Dreampaths Of A Runaway

By: Louise C. Callaghan

€12.00

“A quality of natural-seeming grace is perhaps the most affecting thing about Louise C. Callaghan’s poems. The grace of a river flowing smoothly into the past, its waters sunlit but containing dark and possibly disturbing depths.” Anne Haverty At the heart of her fourth collection, Louise C. Callaghan focuses on the last days of her dying mother, ...

ISBN	978-1-910669-89-1
Pub Date	Thursday, May 18, 2017
Cover Image	Perro Semihundido / The Half-Buried Dog by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain
Page Count	84
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“A quality of natural-seeming grace is perhaps the most affecting thing about Louise C. Callaghan’s poems. The grace of a river flowing smoothly into the past, its waters sunlit but containing dark and possibly disturbing depths.”

Anne Haverty

At the heart of her fourth collection, Louise C. Callaghan focuses on the last days of her dying mother,

Mother dying, is looking for signs.

And now she has gone beyond

personality, no longer concerned

with who we are…

In these five poems of ‘Our Daily Practice’, the voice is lyrical, restrained and searching.

The volume also contains a series of fourteen poems about Fransisco de Goya. Both in the prelude, ‘Portrait of Mañuel Osorio de Zuñiga’,

You know the one, the dark-haired child

with a bird tied to a length of thread…

and the series, ‘Ears for the Deaf Man’, details of his life as court painter are fused with his daily life in the terrible years of early nineteenth century Spain. There is in these poems a simplicity of images and plain statement of stark emotion:

So recently dead

they still gleam

with life.

‘Still Life With Golden Bream’

Louise C. Callaghan

Louise C. Callaghan was born in 1948 and brought up in County Dublin, Ireland. She now lives in Dublin, close to her four children and many grandchildren. Her poetry collections are In the Ninth House (Salmon,2010), The Puzzle-Heart (Salmon, 1999) and Remember The Birds (Salmon, 2005). She compiled and edited Forgotten Light: An Anthology of Memory Poems (A & A Farmar, 2003). Her poetry, which is widely anthologised in Ireland and England, is included in the Field Day Anthology: Vols IV & V. She completed an M.Litt in Creative Writing at St. Andrews University in Scotland (2007).

Hallucinations

All afternoon the wind blows lightly

on the curtain, a gentle breeze,

in and out, in and out.

Lying in her bed in the dim room

she watches curtains breathe

in and out, in and out.

No one there, only shadows

of the great horse chestnut

on patterned cotton.

Was it Summer, maybe June,

for pale candles had dropped their bloom,

sometime during the Summer…

But who in the world to care?

The child reads deeper into the shapes,

sees over and over, a leaving car.

Insomniac

Bishop, in her sixties, played ping-pong

in the hallway of her Brattle Street flat.

She had to stand well back to serve,

skittering from side to side across

its polished parquet-wood floor.

According to Lowell’s young friend,

Kathleen, playing at the other end,

Elizabeth was good. I picture her

in a pair of black leather trousers

in low-heeled, slip-on shoes…

The poc-poc-poc-sound, like coughs

as they played late into the winter night.

Rock & Stone

All the same

I’m going back

to find the field

of a single haystack,

the fuchsia hedge

I lay beneath

blanketed for a night

by woven air

and high black sky.

In my mind’s eye

everywhere is squared

by rock and stone.

Oh I must go back,

to see if anything,

even a word,

can be redeemed.

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Dreampaths Of A Runaway / Louise C. Callaghan