‘This debut collection is of a poet confidently staking claim to attention, a new voice with a crisp poetry writing style that delights in originality. Paul Bregazzi teases readers with a witty and subtle “14 Ways to Eat a Poet,” while also offering fragments, stones, tickets, trinkets and feathers for a poetic “archeology of love.” “Carrying my father” is a powerful marker of territory this poet inhabits with confident originality. A scatter of haiku hold the eye and drum up a conversation across the pages on which the poet drapes his wind-blown scripts, letting the white space flutter around them. There is the sheer triumph of “Blade Smithing Day at Blessington Forge”… one could list many gems of power here; through the collection, each poem develops an accumulative process, like bees gather pollen. These sixty-five poems announce a formidable Dublin voice among Ireland’s contemporary poets.”
Seamus Cashman
‘Paul Bregazzi’s meditations on the natural world are vividly original; he is one of the few poets who can truly make nature new. In Hex, he honours his love of history and humanity by aligning that love with unadorned tenderness, for individuality and for its loss. Sharp, deep, empathic, and funny, the poems in this collection are a language lover’s delight; this poetry sparkles while cutting through – and uplifting – the mundane reality of what it means to move through a life.”
Nuala O’Connor
‘In Hex, Paul Bregazzi treats us to a “slap-up gorgepoemfest.” These are poems to return to, vivid in their observations of humans and animals. Memorably, a maths teacher’s arm takes off “like some/elegant bird into his calculation.” Elsewhere, a hedgehog is “a medieval machine of war.” Throughout, the complex, often funny experience of being alive is celebrated in poetry where the blade of language is “hammered true.”’
Enda Wyley
‘Paul Bregazzi’s poems are witty, tender and intelligent. An excellent wordsmith, he offers us a smorgasbord of words and sounds, animates nature with striking descriptions and deals with memory with a resonating tenderness, controlling his lines all the way down…to paraphrase Robert Frost, “his poems ride on their own melting”.’
Jean O’Brien
Paul Bregazzi was born and bred in Dublin. His poetry has been published, broadcast and anthologised widely and has been awarded and shortlisted in numerous competitions including: Rialto Nature, the Bridport, Bailieborough, Ledwidge, Magma Editor’s Prize, Touchstone Haiku of the Year (U.S.) and the Genjuan International Haibun Competition (Japan). He was selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introduction Series in 2015 and won the Cúirt New Writing Prize for Poetry 2017. He is a member of the four-man collaborative collective Quarterman, was a co-founder with Daragh Bradish of the Listeners literary group and serves as an Assistant Editor with The Haibun Journal. He was the recipient of a South Dublin Co. Council Tyrone Guthrie Centre residency in 2018 and the Words Ireland Mentorship programme in 2019. He received an Arts Council Agility Award in 2023.
Goldfinch
The straggled skin of the goldfinch
we fed for weeks on black seed
lay on the muddled path after the downpour.
Rain-scragged plumage dragged into quill points
each writing the quenched fire of a half bird,
the failed spark of some guttered pyre.
His tiny cape of streelish feathers
spatchcocked on the marl,
his small red mask, the peeping
wingstreak of yellow, gave off
the flittering joy he had given us.
I couldn’t tell you he has gone;
just as I can’t tell you we are a thing
torn in half, dragged onto
death, cold as wet ash.
Leave Taking
September, and her house nearly clear.
Successive visits of sorting, packing,
charity shops, recycling, dump.
Finding her in chains of necklaces,
hangars of blouses and dresses.
Handmarks on doors from midnight
wanderings, screw holes from handrails,
shadow of the stairlift.
Bouquets of flowers in the windows,
their plastic petals needing a Flash rinse.
On the bare dresser; St Anthony,
now headless, jars of change, a passport
used for the funeral of her last sister.
The pair of them, thick as sisters, beam
from the sole remaining photo
sellotaped to the fridge.
With no bread bin for the backdoor key,
toss it on the empty dresser.
Pull the door behind you.
Sam Whippet
For he is whippet of the race of gaze hounds.
For he is embroiled in muscle unless
he is being the cat prince ensconced
on someone else’s favourite chair.
Wind is in him – he overtakes it
yet will not stir out the door to meet it.
Yet meeting it out on the green or in the wood
he will chase and turn it tearing
out his angling dew claws on his carved reverb.
Squirrels are his sworn nemesis
from some ancestral feud.
When he comes upon a drey he halloos all his kin
to its destruction till he be taken from the fray
in a writhing mass of sinew and bowstring.
Rain he will not abide on his countenance
but regally shiver till a bondservant
gives him ingress, plies him with his cloak
as he takes his throne.
The above poems are Copyright © Paul Bregazzi, 2023
