Your ten-year-old self is here
A little ball is here
# Beesmoke flows up in the blue: You have released me, mortal, name your wish!
Your ten-year-old self spreads his arms wide in the manner of a goal-keeper.
He is guarding the fireplace for all he is worth!

You hear the wind slumping up and down the chimney.

Your ten-year-old self asks: Want to play!?

 

                                                                                                        from ‘MUDe’

MUDs are Multi-User Dimensions, online worlds created by language alone. In a collection that throws Irish poetry into the electronic age, John Redmond explores the Internet and car culture, MUDs and moods. New forms of post-industrial community enable us to co-exist facelessly across time and distance, connected but solitary in the virtual realities of the motorway and the Internet. In the title poem, the reader becomes game-player in Redmond’s fictional MUD, where a traditional Irish landscape blurs with fantasy elements. Redmond creates a new kind of poetry from the online world’s fissiparous language, elliptical, self-interrupting, and fizzing with invention.




Cover photograph Nathan Lankford, Florida &16th © 2008 Cover design StephenRaw.com