THE MISSING QUARTER

 

                                                                                       

The Missing Quarter

 

 

Standing, overlooking the Formal Gardens of

The Royal Hospital in Kilmainham,

I explained to the students how the maze

Of Hedges was representative of the human mind

 

With the four Muses, each one enclosed in one

Of the four cardinal points, representing

The different parts of the brain and separate discipline.

Then inviting them in, I showed them first

 

The Muse holding the laurel wreath and I explained

How she was the Muse of literature and letters in general,

While her polar twin, carrying a severed human head,

 

Was representative of both war and medicine.

The third then, holding a palette, was the visual arts,

And finally the missing fourth represented the empty chamber.   

LE RENIEMENT DE SAINT PIERRE - THE DENIAL OF SAINT PETER - BAUDELAIRE

 

                                                                                        

CXVIII

 

LE RENIEMENT DE SAINT PIERRE

 

Qu’est-ce que Dieu fait donc de ce flot d’anathèmes

Qui monte tous les jours vers ces chers Séraphins?

Comme un tyran gorge de viande et de vins,

Il s’endort au doux bruit de nos affreux blasphemes.

 

Les sanglots des martyrs et des suppliciés

Sont une symphonie enivrante sans doute,

Puisque, malgré le sang que leur volupté coûte,

Les cieux ne s’en point encore rassasiés!

 

-          Ah! Jésus, souviens- toi du Jardin des Olives !

Dans ta simplicité tu priais à genoux

Celui qui dans son ciel riait au bruit des clous

Que d’ignobles bourreaux plantaient dans ta chairs vives.

 

Lorsque tu vis cracher sur ta divinité

La crapule du corps de garde et des cuisines,

Et lorsque tu sentis s’enforcer les épines

Dans ton crane où vivait l’immense Humanité;

 

Quand de ton corps brisé la pesanteur horrible

Allongeait tes deux bras distendus, que ton sang

Et ta sueur coulaient de ton front pâlaissant,

Quand tu fus devant tous pose comme un cible,

 

Rêvais-tu de ces jours si brillants et si beaux

Où tu vins pour remplir l’éternelle promesse,

Oú tu foulais, monté sur une douce ânesse,

Des chemins tout jonchés de fleurs et de rameaux,

 

Oú, le cœur tout gonflé et de vaillance,

Tu fouettais tous ces vils mrachands à tour de bras,

Où tu fus maître enfin? Le remords n’a-t-il pas

Pénétré dans ton flanc plus avant que la lance?

 

-          Certes, je sortirai, quant à moi, satisfait

D’un monde où l’action n’est pas la sœur du rêve;

Puissé-je user du glaive et périr par le glaive!

Saint Pierre a renié Jésus…il a bien fait !

 

 

 

 

 

 The Denial of Saint Peter

 

 

What does God do with those tides of anathema

Which climb every day towards the seraphim?

Like a Tyrant gorging on meat and wine,

Gently he sleeps on the gentle sounds of our atrocious blasphemes.

 

The tears of the martyrs and the tortures

Are a drunken symphony without a doubt,

As, despite the blood which their voluptuousness costs,

The climes are not, as of yet, satisfactory.

 

-          Ah! Jesus, remember being in the Olive Garden!

In your simplicity praying upon your knees

To him who laughed to the sound of the nails

Which the ignoble torturer planted in your living flesh?

 

When you saw the toad, the bodyguards and all and sundry

Spitting on your divinity,

And when you felt the thorns digging into your

Skull where dwells the immensity of Humanity;

 

When your broken body was taken by horrible gravity

And finally your two extended arms reposed, and the blood

And your sweat rolled down your pale forehead,

When you were positioned before all like a target,

 

Did you dream of those days so beautiful and brilliant

Where like wine you poured the eternal promise,

When you sat, upon the flank of some donkey,

And the paths before you were all carpeted in roses,

 

Or, the heart still bloated on hope and courage,

You whipped all of those old merchants before you,

When you were Master again? Remorse has it not

Penetrated your side like a lance?

 

-          Certainly, I will evade, trust me, satisfied

That the world of action is not the sister of dreams;

For I have used the sword, so I will perish by it!

And, so, Saint Peter denied Jesus… he did well to.

  

 

 

 

 

 

SOUZI ALI - THE FOXE'S FUR - TRANSLATION OSAMA ESBER

                                                         The Syrian poet Souzi Ali, 2022. 

I first became aware of the poet Souzi Ali two years ago when I was co-editing the April edition of Live Encounters with Mark Ulyseas. As a co-editor,  I wanted to ensure that the edition was not just Eurocentric. The war in Syria was still ongoing and with increased barbarity with the intervention of the Russian army. Osama Esber, the Syrian poet and translator, had already sent me on some wonderful poems about his experience as a poet in exile and who was recounting his experiences from the perspective of California where he had had the good fortune to be now living. So, I was really interested to know if Osama knew of any Syrian poets who happened to be writing poetry in Syria, as I was very interested in including more work from this war- torn land, and that is when Osama sent me on a couple of poems by Souzi and I was immediately hooked.

The following poem, translated wonderfully by Osama, is but one from Souzi's latest collection which still remains unpublished ( The Sixty Year Old Narcissus, 2022) and which Souzi, in a sign of her constant generosity, has allowed me to publish here. I will be publishing more of Souzi's poems over the coming months and weeks as to my mind she is one of the most authentic voices in contemporary poetry. The reason why I say this is because her poetry tackles such difficult subjects such as incest and patriarchy, war and abuse of all kinds. Yet, and here is the ( yes) Miracle, her poetry remains extremely innocent, and for this recent I simply marvel at Souzi's  consummate Art. I am deeply grateful that she has allowed me to publish her work here on my blog, and I also wish to thank Osama for his translations and for introducing me to Souzi's work.  

The Fox’s Fur

Translated by Osama Esber

 

Time, isolation and the sidewalk will be yours.

You will pave the way for the words: “Good Morning!”

Imagine a train under snow

that takes the pelicans of the frozen lake to the north.

You will claim that your wrinkles

 resulted from laughter and inattention,

forgetting great things

the house in the house

and the star in another star.

At 3 o’clock every night

you put your hand under the pillow

and sleep naked.

You dream that you are a painter

that only paints the flowers of cherry trees.

Those who loved you enter your dream

 to make sure that their gardens are intact.

On the shoulder of one of them a blue parrot repeats without end,

“A little Bitch!”

Your blood is as blue as an execution yard.

Everybody waved at you while you crossed the market.

A man was hanging on your back

and a child clung to your shoes and cried.

 

Yours are the brothel, exile, and the bitter beginnings that fascinate you and the spider.

Yours is your mother’s wedding ring.

You will look at your skinny legs while clinging to the legs of a woman

obsessed with tattoos.

You will suck your lazy hands while squeezing the breasts of a woman who has not grow since she was created.

You will smell my dried blood in the corner of your house

while ejaculating your semen in the air.

I will be your insult, which I like,

And your disappointment that stamps my burgundy carpet as ephemeral as snow- flakes.

I will pull down for you from the curtain a turtle that you like.

I will secretly stumble while boiling tea for you.

I will shake my smoking hair on the threshold and listen to your eyes

And you will be calmed again,

after everything returns to its place.

Your only skinny legs

Your only lonely hands

The lonely pain

The storm.

You will be as you are.

You will not do anything more than being you,

lonely as a dim cottage

as a tumor that stabs the leg of an old tree.

 

THE REBEL

 

                                                                         

The Rebel

 

 

The wine seeps onto your tongue like rain upon the dry plains,

Its bitter fruit takes away with it, at every sip, the deep stains

On your life like your inflamed colon, a testament or sign

Of your chronic illness – call it living.

 

Mind and gut in such close synchronicity that each step

You take comes with an apparent tremendous effort,

And you past caring now at the effects of the wine,

It being your last comfort, or solace, bringing you some relief

 

From the constant upset. Not at all trying to sound self-pitying,

These words of yours more a chronicle of your anxiety;

You being in the deep plains of middle age,

 

Estranged from all of your family and at war, practically,

With your own cuntry. Yet despite all of this, you still manage

To smile sardonically at the stain that you have managed to leave behind.  

THE LOVE POETRY OF JUDAS ISCARIOT - POEMS BY MICK CORRIGAN - DIONYSIA PRESS, 2022 - REVIEW

 

The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot

Poems by Mick Corrigan

Dionysia Press Ltd, 2021

59 pages - £ 15.50

 

The prize painting in the National Gallery of Ireland is, without any doubt, Caravaggio’s depiction of The Taking of Christ in which the painter presents us with the iconic image of Judas just as he is betraying Christ with the sign of a kiss, as previously arranged with the Roman legionaries who are depicted in the costumes of Caravaggio’s own time. In fact, Caravaggio even paints himself into the great work bearing a lantern so that he might better see the image of Christ. I am always reminded of the Rolling Stones song on Exile of Main Street in which Jagger sings ‘don’t talk to me about Jesus, I just want to see his face!’ And of course, Oscar Wilde’s unforgettable lines taken from The Ballad of Reading Goal:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

So, betrayal in art, and particularly embodied in the biblical figure of Judas, is nothing new. In fact, when I first saw some of Michael Corrigan’s Judas poems, which was around this time two years ago when I was co- editing the April edition of Live Encounters Poetry and Writing with Mark Ulyseas, I was immediately reminded of  Brendan Kennelly’s Book of Judas ( Bloodaxe Books , 1991) . So, I was intrigued. It was high time, a twenty year period separates the publication of these books, that a poet from this most treacherous of isles penned a few poems treating the monumental and time-honoured theme of betrayal. James Joyce, to conclude this introductory preamble, never stopped harping on about how Irish history was full of tales of treachery, A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist ( 1916) starts off with the parents of the young man in question arguing over the betrayal of Charles Stewart Parnell and continuing on the political scene, being a Cork man, how could I not miss the opportunity to bring up the assassination of Michael Collins…! But enough, if I keep enumerating all the treacherous low down dirty deeds that have been committed down through the annals of time and have been remembered by writers, historians and artists, I’ll never get started on this review. Oh, but a final word, and then I swear I’ll begin, it is interesting to note that both Michael Corrigan’s book and Brendan Kennelly’s were both published in the UK... Enough!

  

The title poem of the book greets the reader on the first page, here is the final verse.

 

On the night I sold you to the wolves of respectability,

in Gethsemane where sleeping olives dreamed of rain,

I pressed my face to the loamy earth and beneath a moon too cold

to touch,

I believe I heard her mournful sigh;

“nothing is new, nothing is new,

I have seen it all before.”

 

The poet, imagining himself being Judas, once again makes the figure contemporaneous and it is something he does quite successfully too with other Biblical figures in the collection, such as Mary from Magdala – this last poem offers a really poignant insight into the Bible’s most notorious woman , made famous by washing the feet of Jesus with her hair and who was rumoured by some to be the sexual partner of the man from Nazareth – he the man God, the lover of a prostitute! Say what you like, but by God that book ( the Bible) is a cracker. No wonder it’s a bestseller!

 

In Ephesus her end of days,

nights shallow with shortening breath,

a mill beneath the small bare room,

millstones grinding, dark sea lapping at her door.

 

I also love the fact that in the first verse the poet informs the reader of Mary’s wealthy origins, as an Irishman Corrigan understands people’s innate prejudices; people are far more likely to forgive someone coming from a ‘good’ home, in other words a family of wealth, rather then they would forgive someone coming from a poor background. This is Max Weber, and the inherent correlation between wealth and respectability, perversely likened in the west to spirituality. This idea of respectability is signaled very early on in the very first poem -see again above, and which underscores the whole collection The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot and how such a notion, being respectable, can make traitors or Judases, of us all. It is in this constantly recurring idea that the poet mines, and to wonderful effect.

 

She sang sea music, fluent in the rise and fall,

knew deep, dark places that calved the biggest waves.

From the flat roof of a prosperous house in Magdala, Galillee,

watched the purple gather of every winter storm

chase small boats to harbour before an angry swell.

 

I don’t know how historically accurate any of the above is, nor do I particularly care. Poets were never much known or appreciated for their literalness, at least in days of yore, metaphor being so much more their quarry. It is only recently, I believe, that poets actually have to literally embody their work in both life and deed, literally breathing words of blessed scripture. Good lord, good luck to them!

Another particular feature of Mister Corrigan’s second, I believe, superlative collection is the irreverent and humorous nature of some of the poems. At times, I was reminded of another stalwart in the recent Irish literary canon and that is Paul Durcan.  Mick , being but a few years older than myself, is of that generation that grew up during the depression in the eighties in the Republic of Ireland and so his humour is deeply informed by the historical context of having experienced both busts and booms, and in that particular order. This is something that you simply cannot imitate. The French have the term terroir which is particular to their culture and they use it principally when attempting to describe the particular flavour and taste of a certain cheese or wine that is principally due to the very particular weather and soil conditions, say, of a specific product coming from a very particular place in France. Champagne is without a doubt the most famous example of this cultural phenomenon as no other sparkling wine can use the term Champagne, if it does not come from this specific area in France, where the famous drink is produced as the French feel other sparkling drinks, such as prosecco, come from very different terroirs with different soil and climates, and so cannot possibly be described using the same term. So, if I were to refer to the particular terroir that Corrigan comes from, it would be this deeply historical aspect and it is just another feature that informs the aesthetic of the poet’s work, like the shells in the soil that inform that old white wine that comes from Bordeaux and whose name simply escapes me now…

 

When the dark waters of sleep

close across my resting butch face

and I become a fat Ophelia

floating down the weedy slope

of memory, hope and duck billed platitudes,

back to childhood, back to faith,

where a diarrhoea fountain

of bare-knuckled nationalism

provides us with its dullard troops

each one trained to shit on sight,

the brightest and best promoted to teach

in the places that smelled of failure and feet.

 

Now, there are many so called poets who have been praised for their satirical nature, it seems to me, and many is the time that I have read their work and wondered what all the fuss was about. Poetic trends, like any, come and go – thank God! But verse such as the above would certainly qualify as satirical verse of the very highest order, to my mind. God knows every particular cuntry ( not a typo!) has its own very specifically exasperating strains, see terroir, and dear old Ireland is not the exception. I remember being at an exhibition in one of the older more established art galleries in Dublin and a very famous photographer, who had made his career abroad, made the comment how in the Republic we made a point of embracing mediocrity and it is this particular phenomenon, again, that I think Mr Corrigan is particularly good at eking out. Begrudgery being another!

 

when masters came to class tooled up

and the biggest looters wore the best suits,

 

I mean every society has its own particular issues, I’ve lived long enough in France to spot its and having lived with an Italian for over twenty years, I am also able to spot that country's, or rather its peoples, particular peculiarities. But it seems to me that what Mr. Corrigan is particularly good at putting his finger on here ( both of the above quotes are taken from Unlearning my Place ) is the atrocious competitiveness and politics of living in a small island where everybody is fighting for their little piece of earth. You can see it in the novels of Andre Camilleri when he is describing Sicily, for example. The cold brutal violence of the mafia in his case. Whereas in the Republic of Ireland, things are a lot less dramatic. Dead. Everybody is caught in a kind of entropy that James Joyce identified on page one of Dubliners – PARALYSIS. The disease has not gone away. Irish society, in general, is still plagued by it. The absolute awfulness of social convention. The tiresome scene that informs everything. Even poetry!

 

Choose friends wisely,

enemies will self-select,

smiling like tigers or growling like bears,

an arm around your shoulder

while pissing down your leg,

the welcome will be warm

before you’re taken out and shot.

 

The indirect nature which seems to govern everybody’s speech, the coded chatter, the back stabbing nature that it all creates. All the atrocious hallmarks of the ‘Irish’ when at home; behind the smiling eyes, the daggers in their bones.

The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot – Poems by Mick Corrigan is a wonderful collection of both poetry and verse, the first is infused with Biblical insight and learning while the latter is concocted with sharp and bitter knowledge won, no doubt, first-hand by the author who thinks so little of the slights by now that he has made it the stuff of polished rhymes, and some memorable phrases.  All the very best to him!

Peter O'Neill

April, 2022