Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

1998; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.1998.a926618

1534-5815

Greg Delanty,

Island Studies and Pacific Affairs

Greg Delanty Filiocht Nua: New Poetry LIGATURE This latent mine--these unlaunch'd voice-passionate powers, Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout, (Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,) These ocean waves arousable to fury and to death, Or sooth'd to ease and sheeny sun and sleep, Within the pallid slivers slumbering. -Walt Whitman, "A Font of Type" I trekked to the Eagle and the unassuming redbrick where you first set Leaves, forecasting how you and all you composed in your time would be dismantled and distributed in the composing room of America before being finally cast aside, melted down and recast in the likes of us, each life set in its unique and sometimes fitting fonts and distributed or flung in the hellbox, turning up again diffused in others. But it's our time to set our own lives down, Ito select and fix them with our own measure in a ligature affixing characters who've gone before to those close by now and way off in the future NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW /IRIS EIREANNACH NUA, 2:3 (F6MHAR/AUTUMN, 1998), 54-62 Filiocht Nua: New Poetry PASSING THE EVERGREEN BAR i.m. Raymond Cunningham and Danny Delanty Suddenly I'm back all those Saturday nights ago, dropping in on you as you light each other up and call for attention only when you call. Your palaver is all Eagle Printing shop talk, fixing dancing words on the pub's correcting stone before the whole works is choked and broken up. Now you set the good old days up again, and I, a printer's devil, pie that dumped stick, inserting how those times were as foul as today's. You each take a slug, then laugh this spirit off, ordering me keep my moolah for the dance as you call. I delay heading down Summerhill to the disco's strobes, scraps, shifts and refusals and stay for just one more with you, forever, in the spoiled good old days. THE BENT FONT I On Poetry Rejection Today's a day I could slip in a bent font to foul up the machine, so I could get away, but this time not for a christening, or a communion, or simply a cure, but to escape the hands writing KILL on my words, setting me back, an infant, in the stocks of my school desk struggling to write the numeral eight. Somehow it's as if instinctively I sense the actual drawing of this figure-starting as a half circle reaching away in the opposite direction to form an S 55 Filiocht Nua: New Poetry and then turning back to complete the figure--is a choreograph of the making of the configuration of a poem. Brother Patrick leans over and my number's up. My hand trembles too much to draw on. He marches me to the dunce's corner. I'm relieved my back is to everyone, ashamed and vexed with my tears. But what kills me most is, while kept in late after school, not a soul witnesses me write that 8. II On Receiving Awards It's like being pushed into the pool of swimming gala days again, the years of months training each day, slogging up and down the baths from dawn until the whistle for school freestyling and butterflying enough each week to make Youghal or Ringabella and back, working on style, breathing, kicking, racing each other and the clock until the day for the Nationals, wondering if I'd beat my traditional rival Williamson this year, warning myself to stay cool when he dispatches his club's henchmen over minutes before the final to call me a culchee, they being Dubs, and everyone outside of Dublin, even from our second largest city, or especially from our second largest city, being a mucker. Filiocht Nua: New Poetry And now I'm preparing for the starting block, making windmills of my arms, shaking out already shaking hands and legs, adjusting my goggles, praying to trounce all comers as they pray the same prayer. All I remember next is gliding out of the last tumble and seeing I'm ahead of Williamson and...