Just after I finished my thesis ( 2014), my wife and I paid a trip to her native Sardinia. It was in the spring, I remember. I had been working on The Trees of Ephesus section of what became a part of my only fictional work More Micks than Dicks - a hybrid Beckettian novella in 3 genres.
I was inspired by a solitary olive tree growing outside our apartment here in Skerries in north county Dublin. It made the cover of my first collection The Elm Tree. Moving to Fingal has hada huge impact on my writing. I used to fancy myself as something of a city poet, I had just completed The Dark Pool my 15 year odyssey and homage to Baudelaire.
But living in Skerries everyday, I was unemployed at the time, forced me to engage with the natural world around me. These sonnets, below, are taken from the short cycle Sweeney Amok. This was my nod to Flann O'Brien and Seamus Heaney and the great Irish literary tradition of which the mad king Sweeney was part of.
The feel of the book is very punk, More Micks than Dicks. So much so that it was published by a punk publishing firm called Famous Seamus in the UK. Well, it all started out great. We sold over 1000 copies, but then, like all things punk, it went tits up! Ah well. It was good while it lasted, I suppose.
A quick word about the photograph above. The above ruin was constructed in the 13th century, sitting above a great hill looking down upon the great plains of southern Sardinia. My wife and I used to travel there a lot on holiday when our daughter was just a baby. Those were wonderful times, discovering this great part of Italy so steeped in history.
Apparently the castle was owned by Count Ugolino, the very same who appears in the final canto in Dante's Inferno. Yes, that's right. Do check out some of the links below.
Sweeney
at Ephesus
And Sweeney stood there before the tree.
I could be anywhere, he thought, scratching his head;
Eden, Ephesus or Portmarnock on the seventh!
I could even be one of those tramps in Godot,
Waiting for just enough rope. Or, out in
The badlands that were once the Amazon.
Such is metaphor, he thought, grounded in
The literal. He approached it, touching it.
Its bark felt rough against his soft palm.
It came as a kind of shock to him, the sensation.
And that is when it came to him, the sudden
realisation.
That this was no Elm, nestling within the shades of
Hell,
But something far less portentous. More like
A symbol then, on which he had yet to attach a sign.
Sweeney
at Ugolino’s Pizzeria
Strategically placed by the train station
In a small town called Siliqua in southern Sardinia.
There under the Kafkaesque shadows of il castello di
Aquafredda, Sweeney sat out of it (the heat), sipping
Eine perle de natura. The television
screen
Spewed out image after atrocious image of some
Scenes from Aleppo;
corpses rolled up like mummies
And were lain out side by side. Till one of the diners
Complained, wanting to see the match.
As the proprietor stepped in bearing the remote
Switch like a prize, Il Cavaliere next appeared
Grinning buffoonishly, before pronouncing to
The assembled gathering, “ Vergognativi...
Voi siete dei
povera ignorante stupida!”
The footballers’
leather transformed then into a human head.
The Road to Ephesus
The degree of precipitation can be measured
By the emotional investment of the other
Objectified person, or personal object.
Enforced ontological residual matter,
Sometimes taking the form of graphemes,
Can be as naturally expulsed as fecal matter-
Yet, with a sweeter perfume, one hopes!
Exile is the estate of man, perpetually.
Lions disappear before our eyes
While the metaphor within us dies.
On the road to Ephesus I met Nietzsche with
A drunken Jesus, who held a copy of The Antichrist.
There on Via del
Orso where jewellers lay murdered
On liquid crystal screens and where the oracles were
first pronounced.
https://castellodiacquafredda.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fysd5cT31bg&t=15s
https://www.amazon.co.uk/More-Micks-Than-Dicks-Beckettian/dp/0955685796/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=more+micks+than+dicks&qid=1575301625&s=books&sr=1-3
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