The Next Poem

My next poem is quite short and it’s about something most of you will recognise. It came out of an experience I had on holidays a couple of years ago. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m correct in saying that it’s the only poem I’ve ever managed to write during my holidays, if you could have called this a holiday – it bore all the hallmarks of an endurance test.

There’s a reference in the poem to roller canaries, which become more or less mythical birds in the last line. I hope the context will make that clear. Incidentally, this poem has gone down extremely well in Swedish translation – which maybe reveals a bit about me! A word I’d better gloss is ‘schizont’; if I can locate the slip of paper, I’ll give you the dictionary definition. Yes, here we are: ‘a cell formed from a trophozoite during the asexual stage of the life cycle of protozoans of the class Sporozoa’.

OK then, I’ll read this and just two or three further sequences before I finish. By the way, I should perhaps explain that the title is in quotations. It’s something I discovered in a book on early mosaics; I wanted to get across the idea of diversity and yet unity at the same time, especially with an oriental, as it were, orientation. And I need hardly tell this audience which of my fellow-poets is alluded to in the phrase ‘dainty mountaineer’ in the second section. Anyway, here it is. Oh, I nearly forgot to mention that the repetition of the word ‘nowy’ is deliberate. As I said, it’s quite short. And you have to picture it set out on the page as five sonnet-length trapezoids. Here’s the poem.
 

Dennis O’Driscoll is among the finest and most popular poets of his generation. New and Selected Poems shows him to be a poet of humanity and wit whose observant, rhythmically supple poetry is attuned to the tragedies and comedies of contemporary life. One of the book’s highlights is ‘The Bottom Line’, a multi-voiced and multifaceted portrait of business managers and bureaucrats.

Closing with a generous selection of previously unpublished work, New and Selected Poems – which follows Dennis O’Driscoll’s acclaimed Exemplary Damages, chosen as a Book of the Year by Seamus Heaney in 2002 – makes for a compelling collection, wide in its appeal and yet imbued with a distinctive and often startling world-view.