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Winner
of the Listowel Writers' Week Poetry Prize 2000. In her first collection,
Sandgames,
Michele Vassal explores the duality of exile through the fading
negatives of memory, exposing them to a light of sexual and religious metaphor.
With an artist's sense of contrast and perspective, she chronicles a sensual
and cruel reality where displacement and belonging coalesce into an intricate
but singular vision.
About the Author
In
the late seventies, Michele Vassal left her hometown of
Barcelonnette, in the Alpes de Haute-Provence and moved
to Dublin. She is now living and writing in Kenmare, County
Kerry, with her family and their five cats. Though French
is her first language, she prefers writing in English. Her
poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies
in Ireland and in the U.S. She received first prize at the
1999 Listowel Writers' Week for this collection of poetry.
Some
Poems from Sandgames
The
Artist Paints The
Immaculate Conception
Drawing
with the right side of the brain
teaches us to trace the empty space
around the object one wants to capture,
its contours revealed by what is not.
When I painted The Annunciation in Bewley's
(the background of Harry Clarke stained glass
and the velvet seats' crimson lustre
made it very pre-Raphaelite)
I remembered little besides his white shoes
because I had thought them in bad taste,
and his eyes, because they were like yours.
But now that I know how to draw negative space,
the invisible angle of his wrist
against your shoulder, the fictive space
between you and him nearly non-existent,
I gouge our existence out of the void:
And
I wonder if it could be, my son,
that this man's absence has defined us.
On
The Long Acre
for John.W. Sexton
the
wrecked ark of a bird's ribcage
paper boned
heaves in the wake of the breeze.
Out of the depth of its hull
ants trickle
in a troubled procession
preceding
the magenta covenant
of a dead cinnabar moth.
A finch on a rush
observes
and for a while
God's vengeance
hesitates.
(Copyright
Michele Vassal 2000. All Rights Reserved.)
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