a Pint of GuinnessThe Woman of the HouseMy PeopleIn Memory of My MotherSo What if there’s no Happy Ending?God Bless the ChildRequiescatIn the WoodsBig Confrom I and the Village (2002)Aisling GhealTo my D-28The Ballad of Joe FitzmauriceHe Barks at his Own EchoThe DíseartHeroesAt the Car WashMoyvaneI And the VillageThe MeadesCountry LifeOn Declining a Commission…Scorn Not the BalladI Don’t Care If What You Sing Is ShiteIn the DarkThe Heroes of My ChildhoodAlzheimer’s DiseaseLassieTo a GuitarKnockanure ChurchThe Mortuary CardIn Memory of My FatherA Corner BoyYou Trust Me When I Leave You for the WildA Sonnet for My WifeDouble Portrait Au Verre De Vinfrom The Boghole Boys (2005)The PlaymanThe Poet Strikes BackThe Celebrant’s a Critic or He’s LostPoet to PoetThe Ballad of Rudi DoodyMairg nach fuil ‘na DhubhthuataA Local MurderThe Day Christ Came to MoyvaneBefore the Word ‘Fuck’ Came to Common UseThe Mission MagazinesOn Hearing Johnny Cash’s American RecordingsDouble Portrait with a Painting by ChagallHis Last PintThe Village SchoolmasterKeeper of the StoryThat’s Football!For Eamon LloydMick GalweyPoem for Nessa, Five Years OldPoem for JohnTable QuizSick ChildA WidowerGranadaNerjaHomeThe Fitzes Come to TownCutting Grass in GlenalappaFor the Fitzmaurices of Glenalappafrom Twenty One Sonnets (2007)On First Meeting the Marquess of LansdowneTrue LoveHomage to Thomas MacGreevyA Middle-aged Orpheus Looks Back at His Lifefrom Poems Of Faith and Doubt (2011)Ruckard DruryMy Father Hired with Farmers at FourteenThe Fiddle Master: Homage to Pádraig O’KeeffeTo My Son as he Leaves HomeTo My Daughter, PregnantDeath of a PlaywrightThe Last Wren Boy‘Help me Make It Through the Night’‘Would you Believe’A Community Mourns …When I PrayWhen I Diefrom A Middle-aged Orpheus Looks Back at His Life (2013)An Irishman Salutes the QueenOn Becoming a GrandfatherMy Girlfriends Now Are Other’s Children’s MamasJust To Be Beside You Is EnoughA Catholic Speaks OutIn ExtremisNew PoemsAn Ageing Artist Looks at a Young WomanAn Ageing Artist Meets an Old LoveOn Hearing ‘Sail Along Silvery Moon’‘Thank You for the Days’La Belle Dame Sans MerciThe Ballad of Timmy MallonThe Ballad of Tommy and the SowObsessionBiographical NoteBooks by Gabriel FitzmauriceCopyright

Acknowledgements

This Collected Poems represents all the poems of mine I wish to be collected at the present time. Time and the road have whittled away at these poems till what is left now are the versions I wish to keep.

I am indebted to the editors and publishers who first published the poems which I’ve taken from the following collections: Rainsong (Beaver Row Press, Dublin, 1984), Road to the Horizon (Beaver Row Press, 1987), Dancing Through (Beaver Row Press, 1990), The Father’s Part (Story Line Press, Oregon, 1992), The Village Sings (Story Line Press, Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Conamara, Peterloo Poets, Cornwall, 1996), A Wrenboy’s Carnival (Wolfhound Press, Dublin, Peterloo Poets 2000), I and the Village (Marino Books, Dublin, 2002), The Boghole Boys (Marino Books, Cork, 2005), Twenty One Sonnets (Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, 2007), Poems of Faith and Doubt (Salmon Poetry, 2011) and A Middle-aged Orpheus Looks Back at His Life (Liberties Press, Dublin, 2013).

Most of the new poems have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Quadrant (Australia) and the Cork Literary Review.

from Rainsong

(1984)

Portaireacht Bhéil

Who would make music hears in himself

The tune that he must play.

He lilts the inarticulate.

He wills cacophony obey.

Portaireacht Bhéil: (Irish) mouth music, lilting, humming

Lovers

Is it the clothes

Or is it the socks?

There’s a sweet smell of dirt off me.

I smell of my friends –

Must take a wash.

A lunatic laughs at Mass.

(It’s really a sin,

But to be normal

Is to laugh at him.)

He laughs at us –

At our cleanliness,

At our fuss.

Better to go and hustle

Like him.

Your car was wrecked,

You buy one new –

Who hasn’t a ha’penny

Well God bless you.

The river,

Convulsed like a lunatic

Stormed on a table,

Is called Annamoy.

I love it

Because it’s a hopeless river.

But sun, clouds, cows

Quiver in it,

Wagtails ripple over it,

While bulls trample its stones.

The village is Newtown Sandes

Called Moyvane (‘The Middle Plain’)

For hate of landlords.

New people don’t like it.

I want to die in it.

Like the mad

Flirting with the happy and sad

And hope and the rope

And water,

The people like islanders

Await the disaster

And live.

Dogs and simpletons

Plough the midday swirl of dust and papers.

I did a line with the city,

Made love to a town,

But always that dung-sotted river

Leafed me home.

Newtown, you bastard,

You’ll break me, I know:

New women won’t live here,

Our women have left here

And always I grow old.

Like a dog and its master,

Like a ship on the water,

I need you, you bitch,

Newtown.

I need you, you bitch,

Newtown.

Eel

Of all the fish in the Annamoy,

We, children, feared the eel.

We harpooned him with forks

Stolen from the table.

He was like no fish we ever knew –

Ignorant of Sargasso, we created him

Of horse-hair and manure.

You couldn’t kill the eel, we knew.

Even when he was wriggling on a fork,

Dusty on dry land, he lived.

We kicked him, beat him,

And still he lived.

To shackle terror

We shoved him,

We thought forever,

In the river.

Derelicts

Whenever I picture the village fools

They drool with the hump

Of benevolence on their backs.

Living in hovels as I remember,

They had the health of the rat.

They perched on the street-corner

Like crows around the carcass

Of a lamb. Stale bread and sausages

Would feed a hungry man.

Beady with the cunning of survival,

Each pecked the other from his carrion.

Children feared them like rats in a sewer –

They stoned their cabins

And the stones lay at the door.

Like priests, they were the expected,

The necessary contrary –

We bow in gratitude for mediocre lives;

We keep the crow, the rat, from the garden.

Like priests, no one mourned when they died.

When they died, we pulled down their cabins;

Then we transported a lawn

That the mad, the hopeless might be buried –

Only the strong resisting (while strong).

We kept the grass and flowerbeds neatly

But the wilderness wouldn’t be put down.

Children no longer play there

(They stone it),

Nettles stalk the wild grass,

Scutch binds the stones together …

Then came the rats.

Hay

for my father

1

Heavy bales are hoors.

The shed is no place

If you’re not too strong.

Sweat sticks

Like hay to wool

And the rhythm of hay

Is the last native dance.

Will it ever stop,

This suicidal monotone of hay?

It goes on like a depression

In the rural brain.

Hay

(Long ago the days were longer)

Hay

(Long ago the men were stronger)

Hay

(Long ago you gave a day’s labour

For a day’s pay)

(It didn’t rain in summer long ago)

Hay Hay Hay

2

I bought a bulk milk container,

I built another shed –

Everyone advised me that

The ass-and-cart, the tank

Were dead.

My father would surely wonder now

At the size of my great herd.

I’ve bulldozed uneconomic ditches

That made Garraí Beag, Fearann, Móinéar –

This great new field I’m fencing

Has no name.

My father

Spoke to his cows in winter

In the stall.

Connor knew his herd by name –

He fed them on the long acre

And was put in jail.

There was a priest here once

Who ranted that a man

Measured his importance

In the size of his dung-hill,

The poor clout!

Nowadays

You measure your importance

In the size of your bulk container.

Shortly they’ll open

‘The Club of the Bulk Container:

Farmers Not Allowed’.

The good is modern –

You can’t opt out.

3

Once I made wynds

In small meadows for fear of rain.

Some of the hay was green.

A friendly dog kept jumping on my back.

We had time for a fag

And porter at the gap.

Later

We milked the cows by hand

And strained the milk with a rag –

‘A white cloth’, we called it.

We laughed in those days

We did

We did

We laughed …

Garraí Beag: (Irish) The small garden

Fearann: (Irish) A field, ploughland

Móinéar: (Irish) A meadow

The long acre: The grass margin at the side of the road

Epitaph

A colossus on the playing field,

A great man for the crack,

For years he spoke to no one

But turned his sagging back on people.

Head down, he would cycle into town.

Whispers prodded that he be seen to:

‘Looked after’, slyly said.

Anyone could see

That his head was out of joint.

And he couldn’t even hold his lonely pint.

They found him hanging in the barn: dead.

Viciousness turned almost to understanding.

Living alone, never wed …

‘His uncle did it years before him.

Kind for him,’ they said.

The crack: fun, high jinks, conviviality

Kind for him: it was in his genes, in his nature

The Skald Crow

for John Moriarty

At first I didn’t know you –

You were a stranger when you came;

I fed you in winter,

I nursed you when you were lame.

You screwed your black beak

Into my brain –

You fed yourself when you were hungry;

I croaked your song.

You are stronger than hope,

Stronger than despair,

Stronger than love,

You are stronger than hate.

Against you I have no litany

But to call you me,

And though you’d trick me

Into felling the tree you nest on,

I’ll not cut down the tree.

In the beginning, you came to me.

Wilderness

Being

Reverberates like a gun;

Swish of sea

And vultures’ cry

Are one

Dripping like a rag wrung:

I could be

Infinite possibility.

In the wilderness

Is no path;

Flotsam in the desert

And the question tossed:

What is is me,

Why am I not me?

Pinstripes

And the suicide’s rope.

Am wolf

And hanging man

And cauldron’s bubble.

Am lamb.

Because We Love

1

On land

Ignorant of man;

In sky

Ignorant of bird;

In river

Ignorant of fish.

Knows the living

Knows the dead

Knows the murderer

And won’t tell.

Won’t give

Won’t kill.

Separate from life

Though living;

Separate from death

Though dying.

Not opposite

Being not one.

Like man and woman.

2

Semen spurted,

Man-sweat in the womb …

Because we love

We’re human