Michael S. Begnal’s Future Blues is both a progression of and a break with his previous collection, Ancestor Worship. Inasmuch as any poet’s work is a continuing narrative defined by nothing more or less than chronological time, Future Blues is the collection that follows its immediate predecessor and so cannot help but be aware of it. Yet, as Begnal has written, “The best musicians, writers, and artists for me are the ones who, either steadily over time or perhaps in radical bursts, change their style or approach – each new work in part an effort to surpass the previous.” The Irish Literary Supplement described Ancestor Worship as “an attempt at reconstructing an obscured heritage.” While traces of such an impulse inevitably recur, Future Blues hurtles forward seeking out “new images and modes of being” (as one poem puts it), even as our collective future – death – looms.

Future Blues, in its title, lashes Irish poetry past and future into alliance – a desperate, daring act. Is that a space between “Future” and “Blues” or a caesura? Whichever, it offers a narrow stage for the uneasy demi-monde of the present, where the Ghosts of Irish Poetry Past and Future meet, and merge. This is a poetry of trace and gesture, of tree and leaf, of light and surfaces, of haze and mark, drink, decline and persistence; a poetry of disjunctiveness which swells notably into cohesive poems in English and Irish – cohesive but still textured; a poetry of anomalies, stitched across time and culture from Mongán to Laurence Sterne to Frank O’Hara to Ron Asheton, often fragile, always intelligent, bristling with formal spice.  Mairéad Byrne

Michael S. Begnal was born in 1966. His previous collections are Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), Mercury, the Dime (Six Gallery Press, 2005), and The Lakes of Coma (Six Gallery Press, 2003). His poems, essays and reviews have appeared internationally in numerous journals and anthologies, in print and electronically. He was editor of the Galway, Ireland-based literary magazine The Burning Bush as well as the book Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice: A Tribute to James Liddy (Arlen House, 2006). In 2008, Begnal earned an MFA from North Carolina State University. He currently lives in the city of Pittsburgh where he teaches poetry and composition.

Gatefold

haven’t you always

always stood standing

nobody else will know these,

some vague memory of autonomy

hovering in the daze

so that suddenly

           NOW is called transition

orange and blue

[something scribbled out]

reverberation

future blues/

nothing will be okay

nothing remains pristine for long

stretched out in dark bed,

the spectacular lights of death

all this terror,

the flying humanoids in the air for real,

     the sinister people who want

     to come back from the past,

     a leafless time

     that wind shook

standing at the window ledge

looking out at the fields

or on whatever street,

no one feels

     these

                    ruins

inside,

in the eyes the flesh and hair

and the hair juts below the belly,

line

and even below, the dark of the nest