Those April Fevers E-Book

Mary O'Donnell

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

Seitenzahl: 63

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Intergalactic, these poems travel from outer space via the moon to coffee tables at a luxuriously considered pace. In doing so they crackle with precision, dance between love and horror, curiosity and wonder. The narrators are as diverse as their subjects, their tones ranging through wry, wistful, lusty and political. There is surrealism here, a world turned upside down by climate change, newly-charged mythologies that shake what we thought we understood about the order of things, and our relationships.

Leseprobe

THOSE APRIL FEVERS

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Mary O’Donnell, 2015

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2015

Design by Tony Ward

Printed in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

978 1908376 57 2 (pbk)

978 1908376 59 6 (ebk)

978 1908376 58 9 (hbk)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to the following print and online journals and anthologies, as well as to RTE Radio, where some of this work has appeared: 2012: Twenty Irish Poets Respond to Science in Twelve Lines; Agenda; Breac; Cyphers; Estudios Irlandeses (ed Rosa Gonzalez); Festschrift on Maurice Harmon’s 80th birthday; The Irish Times; New Hibernia Review (The University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, USA); Outburst; Poethead (poetry blog); Poetry Ireland Review; The Prairie Schooner; Revista Audem (ed. Elena Jaime); Skylight 47 (Galway); South Bank Poetry (London); The Stinging Fly; Stony Thursday Book (Limerick); Studies Irish Quarterly Review; Sunday Miscellany (RTE Radio); The Warwick Review; What We Found There: poets respond to the treasures of the National Museum of Ireland.

Thanks are also due to the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, for a welcome residency in 2012 during which some of these poems were composed.

Cover photograph: Mark Granier

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

Editor for the UK and Ireland:

John W. Clarke

Other titles by Mary O’Donnell

POETRY

Reading the Sunflowers in September (Salmon Poetry, 1990)

Spiderwoman’s Third Avenue Rhapsody (Salmon Poetry, 1993)

Unlegendary Heroes (Salmon Poetry, 1998)

September Elegies (Lapwing Press, 2003)

The Place of Miracles, New & Selected Poems (New Island Books, 2005)

The Ark Builders (Arc Publications, 2009)

[as co-editor]

To the Winds Our Sails, an anthology of Galician women’s poetry (Salmon, 2010)

FICTION

Strong Pagans (1990)

The Light-Makers (1992 & 1993)

Virgin and the Boy (1996)

The Elysium Testament (1999)

Storm Over Belfast (2008)

Where They Lie (2014)

MARY O’DONNELL

Those April Fevers

2015

for Aunt Mary O’Donnell

CONTENTS

Baltic Amber

Waking

Beyond Myths

Pleasure Principles

Markings, 2060

Driving Invisible Through a World of Mirrors

Marriage Advice, 1951

Spring Funeral

At a Wedding, the Stranger, 1980

View Towards a Bridge

Moon Viewing Point

Woman, 1950

Hockney

A Peasant Wedding

Splitting the Difference

Chronicle of the Oil Wars

Sea Life in St. Mark’s Square

Mapping Europe After Global Warming

Goth Persephone’s Mother asks Her to Do the Messages

Summer Evening

Buzzard

Pleasure

Waiting

Feeding the Crone

The Artists are Sleeping

The World is Mine

Forest, Snow, a Train

Consuming Passions

The Cosmos Ticked Silently

Wolf-Month

Hush Now, it’s January

Hungary

Galician Watch-dog

The Parts

Baby Boy, Quaryat al Beri

A Boy in Gaza

Wicklow

Woman of my Dreams

Waiting outside Bewleys

Sister-Trade

The Wigs

Eden

At 35,000 Feet

Dublin

An Irish Lexicon

Boutique Hotel

Five a.m.

Old Croghan Man Knocking at the Window

On Fitzwilliam, after a budget

Uncertainties, 2011

Biographical Note

BALTIC AMBER

Someone said I would uncover pieces of amber

from long-dead trees on this Baltic shoreline.

Day by day, I leave the cottage, walk the sands

to a headland village.

Nobody understands

what I mean when I mention amber, their minds

engrossed by hazel branches hung

with painted eggs, catkins; or hyacinths in bowls.

The time for hyacinths is long gone, I tell them.

I am in need of something that has survived

more than winter, hardening to translucent gold,

enclosing – perhaps – one small seed,

to honour the month and the Easter I was conceived.

I have grown six decades, like aeons,

and my tears have surely become like amber,

enriched and smooth, taking tawny colours

for blood.

Next week I will be casual

about the search, will uncover nuggets

beneath tree fragments,

inhaling salt and resin as I turn freely

from eggs, catkins, those April fevers

WAKING

These mornings you make peace with throwing in the job,

bend over my pillow, kiss me. I swim in the blue

of your eyes, could be that new bride, the one

you imagined you’d married, treasure you risked your life

to bring back to shore from some foreign place.

We always jumped land and ship, never quite at home.

Now we are here, peculiar to ourselves with buoyancy

and roots, ship and shore again for the taking.

Shore is wilder than you thought, shell reefs catch your eye,

a place where mermaids gossip in moonlight,

their dusky nipples, sea-green cleft of tail,

salt-white hair – all imagined in your absence into being.

But journeys did not part us, nor working contradictions

of our tuning. That jangle gave some purchase to the task.

It has taken so long to draw you to this cottage,

across the sands. Wake now. Wake to new doing,

to new pauses in new days. I cannot sleep for joy.

Mermaids no longer bathe in moonlight but you are here.

Sometimes, I miss their gossip, tasks they set

that became my pleasure. See my breasts, the dusky nipples,

two strong legs, my sea-green toenails, and remember:

your ship, but this my shore, created in your absence.

BEYOND MYTHS

Only you can look me in the eye

and hold my gaze. After all these years,

only you return the look.

I’m indifferent if the others look away.

Occasionally, they hesitate on Stephen’s Green

or Merrion, as if a ghost reminded them

of something half-forgotten, still

hankered for. Yes, it’s me, I whisper,

passing by, my need long stanched

for them or sly-eyed lines –

Botticelli Venus, white witch,

Rapunzel in her tower.

They’ve faded to a past in which

we played in passion’s house,

blind to where it really lives. Now,

only you can look me in the eye,

and want to, only you can see the shape

beyond the myths.

PLEASURE PRINCIPLES

The audio’s turned high.

I press the accelerator,

Rachmaninov in my ear.

The motorway rolls out,

time’s chute drawing me faster

as chords and road signs build, break

above the sounds of engine, and the wind buffets

the windscreen with quick fists,

and I’m alive to the wet crush of this music.

Later in the restaurant,

sight also pinpoints to the look of you,

my nose a bouquet

of dog-like discrimination

at our perfect meal, that perfumed wine,

or the twist of sheets when we unbundle our secrets.

Mouth still searches the oasis of your skin,

I become cataract, falling champagne,

taken on the tongue.

With its trillion pores, collective apertures

of the body’s wall,

a habitation. I take pleasure through skin,

quietly as a dawn swim

before the other tourists see this naked ageing

child at play; and I take pleasure

mirror-wise, see all as it should be,

steady on shuffle journey down time’s alley,

where already, something waits,

those just-born stars. Fizzing.

MARKINGS, 2060

Young nurses will decipher the lives of those

who enjoyed the pin-drag and burn of needle,

the blue and the black and the green inks.

They will know the once open secret of Wayne’s love

for Suzy, also daubed on a water silo near the railway,

and of his love for Mum. They will note how Emma’s

shoulder-heart meant she too had felt the pain;

then the leaping strength of Jake’s red dragon,

its fires of justice, still reflected in his ageing mind.

All that rippled across the enclosing sheath