Threshold City Threshold expects, it hungers, not only to be crossed but to be lived by those who wake up dreaming. —Lucien Zell I. Oh poem make me a poet, oh song make me a singer, entering the borderlands in Europe’s dark heart, crossroads magnify, exposed to all winds, the murky mishmash and dense clusters … Read more
An Epitaph Robert Stewart (“Castlereagh”), 1769-1822 A vulgar tool, an empty mask, a poison-blooded viper underfoot: the court and horde alike denied my lustre, drubbed my name. Though I cast the present century in vermillion, no record that I ever lived exists. Sedition wins by merely festering, a hidden epidemic no history can cure! Repressed … Read more
Irish Summer My plight is tied to the incessant rain, Weighed down by post-modernity. Or whatever it is – hypermodernity? The Digital Flood. I was forged in the 1990s you see, Weaned on radio alarm clocks and junk food. It’s all about timing. I watched on powerless As three courgette plants Were nibbled out of … Read more
Cataract Hours of your eye being wetly numbed with other eyes in the waiting room. Then you’re on the operating table, knees raised over a bolster, hand held. Keep still as you’re wheeled under curtains. Eyelid pinned. Look up at the bright lights moving in and out of focus. It’s a skull: two eyes and … Read more
Chimera Times You’ve lived beyond your relevance— Another song, another age, Another line while in a trance, Routine by prompt, an empty stage. The art lives past the life, and all They want is what you did when young, The bright first thing, the curtain call, When fireworks flew and bells were rung. Yet still … Read more
The con cometh The demon smirks, having laid out her wares. Will they see what she’s doing? Will they realise how they’re being taken in? Not all will grasp how an influencer works. She hopes they won’t. Her power over them depends on her ability to cajole and deceive. She insinuates herself into their thoughts, … Read more
Ion Light itself is a chapel an east-west wash spilt on the Christmas rose. Space itself is a chapel a fruitless bowl flowers dried in a jug. Life itself is a chapel at water’s edge murmur of patient prayer. Feature Image: Saint Enodoc Church, Trebetherick, Cornwall, U.K.
Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber and Faber, 2025) The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of … Read more
Gillnets I remember as a child picking them out from the bow, and peering down at currents moving freely through their masks – the net draped from an orderly row of cork floaters, near shore. There a canopy of beeches could dapple light onto the water’s surface, or space between two pine boughs slant a … Read more
There is a Panther on the Streets of Paris slinging hammocks of intent between each step, hunting unbroken hearts beyond the senses. No one knows. Rumours breeze like leaves along Boulevard Saint Germain. Another takes a table at Le Café Des Arts indistinct in clouds of Vogue Bleu. No one. Not even the off-duty gendarme … Read more
Review: Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets (Dedalus Press, 2025) “A writer’s life”, the poet Nick Laird once remarked, with a self-assurance befitting a Royal Society of Literature Fellow, “is a cycle of trying to get to their work, sitting staring at the blank screen, wandering off, steering their reluctant bodies back” to the desk … Read more
Luke 2:1-7 _ It was the time Augustus Caesar had cried pax As children used to do, and said the world must now be taxed, _ When Joseph, following the government decree, Went out of Nazareth and travelled down through Galilee. _ If … Read more
Eternal Return My sixteen year old daughter comes to me to complain about Patrick Kavanagh. O great irony, hardly are the words out of her mouth And I can see those fucking potatoes, The drills and the furrows of old bloody Monaghan! Why do we do it? Why does every generation get subjected To this … Read more
What comes to mind in Ireland What is black? An absence of light, the cassocks of parish priests, dark peat in an Irish bog. What is brown? A leather belt, decaying plants, veins of iron in stones, the layered bark of a log. What is grey? Lowering clouds, skies threatening rain over windswept water, the … Read more
Vitruvian Woman For Laura A Poem for Halloween Svelte limbs, aquiline and flow, her enjambment; The whole pelvic girdle hypnotically balances, Famously compared to a serpent which dances, And which has all full-blooded heterosexual males entranced…! And, there you have it! The Feminists declare, “No more male gazing here!” Where are we? How did … Read more
Maldon days hēt þā hyssa hwæne hors forlǣtan, feorr āfȳsan, and forð gangan, hicgan tō handum, and tō hige gōdum. The Battle of Maldon (991 AD) Galvanized into action, my companion horses neighed as they galloped to the woods, riderless and rudderless. I turned back to my liege lord, reluctant to retreat, … Read more
Discovery Discovery are coloured dark deep red. I heard one falling as I brushed the tree — a startled bird troubling bushy leaves — but with more plummet, accelerated power, crimson sinker parting waves of green, descending progeny, seeds sheathed in a cream flesh, webs of genes cradling what could be, bound for the food … Read more
And Me Naked for you, beneath some moon somewhere, which sounds like an ending, unless you begin with it. White as a page, as a unicorn’s horn, some skin—all of mine. So stare down—star-down is how I want to lay with you. Come further up. Go further in. Night is falling with us. Night, the … Read more
No animals died Our research on toads and carabids considered predator and prey. Japanese toads and bombardier beetles were ‘introduced’, let’s say. The relationships were explosive – but complied with current laws. We intend to show you footage. Please, hold your applause. Our methodology? Each beetle placed in tongue’s reach of a toad. Each swallowed. … Read more
