salmonpoetry.com | Walking Here by Jessie Lendennie

Poetry: Reading it, Writing it, Publishing it
February 2009

Salmon: A Journey in Poetry, 1981-2007
September 2007

Daughter and Other Poems
April 2001

Dogs Singing - A Tribute Anthology
November 2010

CIRCUS EUROPE - Poetry and Images, an international collaboration
January 2013

Even The Daybreak - 35 Years of Salmon Poetry
March 2016

Walking Here
Jessie Lendennie

ISBN: 978-1-907056-84-0

Page Count: 70

Publication Date: Thursday, September 01, 2011

Cover Artwork: Jessie Lendennie

About this Book

As in Jessie Lendennie's previous collection, Daughter and Other Poems, the poems in 'Walking Here' are connected in perception and spirit. They reflect a lifetime interest in philosophy and spirituality; a search for meaning that explores identity, loss, place and change. These poems take the reader on a journey through a variety of physical, spiritual and emotional landscapes; raising questions and examining answers.

Author Biography

Jessie Lendennie was born in Arkansas, USA. After years of travel, she settled in Ireland in 1981. Her previous publications include a book-length prose poem Daughter (1988); reprinted as Daughter and Other Poems in 2001. She complied and edited: Salmon: A Journey in Poetry, 1981-2007; Poetry: Reading it, Writing It, Publishing It (2009) and Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology (2010). She is co-founder (1981) and Managing Director of Salmon Poetry. Her poems, essays and articles have been widely published and she has given numerous readings, lectures and writing courses in Ireland and abroad, including Yale University; Rutgers University; The Irish Embassy, Washington D.C; The University of Alaska, Fairbanks and Anchorage; MIT, Boston; The Loft, Minneapolis, MN; Café Teatre, Copenhagen, Denmark; the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; The Irish American Cultural Centre, Chicago and The Bowery Poetry Club, New York City. She is currently working on a memoir To Dance Beneath the Diamond Sky.

Read a sample from this book

Grattan Strand, Galway

Walking here
Has become my life
The air, the light
Clouds like the softest
Frosted breath,
The first autumn

I have been here
Long before the air
Smelt of change

And every mood
Has its vision
The horizon is both
This path
And the edge of the sea

And my life is bound
By every early morning
Wanting to be here
Wanting to be gone

Dublin

Can you be nostalgic for a place
You’ve never lived?
‘Dublin in the rare ould times’
Poignant tune on early morning radio.
1979 Dublin empty streets
Ha’penny Bridge Bookshop –
Smell of discovery.
How can you live there and not live there?
Dublin was never my choice
Coming from London in search of space
And the clarity that defined poetry
What did I see of Dublin then?
Trinity College – rarified intellectual life
And a tight village of its own.
No, much earlier;
With that ‘Portrait…‘, but I was never a young man
I was a girl in New York City
Troubled by a boy in that even rarer ould Dublin
Certainly not my times, never never my times.
Years later on O’Connell Bridge
I thought of that Liffey
How one image overlays another
The imaginative and the sensual
Here is recognition, here is, perhaps, reality.

West Coast
i.m. Carl Wilson

The usual cows graze on the hills outside my window
Rotating up and down; Bas-relief on big feet
The weather, as usual, is a sun that comes and goes
Flits across the valley without ceremony
Fifty years on and the Beach Boys stream out from the radio
Bringing that other West Coast right here to my sunless place
Hawthorne and chubby Carl Wilson in 6th grade
Spin-the-bottle parties and hide and seek
Figs rotting in back alleys in the ever-present heat
Another boring LA suburb sleeping before the world
Became a California surf
And, you could say, before the ocean became a metaphor
For escape, for our irreconcilable lives.

Copyright 2011 Jessie Lendennie