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Falling into Monaghan / Gerald Hull

Falling into Monaghan

By: Gerald Hull

€8.88 €5.00
Falling into Monaghan is a study of the poet's 'settlement in the west' - in South Ulster on the border territory near the Slieve Beagh mountains. It deals with the consciousness of a kind of desolation that is sometimes bitter, often vigorous, frequently comic. Filtered through this, uniquely, are commentaries on Gerry Hull's London Irish/Italian background. 'you know these people ... the...
ISBN 1 897648 53 7
Pub Date Friday, January 01, 1999
Cover Image Brenda Dermody
Page Count 96
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Falling into Monaghan is a study of the poet's 'settlement in the west' - in South Ulster on the border territory near the Slieve Beagh mountains. It deals with the consciousness of a kind of desolation that is sometimes bitter, often vigorous, frequently comic. Filtered through this, uniquely, are commentaries on Gerry Hull's London Irish/Italian background.

'you know these people ... there's a kindness there that comes through the study'
John Montague

'this is valuable work'  
James Simmons

'this will delight - and frighten a lot of people'
Noel Monahan

Gerald Hull

Gerald Hull comes from a 'mixed generation' Irish-American family in London  and has lived in Ireland for over twenty years, settling in Fivemiletown in Tyrone. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Wales and in recent years has been associated with the Pushkin Prize, Oliver Goldsmith and William Carleton International Summer Schools. He is poetry editor for The Spark Review in Fermanagh and Northern Correspondent for Windows and First Edition. Gerry Hull has read throughout Ireland and gained bursaries from Poetry Ireland and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. He is widely published and, fitting for one whose poetry is fixated on the border counties, was guest editor for the acclaimed South-West edition of The Honest Ulsterman (HU). This is his first full collection.

Falling Into Monaghan

for Margaret

'No hospitality is dangerous because
of the suspicion of murder.'
     - Gerald of Wales

A spirit stung your heel between mists,
laminate hexed will:  a Tara evening, morning
in Tyrone.  Your family would pluck us back,
you three parts Eurydice.  We turned from
Tudor Park to horses, the old railway.

And penetrated high ground.  Aeolus loud
with harmonica, falling into Monaghan,
a Land of Cockaigne.  Teasing hard at
Newbliss, Aughnacloy:  street signs in
bars, their photos of seedsmen fresh
in our minds.  The unknown over hills,
far away; switchbridges, lines awry.
Un-British, a giddy vertigo where cars
hobbled off, bicycles waved and colours
ran ill-defined.

Returning up a scabbed border by Drumfurrer
we smelt the dead, the cattle unburied.
People had emptied, dark holding down.

Then shock of reeling light spread copper
over backing plains.  Our heads roared with gold;
translated into birds we fell to a drowning moon.
Countrymen's words gripped our clowning, on
through a hundred townlands.
Annaghmakerrig 1996

© Copyright Gerald Hull, 1999


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