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books by Janice Fitzpatrick Simmons: |
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Settler (Salmon,
1995) |
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'"A
poem may only take a few minutes to read but it represents, as Susan
Sontag said of a photograph, 'a lifetime of preparation.' A lifetime
of walking around with one's eyes opened. Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons
has the eyes of a See-R. In love poems, in poems about people and
place, belonging and exile, she sees into the innerness and hiddenness
of things. These poems are experiences made vivid, flashes of awareness,
shocks of recognition. By intensifying our perceptions, they help
us to re-see the world. They restore us, enriched, I think, with
new insights and knowledge, to the everyday of our lives.
Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons is a poet of stature,
a sounding, sifting intelligence, 'gaining strength with every song.'
Poems are active meditations according to Tomas
Transtomer, a Swedish poet -- they want to wake us up not put us
to sleep. With this compelling collection be prepared for a night
of stimulating insomnia."
tCathal O Searcaigh
 Janice
Fitzpatrick-Simmons was born in 1954 and educated in the USA.
She has her M.A. from The University of New Hampshire and was
The Assistant Director of The Robert Frost Place. She was a long
time resident of Northern Ireland and is now living in Donegal.
She is the co-founder of The Poets' House and programme director
for the M.A. in Creative Writing at The Poets' House. She is widely
published with poems appearing in Stand, Force 10, Janus, Writing
Women, Cuirt Journal, The Irish University Graduate Review, The
New Orleans Review, Fortnight, US1, The University of California
Review. She appears regularly in The Honest Ulsterman and Poetry
Ireland. She has read at The Irish Festival in Brighton, The University
of Antwerp, The University of Mons Hainault, Notre Dame University
Brussels, The University of Delaware, Vermont College, Brown University
Bookshop, Bracknell Arts Centre, Reading Festival, Lancaster University,
Bewleys Dublin, Eigse na Cuige, Cork, Letterkenny Arts Centre,
Wexford Arts Centre, Dundalk Arts Festival, The Crescent Arts
Centre, Belfast, Queens University, Belfast etc.. She has one
chap book and her first book Settler was published in 1995
by Salmon Poetry.
A
Poem from
Starting at Purgatory
by JANICE FITZPATRICK-SIMMONS
Whitehead
To Dublin
1.
I glimpse seals on rocks from the carriage window,
the train rounds the bend and they are gone,
their appearance so brief I wonder if I really saw them.
The
morning is a chill misted autumn one
and I have been left to the train by husband and child
to make my way on a rare solitary visit
back to the city I left for Belfast. The bad thing
about Central Station is the switch you have to make
from one platform to another, running up one steep corridor
and down another to catch the Dublin train.
The
train makes me restless, not sad but nostalgic.
How I came to him; my little case
crammed with books and high heels.
There is a river that flows between neat,
high banks - Oxbows over flat countryside.
From the train I make out a sign that says
The Ulster Way, beside the water the trail is wet
and green with reeds that grow on the banks.
I watch an old man and the light that falls
with such radiance on him as he faces into the sun.
He raises his hand smiling and turns to walk away.
The river flows so slow that algae's viridian body can't break
up
- it quivers and undulates in the melting sun.
My
first few trips on this train
going the other way, from Dublin to Belfast
were fraught with uncertainty, alive with the future.
Still the gold fields of Barley rolled in the distance.
That night we knew life was lifting in me
we walked by a river that opens to a small still lake.
On the left bank a house with curved windows shone in darkness.
Our tentative hands reached toward each other in the blinding
mist;
and high above us and clear the drifting Milky Way,
its thousand million stars.
(©
Copyright Janice Fitzpatrick Simmons, 1999)
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