Where the Wind Sleeps: New & Selected Poems

By: Noel Monahan

€14.00

In a secular post-national Ireland, Noel Monahan strives to belong somewhere, always searching to find home. A series of meditative sonnets takes him to the stillness of ruins of medieval monasteries on the islands of Lough Ree. Here, the ether of the past generates poetic energy. In this in-between world, the past lingers in the “slow noise of old ways dying”. Yet, Monahan’s territory is everywhere. He extends the param...

Pub Date	Thursday, May 01, 2014
Cover Image	Pádraig Lynch
Page Count	172
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In a secular post-national Ireland, Noel Monahan strives to belong somewhere, always searching to find home. A series of meditative sonnets takes him to the stillness of ruins of medieval monasteries on the islands of Lough Ree. Here, the ether of the past generates poetic energy. In this in-between world, the past lingers in the “slow noise of old ways dying”. Yet, Monahan’s territory is everywhere. He extends the parameters of Irishness, shifts from writing in English to Irish. He gives us a modern Irish version of the Mad Sweeney story. He engages with Europe: Pessoa’s Lisbon, Budapest, Sardinia’s Nuraghi culture. Where the Wind Sleeps: New & Selected Poems features selections from five previous collections, published over twenty-three years, as well as new work and gives us an intriguing insight into Monahan’s observations at the edges of time and place.

Noel Monahan

Noel Monahan is a native of Granard, Co. Longford, now living in Cavan. He has published seven earlier collections of poetry with Salmon Poetry, with an eight collection, Celui Qui Porte Un Veau, a selection of French translations of his work, published in France by Alidades in 2014. A selection of Italian translations of his poetry, Tra Una Vita E L’Altra, was published in Milan by Guanda in 2015. His poetry was prescribed text for the Leaving Certificate English, 2011 to 2012. His play Broken Cups won the RTE P.J. O’Connor award in 2001 and in 2019 his long poem, Chalk Dust, was adapted for stage and directed by Padraic McIntyre for Ramor Theatre. During Covid-19 lockdown in 2021, Noel reinvented his poetry readings by producing a selection of short films entitled Isolation & Creativity, Still Life, Tolle Lege and A Poetry Day Ireland Reading for Cavan Library. Recently, Noel edited Chasing Shadows, a miscellany of poetry for Creative Ireland. Journey Upstream is his ninth poetry collection.

Where the Wind Sleeps

Something will come to you in a dream that

Will help you find your way in abandoned places.

Here, the wind sleeps with nettles and briars

In half-empty walls and the owl hatches

Her chicks in the belfry. Here apparitions

Of monks in off-white habits sleepwalk

Holding empty skulls in their hands and listening

To the slow noise

Of old ways dying.

Each in his solitude finds dereliction,

Prayer that does not rest on words but lives

In darkness and out of the depths of night

Heaven falls like snow on a linen altar,

Two candles burn, carnations as white as

Children’s teeth are little nails of glory and grief.

Nuraghi Fields

i.m. Seamus Heaney

When they buried you in Bellaghy

I was somewhere else, out here

In Alghero, climbing the nuraghi fields

Where stones and more stones stand,

Life hardly changes, bushes bend

With the ways of the wind, sheep rest,

Tomatoes, figs are laid out to dry.

Up here with plants,

animals and wind,

I picked blackberries in your honour,

Gave voice to the lines from the poem:

Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not,

Down from the mountainside, I lit a candle

At La Chiesa Misericordiae, dipped my finger

In the font of mercy.

Opposite Walls

The Battle of Mons

Hung on the wall,

A black and white print,

With the Ninth Lancers charging

Horses’ eyeballs wild with war,

Fierce spikes on the German helmets.

Across from Mons

On the opposite wall

A print of the 1916 Rising,

Sandbags piled in the windows,

Connolly on a stretcher, Pearse’s side-face

Pale with the thought of surrender.

“The Kaiser Kelly fought

In both wars”, my father said.

Every time I sat down to eat

I saw him leave Mons

Hurdle over plates, sugar and milk,

Across the table

To be in Dublin for the rising.

Review: John McAuliffe reviews Where the Wind Sleeps: New & Selected Poems for THE IRISH TIMES, Saturday, June 7th 2014

SHOCK OF THE NEW IN SELECTED POEMS …

Noel Monahan reviewed alongside Harry Clifton, Tom Paulin, Paul Perry

A selected poems offers not just a useful way to gauge the continuities and changes in a poet’s work but also a different vantage point on the broad field of Irish poetry in recent decades.

Noel Monahan’s Where The Wind Sleeps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, €14) collects work from five previous collections and a substantial set of new poems. Monahan’s poems are sociable and realist, and readers will recognise the world he describes and his perspective on it.

An extract from Diary of a Town simply goes around the houses, juxtaposing “ Mary Verdon is dreaming of dying before Christmas / But that happens every year” with “Busty Mahety joins Hughie Small and The Danger Smith / In the Star Bar”, while The Funeral Game surreally remembers a childhood game, “ John Joe beat the dead march on a saucepan. // We held wakes, issued death certificates / To old crows, kittens, chickens.”

The more recent work is smoother but less distinctive: the funerals and elegies are real now, which may be why the poems feel toned down.