folk
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Other books by the author: Poetry The Shifting of Stones Behind the Green Curtain This Far North Three Songs of Home The Book of Winter Cures What Darkness Covers The Well in the Rain Edited As the Poet Said… Plays On Famine Road with Paul Goetzee and Jack Bradley The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien adapted with Jack Bradley
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folk Poems by
Tony Curtis
2011
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Published by Arc Publications Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright Š Tony Curtis 2011 Printed by Lightning Source
978 1906570 74 3 pbk 978 1906570 75 0 hbk Cover design by Pat Mooney Cover photograph supplied by the author.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.
Editor for the UK and Ireland: John W. Clarke
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For Oisín
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Acknowledgements Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following in which a number of these poems originally appeared: The Irish Times; The Cork Literary Review (2009); The Skagit Valley Poetry Festival Anthology (2008); The Skagit Valley Poetry Festival Anthology (2010); The Oxfam Calendar (2008); The Clifden Anthology (2007); Best of Irish Poetry (2008); Tinteán (Melbourne 2009); Captivating Brightness (2008); Poetry Ireland Newsletter (2009). ‘The Flock’ was written for the 10th anniversary of Michael Hartnett’s death and was broadcast on R.T.É’s ‘The Arts Show’ on the 12th of October 2009. Several of these poems were included in Days Like These (with Paula Meehan & Theo Dorgan), Brooding Heron Press, 2008. This book was a fine art edition, edited, designed and bound by Sam and Sally Green on Waldron Island, Washington State. ‘Seven Watercolours’: these haiku were commissioner by Conor Clarke & Stephen Kavanagh, the Design Factory (Dublin) for a Jim O’Donnell furniture brochure. This beautifully produced brochure won the prestigious Robert Horne Award in 2008. For many years, Pat Mooney and his students in the National College of Art & Design have drawn on Tony’s poems to create motion graphic videos. This work can be viewed on YouTube (Search Tony Curtis poems NCAD). Mary lived through the making of every poem in this book, my thanks to her for her patience and her love. I would especially like to thank Pat Mooney, Samuel Green and Sean McDowell for their expertise and unwavering generosity in the final stages of making this book. I would also like to Ross Coughlan for his help in the early design of the book. Finally, I would like to thank everyone at Arc Publications – the best of folk.
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“I have spent all my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for the ear alone… ‘Write for the ear’, I thought, so that you may be instantly understood as when an actor or folk singer stands before an audience.” The Yeats Reader William Butler Yeats
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Contents Folk / 13 I Bench / 17 When I Lay my Hand / 19 In Praise of Grass / 20 The Pilgrim / 22 Two Poems in Memory of Michael Hartnett The Garden Flat / 23 The Flock / 23 The Heartbroken Window / 26 A Writer’s Room / 28 Thrift / 29 Trespass / 31 On First Looking onto the Samuel Beckett Bridge / 32 Envoi / 34 The Birch Tree / 35 The Traveller / 36 The Curious Hare / 37 Invention No. 65 / 38 from Sixty Poems for Ciaran / 39 Mulrooney / 42 Two Pages from They / 45 December / 47 Christmas Eve / 48 The View / 49 Family / 50 Hand / 51 Three Poems from the Asylum The Naming / 53 The Gate / 56 9
Christmas Eve in the Asylum / 57 Unspeakable / 58 Two Faces by a Window / 59 The Maiden’s Collar / 60 Scissors / 62 On Being in a Poetry Band / 63 Tending the Dead / 65 Painting the Flood / 66 Sahoko / 67 Watercress / 69 Dog’s Bay / 73 Errislanan / 74 Seven Watercolours / 76 Yeats, January 1939 / 78 Sea Folk / 81 New Year’s Eve / 83
II Buffalo / 85 Opus in F Major / 87 Two Poems in Memory of Elizabeth Bishop Of Thee I Sing / 89 Leaving St. Elizabeth’s / 90 Emigrant Tune / 93 Jazz / 94 Harmonica / 96 Cash / 99 The Scarecrow The Scarecrow’s Brain / 100 The Scarecrow’s Heart / 102
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The Scarecrow’s Eyes / 104 The Scarecrows’ Gaze / 105 The Skagit Valley Beekeeper / 106 Our Fathers’ Sons / 107 Cutting Logs with Samuel / 108 Like the Buffalo / 109 The Amish Woman / 110 For Poetry, This / 112 Words for Poets / 113 Walt Whitman’s Grave / 119 In Camden, Where the Poet Was / 121 Company / 123 Biographical Note / 125
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Folk Such a warm little word, full of greens and browns, like something woven, a thread into the past; something to hold onto in the dark. If I say the word quietly to myself I think of a photograph I found in my father’s bible after he died: The end of prayer. Roscrea, 1948. Sunday morning after early mass, my folks stand ready for the road. The motorbike between them like a man in a yard holding open a sack; throw in the breeze, the ditches, the lanes that weave through the widening fields. It is the end of November. The feast of St James of the Marches. Winter is in the air. They are dressed for weather. So close, my mother wears my father’s heavy raincoat. He wears goggles and gloves as if with the right words – “So long, God Bless!” –
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the motorbike will lift off into the clouds like a magic carpet. “Hold on!� I hear him say to my mother, as the road, the fields, the houses fade away. And she did, tightly, with both arms, for the rest of their lives.
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Bench I’ve always wanted a good table there in the space by the window, there where the sun comes crawling in the morning. The birds and the moon could watch me working. A cluttered table – you can imagine it holding books, papers, poems, all kinds of scribbling – an empty coffee cup, the lamp burning long after midnight. A sturdy table – the kind the hero comes in and lays his sword upon, or the dead body of his son, a table strong enough to bear sorrow, to bear fruit, flowers from the field, a feather dropped through the open window. A poet’s table – wide enough for the whiskey ballad, long enough for the epic. It must have a feel for sound. The grain should run evenly, a seam of gold that curves
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and curves like a river of words into the pool of a poem. A good table – I’d want the wood to be smooth, pale as the undressed skin of a tree so when the wind blows over its bare back, its soul will waken to the memory of leaves and forest. A useful table – not a perfect table. If it is chipped or scratched it will remind me of rooks and cuckoo fox and squirrel. But I want nothing broken, nothing that speaks of the axe, the chisel, or the saw. When I come to the table in the morning, I want to feel like a woodsman hunting or in the evening, a nesting bird. What I want is to be lost in the forest of myself. Though I’ve searched for years I’ve never found such a table nor the carpenter to make it. All I have is this: hear how it creaks.
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When I Lay my Hand When I lay my hand flat on the wooden table, I think of water against the side of a boat, of earth folded round a coffin, of the axe’s cold blade cleaving the grain, of the bird’s claws on the branch. When I lift my hand and take it away, I think of autumn and the sadness of leaves, and of how the wind tries to wake them, to carry each battered soul back up into the trees.
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In Praise of Grass My father’s three brothers were Cistercian monks at a monastery in the hills. We used to spend weekends there: my mother and father cleansing their souls while I played in the fields. My father’s three brothers prayed harder than anyone I knew, for me and the repose of the souls. I shivered when they sang plainchant praising God’s blessings, their voices softer than girls’. I see them still, lined up like soldiers against the dark – the light dying, the air colder than the cross. I liked the bells that rang all through the night. I liked that everyone was up and out with the light. But what I liked best was to watch the monks work. When they cut the hay or went to gather in the cattle, they were like little bits of autumn moving through the fields – brown leaves blown by the wind.
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God knows I was never any good at prayer, and yet, when a cloud passes along a hillside or I look over an iron gate into an empty field I can still hear their voices praising the grass, the snowdrop, the leaf, the small miracle of rain.
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