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The Last Regatta / Maurice Harmon

The Last Regatta

By: Maurice Harmon

€8.88
Maurice Harmon's poetry ranges from recreations of an idyllic pastoral world on the Ardgillan estate in north County Dublin to memories of psychological numbing at boarding school to scenes of intellectual and sexual challenges and confusions at University College, Dublin. These local settings and experiences contrast with lyrics about the mystery and beauty of Japanese culture and the mythopoeic sequences in A Stillness at ...
ISBN 1 903392 08 X
Pub Date Sunday, April 01, 2001
Page Count 80
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Maurice Harmon's poetry ranges from recreations of an idyllic pastoral world on the Ardgillan estate in north County Dublin to memories of psychological numbing at boarding school to scenes of intellectual and sexual challenges and confusions at University College, Dublin. These local settings and experiences contrast with lyrics about the mystery and beauty of Japanese culture and the mythopoeic sequences in A Stillness at Kiawah. One of these draws analogies between the experience of the native American Kiowas and the Irish experience of similar injustice and dispossession; the other explores the cruelties and intensities of a sexual relationship in a post-colonial world.

Maurice Harmon

Maurice Harmon, a distinguished academic, literary critic and scholar, has published studies of Irish writers from William Carleton to Seán O'Faoláin, Mary Lavin, and Benedict Kiely, from Austin Clarke to Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and Dennis O’Driscoll. Harmon’s career as editor-founder of the Irish University Review and his publications, including Sean O’Faolain: A Life, 1994; the ground-breaking anthology, Irish Poetry after Yeats, 1979; Selected Essays, 2006; Thomas Kinsella: Designing for the Exact Needs, 2008; with The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland, his translation of Accalam na Senórach, the medieval compendium of stories and poems, 2009, among others, affirm him as one of the elect. His reputation as a poet has grown with the publication of the stylish and humane Loose Connections (Salmon, 2012) and the compassionate Hoops of Holiness (Salmon, 2016). afterwords (Salmon, 2020) is his seventh collection. 

The Last Regatta

Beside the tiny pool beside the house
I sometimes pause these late November days
to watch maple leaves flaring down

to clear water and there upheld awhile,
red incorrigible sails that seek and find
the slightest breeze for one final run.

Although no warnings here of gale-force winds
relay the ending of their carefree days
they are sinking slowly, water-logged,

and swirling gently, listing into silt,
minute pyres burning softly down.
It is a good way to go, trim

and tidy as they furl stricken sheets,
tighten lines, prepare for wet dock.
They've had their seasons and their seasons' days,

have hoisted tapestries to catch the breeze,
have known beauty in this temperate place
where a stone lantern keeps constant watch.

They are ending passage now in their own way,
in their own time, untouched by human hand,
unhurried, unshaken, beyond the reach of man.
 


Letter to My Daughter

The cold up north drove them back at us.
They slithered across the path beside our feet,
burst through screens, breaking and entering.

The place so musty we slept on the gallery floor,
conscious of timber racked behind our heads,
of rustling, slitherings along the roof.

Silence stopped me when we came back here.
Sevenday locusts no longer had hysterics,
no longer blundered from the cherry trees.

Spider hammocks sagged like fallen floors
in disused rooms. Sated dragon flies
no longer rode with swallows or with bats.

When you told me your friend was dead,
that was the seasons final emptying,
good days drained, cold along the boards.
 


The Return

I sit by the pond
in the spell of ripple and fly

stand under trees
in the poignancy of leaves

lie offshore
in the fluency of stems

feel the stone's tremor
in the drain of waves

see pitch and stress
in the spider's web

find conclusions
in a grain of sand

discover an air
coldly sufficient

reliable
as the avenue of yew
 

(Copyright Maurice Harmon 2000.  All Rights Reserved.)

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