1983 PAUL MULDOON Quoof

	How often have I carried our family word
	for the hot water bottle
	to a strange bed,
	as my father would juggle a red-hot half-brick
	in an old sock
	to his childhood settle.
	I have taken it into so many lovely heads
	or laid it between us like a sword.

	An hotel room in New York City
	with a girl who spoke hardly any English,
	my hand on her breast
	like the smouldering one-off spoor of the yeti
	or some other shy beast
	that has yet to enter the language.

PAUL MULDOON The Frog

	Comes to mind as another small upheaval
	amongst the rubble.
	His eye matches exactly the bubble
	in my spirit-level.
	I set aside hammer and chisel
	and take him on the trowel.

	The entire population of Ireland
	springs from a pair left to stand
	overnight in a pond
	in the gardens of Trinity College,
	two bottles of wine left there to chill
	after the Act of Union.

	There is, surely, in this story
	a moral. A moral for our times.
	What if I put him to my head
	and squeezed it out of him,
	like the juice of freshly squeezed limes,
	or a lemon sorbet?

TOM PAULIN Desertmartin

	At noon, in the dead centre of a faith,
	Between Draperstown and Magherafelt,
	This bitter village shows the flag
	In a baked absolute September light.
	Here the Word has withered to a few
	Parched certainties, and the charred stubble
	Tightens like a black belt, a crop of Bibles.

	Because this is the territory of the Law
	I drive across it with a powerless knowledge –
	The owl of Minerva in a hired car.
	A Jock squaddy glances down the street
	And grins, happy and expendable,
	Like a brass cartridge. He is a useful thing,
	Almost at home, and yet not quite, not quite.

	It’s a limed nest, this place. I see a plain
	Presbyterian grace sour, then harden,
	As a free strenuous spirit changes
	To a servile defiance that whines and shrieks
	For the bondage of the letter: it shouts
	For the Big Man to lead his wee people
	To a clean white prison, their scorched tomorrow.

	Masculine Islam, the rule of the Just,
	Egyptian sand dunes and geometry,
	A theology of rifle-butts and executions:
	These are the places where the spirit dies.
	And now, in Desertmartin’s sandy light,
	I see a culture of twigs and bird-shit
	Waving a gaudy flag it loves and curses.

1984 SEAMUS HEANEY Widgeon

	for Paul Muldoon
	It had been badly shot.
	While he was plucking it
	he found, he says, the voice box –

	like a flute stop
	in the broken windpipe –

	and blew upon it
	unexpectedly
	his own small widgeon cries.

SEAMUS HEANEY from Station Island

	VII
	I had come to the edge of the water,
	soothed by just looking, idling over it
	as if it were a clear barometer

	or a mirror, when his reflection
	did not appear but I sensed a presence
	entering into my concentration

	on not being concentrated as he spoke
	my name. And though I was reluctant
	I turned to meet his face and the shock

	is still in me at what I saw. His brow
	was blown open above the eye and blood
	had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’

	he said, ‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw
	after a football match… What time it was
	when I was wakened up I still don’t know

	but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it
	scared me, like the phone in the small hours,
	so I had the sense not to put on the light

	but looked out from behind the curtain.
	I saw two customers on the doorstep
	and an old landrover with the doors open

	parked on the street so I let the curtain drop;
	but they must have been waiting for it to move
	for they shouted to come down into the shop.

	She started to cry then and roll round the bed,
	lamenting and lamenting to herself,
	not even asking who it was. “Is your head

	astray, or what’s come over you?” I roared, more
	to bring myself to my senses
	than out of any real anger at her

	for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,
	and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.
	All the time they were shouting, “Shop!

	Shop!” so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat
	and went back to the window and called out,
	“What do you want? Could you quieten the racket

	or I’ll not come down at all.” “There’s a child not well.
	Open up and see what you have got – pills
	or a powder or something in a bottle,”

	one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath
	so I could see his face in the street lamp
	and when the other moved I knew them both.

	But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet
	hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,
	lying dead still, whispering to watch out.

	At the bedroom door I switched on the light.
	“It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.
	Who are they anyway at this time of the night?”

	she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.
	“I know them to see,” I said, but something
	made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed

	before I went downstairs into the aisle
	of the shop. I stood there, going weak
	in the legs. I remember the stale smell

	of cooked meat or something coming through
	as I went to open up. From then on
	you know as much about it as I do.’

	‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’
	‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’
	‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day,

	shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’
	‘Not that it is any consolation
	but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’

	Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood
	forgetful of everything now except
	whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,

	beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on weight
	since you did your courting in that big Austin
	you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’

	Through life and death he had hardly aged.
	There always was an athlete’s cleanliness
	shining off him and except for the ravaged

	forehead and the blood, he was still that same
	rangy midfielder in a blue jersey
	and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,

	the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.
	‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent –
	forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’

	I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive
	my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’
	And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him

and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.

DOUGLAS DUNN from Elegies 1985

	The Sundial
	You stood with your back to me.
	By that crumbling sundial,
	Leaving your book on it –
	Time, love, and literature!
	You shielded your eye from the sun
	As a peacock strutted towards you.
	You called it beautiful and touched its head,
	Then turned around to me, eye-patched
	And fastened to a mourning blink
	Brought there by melanoma’s
	Sun-coaxed horrific oncos,
	Leaving me to guess at
	What mysteries you knew
	Foretold by love or creatures.

DEREK MAHON Antarctica

	‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’
	The others nod, pretending not to know.
	At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

	He leaves them reading and begins to climb,
	Goading his ghost into the howling snow;
	He is just going outside and may be some time.

	The tent recedes beneath its crust of rime
	And frostbite is replaced by vertigo:
	At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

	Need we consider it some sort of crime,
	This numb self-sacrifice of the weakest? No,
	He is just going outside and may be some time –

	In fact, for ever. Solitary enzyme,
	Though the night yield no glimmer there will glow,
	At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

	He takes leave of the earthly pantomime
	Quietly, knowing it is time to go:
	‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’
	At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

JOHN AGARD Listen Mr Oxford don

	Me not no Oxford don
	me a simple immigrant
	from Clapham Common
	I didn’t graduate
	I immigrate

	But listen Mr Oxford don
	I’m a man on de run
	and a man on de run
	is a dangerous one

	I ent have no gun
	I ent have no knife
	but mugging de Queen’s English
	is the story of my life

	I dont need no axe
	to split/ up yu syntax
	I dont need no hammer
	to mash/ up yu grammar

	I warning you Mr Oxford don
	I’m a wanted man
	and a wanted man
	is a dangerous one

	Dem accuse me of assault
	on de Oxford dictionary/
	imagine a concise peaceful man like me/
	dem want me serve time
	for inciting rhyme to riot
	but I tekking it quiet
	down here in Clapham Common

	I’m not a violent man Mr Oxford don
	I only armed wit mih human breath
	but human breath
	is a dangerous weapon

	So mek dem send one big word after me
	I ent serving no jail sentence
	I slashing suffix in self-defence
	I bashing future wit present tense
	and if necessary

I making de Queen’s English accessory/to my offence

PETER DIDSBURY The Hailstone 1987

	Standing under the greengrocer’s awning
	in the kind of rain we used to call a cloudburst,
	getting home later with a single hailstone in my hair.
	Ambition would have us die in thunderstorms
	like Jung and Mahler. Five minutes now,
	for all our sad and elemental loves.

	A woman sheltering inside the shop
	had a frightened dog,
	which she didn’t want us to touch.
	It had something to do with class,
	and the ownership of fear. Broken ceramic lightning
	was ripping open the stitching in the sky.
	The rain was ‘siling’ down,
	the kind that comes bouncing back off the pavement,
	heavy milk from the ancient skins
	being poured through the primitive strainer.
	Someone could have done us in flat colours,
	formal and observant, all on one plane,
	you and me outside and the grocer and the lady
	behind the gunmetal glass, gazing out over our shoulders.
	I can see the weave of the paper behind the smeared reflections,
	some of the colour lifting as we started a sudden dash home.
	We ran by the post office and I thought, ‘It is all still true,
	a wooden drawer is full of postal orders, it is raining,
	mothers and children are standing in their windows,
	I am running through the rain past a shop which sells wool,
	you take home fruit and veg in bags of brown paper,
	we are getting wet, it is raining.’
	It was like being back
	in the reign of George the Sixth, the kind of small town
	which still lies stacked in the back of old storerooms in schools,
	where plural roof and elf expect to get very wet
	and the beasts deserve their nouns of congregation
	as much as the postmistress, spinster, her title.
	I imagine those boroughs as intimate with rain,
	their ability to call on sentient functional downpours
	for any picnic or trip to the German Butcher’s
	one sign of a usable language getting used,
	make of this what you will. The rain has moved on,
	and half a moon in a darkening blue sky
	silvers the shrinking puddles in the road:
	moon that emptied the post office and grocer’s,
	moon old kettle of rain and idiolect,
	the moon the sump of the aproned pluvial towns,
	cut moon as half a hailstone in the hair.

PAUL MULDOON Something Else

	When your lobster was lifted out of the tank
	to be weighed
	I thought of woad,
	of madders, of fugitive, indigo inks,

	of how Nerval
	was given to promenade
	a lobster on a gossamer thread,
	how, when a decent interval

	had passed
	(son front rouge encor du baiser de la reine)
	and his hopes of Adrienne

	proved false,
	he hanged himself from a lamp-post
	with a length of chain, which made me think

of something else, then something else again.

CIARAN CARSON Dresden

	Horse Boyle was called Horse Boyle because of his brother Mule;
	Though why Mule was called Mule is anybody’s guess. I stayed there once,
	Or rather, I nearly stayed there once. But that’s another story.
	At any rate they lived in this decrepit caravan, not two miles out of Carrick,
	Encroached upon by baroque pyramids of empty baked bean tins, rusts
	And ochres, hints of autumn merging into twilight. Horse believed
	They were as good as a watchdog, and to tell you the truth
	You couldn’t go near the place without something falling over:
	A minor avalanche would ensue – more like a shop bell, really,

	The old-fashioned ones on string, connected to the latch, I think,
	And as you entered in, the bell would tinkle in the empty shop, a musk
	Of soap and turf and sweets would hit you from the gloom. Tobacco.
	Baling wire. Twine. And, of course, shelves and pyramids of tins.
	An old woman would appear from the back – there was a sizzling pan in there,
	Somewhere, a whiff of eggs and bacon – and ask you what you wanted;
	Or rather, she wouldn’t ask; she would talk about the weather. It had rained

	That day, but it was looking better. They had just put in the spuds.
	I had only come to pass the time of day, so I bought a token packet of Gold Leaf.
	All this time the fry was frying away. Maybe she’d a daughter in there
	Somewhere, though I hadn’t heard the neighbours talk of it; if anybody knew,
	It would be Horse. Horse kept his ears to the ground.
	And he was a great man for current affairs; he owned the only TV in the place.
	Come dusk he’d set off on his rounds, to tell the whole townland the latest
	Situation in the Middle East, a mortar bomb attack in Mullaghbawn –
	The damn things never worked, of course – and so he’d tell the story
	How in his young day it was very different. Take young Flynn, for instance,
	Who was ordered to take this bus and smuggle some sticks of gelignite

	Across the border, into Derry, when the RUC – or was it the RIC? –
	Got wind of it. The bus was stopped, the peeler stepped on. Young Flynn
	Took it like a man, of course: he owned up right away. He opened the bag
	And produced the bomb, his rank and serial number. For all the world
	Like a pound of sausages. Of course, the thing was, the peeler’s bike
	Had got a puncture, and he didn’t know young Flynn from Adam. All he wanted
	Was to get home for his tea. Flynn was in for seven years and learned to speak
	The best of Irish. He had thirteen words for a cow in heat;
	A word for the third thwart in a boat, the wake of a boat on the ebb tide.

	He knew the extinct names of insects, flowers, why this place was called
	Whatever: Carrick, for example, was a rock. He was damn right there –
	As the man said, When you buy meat you buy bones, when you buy land you buy stones.
	You’d be hard put to find a square foot in the whole bloody parish
	That wasn’t thick with flints and pebbles. To this day he could hear the grate
	And scrape as the spade struck home, for it reminded him of broken bones:
	Digging a graveyard, maybe – or better still, trying to dig a reclaimed tip
	Of broken delph and crockery ware – you know that sound that sets your teeth on edge
	When the chalk squeaks on the blackboard, or you shovel ashes from the stove?

	Master McGinty – he’d be on about McGinty then, and discipline, the capitals
	Of South America, Moore’s Melodies, the Battle of Clontarf, and
	Tell me this, an educated man like you: What goes on four legs when it’s young,
	Two legs when it’s grown up, and three legs when it’s old? I’d pretend
	I didn’t know. McGinty’s leather strap would come up then, stuffed
	With threepenny bits to give it weight and sting. Of course, it never did him
	Any harm: You could take a horse to water but you couldn’t make him drink.
	He himself was nearly going on to be a priest.
	And many’s the young cub left the school, as wise as when he came.

	Carrowkeel was where McGinty came from – Narrow Quarter, Flynn explained –
	Back before the Troubles, a place that was so mean and crabbed,
	Horse would have it, men were known to eat their dinner from a drawer.
	Which they’d slide shut the minute you’d walk in.
	He’d demonstrate this at the kitchen table, hunched and furtive, squinting
	Out the window – past the teetering minarets of rust, down the hedge-dark aisle –
	To where a stranger might appear, a passer-by, or what was maybe worse,
	Someone he knew. Someone who wanted something. Someone who was hungry.
	Of course who should come tottering up the lane that instant but his brother

	Mule. I forgot to mention they were twins. They were as like two –
	No, not peas in a pod, for this is not the time nor the place to go into
	Comparisons, and this is really Horse’s story, Horse who – now I’m getting
	Round to it – flew over Dresden in the war. He’d emigrated first, to
	Manchester. Something to do with scrap – redundant mill machinery,
	Giant flywheels, broken looms that would, eventually, be ships, or aeroplanes.
	He said he wore his fingers to the bone.
	And so, on impulse, he had joined the RAF. He became a rear gunner.
	Of all the missions, Dresden broke his heart. It reminded him of china.

	As he remembered it, long afterwards, he could hear, or almost hear
	Between the rapid desultory thunderclaps, a thousand tinkling echoes –
	All across the map of Dresden, store-rooms full of china shivered, teetered
	And collapsed, an avalanche of porcelain, slushing and cascading: cherubs,
	Shepherdesses, figurines of Hope and Peace and Victory, delicate bone fragments.
	He recalled in particular a figure from his childhood, a milkmaid
	Standing on the mantelpiece. Each night as they knelt down for the rosary,
	His eyes would wander up to where she seemed to beckon to him, smiling,
	Offering him, eternally, her pitcher of milk, her mouth of rose and cream.

	One day, reaching up to hold her yet again, his fingers stumbled, and she fell.
	He lifted down a biscuit tin, and opened it.
	It breathed an antique incense: things like pencils, snuff, tobacco.
	His war medals. A broken rosary. And there, the milkmaid’s creamy hand, the outstretched
	Pitcher of milk, all that survived. Outside, there was a scraping
	And a tittering; I knew Mule’s step by now, his careful drunken weaving
	Through the tin-stacks. I might have stayed the night, but there’s no time
	To go back to that now; I could hardly, at any rate, pick up the thread.
	I wandered out through the steeples of rust, the gate that was a broken bed.

EAVAN BOLAND Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening

	Jean-Baptiste Chardin
	is painting a woman
	in the last summer light.

	All summer long
	he has been slighting her
	in botched blues, tints,
	half-tones, rinsed neutrals.

	What you are watching
	is light unlearning itself,
	an infinite unfrocking of the prism.

	Before your eyes
	the ordinary life
	is being glazed over:
	pigments of the bibelot,
	the cabochon, the water-opal
	pearl to the intimate
	simple colours of
	her ankle-length summer skirt.

	Truth makes shift:
	The triptych shrinks
	to the cabinet picture.
	Can’t you feel it?
	Aren’t you chilled by it?
	The way the late afternoon
	is reduced to detail –

the sky that odd shape of apron –

	opaque, scumbled –
	the lazulis of the horizon becoming

	optical greys
	before your eyes
	before your eyes
	in my ankle-length
	summer skirt

	crossing between
	the garden and the house,
	under the whitebeam trees,
	keeping an eye on
	the length of the grass,
	the height of the hedge,
	the distance of the children

I am Chardin’s woman

	edged in reflected light,
	hardened by
	the need to be ordinary.

1988 CHARLES CAUSLEY Eden Rock

	They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
	My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
	Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
	Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

	My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
	Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
	Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
	Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

	She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
	From an old H.P. sauce bottle, a screw
	Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
	The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

	The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
	My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
	Over the drifted stream. My father spins
	A stone along the water. Leisurely,

	They beckon to me from the other bank.
	I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
	Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’

I had not thought that it would be like this.

EDWIN MORGAN The Dowser

	With my forked branch of Lebanese cedar
	I quarter the dunes like downs and guide
	an invisible plough far over the sand.
	But how to quarter such shifting acres
	when the wind melts their shapes, and shadows
	mass where all was bright before,
	and landmarks walk like wraiths at noon?
	All I know is that underneath,
	how many miles no one can say,
	an unbroken water-table waits
	like a lake; it has seen no bird or sail
	in its long darkness, and no man;
	not even pharaohs dug so far
	for all their thirst, or thirst of glory,
	or thrust-power of ten thousand slaves.
	I tell you I can smell it though,
	that water. I am old and black
	and I know the manners of the sun
	which makes me bend, not break. I lose
	my ghostly footprints without complaint.
	I put every mirage in its place.
	I watch the lizard make its lace.
	Like one not quite blind I go
	feeling for the sunken face.
	So hot the days, the nights so cold,
	I gather my white rags and sigh
	but sighing step so steadily
	that any vibrance in so deep
	a lake would never fail to rise
	towards the snowy cedar’s bait.
	Great desert, let your sweetness wake.

NORMAN MACCAIG Chauvinist

	In all the space of space
	I have a little plot of ground
	with part of an ocean in it
	and many mountains

	It’s there I meet my friends
	and multitudes of strangers.
	Even my forebears dreamily visit me
	and dreamily speak to me.

	Of the rest of space
	I can say nothing
	nor of the rest of time, the future
	that dies the moment it happens.

	The little plot – do I belong to it
	or it to me? No matter.
	We share each other as I walk
	amongst its flags and tombstones.

1989 TED HUGHES Telegraph Wires

	Take telegraph wires, a lonely moor,
	And fit them together. The thing comes alive in your ear.

	Towns whisper to towns over the heather.
	But the wires cannot hide from the weather.

	So oddly, so daintily made
	It is picked up and played.

	Such unearthly airs
	The ear hears, and withers!

	In the revolving ballroom of space,
	Bowed over the moor, a bright face

	Draws out of telegraph wires the tones
	That empty human bones.

KEN SMITH Writing in Prison 1990

	Years ago I was a gardener.
	I grew the flowers of my childhood,
	lavender and wayside lilies
	and my first love the cornflower.

	The wind on the summer wheat.
	The blue glaze in the vanished woods.
	In the space of my yard I glimpsed again
	all the lost places of my life.

	I was remaking them. Here in a space
	smaller still I make them again.

CIARAN CARSON Belfast Confetti

	Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks,
	Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion
	Itself – an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire…
	I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering,
	All the alleyways and side-streets blocked with stops and colons.

	I know this labyrinth so well – Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street –
	Why can’t I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead end again.
	A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields. Walkie-talkies. What is
	My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question-marks.

NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL (trans. PAUL MULDOON) The Language Issue

	I place my hope on the water
	in this little boat
	of the language, the way a body might put
	an infant

	in a basket of intertwined
	iris leaves,
	its underside proofed
	with bitumen and pitch,

	then set the whole thing down amidst
	the sedge
	and bulrushes by the edge
	of a river

	only to have it borne hither and thither,
	not knowing where it might end up;
	in the lap, perhaps,
	of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

EAVAN BOLAND The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me

	It was the first gift he ever gave her,
	buying it for five francs in the Galeries
	in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.
	A starless drought made the nights stormy.

	They stayed in the city for the summer.
	They met in cafés. She was always early.
	He was late. That evening he was later.
	They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.

	She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.
	She ordered more coffee. She stood up.
	The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.
	She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

	These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,
	darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
	The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent,
	clear patience of its element. It is

	a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,
	even now, an inference of its violation.
	The lace is overcast as if the weather
	it opened for and offset had entered it.

	The past is an empty café terrace.
	An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.
	And no way now to know what happened then –
	none at all – unless, of course, you improvise:

	The blackbird on this first sultry morning,
	in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,
	feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing –
	the whole, full, flirtatious span of it.

SEAMUS HEANEY from Lightenings 1991

	VIII
	The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
	Were all at prayers inside the oratory
	A ship appeared above them in the air.

	The anchor dragged along behind so deep
	It hooked itself into the altar rails
	And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

	A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
	And struggled to release it. But in vain.
	‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

	The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
	They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
	Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

MICHAEL LONGLEY The Butchers

	When he had made sure there were no survivors in his house
	And that all the suitors were dead, heaped in blood and dust
	Like fish that fishermen with fine-meshed nets have hauled
	Up gasping for salt water, evaporating in the sunshine,
	Odysseus, spattered with muck and like a lion dripping blood
	From his chest and cheeks after devouring a farmer’s bullock,
	Ordered the disloyal housemaids to sponge down the armchairs
	And tables, while Telemachos, the oxherd and the swineherd
	Scraped the floor with shovels, and then between the portico
	And the roundhouse stretched a hawser and hanged the women
	So none touched the ground with her toes, like long-winged thrushes
	Or doves trapped in a mist-net across the thicket where they roost,
	Their heads bobbing in a row, their feet twitching but not for long,
	And when they had dragged Melanthios’s corpse into the haggard
	And cut off his nose and ears and cock and balls, a dog’s dinner,
	Odysseus, seeing the need for whitewash and disinfectant,
	Fumigated the house and the outhouses, so that Hermes
	Like a clergyman might wave the supernatural baton
	With which he resurrects or hypnotises those he chooses,
	And waken and round up the suitors’ souls, and the housemaids’,
	Like bats gibbering in the nooks of their mysterious cave
	When out of the clusters that dangle from the rocky ceiling
	One of them drops and squeaks, so their souls were bat-squeaks
	As they flittered after Hermes, their deliverer, who led them
	Along the clammy sheughs, then past the oceanic streams
	And the white rock, the sun’s gatepost in that dreamy region,
	Until they came to a bog-meadow full of bog-asphodels
	Where the residents are ghosts or images of the dead.

1992 DENISE RILEY A Misremembered Lyric

	A misremembered lyric: a soft catch of its song
	whirrs in my throat. ‘Something’s gotta hold of my heart
	tearing my’ soul and my conscience apart, long after
	presence is clean gone and leaves unfurnished no
	shadow. Rain lyrics. Yes, then the rain lyrics fall.
	I don’t want absence to be this beautiful.
	It shouldn’t be; in fact I know it wasn’t, while
	‘everything that consoles is false’ is off the point –
	you get no consolation anyway until your memory’s
	dead: or something never had gotten hold of
	your heart in the first place, and that’s the fear thought.
	Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they do.
	There is no beauty out of loss; can’t do it –
	and once the falling rain starts on the upturned
	leaves, and I listen to the rhythm of unhappy pleasure
	what I hear is bossy death telling me which way to
	go, what I see is a pool with an eye in it. Still let
	me know. Looking for a brand-new start. Oh and never
	notice yourself ever. As in life you don’t.

THOM GUNN The Hug

	It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
	Half of the night with our old friend
	Who’d showed us in the end
	To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
	Already I lay snug,
	And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

	I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
	Suddenly, from behind,
	In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
	Your instep to my heel,
	My shoulder-blades against your chest.
	It was not sex, but I could feel
	The whole strength of your body set,
	Or braced, to mine,
	And locking me to you
	As if we were still twenty-two
	When our grand passion had not yet
	Become familial.
	My quick sleep had deleted all
	Of intervening time and place.
	I only knew
	The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

THOM GUNN The Reassurance

	About ten days or so
	After we saw you dead
	You came back in a dream.
	I’m all right now you said.

	And it was you, although
	You were fleshed out again:
	You hugged us all round then,
	And gave your welcoming beam.

	How like you to be kind,
	Seeking to reassure.
	And, yes, how like my mind
	To make itself secure.

1994 HUGO WILLIAMS Prayer

	God give me strength to lead a double life.
	Cut me in half.
	Make each half happy in its own way
	with what is left. Let me disobey
	my own best instincts
	and do what I want to do, whatever that may be,
	without regretting it, or thinking I might.

	When I come home late at night from home,
	saying I have to go away,
	remind me to look out the window
	to see which house I’m in.
	Pin a smile on my face
	when I turn up two weeks later with a tan
	and presents for everyone.

	Teach me how to stand and where to look
	when I say the words
	about where I’ve been
	and what sort of time I’ve had.
	Was it good or bad or somewhere in between?
	I’d like to know how I feel about these things,
	perhaps you’d let me know?

	When it’s time to go to bed in one of my lives,
	go ahead of me up the stairs,
	shine a light in the corners of my room.
	Tell me this: do I wear pyjamas here,
	or sleep with nothing on?
	If you can’t oblige by cutting me in half,
	God give me strength to lead a double life.

HUGO WILLIAMS Last Poem

	I have put on a grotesque mask
	to write these lines. I sit
	staring at myself
	in a mirror propped on my desk.

	I hold up my head
	like one of those Chinese lanterns
	hollowed out of a pumpkin,
	swinging from a broom.

	I peer through the eye-holes
	into that little lighted room
	where a candle burns,
	making me feel drowsy.

	I must try not to spill the flame
	wobbling in its pool of wax.
	It sheds no light on the scene,
	only shadows flickering up the walls.

	In the narrow slit of my mouth
	my tongue appears,
	darting back and forth
	behind the bars of my teeth.

	I incline my head,
	to try and catch what I am saying.
	No sound emerges, only
	the coming and going of my breath.

EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN Studying the Language

	On Sundays I watch the hermits coming out of their holes
	Into the light. Their cliff is as full as a hive.
	They crowd together on warm shoulders of rock
	Where the sun has been shining, their joints crackle.
	They begin to talk after a while.
	I listen to their accents, they are not all
	From this island, not all old,
	Not even, I think, all masculine.

	They are so wise, they do not pretend to see me.
	They drink from the scattered pools of melted snow:
	I walk right by them and drink when they have done.
	I can see the marks of chains around their feet.

	I call this my work, these decades and stations –
	Because, without these, I would be a stranger here.

CHRISTOPHER REID Stones and Bones

	SECOND GENESIS
	‘inde genus durum sumus’
	Ovid: Metamorphoses, Book I

	Two survived the flood.
	We are not of their blood,
	springing instead from the bones
	of the Great Mother – stones,
	what have you, rocks, boulders –
	hurled over their shoulders
	by that pious pair
	and becoming people, where
	and as they hit the ground.
	Since when, we have always found
	something hard, ungracious,
	obdurate in our natures,
	a strain of the very earth
	that gave us our abrupt birth;
	but a pang, too, at the back
	of the mind: a loss… a lack…