A POETRY FESTIVAL IN UMBRIA

Riflessi DiVersi (a pun on ‘Reflections in Verse’ and ‘Diverse Reflections’) is an annual poetry festival held in Umbria – specifically, in the provincial capital Perugia and the nearby town of Magione. The festival takes place in early autumn, and is now in its eighth year. The 2013 festival ran from 25th to 28th September inclusive, and included two public readings, visits to two schools and a reading for 200-plus pupils in the Palazzo dei Priori, Perugia. The poets were Pat Boran and myself (Ciaran O’Driscoll) from Ireland, and Maria Rosaria Luzi and Antonio Carlo Ponti from Umbria. The translators were Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Italian to English) and Rita Castigli (English to Italian). Music was provided by the violin-cellist Andrea Rellini. The director of the festival is Fernando Trilli, founder with the late Paul Cahill of its organizing body, Immagini d’Irlanda in Umbria. The reading in Magione on 26th September was honoured by the presence of the new Irish Ambassador to Italy, Mr Bobby McDonagh, who said that his attendance at Riflessi DiVersi was his first ambassadorial visit outside of Rome.

The 2013 festival marks the beginning of a collaboration between Riflessi DiVersi and Cuisle Limerick City International Poetry Festival, a linking which involves, among other things, an exchange of poets on a yearly basis.

As one of the participants this year, I was hugely impressed by the warmth of the atmosphere and the rapport between all participants, making the twinning of Riflessi and Cuisle entirely appropriate, as our Limerick poetry festival has always aimed to be a friendly and unpretentious occasion.

I was particularly impressed by the secondary school students in the Palazzo dei Priori who braved coming up to the podium from among their 200 colleagues to ask questions and express their views on poetry, and also by those who approached each poet individually afterwards to say how happy they were to experience living poets face to face, and how the session had opened their minds to an entirely new dimension. The enthusiasm of these young people who came forward to talk to us after the reading will remain long in my mind. 

A view over Perugia from the top of the Torre del Cassero di Porta Sant'Angelo, where a public reading took place on Friday evening, 27th September.

Irish poet Pat Boran chats with my son Conor before the Friday evening reading.

During my own reading at the Torre del Cassero, Friday evening. To my left is my translator, Rita Castigli.

My thanks to the Ireland Literature Exchange for their financial support.

Photographs by Margaret Farrelly.

BARNACLED ON OSLO

We are just back from a pleasant, interesting if financially challenging week in Oslo, which must surely be Europe's, if not the world's, most expensive city. Our hotel accommodation was a cramped 'studio apartment' hardly much bigger than a single bedroom. There was a hob with two rings, a microwave oven, two cups, two glasses, two spoons. We would have had to pay heavily extra for any additional cutlery, pots, pans, etc, so we did without them. We had brought our own coffee pot and coffee, and I bought a croissant or two at the nearby 7/11 for breakfast. We lived on one proper meal a day, treating ourselves twice to a splurge in a top-class restaurant. For lunch, we filled bread rolls with ham and cheese in the morning and brought them with us on our various excursions, and bought a few bananas. Matters were almost on a military footing.
We bought weekly transport passes at a reasonable price, and they covered buses, trams, the Metro (or T-bane) and the ferries to the inner islands of the Oslo fjord. Visiting these islands on days of good weather was probably the highlight of our stay, though the Munch Museum, the Ibsen Museum and the amazing architecture of the Opera House were close runners-up.
The islands are environmentally protected, there are small sandy or shingly beaches, hardly any shops or cafés (on some islands there are no retail outlets at all). You can easily and quickly walk around most islands and the views of the fjord and the city are quite stunning from several vantage points. The small beaches reminded me of childhood holidays in Schull, West Cork. The islands we visited were Langoyene, Hovedoya, and Gressholmen.
It was on these islands that we encountered the barnacle geese, beautifully shaped and plumaged creatures, herbivores that moved sedately through grass, cow-like in their grazing.

There are restrictions on the sale of liquor in Norway. While you can buy beer in any super- or mini-market, wine and spirits can only be bought in designated stores, which close at 6 pm. (And I thought it was bad when Ireland brought in a law closing off-licences at 10 pm!) 

I eventually saw a wine store in the Oslo train station, and made sure to get there before six o'clock the following day, rather than spend €8.00 per glass for a a few nightcaps of plonk in the hotel bar. Hence the rather exhausted look of triumph on my face in the photograph below. The price for those bottles (of Italian wine) was comparable to prices in Irish off-licences.

THE ROBOTS HAVEN'T GONE AWAY, YOU KNOW

The robots haven't gone away, you know. That's probably why the poetry editor of 3 Quarks Daily posted my poem 'Please Hold' in his Sunday Poem slot quite recently. In fact, 'Please Hold' has been my most published poem of recent times, having first appeared in Southword, a Cork-based magazine, then in The Forward Book of Poetry 2009, then in the Anthology Poems of the Decade 2002 – 2011 (Forward/Faber, 2011). It was uploaded to Youtube from a reading I gave in the White House Limerick, and also from a Reading at Ó Bhéal, Cork. I published it in my collection Life Monitor (2009), from where it has been selected to be translated into Slovenian for a collection just published in Ljubljana. And here it is again, from 3 Quarks Daily. 

'Please Hold' is an apoplectic rant in verse about the 'new-fangled' impersonal telephone system on which you'd be lucky ever to hear a real human voice. Invasion of the robots! 

3 QUARKS DAILY

JUNE 02, 2013

SUNDAY POEM

Please Hold

This is the future, my wife says. 

We are already there, and it’s the same 

as the present. Your future, here, she says. 

And I’m talking to a robot on the phone. 

The robot is giving me countless options, 

none of which answer to my needs. 

Wonderful, says the robot 

when I give him my telephone number. 

And Great, says the robot 

when I give him my account number. 

I have a wonderful telephone number 

and a great account number, 

but I can find nothing to meet my needs 

on the telephone, and into my account 

(which is really the robot’s account) 

goes money, my money, to pay for nothing. 

I’m paying a robot for doing nothing. 

This call is free of charge, says the mind-reading robot. 

Yes but I'm paying for it, I shout, 

out of my wonderful account 

into my great telephone bill. 

Wonderful, says the robot. 

And my wife says, This is the future. 

I’m sorry, I don’t understand, says the robot. 

Please say Yes or No. 

Or you can say Repeat or Menu. 

You can say Yes, No, Repeat or Menu, 

Or you can say Agent if you’d like to talk 

to someone real, who is just as robotic. 

I scream Agent! and am cut off, 

and my wife says, This is the future. 

We are already there and it’s the same 

as the present. Your future, here, she says. 

And I’m talking to a robot on the phone, 

and he is giving me no options 

in the guise of countless alternatives. 

We appreciate your patience. Please hold. 

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Please hold. 

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Please hold. 

Eine fucking Kleine Nachtmusik. 

And the robot transfers me to himself. 

Your call is important to us, he says. 

And my translator says, This means 

your call is not important to them. 

And my wife says, This is the future. 

And my translator says, Please hold 

means that, for all your accomplishments, 

the only way you can now meet your needs 

is by looting. Wonderful, says the robot 

Please hold. Please grow old. Please grow cold. 

Please do what you’re told. Grow old. Grow cold. 

This is the future. Please hold.

.

.

by Ciaran O'Driscoll

from the journal Southword

Posted by Jim Culleny at 07:41 AM | Permalink

IT'LL BE QUIETER WHERE WE'RE GOING

Here is the beginning of my novel, A Year's Midnight, as main characters 

George and Barbara arrive in Italy for a year of self-development, away from it all.

George stood in the bar of the Autostrada Servizio, irritably puzzled 

as to why he was not being served. He was being ignored yet again. 

This was the story of his life. Furthermore, he didn’t understand what 

was going on. Was there, or was there not, a queue? 

Barbara understood that there was a queue, but that it wasn’t an 

orderly queue. Or that there was an order, but it didn’t take the form of 

a queue. She didn’t subscribe to George’s theory of cosmic conspiracy. 

It had been a tiring day. They had named it the Day of the Hun- 

dred Tunnels, driving from Provence through Ventimiglia on the Italian 

border, past Genoa, and they had just veered inland towards Florence. 

There was farther to go, a couple of hours more to the town, and then 

they had to find the remote farmhouse. But they felt they should stop for 

a while, chiefly because of Alan, who was hungry and whingey in the 

back seat. Besides, it was hot – for them, that is: a beautiful afternoon in 

early September, a mere thirty-three degrees. 

The bar was crowded. The queue that was not a queue had several 

tails. A large woman up at the front was arguing with an impassive bar 

attendant. Brandishing a lottery ticket, she turned frequently to shout at 

other customers in the same accusatory tone with which she addressed 

the mask of a face on the other side of the counter, arguing her point to 

everyone present, to the nation and to the world. 

Purple-faced, George turned to Barbara, raising his eyes, mouth- 

ing an obscenity. 

‘Welcome to Italy, George,’ she said. 

‘Welcome to bloody chaos, you mean.’ 

‘Don’t worry, it’ll be quieter where we’re going. Much quieter.’ 

Ciaran O'Driscoll, A Year's Midnight, Pighog Press (2012)

Available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, in print and on Kindle.

THE DEMON TAXI DRIVER

The taximan drove in silence, and George certainly didn’t feel like small talk. They kept to minor roads, and were very shortly out of George’s familiar surroundings and driving through villages and small settlements, up and down mountains, hugging forested precipices and sudden clear drops where a river flashed in the depths. If he had been in a receptive mood, the passenger would have enjoyed the scenery: the blue-grey Appenines, furred by forestry, the folds like flesh-folds of huge animals, the fur still flecked with snow. But on this particular trip, the animal appearance of the mountains only fuelled his baleful fantasies.

Time passed, and they were down on the level again, on a windswept plain. On one side of the road deserted villages clung to slopes of rocks, ghostly white walls with eyeless dark of windows, decayed buildings, abandoned homes, villages of the dead, of vampires, of werewolves. The mountains now lay like huge animals in folds of flesh on the other side of the plain. The car was shaken and buffeted by the wind, the roaring wind that blew in this huge, desolate space.

‘Where you from?’ the driver barked suddenly, shaking George out of his melancholy. When he looked for some sign of engagement, however, the taximan was eyeing the road intently as if he was driving through fog, as if he had never spoken.

‘I said where you from? Why you not answer?’

‘I’m from Ireland,’ George volunteered meekly. ‘But I have been living in…’

‘Why you come here?’

‘I needed a break.’

‘You need a brek? Why you come here if you need a brek? Why you need this brek?’

‘From writing.’

The driver took his eyes off the road, looked at his passenger for the first time since the journey began. ‘You is writer. You need a brek. And you come here.’ He emitted a dry, cracked laugh.

‘I’m sorry now that I ever came.’

‘Is too late.’

There was a long silence. They were beginning to ascend again, and now the driver had good reason to squint intently at the road, because the sun, about to go under, was glaring blindingly down from the rim of a mountain. It was dark by the time he spoke again.

‘There was a writer, inglese, I knowed him. He come here. He go fucking crazy.’ The driver touched his temple with a middle finger. ‘He go fucking crazy, like you.’

‘I’m not crazy.’

‘Yes you is. You is fucking crazy. Why you come here if you not crazy? Why you want a brek? What is problem? Problem is you is crazy, then you come here, you is more crazy.’

‘That’s about the size of it,’ murmured George. ‘Professor Piero could not have put it better,’ he added, to himself rather than to the driver.

‘Professor Piero,’ the taximan said with a tone of resigned contempt.

‘You know him?’

‘Yes, I know him. He also crazy.’ Finger to the forehead again. ‘He serious crazy. He dangerous. Now I see why you is crazy. You go to Professor Piero. Why you go to Professor Piero?’

They were speeding downwards. The tyres ratcheted sickeningly against the rim of the road. George caught a glimpse in the headlights of a yawning drop.

‘Will you slow down?’ he shouted, his anger spurting through at last. ‘Who the hell are you, anyway? Why are you asking me all these questions? It’s really none of your fucking business.’

‘You want me slow down? I slow down. Is all right. We nearly there. Calmo, calmo. But why you go to Professor Piero?’

‘The dogs brought me to him. Maybe you know the dogs, too, since you seem to know everything. And maybe you know Tessa. And Rogero and Mathilde. And maybe you know that I was sexually abused as a child, by my uncle.’

‘Yes, I know everything. They all crazy. Rogero, Tessa, Mathilde, Professor Piero. They all serious pazzi. You bet they is crazy. Like you. Maybe the dogs not crazy – it not matter. You uncle, maybe he crazy, but he not fucking you. No sesso. Is all in you head, because you crazy. Is so simple. Why you blame you uncle because you is fucking crazy? But we here.’

The car screeched to a halt. George could see nothing in the headlights but a grass margin and trees.

‘I leave you here,’ said the taxi driver. ‘Is maybe two, three kilometers on sentiero, liddle road. It go up, up, up. Soon you see fire. Follow fire.’

‘I can’t see anything.’

The driver slapped his forehead in frustration, started the engine, reversed furiously, lurched forward and stopped again. A narrow path between the trees appeared in the headlights.

‘Get out, please.’  

George got out, suddenly changed his mind, lunged at the taxi driver, grabbing him by the lapels of his jacket and bringing his face up close to his own.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘You better tell me, because I’ve had enough shit from you in a few hours to last a lifetime. Who are you?’

The taximan placed a hand on one of George’s tightly gripping knuckles. He recoiled at the touch, as if electrified.

‘It not matter,’ the taximan said, adjusting his jacket. ‘I bring you where you need to be, is all. Now I go. Now you go on liddle road. Up, up, up. Soon you see fire. Follow fire. You crazy. Soon maybe you is more crazy, or maybe you not crazy any more. In bocca al lupo, best of lucks.’

George watched the headlights of the car until they disappeared. As if on cue, a crescent moon came out from behind the clouds and gave him enough light to begin his ascent.


From A Year's Midnight, Ciaran O'Driscoll, Pighog Press 2012

www.pighog.co.uk/titles/a-years-midnight.html

CARROT CAKE A GO-GO

TREAT CAFÉ, LACKAGH, CO GALWAY

If fate ever happens to take you on the N63 between Roscommon Town and Galway City, or in the opposite direction, and you find yourself in need of refreshment, do drop in to the Treat Café in Lackagh, Co Galway, near Turloughmore. The café is situated in a roadside complex of various businesses including a DIY store, a supermarket, a beauty salon, a hairdresser’s, a car wash, a pub, a pharmacy and medical centre. Services include a post office and ATM, and there is a spacious car park. The whole complex is redolent of a modern version of feudalism, designed to meet most of the needs of the locals, and is the creation of one family, the Flynns, whose provenance in this location goes back to 1842, when they opened a bar and grocery store. The current lord and lady of the manor are Julien and Emma Flynn.

The Treat Café in Lackagh is a people-friendly space, without the musak so characteristic of modern pubs and eating places, blaring so that you can hardly hear yourself or your table companions. The staff, too, were cheerful, prompt and friendly. The decor was interesting: the mauve, red and yellowy green on the walls and lampshades were echoed in the varied upholstery of the chairs, and yet the face of an ancient clock, with Roman numerals and filigreed hands, peers down from a wall. Perhaps the clock is a reminder of the long history of Flynns of Lackagh , hanging there in the middle of a more contemporary, faintly funky decor.

Our coffee was excellent. My wife declared that her slice of carrot cake was the best she had ever tasted. My rock bun, unlike most rock buns I have recently encountered, did not disintegrate into crumbs at the first touch of a knife, and the inner part was soft and consistent in texture. It was crowned with a glacé cherry. I enjoyed it. (I should say here that more substantial fare may be had at the café.)

All in all, a most satisfactory and refreshing break as we drove back from a music festival in Strokestown, Co Roscommon, to Limerick City.  

LA MAMMA MAKES PASTA

The mother of an Umbrian friend makes a pasta called umbricelli, a slightly thicker kind of spaghetti. Here she is separating the strings from one another in case they stick. The blur on her right hand is probably caused by the rapidity of her movements. I was told that the derivation of umbricelli is not from Umbria but from a dialect name for a worm, umbro, which derives from a worm's brownish colour (umber), hence the name is cognate with vermicelli, from verme, the standard Italian name for a worm. But it may be that Umbrians prefer umbricelli to vermicelli or spaghetti because of the sound association with the name of their province.

Photo taken on my Nokia C2-01