Available for pre-order - we will ship orders from 20th March 2024
Ago is a richly detailed and elegantly crafted exploration of mutability fine tuned to the times andplaces where the men and women brought to life here have loved and lived. The luminous, wise, and moving poems—in form and language recalling Dickinson, Hopkins, Kinsella, among others—transport us to the heart of deep time and experience across the Midwest, New England, and Ireland.
Eamonn Wall author of Junction City (2015)
Ago pays homage to those in life who have been “caught” in mortality’s net. With the luster and simplicity of a fine glaze on a porcelain bowl, these poems capture luminous moments from an ongoing darkness that “we will travel into but not return from.”
Leslie Miller author of Y (2012)
Thomas Dillon Redshaw employs concise and lucid form to great effect, intertwining the rigor of a particular American strain with something close to the lyric order of Irish poetry. Among his poetic gifts are eloquence, insight, directness. He fetches images from his own local, familiar Midwest scenes with the same intensity of feeling with which he looks at works of art.
Gerard Smyth author of The Sundays of Eternity (2020)
THOMAS DILLON REDSHAW (b. 1944) is the author of Heimaey, The Floating World, Mortal, and fugitive broadsides and chapbooks. Raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts, he first encountered living Irish poetry in the impromptu readings of Desmond O’Grady in Cronin’s, behind Harvard. He studied poetry with X.J. Kennedy, John Montague, and M.L. Rosenthal. He studied Irish writing with Roger McHugh and David H. Greene. His poems have appeared in American little magazines and, mainly, in such Irish publications as Cyphers, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, and the Irish Times. He edited Well Dreams: Essays on John Montague (2004) and served as editor of Éire-Ireland (1974-1996) and New Hibernia Review (1996-2006), both of whose pages featured contemporary Irish poetry. From 2000 through 2008 he edited the series of fine press printings of Irish poetry from Traffic Street Press in St. Paul, Minnesota.
HORIZON
Our first fields were flat as cloud,
brown as the clouds were gray, wetter
than the rain the clouds gave, yet where
that light rose always but did not burn
there was a straight edge where strangers
stood still again, their blue cloaks
nearly whispering in the wind they followed,
so we moved – bones stiff with the cold,
the muscles of our thighs and backs glistening –
we moved naked and cold, and they started
off into that light again, and we went after them,
so you might have seen us stop, move off,
you might have watched us bury our skins,
our packs of grain and meat one by one
under oaken staves marking our ground,
you might have tracked our bare feet
as we waited silently for one of them to drop
off what we discovered to be an horizon,
to fall off into dark earth and sink away
leaving one of us a tumble of blue cloth or
an amulet we might swear and bleed over.
That was how so few of us came to this sea
and saw them float brightly away into a sun
that for the first time grew all round, all gold.
ULLARD STEPS
One brown, one white, two mares
stand off as I walk their churned ground
up the hill toward the stile.
Three stone steps up, then over.
I put a foot wrong & go down
like a bag of coal, shoulder first,
then face down,
silent in the moss
at the edge of the road, the breath
gone out of me.
Deep in that space
waters slip that fill a stone well below
& hoof prints in the circuit
where the ground is soft.
OUR FATHER
No longer could he curve the letters
of his name on a used envelope or
fill out the right line of a check.
He asked her.
He had found her child’s Bible
in the bookrack that ended in owls.
Standing in her bedroom that night
he held it out to her. Would she
write it out for him, that famous
petition? Those words that everyone
knows?
She wrote it out from memory
on a steno pad she kept in the kitchen.
He kept it folded in a drawer next his bed,
in a drawer he never opened.
