Seamus Harrington

Seamus Harrington has been a regular reader at the White House Poetry Revival readings.

Michael Gallagher

Michael Gallagher was born on Achill Island, worked in London for forty years and now lives in Co. Kerry. His poetry, prose and songs have been published in journals and anthologies throughout Europe, America, Canada, Australia, Japan, India, Thailand and Nepal. His work has been translated into  Croatian, Japenese, Dutch, German.and Chinese His short stories have been long-listed by both RTE and BBC. He won the 2010 Eigse Michael Hartnett viva voce competition and was shortlisted for the 2011 Hennessy Award. In 2012 he won the Desmond O'Grady International Poetry Contest. He has also edited a number of poetry and prose books and is editor of thefirstcut, an online literary journal. 

His poetry collection 'Stick on Stone' (Revival Press), was launched at Listowel Writer's Week in 2013.

POEM

(1)

STICK ON STONE

We knew each other only as men

Emigration saw to that:

Him in London, me in Achill

Me in London, him in Luton.

Even living together, we remained

Strangers in a rented room,

Speaking, not talking,

Robbed of our relative roles.

Sure, there were memories –

One golden Dukinella day

When Mick the Yank, called;

We straddled a low stone wall,

Talked of Wimpy and McAlpine,

Roads and bridges,

Digs and pubs;

The boy was man!

A lunchtime booze in Wandsworth;

Three of us now living in London,

Yet chatting only the once.

Inheritance was split, spoils divided,

Unequally, but with good humour,

Paraic was always his favourite – and mine.

Nights in Castlebar hospital

After the emigrant’s dreaded summons:

“Come now, while he still knows you”

Between the awkward silences,

Came words of stuttered support;

And he survived – again and again.

I almost made it, that last time –

Got to Westport before news

Of our final silence.

Now, as I walk in Dromawda,

His gnarled stick, a stolen spoil, 

 Taps the unsaid 

On the tarstone road.

POEM

(2)

DOSSER

Just another dosser on a London street,

another down and out too damn idle

to make ends meet; how we showed

our contempt for our fellow countrymen,

tossing the odd penny, a tanner on the spin.

We drilled our nostrils skywards

to avoid the rancid stench

of scrumpy or Red Biddy, the acrid pong

of piss oozing from park benches

where tramps, in wasted wisdom,

disputed loud another world's mess.

O'Rourke, now he was different,

returned our scorn with a sullen stare

that mocked it for its faint timidity. A man

beyond pain, his future haunted

in a distant past; he treads, retreads Saint

George's Road, in the stark unwanted now.

There came a story of war, whispered low,

of Coventry; a man running beneath

a bright November moon, running

through the rubble, through cratered streets,

through whish and whoosh and crump

of falling bombs, under a yellow sky

tinged with red and orange leaps of flame,

through stale, singed dust, through thickened

choke of billowed smoke, through Kingsway

to Clara Street, to flattened pile

of earth and stone and brick and tile,

wedding photo still on the wall and, underneath,

severed arm of youngest son, the others

mangled far below.

And so,

he treads, retreads Saint Georges Road,

like all of us, in life's rude game of chance,

a creature, sometimes of choice,

more often, of circumstance.

POEM

(3)

THE JUGGLER

(for Louis Mulcahy)

A scaffold tube,

Twenty foot long,

heavy gauge, galvanised;

grasp one end, trap the other,

strides three, four, five,

palms glide along cold steel.

slide to vertical; stop;

hand over hand, lift, stop:

torso's slow swivel;stop;

a forever between tick

and tock

while the pole skirrs away –

a testing of the tyro wrist –

(nerve's wobbly plates awry);

wrested back

to hover

over

the spigot.

DO NOT LOOK DOWN!

Twenty floors below

ants swarm, scramble, surge

through Piccadilly Circus,

oblivious of the fuss

teetering above.

His sole focus, the spigot –

sleeve that six inch pin –

lower..., lower..., drop.

with one hand, curb the sway,

With other, reach for podger;

engage, tighten, secure.

You ask, my friend,

about achievements,

accolades, applause;

the taking of a prize.

Let me tell you then,

that poets – dabblers or laureates –

are mere jugglers of words;

we make nothing happen,

will never reach the heady heights,

feel the raw, real-life elation

of that stripling scaffolder

as he tackled and tamed

his very first twenty.

What they said ;

'What I find especially attractive about Mike Gallagher’s poems is that their images and insights, their moments of exuberance and of anger, and their evocation of Achill, of London and of his adopted North Kerry, are at the same time grounded and exploratory. Every line is real and lived, and is reflective of a responsive and curious sensibility. These are poems that are hard-earned and deeply felt.'

 - Paddy Bushe

 'Stick on Stone has waited long enough to be written. It spans decades without nostalgia, but with profound sympathy, compassion, and the hunger of a man who has come later to poetry. His pilgrim feet trek from Achill to London to Kerry on an epic journey from innocence to experience – from Irish hedgerow solace to a rented room in London where a father and son ‘speak but don’t talk.’ Micheal Gallagher portrays the unsettled dilemma of his generation in his own special language ...'

- Terry McDonagh

'Micheál Gallagher’s personal sensibility places this collection firmly in the tradition of the best of our Irish-navvy writers such as Dónall Mac Amhlaigh. Stick on Stone functions as a record of four generations of family history, but also four generations of social history, recording the Irish experience of economic exile in London. The collection opens in 1950’s Achill Island and moves backwards and forwards across the Irish Sea, bearing witness to a profound sense of displacement; the poems meld a dispassionate intellect with a passionate heart, transforming the cliché of the drunken, fighting Irish. Gallagher utilises his deeply-felt connection to the rural landscape of his childhood, underpinning his life-experience with poems that find human foibles reflected in the world of nature. A pertinent and emotionally-honest work.'

- Eileen Sheehan

'Mike Gallagher has been writing poems for a good few years now. His work, at its best, is searingly honest, angry, tender, hurt, ironic. His is the emigrant’s voice, powerful and memorable. I welcome this, his first book, and know that it will touch his readers as profoundly as it has touched me.'

- Gabriel Fitzmaurice

Johnat Dillon

Johnat Dillon lives in Clonlara, Co. Limerick and has published a number of collections, among them Mixed Bag.

POEM

(1) 

POEM FOR A SWAN 

A crying lonely

seagul sings mute!

Last of the summer swallows,

The dance of black death

in a strange

cloudy sky.

Rivers the slow streams

funeral rhythm

soft march-by,

That love sick glory white swan

Lays silent in the daffold-gold

fading green reeds

only to die.

And - giant sized herons in misery

spread dull wings

Like our daly cross and life

My dietary red watered eyes

sun gently faces

Black brown death shroud

falls faint.

Our lost love

finds solid peace

Its silent agony

is not alive anymore

All of us...

and nature weeps.

Evelyn Casey

 *** Evelyn: Please check your email re submission and get back to me. B.

Evelyn Casey is a regular reader at the White House Poetry Revival sessions.

Having just returned from Germany in 2009, after 14 years, she was invited to a poetry evening at the White House bar and was inspired to open her secret world of words to others. Her means of escape, for as long as she can remember, has always been scribbling stories dreams, conversations and events. Since then her work has featured in the poetry journal, Revival, and she has been guest poet at the White House Poetry Revival sessions and O Bhéal in Cork. Her work also appear in SEXTET (Revival Press, 2010), an anthology of six poets.

Born 7th of 12 children to wonderful parents, Mick and Eva, to Evelyn, family is her most precious jewel. Reared and educated in Limerick, Evelyn works as a fitness/health trainer at the Limerick University Arena and spends time with Special Olympics Limerick. In her prose and poetry, she likes to express everyone and everything that has yet to be uncovered. 

Evelyn's two life mottos:

You only have to die

Are we having fun yet?

POEM

(1)

THIS PHOTOGRAPH I HAVE OF YOU

( for my Mother )

See also:

Bridget Wallace Louis Mulcahy Joe Healy John Pinschmidt

Sheila Fitzpatrick-O'Donnell

John Pinschmidt

John Pinschmidt is a regular reader at the White House Poetry Revival sessions. Born in 1947, Denver Colorado, he grew up in Connecticut and Maryland and then Northern California from 1959.

Holding a B.A. in English and Drama from the University of California, Berkely (1969), he taught high-school English and Drama for 35 years, all but one for the Department of Defense Overseas Schools in England and Germany. He has been writing poetry for over forty years, but only pursued publication seriously after unexpectedly finishing first runner-up in the 2009 Cuisle Limerick City International Poetry Festival Grand Slam. His work appears in SEXTET, (Revival Press, 2010) an anthology of six poets, and in various issues of Revival, the poetry journal.

John rarely sets out to write a poem. When he does, his poems are often born of minor epiphanies from memories, objects, something heard, read or seen which then go in many directions.

John's first collection Maiden Voyage (Revival Press, 2014) contains poems that are primarily autobiographical.

Links: 

Bridget Wallace Louis Mulcahy Joe Healy Evelyn Casey

Sheila Fitzpatrick-O'Donnell