In honour of St Patrick’s Day, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘B-Aisling’ by Eoghan Walls, one of our Irish poets, from his collection Pigeon Songs.
Friday Poem – ‘B-Aisling’ by Eoghan Walls
Eoghan Walls
Friday Poem – ‘The Dance of Ararat’ by Eoghan Walls
Our first Friday Poem of 2021 is ‘The Dance of Ararat’ by Eoghan Walls from his collection Pigeon Songs which was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2020.
Pigeon Songs follows on from Walls’ much-praised debut, The Salt Harvest. From the first poem, we have a sense of the poet’s themes and preoccupations: we have a richly metaphorical and densely allusive style, a pull towards formal metre and structures. There is also the occasional vigorous vulgarity, adding a touch of blue humour to the canvas, breaking up the formal rigour. Family is a potent presence in poems inspired by parents, grandparents, partners, children. They often emit a sort of energy, a fierce gravitational pull of emotion around the burning heart of a poem ultimately about love, or the sorrow of losing a loved-one.
Pigeon Songs is available on the Seren website: £9.99.
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See Eoghan read from Pigeon Songs and The Salt Harvest in this event from the Seren Stay-at-Home Series.
Friday Poem – ‘Angry Birds’, Eoghan Walls
This week our Friday Poem is the opening number from Eoghan Walls’ forthcoming second collection, Pigeon Songs – ‘Angry Birds’.
Pigeon Songs follows on from Walls’ much-praised debut, The Salt Harvest. From the first poem, we have a sense of the poet’s themes and preoccupations: we have a richly metaphorical and densely allusive style, a pull towards formal metre and structures. There is also the occasional vigorous vulgarity, adding a touch of blue humour to the canvas, breaking up the formal rigour. Family is a potent presence in poems inspired by parents, grandparents, partners, children. They often emit a sort of energy, a fierce gravitational pull of emotion around the burning heart of a poem ultimately about love, or the sorrow of losing a loved-one.
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Friday Poem – ‘On the Sudden Passing of a Crow’, Eoghan Walls
Happy Friday, everyone. This week our Friday Poem is taken from Eoghan Walls’ debut collection, The Salt Harvest. Eoghan has just been shortlisted for the prestigious Manchester Poetry Prize – so do send all your good luck his way.
Dark and evocative, the poems in The Salt Harvest involve rich, multi-layered descriptions of the natural world, and cast a sardonic and tender eye on the human condition. The climates of Walls’ native Ireland inspire both the muscular imagery and the complex forms of work. Also apparent is an ambivalent, often deeply ironic attitude towards a culture once steeped in religion, whilst threads of humour and an imaginative playfulness run throughout.
The Salt Harvest is available from the Seren website: £8.99 (£7.19 for Book Club members)
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Friday Poem – Requiem for a Requiem Shark
This week’s poem is from Eoghan Walls’ debut collection, The Salt Harvest, shortlisted for the 2012 DLR Strong Award.
Dark and evocative, these poems involve rich, multi-layered descriptions of the natural world, and cast a sardonic and tender eye on the human condition. All the climates of his native Ireland inspire both the muscular imagery and the complex forms of work such as ‘Star of the Sea’, ‘Cockles’ and the title poem; each line has been ‘packed with ore’. Also apparent is an ambivalent, often deeply ironic attitude towards a culture once steeped in religion, as in ‘Myrrh’ and ‘Confessions to the Southwest’. Threads of humour run throughout, an imaginative playfulness evident in ‘Martin Healey’s War on God and Ireland’, ‘Frog’ and ‘Star Matter’.
Requiem for a Requiem Shark
The necropsy left no doubt; this was a miracle of death.
Unpeeled from her womb lay the body of the christpup,
teeth crusting out its mouth, with a dorsel fin the breadth
of a thumbnail, tipped in black. The finprint of its makeup,
said Dr. Chapman, proved the non-existence of a father.
Angelsharks burrowed deeper into the ocean bottom.
There was no rising afterwards. Lights above the water
were only torches held by men from the aquarium.
