NancyElin.blog

#Poetry Leontia Flynn (Irish poet)

• Author: Leontia Flynn
  
• Title: The Radio
  
• Published: 2017
• List of Challenges 2019
• Monthly reading plan
• #TBR  challenge update  

1. Finished: 17.08.2019
2. Genre: poetry
3. Rating: A
4. 32 poems and I liked ..18 of them.
5. 56 % = That is a GOOD SCORE!

1. The Radio was published in 2017,
2. was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and
3. won the Irish Times Poetry Now Prize.

1. PART 1 The Child, The Family (10 poems)
2. The book gets off to a good start
   ….but most poetry collections puts some
   great poems at the beginning as a ‘hook’.
3. There are some great images:
4. Yellow Lullaby
   …description a mother rushing to a crying child:
   “…barreling not like some semi deranged trainee barista
   …friendly but confused.”
5. Alzheimer’s Villanelle (Flynn’s father suffered from Alzheimer’s disease)
   description of the sickness…
   ” …imagine a train delayed, delayed, delayed
   that pulls up without a passenger or driver.”

1. PART 2 …And the Outside World (19 poems)
2. The first two poems are stunning:
   August 30th 2013 (…day of Seamus Heaney’s death)
3. Field of Yellow Flowers…..for Gavin Turning 40 (….memories of a lover)
4. Thenext  7 poems received  ‘good’ or ‘very good’ in my notes.
5. Unfortunately after that…
6. the collection seemed to lose its orginal strength
7. …like a bike tire soundlessly leaking air.

1. PART 3 Poems Conceived as Dialogues ( 3)
2. Experimental….but not I was still not impressed.

1. Conclusion:
2. This is a collection of poems I would re-read.
3. If you see this book in your library just stuff it between
4. your other book hauls
5. ….and let Leontia Flynn surprise you!
6. #Bravo

#Poetry Ireland Professor of Poetry

The position of Ireland Professor of Poetry is an academic chair  jointly  administered by three Irish  universities. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (pronunciation: KWILL-en-non) has been chosen for this prestigious position for  three years (2016-2019). A new professor will be appointed soon.

• Author: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin   (ENC)
• Title: The Boys of Bluehill  (40 poems)
• Published: 2015
• List of Challenges 2019
• Monthly reading plan
• #TBR  challenge update  

Introduction:

1. The poems of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (ENC)
2. are rooted in the past and personal memory
3. The past is lost but the poet  revives our historical memory.
4. ENC had been described as the Vermeer of contemporary poetry.
5. ….I’m very curious  to see what impact ENC will have on me.

Finished: 15.08.2019
Genre: poetry
Rating: A
#TBR list 2019

Conclusion:

Title: The Boys of Bluehill   is the first tune she heard her sister play.
…a traditional Irish hornpipe.

Memory shapes creativity in the work of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
She has an unsentimental mind yet writes with feeling.
She creates a world of compelling narratives that
challenge the reader

Her poems seem to escape to another realm.
If you invest time researching her poems
(figurative images, family background, Irish myths,
the allusions in the poems…
you will be richly rewarded!

Theme: musical core that is closely
connected to ENC’s sister Máire.
She was a musician and died more than 25 years ago.

Best poem: …is about Máire “The Skirt”…haunting
Light poems: about her first grandchild…”Dream Shine” and “Incipit Hodie”
Translated poem: poem based on a “The Lament for the Old Woman Beare”…that gives one the sense of a woman who vanishes as she gets older… “The Song of the Woman of Beare“.
Memory poem: going back to things you didn’t do then…and can’t do now…“I Used to Think”
Emotional poem: “Passing Palmers Green Station” – family memories, recounts a journey on the London Underground that brings back to the poet’s mind an earlier journey with her mother to visit “…her younger daughter among the dying”.

Last thoughts:

1. Poems by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
2. …are not easy to understand
3. …if you don’t have the time
4. …to appreciate her language skills.
5. She is truly one of
6. …the best Irish poets of her generation.

#Poetry Derek Mahon (Irish poet)

• Author: D. Mahon
• Title: Harbour Lights  (25 poems)
• Published: 2005
• Review: poem “Resistance”
• List of Challenges 2019
• Monthly reading plan
• #TBR  challenge update  

Reistance Days  — ( prose poem)  dedicated to John Minihan

• It is good to know about the person to whom the poem is dedicated.
• Perhaps it wll help me discover some hidden meaning or references.
• John Minihan is an Irish photographer, born in Dublin in 1946.
•  The photos are an attempt to document the lives of the ordinary people.
• Over the years Minihan developed a close relationship with many writers and his
• photographs of Samuel Beckett show a particular affinity between the two men.
• William S. Burroughs once referred to Minihan as “a painless photographer”.

NOTE:

1. I copied the poem in couplets
2. ….but Derek Mahon wrote it as a prose poem.
3. I found the prose-form difficult to read and because of its length
4. …lost interest.
5. End rhyme makes the poem so much more enjoyable!
6. The poem is long
7. …but not dark or heavy handed
8. ….just try it!

CONCLUSION:

1. 1 poem by D. Mahon was more fun to read
2. …than 3 Crime Fiction thrillers!
3. #ReadMorePoetry

Resistance

The sort of snail-mail that can take a week
but suits my method, pre-informatique,

I write this from the St. Louis, rm 14 —
or type it, rather, on the old machine,

a portable, that I take when I migrate
in ‘the run-up to Christmas. Here I sit

amidst the hubbub of the rue de Seine
while a winter fly snores at a window-pane.

Old existentialists, old beats, old punks,
sat here of old; some dedicated drunks

still sing in the marketplace, and out back
there’s an old guy who know Jack Kerouac.

Spring in December now, of course; no doubt
the daffs and daises are already out

and you lot, in the serene post-Christmas lull,
biking the back road between Hob and Schull.

(ref: Schull, West Cork, Ireland)

Here at the heure bleue in the Deux Magots
where as a student I couldn’t afford to go

a gauche and unregenerate anglophone
tongue-tied as ever in my foreign tongue,
stil getting the easiest constructions wrong,

I inhale the fashions of the sexy city,
its streets streaming with electricity,

its wings and roundabouts on the go as ever,
the fly-boats echoing on the floodlit river

when a switch locks and the long boulevard flares
with a thump and flow obscuring moon and stars

In flight from corporate Christendom, this year
I spent the frightful season in Tangier

with spaced-out ‘fiscal nomads’ and ex-pats
or bored by Bowles beneath the sheltering slats,

(ref: book The Sheltering Sky)

bucket and spade under high cloud and sail,
blue and windblown, a sort of vast Kinsale

(ref: Head of Kinsale, Ireland)

— a travel poster as we flutter down
changing at Casablanca in pouring rain

then ocean contours, minaret and soul,
a dribbling fountain, swirling palms, windsock,

a postcard; camels on the beach, black sheep
routinely scattering on the tiny strip,
the flowing script of Royal Air Maroc;

prescribed odours of cedarwood and kif
in the moist oasis of the Hotel du Rif,

swifts diving over the gardens and the port
of course, for even there the birds migrate;

heat-lightning flash photography in the strait,
eight lengths of a cold pool above a white

city at sea; keen cars of Christmas Day
with a lost tribe of Nigerian sans-papiers,

bright migrants from hot Sahara to cold EU
in the leafy English church Sam Beckett knew.

(ref: iconic photo of Beckett (1985) by John Minihan)

I’d uncles down that way in the war years,
a whole raft of Merchant Navy engineers,

northern barbarians on the Barbary Coast
in their white ducks, a far cry from Belfast —

old-movie time of transit visas, bad cheques,
the Dakar fiasco, ‘everyone comes to Rick’s’

ref: movie Casablanca

but the proud Berbers of the west resist
the soul-stealing gaze of the ‘western tourist’

to nurse the experience of a thousand years
beneath a crescent moon and evening stars

— al-‘Dhara, al- ‘Dharan, al-Qa’id and al-Ta’ir —
peach-pink Arabian nights, the call to prayer
on Lavery’s dunes and balconies, austere

as antelope or ibex, a light as rare:
you with your Nikon would go crazy there.

A real barbarian, Wyndham Lewis in flight

(ref: 1882-1957, English writer, painter, critic)

from daily mail, tube station and wireless set,

found there the desert ‘blue’ tribes’ he liked best
in the days of the Rif rifles and Beau Geste,

far from fake sheikhery and the coast hotels
exploring qasba art in the lunar hills —

‘the best this side of China, I should say’.
Of course, most things are different since his day:

looking like Katie Tyrrell (1863-1921) and the old folks

(ref: Irish sailor and businesswoman. Born in Arklow in 1863, Ms Tyrrell blazed a trail as the first female ship’s captain. Her father had a shipping company that imported and exported goods between Ireland and Wales. From childhood, Kate could be found around the shipyard learning her father’s trade.

in your on ‘sublimely gloomy’  Athy pix,

(ref: Athy is home of photographer Minihan)

as everywhere the filmable populations
have now been framed in shinier compositions,

the open prison of the corporate whole,
for even dissent has long been marketable —

even in the desert of legend and dark myth,
of drought and genocide, what Patti Smith
calls ‘the real earth of Rimbaud,’ no daisies there.

(ref: Patti Smith 1946)

Burroughts and Ginsberg – 9, rue Gít-le-Coeur —
who thought to undermine the monolith
were building new sandcastles in the air.

Back now on the rive gauche and the Pont des Arts
re-reading the works of Bonnefoy and Éluard,
(ref: Bonnefoy 1923-2016 French poet and art historian)
(ref: Éluard 1895-1952, French poet; founder of the surrealist movement)

a flâneur in the dense galaxies of text
yet somehow knowing what to link for next,

I resist Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy
to browse among the picture books, cliché

(ref: Henry Miller 1891-1980, novella days as ex-pat in Paris)

and time exposure, the once bright machines,
the mirrored nudes like open nectarines,

high-definition fashion, Paris de Nuit,
copperplate silence, cranes at St. Denis,

the soap and tickets, the oblivious snow,
a gargoyle musing on the lights below,

soft-focus studio filter work, the glow
and heartening realism of Robert Doisneau
(ref: 1912-1994, French photographer B/W foto’s streets of Paris)

Les Halles, butcher

(industrial suburbs, the great aerial one
of the Renault plant beside de Bois de Boulogne

pensioners, tramps, young lovers in a park,
a kiss at rush-hour or a dance in the dark);

and on the history shelves the wartime books,
old coats and bicycles, old hat and specs

old sniper rifles, Gloria and Étoile
ripping up tarmac in the place St. Michel;

at the Gare du Nord a 24-hour clock,
clanking transports, faces wreathed in smoke

and the damned logo everywhere you look;
midnight editions, by Gironde or Loire

a distant grumble in the sky some where,
a shaky flashlight piercing night and cloud,
low voices murmuring like owls in a wood.

— Days of resistance, un peu soviétique,
plain Sartre and Beauvoir dancing cheek to cheek!

Now our resistance is to co-optation,
the ‘global project of world domination,

the generative darkness hid from sight
in an earth strung with deterministic light

no more than a ganglion of wires and flex,
crap advertising and commercial sex.

Still skeptical, statistically off-line France
resists the specious arguments most advance,

the digital movies and unnatural nosh,
to stick with real tomatoes, real brioche

and real stars like Adjani and Binoche
‘No art without the resistant of the medium’:

Adjani:

Binoche:

our own resistance to the murderous tedium
of business culture lays claim to the real
as product, no, but as its own ideal —

live seizures in the flux, fortuitous archetypes,
an art as fugitive as the life it snaps

tracing the magic of some primitive place
in the last retrenchment of the human face,

gossip and pigeons, close-ups by Kertész
the young Diana in her London crèche. **

(ref: Kertész 1894-1985, groundbreaking photographic composition)
(most famous photorgraph…”La Forchette” )

(** ref: Poem is dedicated to J. Minihan took the icon foto of Princess Di)

Us snappers-ups of photogenic details,
yourself a snapper of immortal souls,

resist commodity, the ersatz, the cold,
the schrecklichkeit of the post-modern world,

that the sun-writing of our resistance days
shine like Cape Clear glimpsed in a heat-haze

(ref: Irish name: Cape Cléire, lies south-west of County Cork in Ireland.)

After so much neglect, resolved anew,
creative anarchy I come back to you,

not the faux anarchy of media culture
but the real chaos of indifferent nature —

for instance, my own New Year resolution
is to study weather, clouds and their formation,

going straight to video with each new release
untroubled by the ignorant thought police.

I wish you good light or a light in a mist
safe from the critic and the invasive tourist,

a Munster twilight far from the venal roar
where waifs, and strays can beat paths to your door,

unseasonable creatures, ears against the sky,
and timorous things that wouldn’t hurt a fly,

conceptual silence, the best place to live —
‘Que faire d’une lampe, il pleut, le jour se lève’:

real daylight keeps on breaking, in other words
So, love to Hammond and the karate kids;

(ref:  Minihan and his family, In 1988, John met Hammond Journeaux, a “lovely” woman from New Zealand, at a dinner party in London, who “blessed” him with two sons – Emmet, now 23 and living in London, and 19-year-old Bosco.

down silent paths, in secret hiding places,
the locked out-house that no-one notices,

listening for footfalls by a quiet river
the sun will find us when the worst is over

when everyone is in love, our children laugh
at the gruff bloke snuffling in the epigraph

and in the window-frame a persistent fly
buzzes with furious life which will never die.

Derek Mahon:

#Poetry Ailbhe Darcy “Insistance”

• Author: Ailbhe Darcy
• Title: Insistance   18 poems  and  I liked  just 1 !!
  
• Published: 2018
• List of Challenges 2019
• Monthly reading plan
• #TBR  challenge update  
• Read 22/43 books that I purchased in 2019!
• NOTE:  all comments are my personal reactions to the poems
• ….A. Darcy is an award winning poet and my thoughts should not
• diminish the quality of her work.

Irish poets I would strongly recommend:

• Gerard Fanning ‘Water & Power’
• Eva Bourke  ‘Seeing Yellow’

General impression:

I read one reviewer describe Darcy’s poems as ‘…a bit too clever’.
The reader’s ability to understand, interpret and appreciate poetry is different with each person, I agree with this. but….

What makes successful poem?
Accessibility is the extension of a poet to the reader and say
Come here, with me and lets share this experience of language.

What makes successful poem?
A poem written in plain language that can connect with the reader.

What irritates me the most?

I dislike  the quirky poets with visual tricks or dazzle readers with their vocabulary!
Too many poets are cryptic….they think the purpose of poetry is to be cryptic.
Poetry should be plain and simple…but that does not mean it cannot be complex.

My notes:

Conclusion: Hair
Oke…Darcy has a wide vocabulary (simulacra, chyme, fettled, to futz) but IMO does not a great poet make.

Conclusion: Umbrella
Yet another poem that leaves me unmoved…

Conclusion: The Car
Quirky….memory of family car and time in South Bend Indiana.

Conclusion: Postcards from Europe
Bombs, St. Martin, sword swallower…sigh
…this poem did not throw open my imagination
it nearly put me asleep.

Conclusion Mushrooms
Mish-mash of words and random thoughts that don’t make sense to me.
Mushrooms? Really?

Conclusion: Stink
I just lost interest….there is no great message…not emotional buzz
…no humor or creative metaphors.

Conclusion: Nice
Absolutely no emotional reaction
This poem about….cockroaches and robots, please!
I listened to the poet recite this poem…it didn’t improve
the reading experience.

Conclusion: Silver
…..more insects, silverfish. Not for me.

Conclusion: Jellyfish
I read the the article by K. Mathiesen which is the inspiration for Darcy’s poem (The Guardian, 21.08.2015). I could not find a coherent link to the article and the poem with the exception of the word jellyfish. I found the poem an unfathomable rant.

Conclusion: Angelus
Now I thought concept is known “devotional prayer for morning, noon and evening’. That should help me read this 3 part poem.
No. I could not make heads or tails of it.
It’s probably not Ailbhe Darcy’s fault…it has to be me.

Conclusion: Service not included
Try as iI do…I cannot link the 4x mentions of shopping centres and 3 x of hospitals.
I presume the speaker is the poet and imagine she’s referring to her mother-in-law
But only Darcy can confirm this.
…all the references to (mother-in-law??)
— your tears?
— your hands
— your own son
— Your hands
— your way there
— your palms
— your daughters
— your hands
Baffled.

Conclusion: Postcard of ‘Walls of Aran’
What a beautiful photograph….yet I was not able to link this with the long blast of words in Darcy’s poem. Her words made zero impact on me. On the other hand….this image is breathtaking! Getting bored with Ailbhe Darcy
….even if she is considered one of the best Irish poets in a generation! I feel obligated to get through her poems….if I bought the book I should read it.

Conclusion: My son is born
Poems about children example: ….by Katie Ford in her collection Blood Lyrics “Of a child early born” brought tears to my eyes but unfortunately Ailbhe Darcy cannot evoke the same emotion in me.

Conclusion: Election Day
What does this poem have to do with an election day?
Darcy has the ability to write a poem which has
NO relation to the title…that I can discover!

Conclusion: A guided tour of the house and its environs

Rambling on and on…. (excerpts)

This is where the floor slants you can roll a ball
This is where I killed the ants with cleaning chemicals
This tortuous shape represents a salamander squeeze
the distance and it grows it shrinks when we leave it alone
This is where you froze the mouse you’d half killed
This is where you’ll lie down again with me…

Here is the beef we ate for the iron
We have been invited to a wedding in Austin
Here is the deck the landlord built
Here is our herb garden
Here is my bicycle
You bought a waffle iron…

I do not see the poetic beauty in this poem.
I could even write something like this!

Conclusion: Ansel Adams’ Aspens
13 sentences with enjambment for  visual effect.
Repetition of a few phases…
” To tiny Ansel Adams…”

Focus on SKY:
the sky must seem a miracle
the sky bright and bottomless
the sky must seem a matter of fact
the bright black sky
the sky is what it is

Focus on TREE(s)
trees gnarled as the knees of elephants
renders each tree a bouquet of paper
each tree out there glows with itself

What does Ansel Adams want to do?
— toiling after the spirit, not just the body of America.
— the mind beneath he wants to grasp

This was a very nice poem about Ansel Adams photographs

Conclusion: Still
Did I like any of the poems?
I liked  ONLY ONE POEM    “Still”.
I read it and then listened to A. Darcy read the poem.
It was THE BEST poem in the book.