Hail Mary

after Yannis Ritsos

Step down Our Lady of the salt fish-eyes
Of the hand smoked over by complaints of the poor
And from all the years that this has gone on

Down in rockpools love is waiting for you
The seagull hangs your sooty icon in his cave
The jealous urchin stabs up at your feet

Come lady clutching the eggs of lightning
The grandmother grasps a knife in her wrinkled pleat
The roots of the olive are on the boil

Some seablue day you will take off your scarf
Take up the daggers of your silvery sorrows
For the hail of May to strike you head-on

For sun to split as the pomegranate
On your sailcloth apron as you share out the sun
To your dozens of orphans seed by seed

Scouring the shore so it gleams like a blade
Or as the snows that glisten in spring so the crab
Comes out to sun himself and his claws cross

Advice to a Ruler

Sir, the present life of man
in the face of unknown time
seems like this:
                                a winter's night,
you at supper with your wise
and strong men, a hearty fire
warming the room, while outside
rage storms of hail and rain

and this lonely sparrow comes fluttering in,
flits out again ...
                                 In through this door
and out by that.
                                 For the time being
shielded from Winter's anger,
his refuge passes in a flash

winging from winter into winter
we lose him from our glimpse of light
into that darkness, as he came.
    

This is John Birtwhistle’s first collection of poems since Tidal Models (1980). Its energy and concentration come out of an interest in a wide variety of formal models – from Chinese lyrics and Imagism to Anglo-Saxon riddles and Surrealism – and an appreciation of certain key twentieth-century radical poets: Breton, Eluard, Ho Chi Minh, Neruda, Ritsos and Fortini. Political disquiet, expressive tenderness, and a care for ordering, edge against each other in the poetry. Dennis O’Driscoll commented in Hibernia that ‘a sweeping imagination ranges over past and future, pastoral and urban themes.’ Reviewing his last book, John Heath-Stubbs described Birtwhistle as ‘an ambitious and original poet, not afraid to take chances’, singling out a group of poems on Conamara as ‘altogether admirable for their exact and loving observation.’