Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

Grammar

I look up from William Strunk's Elements of Styleand there it is: the river depositing shipson the city's shimmering rim; the outsize girlwith her hoop; John Kindness's patchwork fishwith the docks in its sockets like a wash of oil.My back has been turned so long I thought the wholemagnificent shebang had gone up protestingin a pillar of smoke, but the faces on the train are realas taxation and the sea-locked causeway is holding.I read again: do not join independent clauseswith a comma; the possessive of witness is witness's.How do you punctuate a soul in two places?I leave half of it here, take half home to my sonwith his bath accomplished and his sleepsuit on.

FOUND ARCHITECTURE for Kerry Hardie

These days are all about waiting. What would you sayif I tried to explain how my single true activitythis wet and shivery May is "found architecture"?

As the giver of an Italian kaleidoscopethat makes its heel–toe shapes, not from beads or seedsor painted meticulous details, but from the room,

from whatever room I happen to be in,or from the street, always eager and unerringlydemocratic, you stand slightly to the south of me

with your head raised and I imagine you smiling.The day it arrived I mangled the blue of the bathroomwith the pistachio green of my bedroom ceiling

and sat entranced: such symmetrical splicingof everything, anything, to make of my waiting-housea star-pointed frame that entered and left

itself behind as the cylinder turned. Any light that there waswas instantly mystical—a crack in the pattern'stypography, like the door at the end of the corridor

shedding radiance. Yesterday evening, by the sea,a strangled sealed-off swamp by a walkwaythrew up, suddenly, the Aboriginal outback:

rotted glands of a pond between knee-high grassesand a white tree undoing itself in its ink-stainedsurfaces. The tree looked like a crocodile's ribcage

as I passed along the perimeter, or the wide-proppedjawbone of a whale. Until it became, the furtherI walked, a canoe, asleep on the water and fettered

with algae. Another dead branch sat upin the grass like the head of an otter and talked.This, too, was found architecture. And all the usual,

of course: skeletons of geranium leaves on windowsillslong afterwards; snake skins, clouds.Beaches are full of it: found architecture being

the very business of beaches.Most recently(and most disarmingly) this: handed to me in a rollof four like mug-shot photographs from a machine,

his seahorse spine, his open-shut anemoneof a heart, and the row of unbelievable teethshining high in the crook of his skull as though backstitched

into place. From blood and the body'sinconsolable hunger I have been my own kaleidoscope—five winter-bleached girls on a diving board, ready to jump.

Augustine Sleeping Before He Can Talk

The only places he can dive to are the senses.The Christmas lights his father dangled from the cornersof his ceiling in July are his palimpsest for the world—a winking on and off of ebullient colour, unnamed and so untamed,to be committed to memory and then written over.For now the world is simply to be crawled into, like the sea,of which he has no fear, a bubbling, transmogrifying, all-attractingmechanism that has not yet disappointedwith the mean-spirited vanishing act of an ink-black horizon.He has already learned how the tongue contains more mysterythan the granite hulk of an elephant swaying suddenly into focusunder the dank and knotted overhang of Cave Hill, tossingstraw onto its shoulders to keep itself warm because it still—and tragically—remembers Africa, that when he openshis mouth to admit the spoon, anything can happen,from passionfruit to parmesan. The three tributary-soundsof his name that flow as one (as though summer'shottest month had...