Irish Examiner review of Tied to the Wind by Michael Duggan

I had completely forgotten about this review, which I uncovered as I was de-cluttering files, and as it says lovely things about my hybrid memoir, I thought I’d share it!

Summer in a Small Town by Tony Hoagland

Yes, the young mothers are beautiful, with all the self-acceptance of exhaustion, still dazed from their great outpouring, pushing their strollers along the public river walk. And the day is also beautiful— the replica 19th-century paddle-wheeler perpetually moored at the city wharf                with its glassed-in bar and grill for the lunch-and-cocktail-seekers who come for the Mark Twain Happy Hour which lasts as long as the Mississippi. This is the kind of town where the rush hour traffic halts               to let three wild turkeys cross the road, and when the high school music teacher retires after thirty years the movie marquee says, “Thanks Mr. Biddleman!” and the whole town comes to hear               the tuba solos of old students. Summer, when the living is easy and we store up pleasure in our bodies like fat, like Eskimos, for the coming season of privation. All August the Ferris wheel will turn                           in the little amusement park, and screaming teenage girls will jump into the river with their clothes on, right next to the No Swimming sign. Trying to cool the heat inside the small towns                                               of their bodies,for which they have no words; obedient to the voice inside which tells them, “Now. Steal Pleasure.” -Tony Hoagland, 1953-2018

Directory of International Poetry Blogs

I came across this list of poetry blogs, and as I’m always interested in connecting with fellow-poets globally, thought I’d share this with you. (Spotted three Irish blogs among them.) If you’re a blogger yourself, these other blogs might give you some ideas. I know I should consider getting more focused about my own blog! One of these days, when I have a moment…watch this space. Meanwhile, happy exploring!

POETRY BLOGGING NETWORK

With thanks to Kelli Russell Agodon, whose blog is here: https://ofkells.blogspot.com/p/poetry-blogging-network-list-of-poetry.html.

Poetry Blogging Network:

Kristin Berkey-Abbott: Kristin Berkey-Abbott Ada’s Blog: poetrybyada.blogspot.com Kelli Russell Agodon: Book of Kells 
Nin Andrews: Nin Andrews Blog
Marie Anzalone: Cold, Hungry, and In Love
Michael Begnal: B’Fhiú an Braon Fola
Carolee Bennett: Good Universe Next Door
Andrea Blythe: Andrea Blythe’s blog
Dave Bonta: Via Negativa Kristy Bowen: Kristy Bowen’s Blog
James Brush: Coyote Mercury
Lynn Burnett: Poems & Ponderings John B. Burroughs: The Tao of John Burroughs 
Angela Carr: Angela Carr’s blog
Jeremy Cantor: From First Poem to First Book
Grant Clauser: Uniambic 
Josephine Corcoran: Josephine Corcoran
Jason Crane:  Jason Crane Blog
Risa Denenberg: Risa’s Pieces Peg Duthie:  Zirconium
Renee Emerson : This Quiet Hour
Annie Flavin: Annie Flavin
Brenda Marie Fluharty: Brenda Marie Fluharty Blog
Henry Gould: HG Poetics 
Uma Gowrishankar: My Garden
Sarah Kain Gutowski: Sarah Kain Gutowski
Jeannine Hall Gailey: Webbish6
Anne Higgins: Scattered Showers in a Clear Sky
Erin Coughlin Hollowell: Being Poetry
Veronica Hosking: Veronica Hosking Ian: Analog Verse 
Crystal Ignatowski: Some Hiatus
Romana Iorga: Clay and Branches
James Lee Jobe: Book of Jobe
Collin Kelley: Collin Kelley’s blog
Cassandra Key: The Sacred Middle ~ Notes on Living a Magical Life
Carol Parris Krauss: The House on Greenbrier
J.I. Kleinberg: J.I. Kleinberg
Hyejung Kook: Hyejung Kook
Melinda Longtin: inspirwing
Cendrine Marrouat: Creative Ramblines   Melodies: https://tunedance.wordpress.com/ 
Jeremy Mifsud: Poetry by Jeremy 
Amy Miller: Writer’s Island
Lisa C. Miller: theunexpectedrichnessofanordinaylife Billy Mills: Ellipitical Movements Nikesh Murali: The Word Manifesto Drew Myron: Drew Myron Graham Nester: Blog Richard Jeffrey Newman: Richard Jeffrey Newman Blog
Elly Nobbs:  ELLY FROM EARTH
Kevin J. O’Conner: Ordinary Average Thoughts January Gill O’Neil: Poet Mom
Robert Okaji: Robert Okaji Blog
Sagar Pathak: In the Loving Memory of Charles Lamb
Ren Powell: Ren Powell’s blog
Cristina Querrer: Your Artsy Girl Podcast 
Bethany Reid: Bethany Reid’s blog
Susan Rich: The Alchemist’s Kitchen
Dominic Rivron: Dominic Rivron Andrew Robson: Andrew Robson Scribbles
R.K. Singh: RKSingh Blog, ProfRKSingh Blog, Selected Poems Blog   Scot Slaby: Noticing Poetry Joannie Stangeland: Poe-Query: Questions about poetry, writing, and life in general
Jayne Stanton: Jayne Stanton’s blog
Gerry Stewart: Thistle Wren
Bekah Steimel: Bekah Steimel’s blog
Sarah Stockton: Via Divina
Christine Swint: Balanced on Edge
Rob Taylor: Roll of Nickels
Kellea Tibbs: MarchThirtyOne Blog
David Vincenti:  David Vincenti’s Blog Less Traveled
Tony Walton: Tony Walton Blog
Keith Welch: Blog o’ Poetry
Laura Grace Weldon: Laura Grace Weldon’s blog
Michael Allyn Wells: Poetry in American Culture
Leslie Wheeler: Taking Poetry Personally 
Eileen Winnand: These Are the Artifacts
Katharine Whitcomb: Poetry Is Cool Robert van Vliet: A Foolish Consistency
Ellen Young: Free Thought and Metaphor

PODCASTS:
The Daily Poem Podcast: (David Kern) 

Calendar of Literary Festivals in Ireland 2022

I’m a a bit of a list-fiend. And this one is irresistible, for a poet or writer, or anyone who would love an excuse to hit the road. There’s something on somewhere in Ireland, every month of the year. Could be your bucket list!

January

Classics Now
21–23 January, Dublin
@ClassicsNowFest

February

North Belfast Festival
25–27 February
@northbelfast100

March

Ennis Book Club Festival
4–6 March, Ennis, Co Clare
@ebcf

Belfast Children’s Festival
4–13 March, Belfast
@Young_at_Art

NOIRELAND International Crime Fiction Festival
8–10 March*, Belfast
@NOIRELANDfest

Kanturk Arts Festival
15–19 March*, Kanturk, Co Cork
@KanturkArts

Ballydonoghue Bardic Festival
24–27 March, Ballydonoghue/Lisselton, Co Kerry
Facebook/BallydonoghueBardicFestival

April

Dublin: One City One Book
1–30 April, Dublin
@1dublin1book

Cúirt International Festival of Literature 4–10 April, Galway @CuirtFestival

Franco-Irish Literary Festival
8–10 April, Dublin
@afdublin

Cork World Book Fest
20–25 April*, Cork
@WorldBookFest

Brewery Lane Writers’ Weekend
22–24 April, Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary
@BrewerLaneT

Towers and Tales Lismore Story Festival
29–30 April, Lismore, Co Waterford
@TowersandTales

Féile na Bealtaine
28 April–2 May, Dingle, Co. Kerry
@feilebealtaine

Annual Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend
30 April–2 May*, Achill Island, Co Mayo
@BollAchill

May

Féile na Bealtaine 28 April–2 May, Dingle, Co. Kerry
@feilebealtaine

Annual Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend
30 April–2 May*, Achill Island, Co Mayo
@BollAchill

Strokestown International Poetry Festival
1–3 May*, Strokestown, Co Roscommon
@Strokestownpoem

Marie Edgeworth Literary Festival
6–8 May, Edgeworthstown, Longford
@edgeworthsoc

Padraic Colum International Literary Festival
15 May*, Longford
@CreativeLongfd

Cork International Poetry Festival
18–21 May, Cork
@MunLitCentre

International Literature Festival Dublin
19–29 May, Dublin
@ILFDublin

June

Listowel Writers’ Week
1–5 June, Listowel, Co Kerry
@Writersweek

Goldsmith International Literary Festival
3–5 June, various locations in Co Longford
@Goldsmithfest  

Festival of Writing and Ideas
10–12 June, Borris, Co Carlow
@Writingandideas  

Belfast Book Festival
10–19 June, Belfast
@BelfastBookFest

Bloomsday Festival
11–16 June*, Dublin
@bloomsdayfest

Dalkey Book Festival
16–19 June, Dalkey, Co Dublin
@dalkeybookfest

Immrama – Lismore Festival of Travel Writing
17–19 June, Lismore, Co Waterford
@lismoreimmrama

Limerick Literary Festival
18–19 June, Limerick
@kobweekend

Hinterland Festival of Literature and Arts
23–26 June, Kells, Co Meath
@HinterlandKells

July

Wexford Literary Festival
1–4 July*, Enniscorthy, Co Wexford
@WexfordLitFest

West Cork Literary Festival
8–15 July, Bantry, Co Cork
@wcorklitfest

John Hewitt Society International Summer School
25–30 July, Armagh
@The_JHS

August

Blueway Poetry Festival
30 July–1 August, Lismore, Co Waterford
@BluewayPoetry 

TitanCon, Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Festival
5–7 August, Belfast
@TitanConBelfast

Ennistymon Book Town Festival
28–29 August*, Ennistymon, Co Clare
@BooksEnnistymon

September

The Write Time Festival 1–30 September*, Dublin @fingallibraries

International Dublin Writers Festival
16–18 September, Dublin
facebook.com/internationaldublinwritersfestival

Shaking Bog Nature Writing Festival
10–12 September*, Enniskerry, Co Wicklow
@theshakingbog

Cashel Arts Festival
15–18 September, Cashel, Co. Tipperary
@Cashelartsfest

C.S. Lewis Festival
15–18 September, Belfast
@CSLewsisFest

Children’s Books Ireland International Conference
22 September, Dublin
@KidsBooksIrel

Write By The Sea Festival
23–25 September, Kilmore Quay, Co Wexford
@write_KQ

Aspects Festival
24 September–3 October*, Bangor, Co Down
@aspectsfestival

Éigse Michael Hartnett Festival
30 September–2 October*, Newcastle West, Co Limerick
@EigseMHartnett

Bray Literary Festival
30 September–2 October, Bray, Co Wicklow
@braylitfest

October

Éigse Michael Hartnett Festival
30 September–2 October*, Newcastle West, Co Limerick
@EigseMHartnett

Bray Literary Festival 30 September–2 October, Bray, Co Wicklow @braylitfest

Dromineer Literary Festival
1–3 October*, Dromineer, Nenagh, Co Tipperary
@DromineerLit

Echoes: Maeve Binchy and Irish Writers Festival
1–3 October*, Dalkey, Co Dublin
@echoesdalkey 

Children’s Book Festival
1–31 October, Libraries countrywide

Kildare Readers Festival
1–17 October*, throughout Co Kildare
@KildareReaders

Words by Water
 2–5 October, Kinsale, Co Cork
@WordsByWater

Iron Mountain Literature Festival
5–7 October*, Carrick on Shannon, Co Leitrim

Wild Atlantic Words Literary Festival
5–10 October*, Mayo
@WildWordsMayo

Cork International Short Story Festival
6–10 October, Cork
@MunLitCentre

Bookville Festival Kilkenny
7–12 October, Kilkenny
@bookvillekilkenny

Gerard Manley Hopkins International Literary Festival
8–10 October*, Newbridge, Co Kildare

Dalkey Creates Festival
11–14 October*, Dalkey, Co Dublin
@DalkeyCreates

Red Line Book Festival
11–17 October*, Dublin
@RedLineBookFest

ISLA (Irish, Spanish and Latin American) Literary Festival
14–16 October*, Dublin
@ICDublin

Octocon, the National Irish Science Fiction Convention
15–16 October, Croke Park, Dublin
@Octocon

Waterford Writers’ Weekend (part of theImagine Arts Festival)
21–23 October, Waterford
@Wwritersweekend
@Imagine_Fest

Omagh Literary Festival: Honouring Benedict Kiely
23 October*, Omagh, Co Tyrone
@kiely_weekend

November

Leaves Festival of Writing & Music
2–7 November*, Portlaoise, Co Laois
@leavesfestival

Allingham Festival
3–7 November*, Ballyshannon, Co Donegal
@AllinghamArts

An Fhéile Beag Filíochta
5–7 November*, Baile  an Fheirtéaraigh, Co Chiarraí
@Féilebeagfillíochta

Murder One International Crime Writing Festival
6–29 November*, Dublin
@MurderOneFest

Dublin Book Festival
9–13 November, Dublin
@DublinBookFest

Imram Irish Language Literature Festival
11 November–15 December* , Dublin
@Feile_IMRAM

Festival of Reading and Writing for Young Adults
17–20 November*, Waterford
@TheLitYWF

Rolling Sun Book Festival
15–18 November*, Westport, Co Mayo
Facebook/RollingSunBookFestival

The Lit: Festival of Reading and Writing for Young Adults
17–20 November*, Waterford
@TheLitYWF

Dingle Literary Festival
18–20 November, Dingle, Co Kerry
@DingleLit 

Did not run in 2021 but due to return in 2022

Bram Stoker Festival
Dublin
@bramstokerdub

Allihies Inspires Festival
Allihies village, Beara, Co Cork
@Allihiesinspire

Cancelled for 2022

Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival
Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin
@mountainstosea

Féile Fidelma Mystery Fiction Weekend
6–8 September, Cashel, Co Tipperary
@Cashelartsfest

No information available as yet for 2022

Doolin Writers’ Weekend
Usually held last weekend in January, Doolin, Co Clare
@HotelDoolin

UL/Frank McCourt Creative Writing Festival
Limerick City

Howth Literary Arts Festival Howth
Co Dublin
@howthlitfest

Graiguenamanagh Town of Books Festival
Graiguenamanagh, Co Kilkenny
Facebook/IrelandsBooktown

Something Wicked Crime Fiction Festival
Malahide, Co Dublin
@somethingwicket

Hillsborough Festival of Literature & Ideas
Hillsborough, Co Down
@The_JHS (Did not take place in 2021)

John O’Connor Writing School Literary Arts Festival
Armagh
@johnoconnorws

Directory of Independent Booksellers in Ireland

Prim’s Bookshop, Kinsale, Co Cork
(Bibliotherapy)

My favourite occupation when visiting a new town is to seek out independent bookshops. I’m sure there are other readers and writers like me, who will also appreciate this list.  Hope so anyway.

Where would we writers and readers be without bookshops and their amazing owners?

Academy Books Southgate, Drogheda, Ireland: website

An Siopa Leabhar, Dublin, Ireland: website

Antonia’s Bookstore, Trim, Ireland: website

Bandon Books, Bandon, Ireland: facebook

Banner Books, Ennistymon, Ireland: website

Bantry Bookshop, Bantry, Ireland: website

Barker & Jones, Naas, Ireland: website

Bell Book And Candle, Galway, Ireland: facebook

The Book Centre, Kilkenny, Ireland: website

The Book Centre, Waterford, Ireland: website

The Book Centre, Wexford, Ireland: website

The Book Lady, Roscommon, Ireland: facebook

The BOOK MARKet, Kells, Ireland: website

The Book Well, Belfast, Northern Ireland: website

Bookends, Bangor, Northern Ireland: website

Bookmarket, Clonmel, Ireland: website

Books At One, Letterfrack, Ireland: website

Books On The Green, Dublin, Ireland: facebook

Books Upstairs, Dublin, Ireland: facebook

Bookstór, Kinsale, Ireland: facebook

Bookworm Bookshop, Thurles, Ireland: website

Bridge Books, Dromore, Northern Ireland: facebook

Bridge Street Books, Wicklow, Ireland: website

Charlie Byrnes Bookshop, Galway, Ireland: website

An Café Liteartha, Dingle, Ireland: website

The Campus Bookshop, Dublin, Ireland: website

Chapters Bookstore, Dublin, Ireland: website

The Clifden Bookshop, Galway, Ireland: website

Clonakilty Bookshop, Clonakilty, Ireland: facebook

The Company Of Books, Dublin, Ireland: website

P Commane Book Shop, Tralee, Ireland: website

Crescent Book Shop, Dooradoyle, Ireland: facebook

De Burca Rare Books, Dublin, Ireland: website

Dingle Bookshop, Dingle, Ireland: website

The Dragon’s Quill Bookstore, Dromara, Ireland: website

The Ennis Bookshop, Ennis, Ireland: website

Farrell and Nephew Bookstore, Newbridge, Ireland: website

Fermoy Books, Fermoy, Ireland: facebook

Fitz-Geralds Bookshop, Macroom, Ireland: facebook

The Flying Poet, Kinsale, Ireland: website

Four Masters Bookshop, Donegal, Ireland: facebook

Foyle Books, Derry, Northern Ireland: facebook

Gadái Dubh Books, Ballymakeera, Ireland: facebook

Kevin Gildeas Brilliant Bookshop, Dún Laoghaire, Ireland: facebook

The Gutter Bookshop, Dalkey, Ireland: website

The Gutter Bookshop, Temple Bar, Ireland: website

Halfway Up The Stairs, Greystones, Ireland: website

Hampton Books, Dublin, Ireland

(if anyone has a website/facebook/twitter/insta for them it would be appreciated)

Alan Hanna’s Bookshop, Dublin, Ireland: website

John’s Bookshop, Westmeath, Ireland: website

Just Books, Mullingar, Ireland: website

Kenmare Book Shop, Kenmare, Ireland: facebook

Kennys Bookshop & Art Galleries, Galway City, Ireland: website

Kerrs Bookshop, Clonakilty, Ireland: facebook

Khans Books, Kilkenny, Ireland: website

Last Bookshop, Dublin, Ireland: website

Liber Bookshop, Sligo, Ireland: website

The Library Project, Dublin, Ireland: website

McLoughlins Bookshop, Westport, Ireland: website

Manor Books, Malahide, Ireland: facebook

Marrowbone Books, Dublin, Ireland: website

The Maynooth Bookshop, Maynooth, Ireland: website

Midland Books, Tullamore, Ireland: website

Midleton Books, Midleton, Ireland: facebook

The Nenagh Bookshop, Nenagh, Ireland: website

No Alibis, Belfast, Northern Ireland: website

O’Mahony’s Booksellers, Limerick, Ireland: website

Pangur Bán Bookshop, Ballina, Ireland: 

(if anyone has a website/facebook/twitter/insta for them it would be appreciated)

Philip’s Bookshop, Mallow, Ireland: website

Prim’s Bookshop, Kinsale, Ireland: 

Prim’s Bookshop: Bibliotherapy, Kinsale

The Plot Thickens, Derry, Northern Ireland: facebook

Quay Books, Limerick, Ireland: website

Rathfarnham Book Shop, Dublin, Ireland: twitter

The Reading Room, Carrick on Shannon, Ireland: website

Red Books, Wexford, Ireland: website

Roe River Books, Dundalk, Ireland: website

The Salmon Bookshop & Literary Centre, Ennistimon, Ireland: website

Scéal Eile Books, Ennis, Ireland: website

The Secret Bookshelf, Carrickfergus, Ireland: website

T Sheehy & Sons, Cookstown, Northern Ireland: facebook

Sheelagh na Gig Bookshop, Cloughjordan, Ireland: website

The Skerries Bookshop, Skerries, Ireland: website

Tertulia Bookshop, Westport, Ireland: website

The Time Traveller’s Bookshop, Skibbereen, Ireland: facebook

Ulysses Rare Books, Dublin, Ireland: website

Universal Books, Letterkenny, Ireland: facebook

Vibes and Scribes, Cork, Ireland: website

The Village Bookshop, Greystones, Ireland: website

The Village Bookshop, Terenure, Ireland: website

The Winding Stair, Dublin, Ireland: website

Woodbine Books, Kilcullen, Ireland: website

Woulfes Bookshop, Listowel, Ireland: website

Tied to the Wind, a hybrid childhood memoir by Afric McGlinchey

I thought I’d collect a selection of the reviews and interviews I’ve been privileged to receive to date for my recent memoir, Tied to the Wind. I’m posting the full endorsements I received from authors and poets I admire. For reasons of space, only extracts from these endorsements could be included in the book.

ENDORSEMENTS:

Tied to the Wind, is a whirlwind epic of a young Irish girl coming of age – set primarily against a wild and expansive African landscape and the War of Independence in Zimbabwe.

This is a romantic yet brutal world, where alcohol-fuelled oversight can sometimes blur the lines between childhood freedom and unintentional neglect.

The hugely attractive and magical power of Afric McGlinchey’s writing is found in the clarity of her storytelling. The tight weave of this colourful and complex tapestry cuts right to the marrow of the life, love, pain, aspiration and disillusion of a family united in love, yet torn in all directions by culture, career and geographical location.

Afric McGlinchey’s Tied To The Wind is powerful, insightful and fascinating. Through the innocent lens of a child’s point of view, she explores the failures of adults without judgement or recrimination, and learns from her father that failure is but an opportunity to begin again – offering the freedom to set out on a new adventure. 

The narrative ultimately reaches a personal redemption when we meet her and her cousin Freya, both young women, living the life, having fun, penniless and busking in Paris – feet firmly on the ground and tacking into the wind. Absolutely wonderful. – Cónal Creedon

*

Afric McGlinchey is a poet of memory, of migration, of displacement, but also of childhood and of love. Tied to the Wind portrays a life lived between Ireland and Africa depicted in searingly beautiful prose, as sharp and as poignant as black and white photographs. I loved it. – William Wall (author of Smugglers in the Underground Hug Trade, Doire Press)

*

I’ve had a truly lovely experience with Tied to the Wind. It’s a book of intense sensations, and kaleidoscopic atmosphere. I could almost feel its heat, smell its exotic fragrances, hear its gentle sounds. It was beautiful, poignant, and transporting. I finished it last night by the fire, and already I miss it. – Sara Baume (author of Handiwork, Tramp Press)

*

I loved Afric McGlinchey’s lyrical and haunting memoir Tied to the Wind. Simultaneously intimate and epic, McGlinchey’s search for belonging voyages the reader through a sequence of unforgettable landscapes, braiding beauty and challenge into an unforgettable book that lingers long in the reader’s heart. – Grace Wells (author of Fur, Dedalus Press)

*

Afric McGlinchey has written a memoir with prose poetry as her medium; the past returns in waves of memorable, poignant images, where love is challenged, and home is ever in question. Where to be, how to be and how to love are the kinds of questions Tied to the Wind asks; it’s a courageous and moving piece of work. – Paul Perry (author of the Garden, New Island Press)

*

Exquisite – a beautifully-written, lyrical charm.  – Paul McMahon (author of The Pups in the Bog, an Abbey Theatre production)  

*

Afric McGlinchey’s long-form debut steals beguilingly across the spiderweb between poetry, memoir and novel, offering an exquisitely rendered narrative of a young, hurting, growing life. Lush, sensitive, harrowing, gloriously written.  – Mia Gallagher  (author of Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland, New Island Press)  

******  

Here’s a piece I wrote for The Irish Times about the process of writing Tied to the Wind:

Bringing my mother back to life

Afric McGlinchey on writing her memoir Tied to the Wind to pin down her past

Mon, Jan 3, 2022, 06:42Afric McGlinchey

Aifric McGlinchey: “I had to be the agent of my own story, not merely a witness to other lives.” 

The compulsion to write a memoir began to overwhelm me, particularly after my mother died. (She had early-onset dementia and I was afraid it might happen to me too.)

If some memories have dissolved, others have retained their significance. I wanted to explore why these, why not others. I haven’t relied on journals and diaries – all of them were lost over the course of our family’s many moves. So these are the memories that came along with me, as part of my psychological baggage. I have included occasional interjections by my father and siblings, to highlight my fallibility as a narrator, and to suggest that their perspectives might have produced an entirely different story.

Of course, I wanted to get my hands on as many memoirs as I could to research ways of entering the narrative, but was concerned that this would have a distorting influence; I might adapt them, and accept words and concepts that would cause my to stray from my own intuitive direction. Also, while others might strive for constraint, my personal mission was to rescue exaggeration, not to write reasonably. Drama has been a key factor in my upbringing, and I’m told I can be quite melodramatic myself.

I was the peace-maker in my volatile family, and a people-pleaser. In writing my auto-fictional memoir, I discovered that I had also become a master of dissociation as a coping mechanism.

As children, my siblings and I had to become accustomed to moving, and with each move, to experience losses and separations. The result of such a peripatetic life is either not to become attached at all, or conversely, to dive in deeply as quickly as possible, to extract maximum emotional value, before you are wrenched away. And the way to people’s hearts, I discovered, was through our family stories, many of them growing taller and taller with each re-telling.

When it came to writing this memoir, I couldn’t be absolutely certain about what was true and what was exaggerated. Which is why the memoir has been cast as auto-fiction. This gave me the freedom to change names (for protection), and to converge memories. I have also altered the chronological sequence for two reasons: because I can’t precisely remember dates, and also for narrative convenience.

But why publish at all?

The public reason is that I was awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary and felt the need to produce a result. A more private reason is that I also wanted to bring my mother back to life. I was a daddy’s girl and didn’t know my mother well. I wanted to ‘find’ her, and by osmosis, learn something about myself too. Also, I never had closure with her. There were things we both needed to forgive. I wanted to revive her so I could love and honour her more.

And there’s a third reason. When I met the Limerick-born poet Desmond O’Grady in Kinsale, where he was living at the same time as me, he repeatedly offered this advice: ‘live a life. Leave a record.’ And that made an impact on me.

In the end, I had far too much material. I found that by breaking down the stories into micro-memories, and treating them as prose poems, I could apply my editing skills as a poet and keep cutting until each took up no more than a page.

Many of the memories relate to stories my father told us over the years, and to things that happened to my brother, to my mother. But Alan Heathcock, an American writer whose workshop I attended, advised me that I had to be the agent of my own story, not merely a witness to other lives. I had to be the actor – find my own acts.

I am conscious that happiness ‘writes white’. But still, when I looked at my narrative more closely, I was shocked: why were the strongest personal experiences based around anger, embarrassment, shame, guilt? Why did my childhood identity seem to be primarily bound up with the concept of fear?

And then I realised something. It was my fears that made me an agent in my own life; that drove me to act.

That revelation led me to focusing my narrative around a single event – the first completely independent act of my life. A parachute jump.

It was to be a defining moment. It would liberate me from my fears. It would change my life.

And it did. During the landing, I fractured four vertebrae, and was lucky to survive. For the first fortnight, the doctors believed I would be paralysed from the waist down. I was incarcerated in hospital for a long time. And during that time, I began to write.

So yes, the jump did change my life. I’ve become a writer as a result of that single mad act. Thank you for helping me to realise that, Alan Heathcock.

The narrative is interspersed with a series of flashes forward to that jump.

So far, the wind has carried me to a certain height, from which I have had a whole new perspective. I trust and hope it will continue to offer a soft landing.
Tied to the Wind by Afric McGlinchey is published by Broken Sleep Booksand is also available as an ebook.

****

Here’s the The Irish Times link: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/bringing-my-mother-back-to-life-1.4765419?fbclid=IwAR0YyllGTotleNc83PG8t5qJOP0qtCVTk6WR1JmGe8t2MymxYjIvsGatzPo

REVIEWS:

In The Dublin Review of Books by Fióna Bolger (November 2021, 126 Shares)

Skydiving 

Fióna Bolger

Tied to the Wind, by Afric McGlinchey, Broken Sleep Books, 328 pp, €17.99, ISBN: 978-1913642907

Migration, trauma, and shifting identities across borders feature in the questions I circle in my head as I read Tied to the Wind. And there is much here to add to that mix. I also note the space between the protagonist, Itosha, and Afric McGlinchey, the author. Perhaps this distancing allows McGlinchey to write about her childhood self more easily. She mentions in her blog the challenge of writing a memoir, and chooses to define the book as auto-fiction, because memory is too tenuous and fragile to pin down as fact.

As Oliver Sacks wrote: “Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” With this, I qualify my own creative reading of Tied to the Wind.

This is Afric McGlinchey’s third book. Two poetry collections, The Ghost of the Fisher Cat and The Lucky Star of Hidden Things, and a chapbook, Invisible Insane, were previously published to much critical acclaim, and her collections have both been translated into Italian.

Tied to the Wind is poetic in intent and portrays “a young girl’s attempts to tether herself to a life that keeps coming unfixed, every time her family moves from Ireland to Southern Africa. Interwoven into the narrative are the puzzle pieces of a fateful decision to undertake a skydive, despite her fear of heights.” There is a family at the centre of these stories. A mother, a father, a brother, a sister. The interjections, set apart at the foot of some pages, by both Molly and Ivor (Itosha’s younger siblings) lend the text the air of something which has been, if not agreed upon, at least discussed with the surviving family members.

The book is formed of a collection of fragments, each page containing a short flash piece, or prose poem (depending on your inclination to categorise) or a right-aligned lyric. These short texts are like a series of interconnecting beads which the reader has to string together to follow the journey for herself. And yes, you must string, your hands, your body becoming implicated in this visceral experience.

“Tied to the Wind doesn’t pretend to present a cohesive picture of a life,” McGlinchey warns us. I would suggest that Tied to the Wind doesn’t tolerate pretence of any type; as readers, we find ourselves drawn in but not allowed to suspend our faculties. These flash pieces light up aspects of our own lives, of ourselves, and as such we are implicated in the making of the story in a way a solid narrative novel could never achieve.

On receiving a copy, I was struck by its weight, size and texture. It is similar to an old-style school textbook in its size and holding it is a comforting sensation. The feather illustration on the cover is so realistic you almost feel like blowing it away. And the cover fixes some of the motifs we will find in the text – the colour of a clear sky, the element of air, the windblown feather of a bird.

Other key elements:

The sky: Irish, Southern African, clear or cloudy, rippling with heat, or clouds “eating up the sun”;
day: “Time passes more slowly in a field when you are lying in it. Watch the silvery sun being pulled to the horizon as though there was a secret magnet.”
night:
“He takes my hand. Not a word about the incident, just points out all the stars streaming a sash of liquid silver across the sky.”

The sky is a recurring character. Itosha’s relationship to it deepens through her parachute jump, which is a presence throughout the text. The on-the-brink almost breathless skydiving poems appear at intense moments in the otherwise prose narrative. Air, in its wind form, pushes the words of the skydiving interludes to the very right edges, as if the words are almost being blown off the page.

You’re here,
a comet
on the rim
of the sky,
as the earth spins
and hurtles.
You look up
for proof
that your parachute
is still open,
the wind
shouting
inside it.
Before and after
have been
sheared away.
There is only
this.

There are feathers to be found falling through the text: “The first migration …”, where the birds are air-surfing above the children, the seagull, “Skimming down across the sea … lonely bird, just like me, to Itosha’s mother “folding her cleverness away under bright-coloured wings”, her father’s piano hands “flying like birds”, her mother as a carrier pigeon  and she herself “feeling an uprush of birds in my chest”, or a swift, the bird tied to the Ireland/Southern Africa migration route, to name but a few.

With Itosha, we swallow-dive, “leaping into the air, feeling its rush flow over your body, flipping, then plunging into the pool. Everything is different under water, that denser element.” For someone whose greatest achievement is the reddening of a belly flop, I am in that body leaping, flowing, feeling the dive. For the child Itosha, experiences are intense and embodied and the writing captures this in concentrated form. We are given visceral detail and drawn into the body of the text again and again.

Itosha recounts her many guilty secrets, from the snake killed because she disturbed it, to self-blame after shouting to her brother for help, an act that triggers a family schism. As the Rhodesia she has been living in becomes increasingly militarised, she is surrounded by soldiers on R & R from the war and exposed to the physical and psychological consequences of this. Her detailed snapshots of characters such as Jack before and after service and the impact of their PTSD on those around them are powerful testimony to the damage inflicted by war and conflict.

Jack, when he and Itosha first meet, is not what she expects. “He reaches to rescue a dragonfly fizzing dustily on the surface, wades to the edge, lays it on the concrete and watches until it shakes its wings and totters off.” But later, after he’s been to war, where “He didn’t die, though all the rest of his stick did”, she is horrified by his behaviour. “Now he’s driving the car directly at a mother balancing a basket of avocados on her head, baby swaddled behind her in an orange kikoi. She topples into the ditch, becoming a parcel of soaked orange cloth.”

And the avocados become code perhaps for grenades and violence, reappearing later in the garden of her house, now full of soldiers.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
…
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind

                        Emily Dickinson 1263

McGlinchey tells the truth, but from the angle of a skydiver, and we are drawn into this world of spinning experience. Along with Itosha, we are trying to make sense of it all. “Black, why are you called Black? He laughs softly. I can ask the same thing. Why are you called Itosha? Maybe because you are an African girl? I giggle.”

We never find out either of the whys, but the questions resonate in our heads as we read on. “Back in my room, I lean on the sill. Maybe my name is a sign. Maybe I am meant to be an African girl.” And years later, she thinks: “What a name. Who gave it to him? Why didn’t we ask if he had another name, a birth name?”

McGlinchey resists the ever-present temptation to editorialise. Itosha experiences the world in the present moment and we are invited to share her perception. She grows in understanding as she ages but no overarching world view is presented. We are invited to look here, and here, and here, and make of it what we will, just as a child must do.

His shadow looming on the wall, whistle of the thin, flexible riding crop. Ivor makes not a sound. So I hold it in too, but grasp with each successive whip-whip-whip, squeezing Ivor’s hand tight. One, two, three, four, five six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve …
That’s enough Seán. Mum’s grey voice in the doorway.
After Dad follows her out of the room, we stay knelt over the bed as we catch our breath and check out the welts on our bums. They begin to trickle red. Ivor turns to me. We won, he says. How do you mean? I ask him. Because, we didn’t cry.

Later in the book, as her parents discuss moving country, Itosha describes their conversation: “Their voices leave spaces, like a threadless hem with a line of small holes.” And again, we are pulled into this family dynamic, not just as observers, but in a more visceral way.

When Dad returns from the hospital, words are coming from his mouth but they take a while to reach me. Intensive, he repeats. Care. We must take care of her. She almost died, as he looks at me. Do you understand? That heart attack nearly killed her.
My heart caught on a hook.

The use of pauses and charged language intensifies the experience of reading these pieces. Each resonates with the reader all the more for not being fully embedded in a conventional narrative. Glossing over these provocations to remember our own childhoods is not possible: there’s nowhere to run on the mainly white pages. This way of writing, as bursts of embodied emotion in poetically charged language, makes clear the flash, momentary nature of memory. At the same time, the language allows the reader to experience each piece in their own body. “My heart caught on a hook.”

We find ourselves reading the story of a young girl growing into womanhood, between continents, with constantly shifting surroundings, unable to find stability, as she highlights at the end. The white space in this book becomes the blue sky in which the words are falling towards earth with an inevitability and we as readers are called to construct a narrative for ourselves with an increasing sense of urgency.

This text could be seen as an enactment of trauma. There’s a sense in which all moments exist and are equally relevant at any time: the constant rattling of the ice cubes in a bucket becomes a sound track to the endless parental partying, “and we’ve missed it again, the tree-wafting, world-sleeping nightness of night”; the association of a chocolate bar with an incident of childhood sexual abuse; the teen’s voice declaring “Adults are not to be trusted. Not even priests. Especially not priests.”; and the breathlessness of the interspersed skydiving experience throughout the book. All of these contribute to the sense of a text so intense and fragile it is cracking in places, allowing space and time to mix and meld.

For some readers, secret spaces might be perceived, hidden between these prose poems and skydiving pieces, “places more intimate even than our own bodies”.

I find myself writing about the fact that some people have never had a tree, or a room or even a bed to themselves. They have lived every minute of their lives in the presence of others. But no matter where anyone is in the world, whatever their circumstance, they can go to this secret place, the most intimate thing we have, more intimate even than our bodies.

Although this is a unique work – auto-fiction in a flash-fiction format with an intense use of language and a fearless approach to content – there are two other books with which the themes of PTSD and the search for a place to belong resonate for me. Robin Robertson’s The Long Takealso uses poetry to portray trauma and PTSD. And Sarah Crossan’s The Weight of Water handles the story of a girl’s migration and search for a sense of belonging through a form of poetry. In McGlinchey’s work, she captures both these themes through a similarly hybrid form.

This book is a skydive from the first slap and a four-year-old and her brother on the run, wondering “how will I know my own home?” through numerous shifts of place, family issues, the impact of war on individuals and communities, through violence, racism, sexism, alcoholism, and finally, to the note passed by a stranger to Itosha: “If you tie yourself to anything, tie yourself to the wind.”

The brave reader dives in to these intense experiences, but this book lands you gently, if shaken, at the end. Your parachute is McGlinchey’s sure-wordedness and craft, her ability to catch the winds of language and fly us with her. Do not open this book lightly, but know that the experience will be well worth it.

1/11/2021

Fióna Bolger has lived in Ireland and India. Her first full collection was published in 2019 by Yoda Press, Delhi, A Compound of Words. Her grimoire, The Geometry of Love Between the Elements, was published by PB Press in 2013. She facilitates workshops on various aspects of poetry for all ages and stages. Her next collection is due out from Salmon Poetry in June 2022, Love in the Original Language. www.fionabolgerpoetry.com

Review in the Irish Examiner by Michael Duggan:

                                                              

Here’s a link to an interview for OUT FROM THE CITY (interview by Leah Mulcahy):

Out From the City, Out From the Country, Out From the Continent: An Interview with Afric McGlinchey

Here’s an interview with the author Nikki Dudley for her blog:

Hello!

Thanks for agreeing to appear in my newsletter / on my blog. 

Q: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your writing?

I live with my partner, an artist and poet, by the sea in a remote part of West Cork.  I’m a book editor, reviewer, workshop facilitator and mentor. So my life is all about the written word. When I’m not working, I’m reading other stuff and writing, walking and swimming. Lockdown has been easy for us, as not much about our life has changed. 

In terms of my writing habits, I don’t have a set rhythm or ritual, although I’m more likely to write in the morning. I hate the idea of being pigeon-holed, although there’s not much chance of that anyway,  as I’ve lived a pretty nomadic life, and don’t really fit into any of the Irish boxes. All I ask of myself is that every new book I write has a freshness to it, a new angle, different from my earlier work. Of course, one’s writing style or ‘voice’ is always going to be identifiable, like handwriting. No getting away from that!

Q: Which book/s have you read at least 3 times?

Well, I’ve read King Lear – my favourite Shakespeare play – at least six times, but as that was for study, maybe it doesn’t count? Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems, because I wrote my thesis on her work. Recently, I read the Canadian poet, Eva H.D.’s début, Perfect Rotten Mouth several times. Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Oh, and Amy Leach’s Things that Are. But I am such a bibliophile that usually I get to read  a book only once or maybe twice, because there are so many tantalising others queued up, waiting.

Q: Is there a writer you would love to meet? Who and why?

Impossible question! So many writers, so many reasons! Maybe James Joyce – a very complex character, probably fun when he was drinking. Because even though he was supremely selfish, his self-belief and his gigantic vision, intellect and ambition were spectacular – as well as his ability to win patrons, his courage, impulsiveness and sense of adventure,  his ability to absorb languages the way you absorb a tan in the sunshine. Joyce reminds me of my charismatic, alcoholic, musical, self-absorbed, adventurous father, whom I adored.

Q: What’s your least favourite part of the writing process?

Having to promote a new book. Although I do enjoy readings if there’s another poet reading with me. Much less pressure! 

Q: Which fictional character would you invite for a drink and what do you think you’d discuss?

I’d like to invite both Sugar and Agnes from Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. It was agony reading about Agnes’s continuing ingnorance of sexual matters, even periods, and I’d love to have a heart-to-heart with both of them about being women in those Victorian times, sharing with them how it is these days, discussing the dynamics between men and women then and now.

Q: How would you describe your writing style? Are you a plotter or a pantser? Do you write everyday or whenever the moment strikes you? 

A pantser. I binge write at first. Once the bones of a book are in place though, strategy comes into it.

Q: What advice would you give a new writer?

Seek out a mentor. Make friends with your local librarian, and request books. Read, read, read, not just Irish, but international writers, and outside your own genre too. Only submit poems you’re proud of to journals you admire (if you can’t afford to subscribe to them, you can access them in good libraries, or online). Always wait at least a month after writing a poem before sending it anywhere, because hopefully you’ll continue editing and improving it. Submit regularly to New Irish Writing and enter competitions. 

Q: What inspires you?

The sea. Swimming. The natural world. Dinner party conversations with good friends. Music. Art. Movies. New places. Flying. Love. Reading. 

Q: Which words/phrases do you overuse in your writing?

Honestly not sure. Just did a check on Wordcounter and the repeated words in an extended piece I’ve just written are: wind, light, sea, body. You can see where I’ve been spending lockdown!

Q: Tell us about your latest work. 

It’s called Tied to the Wind, and is an auto-fictional account of my nomadic childhood. My family moved back and forth between Ireland and Southern Africa, so it was difficult to attach, latch on, to have a sense of belonging. I wanted to re-enter that childhood space, to relive those moments. So I wrote in the present tense, with no advantage of enlightened adult hindsight. I wanted to meet the child I was, and get a sense of her and her perceptions. The I, in the story, is called Itosha. That distancing helped.

The constant moving triggers a sense of destabilisation, exacerbated by my father’s alcoholism, racism, war and the conflicts of complicit colonial privilege. Interwoven into the narrative are flash-forward puzzle pieces of a fateful decision to undertake a skydive, despite Itosha’s fear of heights. She wanted to shock everyone, including herself, to be an agent in her own life. And that impulsive act backfires. But she does learn something too.

I intended the narrative to be in the form of prose poems, but some critic is bound to argue that it’s no such thing. Of course, it depends on how you define a prose poem. I read the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, and the diversity of those poems is exhilarating. I also read Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – another one I’ve read a few times! My story isn’t as lyrically ‘heightened’ as that. But if I define a prose poem as having a certain compression, an atmosphere,  as having its own entity, who’s to contradict me?

Q: Where can we find out more about you and/or your book?

Here’s a link my book on the Broken Sleep Books website, where you can order the book:

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/afric-mcglinchey-tied-to-the-wind

And here’s a link to my website: www.africmcglinchey.com

Twitter handle: @itosha

Thank you for your questions, Nikki. It’s been fun.

Here’s a link to Nikki Dudley’s website: https://www.nikkidudleywriter.com/blog/speaking-to-afric-mcglinchey-about-her-new-collection

*****

A Journalist in uMlazi by Nick Mulgrew

(Warning: This is a triggering poem.)

He was a journalist for ten years. During his training,
he was sent to uMlazi D Section. It was raining.
With mentor and broken Zulu he searched on the roadside
for anyone who knew of a girl who had been raped
by a man in the dark in a bush by the path by the stream.

He couldn’t believe he would find that girl. He’d had a dream
his work might be meaningful; but there might be no meaning
in the diagonal world of green and mist and keening
people, who stared at him like the interloper he was.
Hubristic boy, stunned sun-god caught with his ear in the conch.

The first person he spoke to, though, stood right next to the girl.
The second person he spoke to was the girl. But which girl?
the girl asked. There were five girls, in fact, with eight-ball eyes each,
each wandering this neighbourhood in their mauve matric hoodies.
They’d each been attacked on their way home from extra classes.

She took a maze of paths, showed him the dent in the grasses.
Yes, this is where it happened, she said, unable to blink
away tears from swelling, and welling she began to shrink
within herself. The journalist nodded, wrote in shorthand;
in his best impression of someone who could understand.

The girl said she knew who he was. They all knew who he was.
Yes, he’d raped at least five girls her age. They knew who he was.
She had told laughing policewomen. They knew who he was.
The journalist asked, therefore, if could he write who he was.
No—due to legal reasons, he would not write who he was.

He was a journalist for ten years. This was his first day.
His mother picked him up from work; the next she did the same.

Da Yanhe — My Wet Nurse

Da Yanhe, is my wet nurse. Her name is the name of her village where she was born, She is a childbride, Da Yanhe, is my wet nurse.
I am a landlord’s son; I am also Da Yanhe’s son Who has brought me up by breastfeeding me. Da Yanhe raises her family by raising me, And I have been raised by drinking your milk, Da Yanhe, my wet nurse.
Da Yanhe, the snow today reminds me of you: Your grass-covered grave covered with snow, Your withered tile-plant on the eaves of your closed house, Your plot of land of ten square chi mortgaged, Your stone bench grown with moss before your house, Da Yanhe, the snow I see today reminds me of you.
You embraced me in your arms and stroked me with your large hands; After you had the burning faggots ready, After you cleaned the soot on your apron, After you tasted whether the rice was well cooked, After you placed the dark sauce-bowl on the dark table, After you mended your sons’ clothes torn by thorns on the mountains, After you wrapped your youngest son’s hand wounded by a faggot-knife, After you nipped the lice one by one on your husband’s and sons’ clothes, After you picked up the first egg today, You embraced me in your arms and stroked me with your large hands.
I am a landlord’s son; After I had sulked all milk of you Da Yanhe, I was taken back to my own home by my parents. Alas! Da Yanhe, why did you weep?
I was now a new member of my own parents’ family! I felt the lacquered and cared furniture, I felt the golden patterns of the bed of my parents, I gazed at the board inscribed with Tianlunxule which I did not understand on the eaves, I felt the silk and pearly buttons of the new clothes I began to wear, I watched my strange sister in the arms of my mother, I sat on the lacquered bench equipped with a bowl of cinder, I ate the rice rolled for three times, But, I felt so strange and upset! Because I I was now a new member of my own parents’ family.
To make a living, Da Yanhe Started laboring with her arms that used to embrace me After she had used up her breast-milk; With a smile, she washed our clothes, With a smile, she went to the nearby pool with a basket of vegetables, With a smile, she minced the ice-covered radish, With a smile, she drew out the wheat dregs for pig food with her hands, With a smile, she fanned the fire in the stove on which pork was stewed, With a smile, she took the winnowing fan to the threshing ground      To insolate those beans and wheat, To make a living, Da Yanhe Started laboring with her arms that used to embrace me After she had used up her breast-milk.
Da Yanhe, deeply loved this son she breastfed; On festivals, for him, she busied herself cutting the sugared rice-lump, For him to stealthily visit her home near the village, For him to call her “ma” at her side, Da Yanhe put up the portrait of Guan Yunchang painted in fabulous color      On the wall of her kitchen,Da Yanhe would praise this son she breastfed to her neighborhood; Da Yanhe had a dream which couldn’t be told to others: In her dream, she enjoyed the wedding wine of her breastfed son, Sitting in the hall brilliant with red lanterns, She was dearly called “Ma” by her beautiful new daughter-in-law,………

Da Yanhe, deeply loved this son she breastfed! Da Yanhe died before she woke up from her dream. When she died, her breastfed son was not by her side, When she died, her husband who beat and criticized her also shed tears for her, Her own five sons, each in tears, When she died, she gently called her breastfed son’s name, Da Yanhe, has died, When she died, her breastfed son was not by her side.
Da Yanhe, gone in tears! With the insult of human life for some forty years, With numerous sufferings of being a slave, With a coffin bought with four yuan and some bunches of rice stalks, With some square feet of burial place, With a handful of money-ashes, Da Yanhe, she was gone in tears.
And this is what Da Yanhe did not know: Her drunken husband had died, Her first son became a bandit, Her second died in the smoke of gun-fire, And her third, fourth and fifth sons Living in the scolding of their masters or landlords. And I, I am writing a curse for this unjust world. When I return to my homeland after long drift, In the waist of the mountain and in the field, We feel closer than six or seven years ago when we brothers meet! This, this is for you, Da Yanhe in slumber You do not know this!
Da Yanhe, your breastfed son in prison today,Is writing a psalm for you, For your soul underground, For your outstretched hands that embraced me, For your lips that kissed me, For your dark and mild face, For your breasts that raised me, For your sons, my brothers, For all wet nurses like Da Yanhe and their sons On this vast land, For Da Yanhe who loved me as she loved her own sons.
Da Yanhe, I am your son Brought up by sulking your breast-milk, I respect you And love you!

Ai Qing (1910—1996), originally named Jiang Haicheng, was a native of Jinhua County, Zhejiang Province. In 1928, he was enrolled in the state-run West Lake Art School. In the next year, he went to study inParis, France. In 1932, he returned to China, and joined China’s Federation of the Leftwing Fine Artists. In the July of the same year, he was arrested. He was freed in 1935. he went to Yan’an in 1941. he was the editor-in-chief of The Poetic Journal (Yan’an edition). After 1949, he was deputy editor-in-chief of People’s Literature, vice chairman of Chinese Writers’ Association, vice president of the Center of Chinese Writingand a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. His major works include Da Yanhe, Towards the Sun, Torch, He Died in the Second Try, North, The Notice of Dawn, On the Sea Cape, The Song of Return, and Selected Poems of Ai Qing (collections of poems), etc. he was also the author the monographs On Poetics and Essays on New Art and Literature. His poems have been translated into dozens of foreign languages.                                                            (Tr. by Yang Xu)

Autumn by Adam Zagajewski

TRANSLATED BY RENATA GORCZYNSKI

Autumn is always too early. The peonies are still blooming, bees    are still working out ideal states, and the cold bayonets of autumn    suddenly glint in the fields and the wind rages. What is its origin? Why should it destroy    dreams, arbors, memories? The alien enters the hushed woods,    anger advancing, insinuating plague;    woodsmoke, the raucous howls of Tatars. Autumn rips away leaves, names,    fruit, it covers the borders and paths,    extinguishes lamps and tapers; young    autumn, lips purpled, embraces    mortal creatures, stealing their existence. Sap flows, sacrificed blood, wine, oil, wild rivers, yellow rivers swollen with corpses, the curse flowing on: mud, lava, avalanche,    gush. Breathless autumn, racing, blue knives glinting in her glance. She scythes names like herbs with her keen    sickle, merciless in her blaze and her breath. Anonymous letter, terror,    Red Army.

In the seventh year by Jackie Kay

• 

Our sea is still mysterious as morning mist

its flapping arms stretched out for dry sand

its running heels sliding over pebbles

when the sun dives in at night

We are turquoise and clear some days

still as a breeze; others story like stones

you are in deep stroking my bones

my love an ache, the early light

spreading the water

seven years seven years I repeat

over and over

clasping this timeless, this changing thing.

Someone asked for a brief analysis of this poem: I see it as a love poem to ‘Louise’, where the sea is perceived as a body with ‘flapping arms’ and ‘running heels’. The lovers are compared to the ocean: ‘we are turquoise and clear some days…’. It’s a poem that describes the physical act of making love: ‘you are in deep, stroking my bones’, and we get the sense that this is an anniversary: ‘seven years seven years’. The images flow into each other, so ‘this timeless, this changing thing’ could be seen to refer both to the beloved, Louise, and also to the nature of love itself. It’s a poem worth rereading over and over for the beautiful way the sea and their love overlap.