Poetry

Bray, February 16, 2025 (for Sylvia) Precious: from the French, meaning loved and treasured, and thus quite the mot juste for your presence in our lives. Right from your august arrival twelve short years ago today, you’ve always been my hero, full of fun but still tenaciously fighting your embattled corner against the unfairness of […]

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Bray, Co Wicklow, February 16, 2026 (for Sylvia) Forgive me, Sylvia, but I hardly recognised you in your light blue mini dress and your fake tan, amid a gaggle of girls just as riotously attired, all on your merry way to your first disco. Suddenly, in the mere blink of an eye, you are a […]

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St Vincent’s Hospital, December 2025 (in memory of Joe Boland) Soon we shall all be shades, you’d say at the end of a long and misspent night ignited by booze, badinage and barbs; or else, a mere few minutes after turning up at our door to pace up and down the kitchen, you’d say I’m […]

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Viktoria Mullova was here, Alfred Brendel, too. I thrilled to these recitals but long before its rejigged concert role, undergraduates knew a hall of terrors, through whose forbidding doors final degree exams could seal a student’s fate. I got a lowly Third, damning me to Grub Street where, as it happened, real life lay in […]

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(for Helen) They were flying kites that September morning high in the sky at Killiney. Not yet two years old, you gazed astonished at these fluttering aliens, not quite believing what you were seeing. That same day, two clerics were flying kites, too, seizing their moment during Pope John Paul’s visit to remind us from […]

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Royal Irish Academy of Music, 2005 (in memory of Seamus Heaney) It’s been ten years since your Nobel calling, with all the fuss attendant on such fame, yet here you are fulfilling yet another claim on your energies, this time enthralling a room of students with your learnt-by-heart rendition of Keats’s autumn ode. You stumble […]

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Friends of the writer, they’ve come all the way from Tuam for this first night, but now they fear meeting him. They can’t say they hated the play (what was he thinking?) and as he draws near they scramble for a face that won’t reveal their feelings. But they’ve no cause to worry: buoyed by […]

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Doran’s barber shop, can you believe, is still there on Castlewood Avenue, while back from oblivion is the Stella, or at least a hipster’s retro take on it, but further down the road that old fleapit, the Prinner (the Princess if you don’t mind), is as long gone as the Lone Ranger and Tonto serials […]

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(for Sylvia) You are not yet three and yet here we are at your usual table by the corner window, with waiter Mio, on whom you have a crush, dancing away with your order. When I rise, you ask where I’m headed. “To the loo,” I say. “OK,” you reply, and then pause until I’m […]

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St Joseph’s church, Glasthule, 2019 (for Ailbhe) The first time in this church was on our way to the playground and we lit two candles, so now you ask if we can do it again. A Mass is on and though I’m not a believer and at three you don’t yet know who you are, […]

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St Mary’s College, Rathmines Never the centre, always on the wing, I spent those winter afternoons just out of touch and fearful of the pass that seldom came. All to the good: those few times when I played scrumhalf, flank forwards twice my size pummelled my weedy frame into the mud, leaving me for dead. […]

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Cafe Grey, Greystones, 2019 Why are you always disappearing, John? That’s what you said, Sylvia, and it was true: though merely for a furtive smoke, yet gone from your presence, and quite out of the blue. I don’t like it, you rebuked me, as if somehow you knew that people really can disappear, not just […]

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  Waking at night I hear a pig squeal. My room is low-ceilinged with half-moon windows. Outside the front door there is a courtyard. On summer mornings I can trap the sun. Sometimes at night, though, I wake to hear the pitiable scream of a trapped pig. It is difficult to believe I am not […]

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I have no idea what we talked about that midsummer bank holiday evening at the corner of the Leinster Road, two students circling each other by the side wall of Rathmines library and jabbering on as if our lives depended on it. We didn’t know each other then, and a lifetime later, as I watch […]

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(in memory of Margaret Kennedy) I was on the road, just below the brow of the headland, when I heard you call. Another dinner, another May evening. Now, though, I slow each moment to the crawl of images we shrug off at the time: Joe in the nearby meadow making hay, the sun skewed westward […]

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(for Helen and Warren, February 2013) A woodland nymph, or so the name suggests: a sprite, perhaps, best fit for river banks or bird-filled glades, now an inquiring guest in our more puzzling world. Let’s just give thanks for those blue eyes, that eagerness to greet our fear and wonder with an impish smile, as […]

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(for Sylvia, August 13, 2018) Bare-chested and tanned, a man is whirling his little daughter around the multi-coloured carousel in the playground at Conde-en-Brie. Three years ago, on this same carousel in this same playground, your mum and dad whirled you around, too. What fun we had that afternoon in the French summer sun. You […]

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Rockfield Drive, Terenure, 1960 Disrupted while playing a Haydn quartet by the yowled complaint of his youngest son, your father came to where all of us were at play and, without any ado, slapped you across the face. I can hear it still, that whack, and can still see the fiddle tucked under his left […]

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August 2023 (for Marlene) We’re homeless and adrift, if only for the time it takes to reach our new house, so farewell to neighbours Neil & Co, who stood us so well down the decades. They’re still in their prime as we join the unforgiving ranks of those old enough to pity for their paltry […]

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