Trevor Conway’s debut poetry collection weaves startling imagery while exploring the creative impulse. With a blend of rhyme and free verse, human nature is analysed, satirised and sometimes glorified. Evidence of Freewheeling embraces key elements of modern life: technology, sport, human nature and the poet’s physical surroundings, particularly his native Sligo and his current home Galway.

Trevor Conway

Trevor Conway, from Sligo, writes poetry, fiction and songs, as well as book reviews, drama and film scripts. An album of his songs has been recorded and released, titled Morning Zoo. He has an MA in Writing from NUI Galway, and has been a featured reader at events such as Galway’s Over the Edge series, the Tuam Arts Festival and Cork’s O Bhéal series. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies in Ireland, Austria, the UK, the US, India and Mexico, where his poems have been translated into Spanish.

Similarity

Those who have shared

Many passing years

Often bear a close resemblance,

It’s said.

I see its proof,

Sifting through my parents’ generation,

Rapport sculpted on cheeks,

A story told

Like two pages of one book,

As though emotions shared

Are stored in the rising, dipping

Landscape of muscle.

My face may rise in tandem,

Might play the slow duet

Into the years.

It may carve its own path,

Like chiselled ivory in the moon’s light.

There are mountains and valleys

In my face.

The Taste of Raspberries

I bit into a peach,

And somehow, the sour kick

Of flesh softened by four days’ waiting

Reminded me of raspberries,

Dunally raspberries,

Skulking behind the fir trees of my childhood home.

We’d pinch them off like eggs from a nest,

Be on our way

Across the rocky stream dipping and tumbling to Sligo town,

Or whipped by low twigs

As we scurried between trees,

A burst football or two

Kicked to the base of each trunk.

Sometimes, kids from fields away

Would come to play

(Or cousins, measured in roads).

They’d steal a berry or two.

Today, I’ll buy my fruit in the Galway market,

Sure to pluck a Sligo face

Shining between the shoulders and scarves.

Here is where they come some Saturdays.

I’ll cross the Corrib,

Atlantic spray webbed to my window.

I play in Salthill, too,

But I’ve never found a raspberry

At the bottom of the ocean.

Threads

Like a hunchback on the floor,

Its shadow thinned by candlelight,

Faded jeans and jumpers fly,

Adding to its sloping height.

Each item wears its time of year,

From airy summer to winter-weight.

A flailing shirt falls to the floor,

Arms at the angle of ten-to-eight.

Stripes of blue and white emerge,

Print peeling from the chest,

A freckled face fills its hole,

Lips and hair once caressed.

Worn, but worn for something more

Than warmth, allegiance or style;

Memories and emotions woven in,

For now, it belongs to no pile.

I see character in all things worn:

The wire hanger bent out of shape,

The candle’s wick drowning in wax,

The cotton neck’s oval gape.

Those stripes still hang to the edge of a chair

As the hunchback is cleared away,

But every fabric sheds its skin.

Loosened threads will always stay.

Review: Evidence of Freewheeling by Trevor Conway reviewed by Kevin Higgins for The Galway Advertiser, Thurs 7th January, 2016

The fantastically titled Evidence of Freewheeling (Salmon Publishing) is Trevor Conway ’s much anticipated debut poetry collection. Reading it, the first thing that struck me was many of Conway’s poems have a surface impersonality of which TS Eliot would approve. He is certainly not a this-is-what-happened-to-me-last-week type of poet. Several poems are observations of a somewhat philosophical variety. In ‘Inspired’ he tells us “I have no great theory,/Just words,/Like an old friend/Returning in new clothes.” ‘Trimester’ is a rigorous time bomb of a poem which makes the reader face some of the most difficult questions going. An embryo speaks from the womb: “All I know is darkness,/Starved of any sight/ take the blood of another”. Conway’s un-sentimentality makes this not-yet-born being sound almost like a vampire. But the rougher questions emerge later in the poem: “I could lead a country,/Or save a stranger’s life./I could be your lover./I could even rape your wife.” Some poets are content to feed the chattering classes nice sounding morsels, the intellectual equivalent of comfort food; in contrast Conway is a big poet. Long may he continue to quietly disturb the peace.

ISBN	978-1-910669-23-5
Pub Date	Saturday, November 14, 2015
Cover Image	Steven Pearse Conway
Page Count	64
Share on

Evidence of Freewheeling / Trevor Conway

Evidence of Freewheeling

By: Trevor Conway

Contact us

Other Links

Useful Links

Social Media

Newsletter