The Sleep Bus

Following on from other Gert’s review of Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, this poem seems apt:

New Year resolutions – and another prize

Good King Whatsisface

The slave girl’s song

Anne Enright : The Wren, The Wren

In a June edition of The London Review of Books I came upon six poems by an Irish poet I didn’t know. Philip McDaragh certainly sounded Irish, and two of the poems were translated from Irish of the 12th and 9th Century respectively. I had always loved the Irish air, Lagan Love, and one little poem was called The Bird of Lagan Lough.

the wee bird,

yellow-beaked,

blurting sweet

melody over

grey water

is a blackbird

hidden in gorse

(yellow, of course)

Louise Gluck 1943-2023

Oooh, nasty

Your asthma has won

     the audience’s sympathy;

Don’t lose it by reading

      your poems

From The Epigrams of Martial, tr. Laurie Duggan (Scripsi 1989)

Image: http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/declaiming-poetry/

Bunny Slope

When I’m writing a poem,
there’s less and less of it.

As I approach the mountains,
they vanish behind a gentle hill,
behind the bunny slope.

And once I’m standing with them
face to face,
they take away my speech.

The very best poem
finishes half way

Tadeusz Dąbrowski

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Paris Review no 291 (Winter 2016)

Mary Ellen

My grandmother treadled the sewing machine

singing Irish songs and laying down the law

on subjects such as children drinking tea. 

It would be the black blood we would have.

From her I have such words as “skerrick”,

“smashed to smithereens”. When our mantlepiece fell down

she loaded up the marble chunks, and wheeled

the tipping barrow like a man. At ninety four

she marched along the tramtracks in her nightie

among the yawning street girls. 

To the polite young policeman offering a lift

“The only lift I’ll be getting is a lift under the ear!” 

From Ireland to the wheatfields by way of Curry’s pub

still the Junoesque girl behind the bar

keeping men at bay with the whips of her words.

Sleekening the hull

They seem very small, short, cute little poems – and then I think about them for about three weeks afterwards.
Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast