The Shark Nursery E-Book

Mary O'Malley

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

Seitenzahl: 37

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025 The poems of The Shark Nursery respond to a disturbed world. The experience of lockdown, of lives lived in an online reality, and of the animal world are the interlocking parts of the poems' world. The animal poems draw on the tradition of animals in Irish poetry and myth. From the wolf's touch to the rat's tweet, animals and fish refuse the roles human beings impose on them. O'Malley's animals find new language in the face of contemporary perils. In fusing mythic with modern elements, The Shark Nursery is marked by rigorous attention to language and tone. Its poems weave between human, animal and metaphysical realms. In a space before noise begins, tigers visit cities and a white leopard sits on a lawn in Suburbia. In the strange, sealed off world portrayed in the 'The Ballad of Googletown' – an eerie, genuine ballad, where the familiar tropes and refrains of ballad are hung out to dry – lives are lived online and social interaction is unnecessary: The cars are in the drive And the bees are in the hive They say the kids are safe inside In Googletown This new book promises, as Joseph O'Connor has written, all those things 'we go to Mary O'Malley for: truthfulness, seriousness, playfulness, too, and then a particular sort of hesitating and hard-won wisdom, a pushback against nonsense or sentiment or fakery, the beauty of plain words placed in careful order, carefully – and always, the bliss of musicality.'

Leseprobe

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For Steve and Eli

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‘Un souffle ouvre des brèches operadiques dans les cloisons, – brouille les pivotement des toits rongés, – disperse les limites des foyers – éclipse les croisées.’

‘A gust of wind opens up opera-like breaches in the walls, – scrambles the swivelling of corroded roofs, – scatters the outline of hearths, eclipses casement windows.’

Rimbaud, ‘Nocturne Vulgaire’8

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Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphIWolf SongJusticeOn Trá MhórEpitaph on a StoneErasureThe Ghost LibraryIn The DarkCape FinisterreThe GodstoneHouseMedea’s DreamsDistanceShortsCircus ActLisbon RevisitedDiana’s RegretLady Among the RosesA Morning SwimThe Shark NurserySweeney and the RatPersonCitizenRatIn the Marine LibraryThe Singer10IIAnother Plague SeasonEven SoLate SwallowAsylumAt Cré Na Cille 2021Lockdown AubadeCornflowersAprilHolyMessengerBright Ring of DayThe Lucky OnesIIIThe Siege of EnnisThe Ballad of GoogletownPortraitApis MelliferaSpace CatOrthodox Choirs with BellA Folk TaleThe Law of the FallMaleficiumAt CéibhLiftNightThe Science of the FairytaleLorenzo De’ Medici and A Hidden LifeRoleThe TempestCherry Tree Carol11The Wandering RocksThe DigPoppiesPereira MaintainsHeligolandHorseFastnessAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright12

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The Shark Nursery

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I

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Wolf Song

i.m. Eavan Boland

Sit still now. Take up your pen.

In this space before noise begins

tigers are visiting cities

and a white leopard sits

on a lawn in Suburbia.

A wolf is walking along

an empty beach in California.

A poet sings his traces.

Now she too is becoming history.

Already the first slow movement

of the strings is parting the silence.

This is the point in the story

when shadows thin as blades

quiver in the April air.

You can see the wolf through them.

Soon he too will be gone, forgotten,

this long free walk by the sea a detour.

The sea will remember him.

When he licked my hand at the hawthorn

his traces sharpened the salt air.

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Justice

The night that André Gide and Mallarmé

toasted ‘cher absent Verlaine’

at a banquet, when the departing guests

met the great poet a few streets away,

filthy in tatters, a street person,

one of them, torn between disgust

and delight when the great man

recognised him, turned away.

Who now quotes Régnier

in his immaculate waistcoat?

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On Trá Mhór

Here I can be silent, read

what the wind writes on the sand.

This is my share.

Let the sea talk and the curlew lament.

Let the lark rise like champagne, here

I meet myself in the wheeling Maybirds.

Follow the pattern the shells make

to the tide’s tune, called by the high moon.

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Epitaph on a Stone

After Paz

Aillebrack was a village,

two syllables of split rock.

Then came Our Lady of Displacement

delivering old news in the new way.

Language was swept clean.

The remnants became my home,

the sea its tomb.

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Erasure

Least expected from a low sky

a man-shaped star or satellite

came unwanted over the gate

to the door, and hospitality

demanded I be polite, serve cake

and tea to his small retinue,

milk to his cat. I thought I had done

with stars and their emissaries,

figures etched out of the scarce

dazzle of daylight, all that.

Finally he spoke. ‘I’, he said

in that quiet way they have,

‘am Azrael. You’re in my book

of course’ and sat there, erasing names

as he drank my tea, ate my cake.

‘Did you come to rub me out?’ I asked.

‘Oh no’, he said, ‘Look’ and I saw

my own name faded like an x-ray.

‘Your own kind are doing that.’

He spoke kindly I thought.

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The Ghost Library

A man prepares a simple meal of bread and cheese,

another conjures up a masterpiece with lemons