RETURNING TO ITALY

Here we are, Margaret and myself, in the summer of 2008 among Italian friends. The setting is a converted farmhouse in the countryside near Perugia. On Friday (29 April) we are returning for a few days to the farmhouse, where we spent a most amazing and creative year in 1994 – 1995. We are looking forward to meeting these friends again after almost three years, which is the longest period we have stayed away from the place since our year's sojourn there.
The area has become the setting for a gothic novel, 'A Year's Midnight', which I hope to publish shortly. I have already published a number of excerpts from it on this blog, e.g. 'A Desecration of Considerable Magnitude' and 'The Canine Position on Abortion'.
The idea of the novel was a sort of 'what if?' proposition. What if the year we spent in Italy had been a complete disaster, instead of a complete success? Imagine two characters like yourselves, who arrive in the heart of rural Italy with a five-year-old child, knowing practically nobody, with only a rudimentary knowledge of the language, hoping to make it a period of renewal, and everything gradually goes haywire for them.
It is largely thanks to the people in this photo, and a number of others, that we can look back on that year in Umbria with such affection and vivid memories.

CEAD DUL AMACH: PERMISSION TO GO OUT

The person I am pointing at in the above photograph is Derry O'Sullivan, an Irish poet who has lived the best part of his life in Paris, and writes in Irish, translating much of his work into French and English. The occasion is the launching last year of his fourth collection, An bhfuil cead agam dul amach, má's é do thoil é? at the Centre Culturel Irlandais. The title means 'May I go out, please?' (literally Do I have permission to to go out, if it is your will?) Three of O'Sullivan's collections have titles which are questions, the previous two questions being 'Where is your Judas?' meaning judas-eye but with a hint of betrayal, and 'Where is the landlord of l'Univers?' – l'Univers being a pub in Paris which Derry frequented, but with a hint of God. His other collection is a long poem which was sparked by the discovery that his apartment in Paris housed a Jewish family during the Second World War, and that the family were taken away by the Nazis; it is called An lá go dtáinig siad  – 'The day they came'.

'An bhfuil cead agam dul amach má's é do thoil é?' is quite a lengthy title for a book, and indeed it was quite a mouthful for a primary school child in the 1950s to have to say if he or she wanted to – or pretended to want to – leave the classroom and go to the toilet. In my primary school in Ballyline, County Kilkenny, it became truncated to 'Mac-mac a dul é?' which of course is complete gibberish, reminiscent of the gibberish anglicisation of many Irish place-names, e.g. Knockcrockery, which to me conjures up an image of mayhem in a china shop. And what may we say about Termonfeckin? 

POETS FROM LIMERICK AT CRAWLEY WORDFEST, SUSSEX

Mighty Munster Poets at Crawley WordFest!

As part of our presence at Crawley WordFest, we are delighted to present a special free event featuring some of the finest wordsmiths from the poetry-rich region of Munster, Ireland.

With the support of Arts Services, Limerick City Council, the following three fascinating poets are to fly in especially for the Crawley WordFest:

Ciaran O'Driscoll
Jo Slade
Bridget Wallace

The event will take place at 8 pm on Friday 8th April, upstairs at

Pizza Express,
2 The Boulevard,
Crawley,
West Sussex,
RH10 1XX.
Tel: 01293 531678.

With its blend of dark humour and lyrical craft, it's no surprise that Ciaran O'Driscoll's poetry has received international acclaim. As shown in his Pighog collection, Surreal Man, his work combines a killer sense of humour with the acumen and verbal dexterity gained over a lifetime creating and teaching art and literature. 

     He was born in Callan, Co. Kilkenny, and presently lives in Limerick. He is a retired lecturer from the School of Art and Design at the Limerick Institute of Technology. In 2007, he was elected to Aosdána, an institution established by the Irish Arts Council to honour Irish artists and writers who have made an outstanding contribution to art and literature.    

     He has six collections of poetry to his credit: Gog and Magog (Salmon Publishing, Galway, 1987); The Poet and His Shadow (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1990); Listening to Different Drummers (Ibid,1993); The Old Women of Magione (Ibid, 1997); Moving On, Still There: New and Selected Poems (Ibid, 2001); and Life Monitor (Three Spires Press, Cork, 2009). He has also published two poetry chapbooks, The Myth of the South with Dedalus in 1992 and Surreal Man with Pighog (UK) in 2006. Reviewing his most recent poetry collection Life Monitor in The Irish Times, Eamonn Grennan wrote of Ciaran O’Driscoll as "a poet in confident possession and exercise of his craft. [His] poems do what good poems should do, widening and deepening the world for the rest of us." 

   Liverpool University Press published his childhood memoir, A Runner Among Falling Leaves in 2001. 

Jo Slade is both poet and painter and lives and works in Limerick. She is celebrated both at home and abroad for her elegant and thought-provoking poetry. Her poems are widely published in journals and anthologies internationally and have been translated into French, Spanish, Romanian, Russian and Slovenian. Her first collection In Fields I Hear Them Sing came out in 1989. Her second collection The Vigilant One (1994) was nominated for the Irish Times / Aer Lingus Literature Prize. 

    Her Certain Octobers (1997) combines French and English verse and exemplifies the linguistic prowess which has earned her recognition as Writer-in-Residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais and as a nominee for the Prix Evelyne Encelot Ecriture Prize, Paris. City of Bridges was published in 2005. She has led poetry Master classes throughout Ireland, and represented her country at International Poetry Festivals in France, Canada and Slovenia. She has been Writer-in-Residence with Limerick County Council Arts Office.

Bridget Wallace is a native of Limerick city. She has been writing poetry for many years and has been published in Incognito and The Stony Thursday Book. Some of her most recent work appears in Sextet, an anthology published by Revival Press. Bridget has a strong academic interest in literature, particularly poetry, and has been a tutor with Oscail, the Irish Open University. In 2010 she graduated with a Phd. from Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Bridget’s special area of interest is Postcolonial theory and modern Middle Eastern literature with an emphasis on poetry. 

The WordFest already boasts a superb selection of events, including Report, Discuss, Promote, a panel discussion on spreading words with new and old media, featuring Pighog Press Director John Davies, and a Live Open Mic night featuring the launch of Antony Owen's stunning new pamphlet, The Dreaded Boy.

Our friends in Crawley expect to be adding to their impressive line-up of poetry, music, fiction and debate over the next week, so please check their events page for all the latest information, wordfestcrawley.org

See you there! 

THE VERSATILE TURNIP

I give an impromptu reading, on request, outside Bushe's Bar, Baltimore, West Cork at around one in the morning, 26 June 2010. The poem I am reading is 'Turnip' from my latest collection Life Monitor (2009).

TURNIP

The boy with the acne at the cash register

didn’t know what the code for turnip was

and had to shout across to the girl

at the cash register on the other side

who shouted back ‘It’s T-U-R’.

The button for TUR on the cash register 

was caked with deposits of the ages

and coated with cobwebs, apparently

no one had bought a turnip for centuries.

(The button beside it was for TUT:

the boy king sent to early mummy cloths?) 

The lad with the acne looked at me,

pity in his eyes, and asked ‘Is that all?’

I wanted to tell him that turnips

were the salvation of my father

in the hungry thirties, he stole them

from the fields and ate them raw,

only for turnips I might not be here today,

but all I said was ‘Yes, that’s all,’

and the lad pressed the button and I paid 

and left with my solid Swede,

which is another name for a turnip

especially in the UK, where the latter

is something different, smaller and white.

A turnip keeps me cheerful in November:

strong-tasting, redolent of contentment

when diced and boiled, buttered and peppered,

it brings a golden comfort in cold weather,

and conjures up in its own selfless way

a feeling of protection and good order,

of sleeping safe and sound in your bed.

I think the world should be run by a turnip. 

As a result of the huge royalties I earned from this collection, below you can see me enjoying a holiday in Portugal.

NOT!!! (Well, yes, it is Portugal....) 

HIGH WIRE OF GOSSAMER

A spider in mid-air on a dull morning. Photo taken on Alexander Road, London N 19.

SEVEN SISTERS, KNOTTY PROBLEMS AND THE DEVIL - ALL IN SUSSEX

Not the White Cliffs of Dover, but the Seven Sisters (if you count the hills), which are in East Sussex between Eastbourne and Seaford, off the A259. We walked the length of them, up down up down, on a walking holiday in July 2009. A very pleasant day, one of a week's 10km-or-so daily excursions. (We kept to the 'easy walk' category; there were also medium and difficult ones to chose from day to day.)

We came across this knotty tree on another, rural walk in Sussex. It wasn't far from a small Norman church but I can't remember the exact location.

The Chanctonbury Ring, ancient fortress and temple, sown in later times with beech trees. Local legend has it that the Chanctonbury Ring was created by the Devil and that he can be summoned by running around the clump of trees seven times anti-clockwise. When he appears he will offer you a bowl of soup in exchange for your soul. Obviously not a consomme or any kind of clear soup. Have to be a murky broth, it would!

THE RECTOR WASN'T A BAD ENGLISH TEACHER...

The rector was pink-fleshed and chubby-cheeked, and had a very short white beard, a trimmed tuft on the chin by way of an answer to his moustache. He had an almost bald pink pate, and was generally chubby: the roundness of his belly was emphasised by his all-of-a-piece brown habit, and he had the sloped look of one of those solitary standing stones that you can see in the French countryside, except of course that he wasn't as tall, and even in human terms he was only of medium height. He was rather volatile of mood, temperamental, given to sudden punishments, and often suddenly changing his mind about them. However, he was popular with the boys, and of sound judgment on the whole, despite his faults. He was more inclined to be soft than strict - a great relief to us all, given the severity of the dean.

    The rector wasn't a bad English teacher, even though he preferred Catholic authors such as Francis Thompson and G.K. Chesterton to anyone else. His digressions from the set texts aroused my curiosity, particularly his tirades against the moral shortcomings of the literary greats. It seemed from listening to him that depravity was an occupational hazard among poets and writers. Shelley and Byron were scoundrels. Wilde led an unspecified kind of extremely wicked life for a long time and as a result found himself in prison, where fortunately he learned to repent his ways, so that he died a Catholic. James Joyce, on the other hand, was totally depraved, and died cursing the Catholic Church. The rector had seen Joyce's death mask in Paris and it was terrible to behold - the face of a demon. No boy in his class should ever dare to read a single paragraph of the corrupt and corrupting works of James Joyce. 

    The rector's condemnation of Joyce was probably why I went out of my way to buy A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the following summer. The book disturbed me with recognitions of the past five years of my life, seen from a point of view that was difficult to grasp at first because of the strangeness of style, but soon became amazingly obvious: the story was being told, not from the perspective of a grown-up looking back, wise and wizened, but from the perspective of the boy himself, as a boy. So this, then, was the wicked James Joyce? OK, so he went to a prostitute; but he was sorry and confessed to a priest afterwards: he didn't seem all that wicked. Quite the opposite, Joyce's book seemed to be telling things as they really were for an adolescent boy, and wasn't that a good thing to do? 

    But the rector actually had a feeling for literature, although his taste was limited. He could also be a bit of a buffoon, and occasionally indulged in play-acting. You'd know from the way he grimaced that he didn't like a poem he was about to read. He didn't care much for the Anglo-Irish poems on the course, and particularly disliked one by Seamus O'Sullivan:

My sorrow that I am not by the little doon

        By the lakes of the starlings at Rosses when all is still

And still in whispering sedges the herons stand....

He read this poem with a screwed-up face in a stage-Irish accent, causing an outbreak of hilarity. Then, realising that he had gone too far as some joker felt licensed to imitate his voice and facial expression, he reddened and shouted a petulant 'Silence!' And that was it: Seamus O'Sullivan, prescribed Leaving Certificate poet, had to be treated with respect, and English Class was English Class.

    The rector also taught elocution. There were sessions on occasional Saturday mornings to which classes were summoned at a moment's notice. We didn't at all like these impromptu sessions, since Saturday morning was supposed to be free time, when you could write letters and engage in activities such as polishing or not polishing your shoes, cleaning or not cleaning your locker. The elocution class was held at the bottom of the study hall, and the students sat on the tops of the desks, which were backwards relative to the position taken by the rector. The whole business had an untidy, disorganized feel to it. 

    Both chorally and individually, we were put through the recitation of such great lines as Matt and Pat broke the lath, and Bob Beckett's big baby bounces and bawls. His fondness for elocution was probably the reason why the rector had a liking for such awful poems as 'Lepanto' by G.K. Chesterton, with its deadly alliteration:

Dim drums drumming in the hills half-heard....

Maybe he nursed a hope that one day he would wield together a group fit to perform 'Lepanto' in some competition for choral recitation. Unfortunately, the boys' accents were on the whole very thick, and the elocution lessons often ended with the rector losing his temper at the stubbornness of Munster pronunciations. 

    Here's the rector coming into the study hall just before suppertime, beaming a silly exaggerated smile, and summoning one of the boys in an affected superior accent: Tony Ronayne, come heah. There's a bell-saliva response to this among the massed ranks of the unchosen: a huge sucking noise, a coming together of individual sucking sounds, rises from all sides. Ronayne blushes furiously walking down the hall. As the commotion continues, even the timidest are encouraged to join in, and the din grows louder. Eventually, some idiot roars at the top of his voice. We can see the rector's face change, and silence falls again. But he's in enough of a good humour on this occasion, and lets the offence pass. He resumes his play-acting, but in a more sarcastic way, proclaiming in an exaggerated Cork accent: The savage love his native shore. Oh God, he do. Meaning, of course, that we are all a bunch of ungrammatical savages, particularly whoever has shouted and roared. Noisy, obsequious laughter follows, and the rector flaps his arms like a bird, hissing Boys, boys... boys! Back to your study! 

    This flapping propensity probably accounted for the rector's nickname: Birdie, or The Bird.

From 'The Hungarian for Cheese', a memoir, ©Ciaran O'Driscoll 2011