A Midgie

John McAuliffe

£5

978-1-906613-18-1

John McAuliffe has published two books with The Gallery Press, A Better Life and Next Door. His poems have been published in Best Irish Poems 2008 & 2010, Cork Literary Review, Gallous, Icarus, International Literary Quarterly, The Irish Times, The Meath Anthology, The North,  Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, PN Review, The Spectator, The Stinging Fly, and The Watchful Heart.

He was born in 1973 and grew up in Listowel, Co. Kerry. He lives in Manchester, where he co-directs the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester and edits the Manchester Review and the online poetry digest thepage.name.

In Spring 2010 he was Visiting Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University.

CONTINUITY

The wind sails leaves around the house like late notices
for the garden’s deterioration. Turn a blind eye.
RTE longwave announces gigs in familiar venues,
I like the presenter’s comfortable thoughts of tonight
and the day after, until, that is, he introduces
The Holy Land by the Bothy Band then veers
into advertising a poetry broadsheet and a silver plate,
before attacking quote the crimson tides
and purple mountains end quote someone (who?)
might waste their money on instead in Woolworth’s.
There’s a snatch of a shipping forecast and
I’m unloading the dishwasher when I hear a new voice,
which strands me by announcing, ‘This is The Archive Hour.
And that was The Long Note 30 years ago today’
out of earshot as I am of the autumn sun and rain
which the radio forecast, too, on this hour that’s gone
south with its silver plate, its piano and bodhran,
where, in Woolworth’s, a crimson tide progresses
beneath a purple mountain and someone hums a reel:
he knows the start of it but puts a question mark
against the title: it’s ‘The Holy Ground’ but he doesn’t join the dots.
He has places to go. There will be time again for names and dates,
for taking it all down, for credits, for footnotes.

— John McAuliffe, A Midgie (Smith/Doorstop, 2010)