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Dreampaths Of A Runaway |
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| Louise C. Callaghan |
ISBN: 978-1-910669-89-1 Page Count: 84 Publication Date: Thursday, May 18, 2017 Cover Artwork: Perro Semihundido / The Half-Buried Dog by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain |
About this Book
“A quality of natural-seeming grace is perhaps the most affecting thing about Louise C. Callaghan’s poems. The grace of a river flowing smoothly into the past, its waters sunlit but containing dark and possibly disturbing depths.”
At the heart of her fourth collection, Louise C. Callaghan focuses on the last days of her dying mother,
Mother dying, is looking for signs.
And now she has gone beyond
personality, no longer concerned
with who we are…
In these five poems of ‘Our Daily Practice’, the voice is lyrical, restrained and searching.
The volume also contains a series of fourteen poems about Fransisco de Goya. Both in the prelude, ‘Portrait of Mańuel Osorio de Zuńiga’,
You know the one, the dark-haired child
with a bird tied to a length of thread…
and the series, ‘Ears for the Deaf Man’, details of his life as court painter are fused with his daily life in the terrible years of early nineteenth century Spain. There is in these poems a simplicity of images and plain statement of stark emotion:
So recently dead
they still gleam
with life.
‘Still Life With Golden Bream’
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Author Biography
Louise C. Callaghan was born in 1948 and brought up in County Dublin, Ireland. She now lives in Dublin, close to her four children and many grandchildren. Her poetry collections are In the Ninth House (Salmon,2010), The Puzzle-Heart (Salmon, 1999) and Remember The Birds (Salmon, 2005). She compiled and edited Forgotten Light: An Anthology of Memory Poems (A & A Farmar, 2003). Her poetry, which is widely anthologised in Ireland and England, is included in the Field Day Anthology: Vols IV & V. She completed an M.Litt in Creative Writing at St. Andrews University in Scotland (2007). |
Read a sample from this book
Hallucinations
All afternoon the wind blows lightly
on the curtain, a gentle breeze,
in and out, in and out.
Lying in her bed in the dim room
she watches curtains breathe
in and out, in and out.
No one there, only shadows
of the great horse chestnut
on patterned cotton.
Was it Summer, maybe June,
for pale candles had dropped their bloom,
sometime during the Summer…
But who in the world to care?
The child reads deeper into the shapes,
sees over and over, a leaving car.
Insomniac
Bishop, in her sixties, played ping-pong
in the hallway of her Brattle Street flat.
She had to stand well back to serve,
skittering from side to side across
its polished parquet-wood floor.
According to Lowell’s young friend,
Kathleen, playing at the other end,
Elizabeth was good. I picture her
in a pair of black leather trousers
in low-heeled, slip-on shoes…
The poc-poc-poc-sound, like coughs
as they played late into the winter night.
Rock & Stone
All the same
I’m going back
to find the field
of a single haystack,
the fuchsia hedge
I lay beneath
blanketed for a night
by woven air
and high black sky.
In my mind’s eye
everywhere is squared
by rock and stone.
Oh I must go back,
to see if anything,
even a word,
can be redeemed.
Copyright © Louise C. Callaghan 2017
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