writing
Warmest thanks to The London Magazine for making me feel so welcome at their prize giving ceremony this week, and to meet first and third place winners Sarah Westcott and Michael Henry James.
My poem ‘Aroi’ was second in the London Magazine Poetry Prize 2017 and is due to be published in an upcoming issue.
I was delighted to hear that my first full collection of poetry (tentatively titled In America) was one of three runners-up for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2017.
Warmest congratulations to the winner Ruth Timmons, and to my fellow runners-up Victoria Kennefick and Ben McGuire.
Previous winners of the award have included Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan, and Sinéad Morrissey.
Last month brought one of the best pieces of news I’ve received all year: my poem ‘Aroi’ winning second place in The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2017.
Writers who have appeared over the centuries within its pages include William Wordsworth, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Paul Muldoon, but what really excites me is that Sylvia Plath had poems published in The London Magazine both during and after her lifetime.
Plath has been one of the greatest influences on my own work, so to appear in the same publication that featured her poetry is a huge honour.
Sarah Westcott is the winner of The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2017, with third place going to Andrew Henry James.
I’ll conclude this post with a poem of Plath’s–probably her most famous one. ‘Ariel’ has never made as strong an impact on me as some of her others (such as ‘The Colossus’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Lady Lazarus’) but nevertheless I find myself returning to it again and again, eternally intrigued.
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
I’ve just returned to Ireland after reading at the 10. Uluslararasi Istanbul Şiir ve Edebiyat Festivali (10th International Istanbul Poetry and Literature Festival)–thank you so much to the festival and to Culture Ireland for bringing me over as a guest reader.
Istanbul is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited, and I am grateful to have met so many wonderful people and fellow poets from Turkey as well as other parts of the world.
You can check out some of my Istanbul highlights here on my Instagram page, which have proved invaluable in terms of creative inspiration.
Photo cred: Esra Ari
Many thanks to Sabotage Reviews, which recently published a review of Rapture. In describing what he sees as the book’s approach to desire (‘so unabashed, so unaffected’), its ‘ambiguous morality’, and its ‘subversive religious material’, Humphrey Astley writes:
Clearly, [Kelly is] concerned with themes of innocence versus experience, though they seem to coexist in her poetry, in a world where erotic frustration is imbued with prepubescent visions ‘the colour of my childhood bedroom’. In this sense, Kelly can be associated with an emerging school of metamodernism, or ‘naive capability’, if you like. Such art exists between tradition and modernity, in the midst of a coming-of-age, ‘between the old, known world / and some fiery entrance to elsewhere.’
The full review is available to read here.
I was delighted to hear that I made the shortlist for the Dermot Healy Poetry Award and for Mslexia’s 2017 Poetry Competition.
Helen Mort won the Mslexia Competition with her poem ‘Vanishing Point’, which you can read here.
Here’s the shortlist for the Dermot Healy Award, with the winners to be announced in the coming weeks.
I’m very happy to have my poem ‘Sacred Heart’ published in the latest issue of Poetry Ireland Review, edited by Eavan Boland.
You can by Poetry Ireland Review Issue 122 here, and in the meantime here’s one of my favourite Eavan Boland poems, ‘Quarantine.’
Quarantine by Eavan Boland
Self Portrait as Cavelady by Amy Gerstler
Nameless volcanos vomit rock.
Can’t keep cave clean. Swarms
of striped flies invade at dusk, bats
catch too few. Tender feeling for
baby mammoth as we eat him.
Sudden juice-leak from my eyes.
I pet baby mammoth’s roasted
hide, unfold hairy ear-flap still
stuck to skull and whisper into it.
Later, take chips of burnt sticks,
spit, plus mammoth fat, mix
in cup of hand and use paste I
make to sketch young mammoth
on shadow wall. Make black hand-
prints too. Rub mammoth fat
on my old, cracked feet. Rub some
on scars. Gather fresh dry leaves
for sleep. Give baby chunk of tusk
to suck so he’ll shut up. His yowls
rile wolves, who pace and whine
just beyond the all-night fires.
from B O D Y
Punishment by Seamus Heaney
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeuur
of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
The Blue Booby by James Tate
The blue booby lives
on the bare rocks of Galápagos
and fears nothing.
It is a simple life:
they live on fish,
and there are few predators.
Also, the males do not
make fools of themselves
chasing after the young
ladies. Rather,
they gather the blue
objects of the world
and construct from them
a nest—an occasional
Gaulois package,
a string of beads,
a piece of cloth from
a sailor’s suit. This
replaces the need for
dazzling plumage;
in fact, in the past
fifty million years
the male has grown
considerably duller,
nor can he sing well.
The female, though,
asks little of him—
the blue satisfies her
completely, has
a magical effect
on her. When she returns
from her day of
gossip and shopping,
she sees he has found her
a new shred of blue foil:
for this she rewards him
with her dark body,
the stars turn slowly
in the blue foil beside them
like the eyes of a mild savior.
Róisín Kelly 