Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Filíocht Nua = New Poetry

1999; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 3; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.1999.a926701

1534-5815

Thomas J. McCarthy,

Island Studies and Pacific Affairs

Thomas McCarthy Filiocht Nua: New Poetry BASEBALL, A MEMORY The evening is heavy with final papers these seven grey days in early May. Clouds hang about the weakened sky like unsigned Twins. I watch my daughter, a free agent, pitch wildly from the mound. She throws the ball like a scholarthe sporting nonchalance of a child. There is so much politics in her little fist that the gesture is a translation, something other and abstract. She does not give up her meaning easily, the way a father would, without a glove, on a Minnesota afternoon. NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW/IRIS EIREANNACH NUA, 3:4 (WINTER/GEIMHREADH, 1999), 49-55 Filiocht Nua: New Poetry PRAYER SERVICE Here, the vibrant life of Federal prayer. April has put aside its damaged fruit blossom in the late arrival of a rented preacher. Let him make simple a while what is complex, and always elsewhere. When you think of the intelligence of America, millions of the intelligent who inhabit the sandstone Romanesque of leafy quadrangles in the Midwest: when you think ofit, when you think you wonder about the fluoridation of water and the alum of education. Something putrid always leaks throughno country can be a glass fruit bowl. America quite suddenly is in the world where an apple cannot rot safely. You cannot avoid it. The crowded pew of April, the white chill getting through. Filiocht Nua: New Poetry FRUIT BOWL In this tall fruit bowl on a Tuesday night I count six green apples and two lemons. The lemons are a kind of Florida disengaged for a moment, wrinkle-skinned like a migrant too long in the fields; and the apples, well. There is a waxlike burnish, a suburban manicure on every stem. The six apples might have arrived some afternoon in a large Volvo, an airconditioned saloon. Here they have tumbled over citrus campesinos and held their composure like the perfect children of an orchard owner. But here again is lemon scent, the canvas life of America, a Tuesday fruit bowl: two pigments, all that body an soul, sun-kissed by Florida's palette knife. 51 Filiocht Nua: New Poetry MONTENOTTE Suburb of the leaking roof and the saturated cornice: the city looks in at us through damaged windows. Shutters and cloud are opened. October threatens more sunlight to bake again our exhausted walls,, the folded down valerian. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE After the wrought-iron gate, wrought-iron bridge, I wander through the undergrowth of laurel and camellia. In truth, afraid. I fear that twenty-year-old revisionist: the second-year I was, the cool bitterness. My own depit amoureux. 52 Filiocht Nua: New Poetry BLACKROCK CASTLE Kitsch it was then, kitsch as any castle praised in song. It stands by the river, dead drunk now in a new suit. But its floodlights from the roundabout meant I'd escaped yet again the congest flood plain. TIVOLI ROUNDABOUT A three-car pile-up on a Saturday night: blue lights of a squad car, the smoky blue haze of Montenotte is my mirror from the traffic of childhood. I must stall with this blue night on the roundabout. 53 Filiocht Nua: New Poetry FRENCH CHURCH STREET We go the way of all Huguenots tonight. The street's on fire with the red glow of October. Unexpected light follows us like a foreign skill with cloth. Red sails of early evening tack homeward. The very stars are Huguenot. WATERSTONES, SATURDAY NIGHT We read the elemental Odes of of Pablo Neruda, five poets of the South. In my old book, a press cutting of Santiago station. Chile so far away, only rain with seven names, our unhoping song, weeps upon the windows of Patrick Street. 54 Filiocht Nua: New Poetry ROCHESTOWN ROAD The lights of Rochestown from my study window; a bourgeois infestation from the boarding schools of the West. September of '64 and '65 and '69, gym slips and football boots all wedded now. Their adult lives, like ragwort, yellow in the rain. SWANS AT THE NMRC Swans glide on the Lee near the Electronics Centre, their heads bowed like young engineers, or priests, over the sacred wafer of microchips. One breaks the surface with its...