Nantucket Blogworks » By Dick

National Poetry Month

Bookworkers — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:28:17 +0000

The English poet Simon Armitage read from his work this past week at the Cúirt International

Festival of Literature in Galway. The American edition of Seeing Stars, the collection from which this poem

is taken, will appear from Random House in August.

Aviators

They’d overbooked the plane.
“At this moment in time,” announced the woman at the counter,
“Xanadu Airlines is offering one hundred pounds
or a free return flight to any passenger willing to stand down.”
A small man in a cheap suit and Bart Simpson socks scratched his ankle.
“One hundred and fifty pounds,” she announced, fifteen minutes later.
Nobody moved. “Two hundred?”
From nowhere, this neat looking chap in a blue flannel jacket and shiny shoes
loomed over the desk and said, “I’ll take the money.”
“But you’re the pilot,” she said, then added, “Sir,”
as if she’d walked into a Japanese house and forgotten to take off her shoes.
The pilot whispered, “Listen, I need that money.
I’m behind on my mortgage payments because my wife’s a gambler;
I’ve got two sons at naval college – the hats alone cost a small fortune -
and I’m being blackmailed by a pimp in Stockport.
Let me take the two hundred. You’d be saving my life.”

I’d been sitting within earshot, next to the stand-up ashtray.
“Give him the money,” I said.
“Who are you?” she asked. She was wearing a gold plastic name-badge.
“Dorothy, I’m George,” I said, “and clearly this man’s in pain.
I don’t want him going all gooey midway over the English Channel.
I once heard sobbing coming from the cabin of a Jumbo Jet
at thirty-three thousand feet, and let me tell you,
it sounded like the laughter of Beelzebub.”
“But who’ll fly the plane?” she wanted to know.
“Why me, of course.” I opened my mouth
so she could see how good my teeth were – like pilot’s teeth.
“Do you have a licence?” she asked.
I said, “Details, always details. Dorothy, it’s time to let go a little,
to trust in the unexplained. Time to open your mind to the infinite.”
By now my hand was resting on hers,
and a small crowd of passengers had gathered around our little scene,
nodding and patting me on the back. “Good for you, George,”
said a backpacker with a leather shoelace knotted around his wrist.
It was biblical, or like the end of a family film during the time of innocence.
I said, “Dorothy, give me the keys to the cockpit,
and let’s get this baby in the air.”

In Galway; Neil Labute’s “Autobahn”

Bookworkers — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:48:46 +0000

I’ve just come from a small parking lot over on Nun’s Island here in Galway, where I was one of the audience of twelve at the 5:00 p.m. performance(s) of Neil Labute’s Autobahn, which takes in four parked cars. Each car contains a young man and a young woman, the actors, in the front seats, and an audience of three in the back. After about every fifteen minutes, the audience shifts cars, moving from one tense episode in a relationship to a difficult moment between another couple. In one scenario a couple is trying to come to terms with having returned their foster child to care; in another a man tries to understand his partner’s part in a strange, compromising situation with two men which she claims to not clealy remember. All of the vignettes focused on the separately understood terms of the relationship and on the language used to clarify the situation. The results were mixed, but it was interesting and mostly successful, and in only one of the cars did it become uncomfortable stuffy. I hesitated to open a window, concerned that I might be tampering with the set.

Tonight there’s a reading with Gerbrand Bakker, the Dutch winner of the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the novel The Twin and the Nigerian writer E.C. Osondu, author of the story collection Voice of America, who currently teaches at Providence College. Both authors’ books are readily available through Bookworks.

National Poetry Month

Bookworkers — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:45:12 +0000

American poet Thomas Lux reads on Friday afternoon

at the Cuirt International Festival of Literature in

Galway, Ireland. Here’s a good example of his work:

Gorgeous Surfaces

They are, the surfaces, gorgeous: a master
pastry chef at work here, the dips and whorls,
the wrist-twist
squeezes of cream from the tube
to the tart, sweet bleak sugarwork, needlework
toward the perfect lace doily
where sit the bone-china teacups, a little maze
of meaning maybe in their arrangement
sneaky obliques, shadow
allusives all piling
atop one another. Textures succulent but famished,
banal, bereft. These surfaces,
these flickering patinas,
through which,
if you could drill, or hack,
or break a trapdoor latch, if you could penetrate
these surfaces’ milky cataracts, you
would drop,
free-fall
like a hope chest full of lead
to nowhere, no place, a dry-wind, sour,
nada place,
and you would keep dropping,
tumbling, slow
motion, over and over for one day, six days, fourteen
decades, eleven centuries (a long time
falling to fill a zero) and in that time
not a leaf, no rain,
not a single duck, nor hearts, not one human, nor sleep,
nor grace, nor graves–falling
to where the bottom, finally, is again the surface,
which is gorgeous, of course,
which is glue, saw- and stone-dust,
which is blue-gray
ice, which is
the barely glinting grit
of abyss.

Thomas Lux

In Galway

Bookworkers — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:28:23 +0000

The Cuirt International Festival of Literature begins this evening with a wine and canapés reception at the City Museum, followed by a program of readings by Dermot Healy and Paul Murray from their novels Long Time, No See and Skippy Dies at the Town Hall Theatre. Then, full-day programs will run from Wednesday through Sunday, with readings, book launches, plays, a poetry slam, interviews, panel discussions, art exhibits, performance pieces, music and lectures. The Cuirt crowd, as I’ve learned over the years, are very opinionated, and this year’s lineup seems to be anticipated with muffled enthusiasm. Probably partly due to some budget constraints, the international participants seem to be fewer as are the number of big names. “We’re used to having our Nobel Prize winners,” someone said to me in Neachtain’s (nock’-tins) pub last night. But each year the Festival is different, and each year there are always some memorable readings and other highlights, and I expect no less this year. The playwright Tom Kilroy has the honor of kicking things off shortly with a few well-chosen and witty remarks.

In Dublin

Bookworkers — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:15:34 +0000

April is One City, One Book month in Dublin and this year’s book

is the novel Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the

Sea. Ghost Light, on Bookworks’ shelves now, is the moving,

fictionalized story of Molly Allgood, who as a young girl was an actress in Dublin’s

Abbey Theatre and the lover of the playwright John Millington Synge.

In the present of the novel, Molly is living in poverty in post World War II

London, her career as an acclaimed actress behind her, her passion for life

still alive but surviving largely on memories.

Every day, somewhere in the city, there’s an event designed to enhance

the experience of reading the book. The kickoff was an evening of “The Music

of Ghost Light” at the Abbey Theatre which featured many performers,

including Camille O’Sullivan, Steve Cooney and the author’s sister, Sinead.

Other events include a dramatized reading of the letters of J. M. Synge and

Molly Allgood, the writer and critic Declan Kiberd discussing Synge’s use of

Irish language and Hiberno-English in his plays, and an informal dance workshop

featuring the music of Edwardian Dublin. It’s a wide-ranging, well-planned program

that’s created some buzz around the city.

April 28th poem

Bookworkers — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:41:58 +0000

Donal Og

It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

You promised me, and you said a lie to me,
that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked;
I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you,
and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

You promised me a thing that was hard for you,
a ship of gold under a silver mast;
twelve towns with a market in all of them,
and a fine white court by the side of the sea.

You promised me a thing that is not possible,
that you would give me gloves of the skin of a fish;
that you would give me shoes of the skin of a bird;
and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness,
I sit down and I go through my trouble;
when I see the world and do not see my boy,
he that has an amber shade in his hair.

It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you;
the Sunday that is last before Easter Sunday
and myself on my knees reading the Passion;
and my two eyes giving love to you for ever.

My mother has said to me not to be talking with you today,
or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;
it was a bad time she took for telling me that;
it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
or as the black coal that is on the smith’s forge;
or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
it was you put that darkness over my life.

You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!

This translation of the 8th century ballad (“Young Donal”) from the Irish was done by Lady Augusta Gregory, one of the leading figures in the Irish literary revival of the early 20th century. With W.B. Yeats she was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. The English she uses for her translation of this beautiful lament is the dialect she would have heard around her home in the barony of Kiltartan, County Galway. The strange inflections of the grammar would have been pretty true to that dialect, but they also served to offer as close a represent- ation of the Irish language as she thought possible.
–Dick

Calm Down

Bookworkers — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:20:21 +0000

Roddy Doyle gave a good reading of a short story at the Cuirt Festival in Galway this past week. And at my guest house I was reading selections from a collection of essays about the Irish writer and dramatist John Millington Synge. One of the essays is Roddy Doyle’s about the difficulties of getting Dublin inner city kids to appreciate literature and about how Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World worked surprisingly well because the kids got the characters. When he asked them to take parts for a classroom reading of the play, instead of doing their usual ducking and hesitating, it was

“‘Me.’ ‘Please, Sir.’ ‘Me.’”

Other writers didn’t work very well. Yeats.

“‘Sir, why didn’t he just ask her to go with him?’”

Then I saw the picture posted here of the gorgeous daffodils from Patti and Prenny Claflin and saw Wordsworth’s Daffodils poem and remembered

“I spent hours and hours trying to convince them that Wordsworth wasn’t an eejit. ‘They’re only flowers, Sir. Calm down.’”

Some more notes from the Cuirt Festival, Galway

Bookworkers — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:06:36 +0000

This morning fifty or sixty people gathered on the stone bridge over the Corrib River for the unveiling of a bronze plaque with a poem by Moya Cannon. This is the sixth year that a poetry plaque has been installed around Galway during the Cuirt Festival of Literature. The first was of a poem by Seamus Heaney.

There have been a few excellent readings so far. Fiction writers Claire Keegan and Kevin Barry, who read in different programs at the Town Hall Theatre, were two of my favorites. Claire Keegan read an excerpt from her story “Foster”, which won the Davy Byrne Irish Writing Award, offered by the Dublin pub made famous by its place in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Five women writers were among the six short-listed for the 25,000 euro prize. Richard Ford was the judge. Keegan’s story is about a young girl who is sent to live with an older couple, the Kinsellas, for a time. The complexity of the relationships in this coming-of-age story are defined by Keegan’s beautifully discriminating prose and the tension and anxiety which are threaded through the story. In the Q & A after, she described her slow, meticulous writing process, which has seen her go through as many as thirty drafts on a story.

Kevin Barry’s story, “Fjord of Killary” is told by a character who has bought an old hotel on Ireland’s only fjord, in a remote quarter of the west coast. The narrator had hoped to balance the pleasant life of a hotelier with his efforts to work on his poetry, but a recalcitrant Byelorussian staff and the needs of a cast of curious locals frustrate him. And disaster looms when a furious storm unleashes fabulous amounts of rain and the fjord threatens to engulf the hotel. Barry had a way of dramatizing his fiction when I saw him read a few years ago when his collection There Are Little Kingdoms was published, but his presentation was really hilarious when he read this comic piece, which appeared in February in The New Yorker. It was wonderful but it did sort of raise the question for some of whether, because Barry is obviously aware of and enjoys his performative strengths, he doesn’t risk turning the act of writing into the production of a script for performance. Whatever, he’s very talented and he’ll sort that out.

Keegan’s stories have appeared in two collections–Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields. “Foster” appeared in The New Yorker and is in a recently published anthology of the shortlisted stories from the Davy Byrnes contest. That book doesn’t seem to have appeared in the U.S. yet, but you can read both “Foster” and “Fjord of Killary” in their entirety on The New Yorker website.

A poem for April 22nd

Bookworkers — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:33:58 +0000

While in Ireland, I’ve been asked numerous times about the craziness that brought about the suicide of the Irish schoolgirl Phoebe Prince in South Hadley, Mass., that Dani mentioned in earlier post. I certainly don’t have any satisfactory explanation for what happened, but most of the people who have brought it up seem to see it as a notoriously American kind of event. It reminded me of this William Stafford peom which I was able to find.

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will find in the corner of your eye, in the quick slip of your foot–air far down, a snap that might have caught. And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing voice that finds its way by being afraid. That country is there, for us, carried as it is crossed. What you fear will not go away: it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That’s the world, and we all live there.

I’d say that this poetic advice or information is not easy to use, its reassurance not easy to understand, but for those who view life as a threatening landscape the poem has something to say that is quite touching.

Somehow connected to all of this is the fact that although the very air of Galway this week breathes poetry, beautiful prose and the life of literature, I find myself responding to the enthusiastic comments of my writer friends Danny Denton and Mike McCormick and beginning to read Impact: The Human Stories Behind Ireland’s Road Tragedies by Jenny McCudden. She is the Western Correspondent for TV3 News here and her book deals with Ireland’s “collision culture” through first-hand accounts and interviews with victim’s families, police, the boy racers, government officials and emergency workers. It’s pretty grueling but powerful reportage.

A Cookworks offering from Dublin

Bookworkers — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:55:10 +0000

Philip MacDermott’s Sherry Trifle

After a skyped recipe query from his daughter Cláir of Nantucket, my host in Malahide, on the sea just north of Dublin, Philip MacDermott, decided he should whip up a sherry trifle for his sister’s visit. It was only after it was finished that I realized I should have photographed the stages of preparation for a Cookworks entry. But anyway, with only the finished product to view, here’s Philip’s recipe.

In a flat-bottomed glass bowl or square dish about 4″ deep, place an inch-thick layer of sponge cake. Slather that with a layer of jam (flavor’s your choice; Philip used strawberry) and cover all with another inch-thick layer of sponge cake. Now soak all of the sponge cake with 125 ml. (a bit over 4 ounces) of sherry (this one got Amontillado).

Over this now layer approximately 12 ounces of either fruit from canned fruit cocktail drained of its syrup or a mixture of your own freshly chopped fruits. Cover all of this with 12 fluid ounces of flavored gelatin or Jell-o (Philip’s choice again was strawberry) and leave it to set. We left it overnight, but it will usually be firm in a couple of hours.

When this is firm, cover it with a one-inch layer of custard. And finally, cover the custard to near the top of the dish with whipped cream. This last I suppose might be optional. Whatever, the Sherry Trifle now sits there beckoning you–well, challenging you, really. Enjoy, as they say.