A uniquely interesting book because of the interviewer’s tact, his special knowledge of the work and his abiding belief in the importance of poetry in the world.
                        Colm Tóibín, Sunday Business Post Books of the Year

Wonderful acts of recollection, mingled with musings about writing that are beautiful and true.
                        Andrew Motion, Guardian  Books of the Year

A deeply nourishing book.
                        Anne Enright, Guardian  Books of the Year

Richly enjoyable, consistently engaging.
                        Terence Brown, The Irish Times

These pages read so conversationally, like a true meeting of minds - the erudition and acute sensibility of the questions matched by Heaney’s customary virtuoso display of knowledge, insight, and grievous (a favourite word of his) honesty.                                 
                        Bel Mooney, The Times

Stepping Stones is, in effect, Seamus Heaney’s autobiography: childhood, religion, marriage, the Troubles, the Nobel, his theory of poetic inspiration (’a ball kicked in from nowhere’) - all are memorably addressed.
                        Blake Morrison, Guardian Books of the Year

Guarded and gracious, certainly, but there’s a firmness here that will make you gulp. Hard to put down.
                        John Kelly, Sunday Business Post Books of the Year

 A life self-told, and a priceless body of poetry self-described by the finest living poet in the English language.
                        Douglas Dunn, Sunday Herald Books of the Year

To listen to the greatest poet of the age, speaking about the mysteries of his art with modesty and wit and yet with deep assurance, is a privilege and a joy.
                        Ann Wroe, The Tablet Books of the Year

Meticulous and measured, a work of deep insight and revelation; it is an invaluable addition to the work of Heaney.
                        Vincent Woods, The Irish Times

Unflaggingly absorbing . . . It’s all here, from Ted Hughes and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Goya, from the Troubles (”poetic justice isn’t enough”) to “seminar-speak”, from friendship and fun to literary responsibility and religion. The tone is easy, relaxed - even rambling - yet every sentence thrills.
                        Michael Kerrigan, Scotsman

A truly marvellous book, a book which is the meeting of two deeply committed and thoughtful poetry minds.
                       Bernard O’Donoghue, Poetry London

Rich in anecdote, reflection and close-ups that mirror the autobiographical nature of much of the poetry. It not only illuminates the work of this great poet, but sets a new template for how a life can be put on the record.
                        Gerard Smyth, Irish Times

Chatty and authoritative and, for anyone who loves Heaney’s work, gripping.
                        Christina Patterson, Independent

A must for Heaney’s many aficionados, for whom the contexts of his writing will be fascinating… He possesses a marvellous ability to recall the detail of his life, right back to childhood… The book mercifully lacks the feel of hagiography. There is, too, a sense of Heaney’s twinkling humour.
                        Stephen Knight, Independent on Sunday

O’Driscoll’s questions are very well chosen … he has a knack for drawing his subject out without ever being banal or toadying … there is an easy but firm intelligence behind everything that Heaney says here … this really is a remarkable book. There isn’t a dull, vapid or useless sentence in it; it’s about what it is to be human as much as it is about what it is to be a poet … it must have taken years, and an enormous amount of energy on the part of the both people. Even the index is highly commendable (always a good sign that a book has had properly lavish attention spent on it). It is packed with both insight and good humour. Even those possessing scant familiarity with Heaney’s verse will like it. Unbelievably, it only costs a tenner. Off you go. 
                        Nicholas Lezard, Guardian Paperback of the Week

This is not only a radically original book; in its own quiet way it is also a great one.
                        Donald Fanger, Truthdig

Years ago, I wrote that ‘Heaney’s lack of self-importance makes those he meets feel important, and there can scarcely be a reader left in Ireland who does not claim (based on a single encounter) to know him, or even to know him well (a status earned by a second meeting).’ Although Seamus Heaney and I have known each other for a long time – I attended the launch of his third collection, Wintering Out (1972), when I was eighteen; I interviewed him for a Dublin weekly journal at the time of his fortieth birthday in 1979 – I keep my distance in Stepping Stones. The book is about him, not about ‘us’, and, so, I am as invisible, as impersonal, as unobtrusive as possible in its pages.

What first gave you the idea for writing Stepping Stones?

I have a strong archival impulse – as was demonstrated by my two voluminous collections of contemporary quotations about poetry: The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006) and its American counterpart Quote Poet Unquote (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). Those books – in which Seamus Heaney is well represented - snatch from oblivion a plethora of definitions, ruminations and witticisms that would otherwise vanish on the airwaves or moulder in obscure little literary magazines. A similar motivation operated for Stepping Stones. Is there a more wise, profound and eloquent interviewee in poetry than Seamus Heaney? I wanted to capture his ideas at much greater length than other interviews had; to rescue reflections or recollections that would be absent from the record otherwise. My hope was that the book would present a three-dimensional portrait of the artist, a biography in all but name; by doing so in his own words, it would amount to a Heaney autobiography also.

Can you tell us how the interviews in Stepping Stones were conducted and over what time period?

Some parts of the book (Chapter 13, for instance) are transcripts of oral conversations, but most of the interviews were conducted in short written bursts between 2002 and 2007. At a time when Seamus Heaney was intensely preoccupied with more important things than dialoguing with me (he was composing the poems in District and Circle, drafting and delivering lectures, travelling abroad on literary and teaching duties, translating Sophocles’ Antigone for the Abbey Theatre as The Burial at Thebes, assembling his essays for Finders Keepers), it was not feasible to proceed in any other way. But each time the rare opportunity presented itself, he responded to my latest volley of questions at precisely the kind of fleet-footed, improvisatory pace that marks the best oral interviews. In any event, the written (usually e-mail) interview is now increasingly prevalent and has become the norm on literary websites. Long before the internet, some of the most enjoyable interviews came in written form: Philip Larkin’s Paris Review gem, for example, and Vladimir Nabokov’s masquerade.

Seamus Heaney is a poetic giant of our times - were you ever star-struck!?

Was and am. But I would opt for ‘awe-struck’ rather than ‘star-struck’ because his fame was most certainly not the spur that impelled me to retrace the trajectory of his life. I was every bit as much in awe of his genius when I interviewed him in his seventieth year as I was when I interviewed him as he was about to turn forty and publish Field Work. More so, actually – because, by the time of Stepping Stones, there was a much greater bibliography to marvel at.

Presumably you knew Heaney’s poetry intimately before you began interviewing him? To you, what are his great strengths as a poet?

His superlative gift for matching words with things, things with emotions. Possession of the richest and most individual vocabulary of any living writer helps, as does the capacity to constantly recreate himself as a poet - he cultivates fresh new laurels rather than resting on old, dry, brittle ones.

What were you most surprised to learn about the man and the poet as your interviews progressed?

Every page of Stepping Stones contains surprises – of description, reflection or recollection. Revelation? There are revelations aplenty too – Heaney’s passport not having been ‘green’ until he moved to the Republic of Ireland in the 1970s; his having been sounded out for the poet laureateship… But Stepping Stones is not so much The Book of Revelations as The Book of Impressions. It is dotted with pointillist clusters of evocative detail that gradually cohere into a life-size colour portrait.

Is Heaney an Irish poet? By that I mean is trying to understand something that we call Ireland essential to understanding Heaney’s work?

He is not just an Irish poet or a Northern Irish poet but a south County Derry poet, steeped in local lore, language and memories. Ulster dialect words, that have no currency in Tipperary where I grew up, are his gold standard for living language, against which other Englishes are judged, just as his apprehension of the eternal verities is grounded in the experiences of his Derry childhood. At the same time, Seamus Heaney is no more Irish than that other poet of the local, universal and eternal, James Joyce. Both men think locally and write globally.

What was the most difficult aspects of bringing Stepping Stones to life? How did you overcome them?

The most time-consuming part – and it is too trivial to merit more than the briefest of mentions – was the preparation of the editorial apparatus: dialect glossary, chronology, bibliography, biographical glossary. Fact-checking is as tedious as it is essential: an inaccuracy in a biography is as catastrophic as a misprint in a poem.

You are a poet yourself Dennis — is poetry inspiration or perspiration in your experience!?

99% inspiration and 1% perspiration. Philip Larkin, with his usual gnomic brilliance, encapsulates the matter with less sweat: ‘You cannot write a poem unless you have a poem to write.’

Did you have an idea in your mind of your “ideal” reader? Did you write specifically for them?

The essential part (the 99% bit) of writing a poem – seizing on the initial revelation of form, rhythm, image - is over so quickly that there is no time for thought of ‘the reader’ to enter into the process. ‘The reader’ may make an appearance in the course of revision (the 1% bit), if issues of clarity and comprehensibility arise as one begins to wonder how baffled or otherwise people will be by the more recondite aspects of the poem.

What do you do when you are not writing?

I edit a magazine. Not quite an anti-poetry magazine, but most certainly not a literary one - Tax Briefing, the technical journal of Ireland’s Revenue and Customs service, which analyses current developments in tax legislation and administration. Very popular with tax advisors and accountants, they phone me frequently to ask when the next issue is due. I wonder if poetry magazines attract such eager readers.

What are you working on now Dennis?

Michael Hamburger, who died in 2007, was one of my earliest and most revered literary mentors and friends. His translations are known but his other writings are unjustly overlooked. I have begun curating a Michael Hamburger Reader, with a view to exhibiting his most permanent work. That archival drive again!

Who is your favourite poet and who is your favourite prose writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

My favourite modern poet is Bertolt Brecht, to whose ‘Buckow Elegies’ Michael Hamburger introduced me. My favourite poetry anthologies are The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse, edited by Emrys Jones, and Daniel Weissbort’s The Poetry of Survival. My favourite prose writers include Herman Melville, George Eliot and Henry James. A contemporary novel I admire is Beat Sterchi’s Blösch (dubbed ‘the Ulysses of the dairy cow’ by one of my friends); it has been translated from German by Michael Hofmann, one of the very best poets of my generation.

Do you have any tips for the aspiring poet!?

Poetry is a form of play. Play is a diversion from work. All play and no work will make Jack a dull poet.

www.bookdepository.co.uk
[2009]

In Ireland, poetry is more respected than read. But the fact that it is respected means that there is a favourable environment in which to write. In the so-called ‘advanced’ industrial western countries, it is viewed as an irrelevant medium for the 21st century. This is not yet true of Ireland, where we had a history of poetry as subversive allegory – Ireland personified as a beautiful maiden - and, in the case of people like Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, poetry as protest against the passing of the old Gaelic order. Then there is the patriotic poetry associated with the Young Irelanders and the fact that the leadership of the 1916 rebellion included at least three poets: Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett and my own county man from Tipperary, Thomas McDonagh. W.B. Yeats was heavily influenced by an old Fenian, John O’Leary. The Ulster ‘Troubles’ brought Northern poets like Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley to the attention of a wider public than normal. The combined result of all these historical factors is an environment in which poetry is regarded as relatively normal and even potentially valuable. That sense of normality makes Ireland a positive place for poetry, much more so than the inimical, hostile and alienating environments you find in other western countries.

How has being a successful published poet shaped and affected your life? Would you say you get special treatment at all?

I’ve had a job in the civil service since I was 16. Someone sporting a black broad-brimmed hat and playing the artist would not be welcomed in my workplace, where getting on with the job is all that counts and artistic alibis have no force. In the community at large, one is occasionally asked for feedback on a sheaf of unpublished poems; but, for the most part, people don’t pay the least attention to who you are and that suits me perfectly well. I’m absolutely comfortable in my anonymity.

What glamour comes with being a poet?

Poets should aspire to something more worthy of their calling than glamour. They should not even be embarrassed to aspire to lofty concepts like Truth.

How can one fit writing poetry into a life of work?

If anything, it’s an advantage to have a job because it gives you a context for your writing; it broadens your experience; it grants you a living language on which to draw; it provides endless insights into ‘ordinary life’. Problems arise only in finding time to fulfil reading engagements and for work on criticism and reviews. An example of a task which it would be difficult to complete with a full-time job was my Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations, which contains thousands of poetry quotations that were never collected by anybody else. The idea was to avoid replicating what one finds in other reference books and to create an entirely new reference book comprised of fresh and recent material.
When I interviewed Thomas Kinsella for Poetry Ireland Review, he told me that his years as a civil servant had taught him how best to organise his work and his time; the bureaucratic life has certainly taught me a great deal about using my time as economically as possible. Only in the last couple of decades have poets begun to see poetry as a profession rather than as a calling, something for which formal third-level training is necessary, as though it needed regulation like medicine or law.

Do you write best at any particular time of day or in any particular environment?

If you are in the grip of a really good idea nothing will stop you. Some poets indulge in dandified superstitions and are unable to begin writing in the absence of some triggering smell or some favourite ivory-inlaid writing table. But poetry has been written by people in the most abject circumstances, in the course of horrendous incarceration, in poverty, and adrift in remote arctic gulags. A true poem will transcend the circumstances of its making.
But if an ideal situation is an option, it will naturally enough be one where the more quiet there is, the more early morning it is, the more free of distraction you are, the better; but I suspect that these needs relate more to the conscious business of revision than the more unconscious, instinctive and all-absorbing act of writing itself. Pressure can actually lead to inspiration, in fact. It’s often at the moment when you are least able to actually respond that you are tested by some prompt you receive from the muse. If you happen to be in the middle of a meeting, say, then you can scrawl down a quick mnemonic note and successfully build on it later.

Do you go through hundreds of drafts until you’re satisfied a poem is finished?

It’s possible to over-revise, especially if, in the process, you are extinguishing the initial spark, losing the initial spontaneity of the poem. As the French poet, Paul Valéry famously remarked: “No poem is ever completed, only abandoned.” But Valéry’s remark begs the question of how best to tell that the poem on which you are working should now be abandoned. A poet’s critical judgement needs to be as sharp as his or her writing skills. You ought, ideally, to be your own toughest judge, your own most objective arbiter.

How do you work a moment of insight or inspiration into a poem?

I would tend to leave aside the initial fragmentary lines and phrases and, when I returned to them, would hope to be able to tell from experience whether the material was really promising enough to be worthwhile shaping into a poem.

So you ignore your quick note but try to work on its central concept?

No. The poem’s inspiration – a word which, for all its whiff of antiquity, must still serve for what I have in mind - might still not be complete. The note you scrawled may simply be the start of something which requires a separate inspiration for its completion. Another kind of poem – the ideal kind, the most exhilarating – is the one where everything comes together in one wave, fully formed, and all you need to do is write it down and dust it off. Much more common, however, is a third category where you think you have the most marvellous material, but the whole thing falls flat once the actual writing gets underway. To your great frustration and disappointment, you realise that nothing will come of attempts to salvage it. Best not only to abandon it, but to dump it too.

Would you ever leave a poem uncompleted because you were having trouble finding a single word to complete it perfectly?

Very often I will draw on a particular idiom. I might mimic the language of business, say; corporate language of that kind will obviously require its own idiom. So I have to make sure, as if it were a drama, that I am consistent in my deployment of that idiom. The changing of a word might simply be for the sake of consistency. However, at that stage the poem is already essentially either lost or won.

Tell the story of how your first book got to the published.

When I put together my first book-length typescript (a callow and feeble collection, which I now detest), the most established publisher was the Dolmen Press. They had published, in very stylish volumes, the work of Austin Clarke, Padraic Fallon, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Richard Murphy and Michael Hartnett. So I thought, I should start with Dolmen, although I knew nobody at all in the company and no one had offered to put in a word on my behalf. One morning at work, a letter of reply arrived. The envelope was aglow with Louis Le Brocquy’s lovely red logo of a dolmen. I tore it open and can still recall the phrase used by Liam Miller, the Dolmen Press founder: he said he was ‘vividly impressed’ by the poems and that, if Arts Council support was forthcoming, they certainly would publish them. With the presumption of youth, I assumed that this was how the world worked. You package up your poems, despatch them off to a good publisher and receive an automatic acceptance. If only things were that simple…

What advice would you offer those with aspirations of one day being a published poet?

Every young poet has no choice other than to establish some track record in the literary journals before submitting a book to a publisher. Doing so will also provide vital editorial feedback, even if it comes in the stark form of rejection slips. This is all part of the normal apprenticeship and should not inhibit anyone who is truly dedicated to the art of poetry – someone, that is, who is driven to write poetry rather than to be a poet.

Published in Icarus (Trinity College, Dublin), Volume 58, No. 3, May 2008.

There could not be enough prose about poetry, especially from Dennis O’Driscoll.
    - Medbh McGuckian, Ropes

A critic who can write lucidly and enthusiastically, find fault without being captious and praise without excess, is Dennis O’Driscoll.
    - Douglas Sealy, The Irish Times

Dennis O’Driscoll was a maker of reputations at a remarkably early age (before he was 25), with a notably discriminating eye.
    - Bernard O’Donoghue, Contemporary Poets

Dennis O’Driscoll is one of Ireland’s most respected critics of poetry.
    - John Greening, Times Literary Supplement

The poet and critic Dennis O’Driscoll is the best judge I have ever known of a good poem and of what makes a poem good.
    - Richard Murphy, The Irish Times

The most perceptive and knowledgeable critic of modern poetry, O’Driscoll is an excellent guide unhampered by critical baggage.
    - Neil Astley, Staying Alive

…combines the intellectual rigour and fair-mindedness of the civil servant with the passion of the insatiable reader.
    - Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times

The very independence of O’Driscoll’s stance is in itself refreshing, but more than that, his essays about poetry and those who write it are thought-provoking and entice one to re-read the poets he considers with the added intelligence and perceptiveness he has provided.
    - Patrick Quinn, PN Review

In their judicious enthusiasm, their telling engagement with whatever takes his fancy, O’Driscoll’s reviews make him an exemplary citizen in the republic of letters, a true, shrewd-tongued but never uncivil, servant of the Muse.
    - Eamon Grennan, Poetry Ireland Review

Over the years O’Driscoll has unfailingly passed the ‘I’ll buy it’ test: if a magazine has something by Dennis in it, I’ll buy it, regardless of the rest of its contents.
    - David Wheatley, The Dublin Review

The perfect literary quizmaster’s ‘who said this?’…an entertaining miscellany of comments made about poetry in the last 20 years by writers, journalists, teachers, broadcasters, poets and dictators.
- Culture

An anthology that aims to recharge its subject, to demarginalise it, or at least to demystify it, in the sense of showing that poetry is a human activity…You’ll have fun reading it. And it may even tempt you into reading some poetry.
- Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Strangely gripping…startling insights into an artform that scares most people to death. Some are baffling, some are funny and some are alarming. ‘Now I have the time to become a poet’, is a recent pronouncement from that well-known writer, Saddam Hussein.
- Christina Patterson, Independent (London)

There are surprises at every page’s turning.
- John Montague, Irish Times

It’s always a pleasure to read a volume that you can commend unequivocally to anyone with a heart and a mind. O’Driscoll’s crisp, unobtrusively musical precision gets to the heart of so many subjects, large and small…
- Robert Potts, The Guardian

O’Driscoll’s mind…ruminates on experience with alacrity, humility, and an unwillingness to pontificate. His talent - which could equally grace a novel - should stand the test of time.
- Paul Groves, Poetry Review

O’Driscoll is still younger than some more feted Irish poets; at his best he is already their equal.
- Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times

…one of the most interesting poets now writing in English. O’Driscoll’s poetry has the rare virtue of making us feel that most other poets are forcing things a little, striving for effect. He writes directly, naturally, about the emotions that are closest to us and, for that very reason, go unobserved: how we actually feel about work and possessions and aging.
- Adam Kirsch, Slate

O’Driscoll is a real poet: his lines stay with you, and crop up unbidden in your mind as you go about your day.
- Clíodhna Carney, Poetry Ireland Review

It takes a special genius to see the real and important lurking in the mundanely routine - O’Driscoll, the Irish Larkin, does. This most astute of poets juxtaposes the soul of the artist with the exactness of the anthropologist; the result is work of meditative intelligence, humour and forgiving humanity.
- Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

O’Driscoll is a quietly exciting, subtly intelligent poet; and his book the most consistently entertaining Selected I have read for a long time.
- Grevel Lindop, Poetry London

O’Driscoll is a recording angel of life’s sacred banalities. He does this without censure or snobbery, and without hiding behind a mask of irony. It’s difficult to think of another poet who pulls off quite the same trick. New and Selected Poems is a significant achievement.
- Michael Murphy, Poetry Review

Dennis O’Driscoll’s mock-epic poem, ‘The Bottom Line’…is among the great, great poems of our age, perfectly pitched and richly cinematic, an amalgam of Ulysses and The Waste Land, The Office and American Beauty.
- Thomas Lynch, The Irish Times

Dennis O’Driscoll has produced an extraordinary body of work… Some of his poems have already achieved the status of classics.
- Richard Tillinghast, Poetry Ireland Review

There isn’t a dud poem in this book [Reality Check]. They all afford pleasure from the way we experience the language as playfully alive. They make us see the world which we tend to take for granted differently - both its woes and joys - sometimes highly entertainingly, sometimes with profound gravitas.
- Matt Simpson, Stride

A poet of… immense gifts.
- John Burnside, The Irish Times

A severe, exact observer and craftsman, he keeps a light touch because he so readily identifies with his subjects’ disquiet, with our fundamental insecurity.  The pleasures of his work are strongly salted, and seem more addictive for that. 
 - Robert Gray, The Australian

I catch a glance sometimes of my own dead at the window,
those whose traits I share: thin as moths, as matchsticks,
they stare into the haven of the warm room, eyes ablaze.

It is Sunday a lifetime ago. A woman in a now-demolished house
sings Michael, Row the Boat Ashore as she sets down the bucket
with its smooth folds of drinking water…

The steadfast harvest moon out there, entangled in the willow’s
stringy hair, directs me home like T’ao Ch’ien: A caged bird
pines for its first forest, a salmon thirsts for its stream.

Yet, though we rebelled against Him
like adolescents, uplifted to see
an oppressive father banished -
a bearded hermit - to the desert,
we confess to missing Him at times.

Miss Him during the civil wedding
when, at the blossomy altar
of the registrar’s desk, we wait in vain
to be fed a line containing words
like ‘everlasting’ and ‘divine’.

Miss Him when the TV scientist
explains the cosmos through equations,
leaving our planet to revolve on its axis
aimlessly, a wheel skidding in snow.

Miss Him when the radio catches a snatch
of plainchant from some echoey priory;
when the gospel choir raises its collective voice
to ask Shall We Gather at the River?
or the forces of the oratorio converge
on I Know That My Redeemer Liveth
and our contracted hearts lose a beat.

Miss Him when a choked voice at
the crematorium recites the poem
about fearing no more the heat of the sun.

Miss Him when we stand in judgement
on a lank Crucifixion in an art museum,
its stripe-like ribs testifying to rank.

Miss Him when the gamma-rays
recorded on the satellite graph
seem arranged into a celestial score,
the music of the spheres,
the Ave Verum Corpus of the observatory lab.

Miss Him when we stumble on the breast lump
for the first time and an involuntary prayer
escapes our lips; when a shadow crosses
our bodies on an x-ray screen; when we receive
a transfusion of foaming blood
sacrificed anonymously to save life.

Miss Him when we exclaim His name
spontaneously in awe or anger
as a woman in a birth ward
calls to her long-dead mother.

Miss Him when the linen-covered
dining table holds warm bread rolls,
shiny glasses of red wine.

Miss Him when a dove swoops
from the orange grove in a tourist village
just as the monastery bell begins to take its toll.

Miss Him when our journey leads us
under leaves of Gothic tracery, an arch
of overlapping branches that meet
like hands in Michelangelo’s Creation.

Miss Him when, trudging past a church,
we catch a residual blast of incense,
a perfume on par with the fresh-baked loaf
which Milosz compared to happiness.

Miss Him when our newly-fitted kitchen
comes in Shaker-style and we order
a matching set of Mother Ann Lee chairs.

Miss Him when we listen to the prophecy
of astronomers that the visible galaxies
will recede as the universe expands.

Miss Him when the sunset makes
its presence felt in the stained glass
window of the fake antique lounge bar.

Miss Him the way an uncoupled glider
riding the evening thermals misses its tug.

Miss Him, as the lovers shrugging
shoulders outside the cheap hotel
ponder what their next move should be.

Even feel nostalgic, odd days,
for His Second Coming,
like standing in the brick
dome of a dovecote
after the birds have flown.

The August day you wake to takes you by surprise.
Its bitterness. Black sullen clouds. Brackish downpour.
A drift-net of wetness enmeshes the rented cottage,
towels and children’s swimwear sodden on the line.

Dry-gulleted drains gulp down neat rain.
Drops bounce from a leaking gutter with hard,
uncompromising slaps: and, like resignation
in the face of death, you contemplate winter

with something close to tenderness, the sprint
from fuel shed to back door, the leisurely
ascent of peat smoke, even the suburban haze
of boiler flues when thermostats are set.

You warm to those thoughts as you sit there,
brainstorming ways to keep the family amused,
plans abandoned for barefoot games on dry sand.
Handcraft shops? Slot-machine arcades? Hotel grills?

In truth - manipulating toast crumbs backwards,
forwards at the unsteady table’s edge - you’d prefer
to return to your bed as if with some mild
ailment, pampered by duvet, whiskey, cloves.

II

Let it rain.
Let the clouds discharge their contents like reserve tanks.
Let the worms burrow their way to the topsoil
from whatever dank Sargasso they were spawned in.
Let dampness rot the coffin-boards of the summer house.
Let the shrubs lose their foothold in the wind,
the nettles lose their edge, the drenched rat
with slicked-back hair scuttle to its sewage pipe.
Let the tropical expanses of the rhubarb leaves
serve as an artificial pond, a reservoir.
Let the downpour’s impact on the toolshed be akin
to the dull applause on an archive recording of a love duet.
Let the bricklayers at the building site wrap
pathetic sheets of polythene around doomed foundations.
Let the limb ripped from the tree’s socket
hover fleetingly in the air, an olive branch.
Let a rainbow’s fantail unfurl like a bird of paradise.
Let a covenant be sealed, its wording watertight.
Let the floods recede.
Let there be light.

III after Giacomo Leopardi

The storm runs out of wind; nature, which
abhors a silence, fills the vacancy with birdsong.
Deserting the airless, low-ceilinged coop,
the hen repeats herself ad infinitum. Replenished
like the rain-barrels, hearts grow sanguine.

Hammering resumes. Humming. Gossip. Croons.
Sun strides down lanes that grass has repossessed,
takes a shine to the brasses at the hotel where,
by the window she thrust open, the chambermaid
is marvelling at the cleansed freshness, calm.

Balm of mind and body. Will we ever feel
more reconciled to life than now, ever
know a moment more conducive to new hopes,
eager beginnings, auspicious starts?
How easily pleased we are. Rescind

the threat of torment for the briefest
second and we blot out dark nights of the soul
when lightning flashes fanned by wind
ignited fire and brimstone visions.
Sorrow is perennial; happiness, a rare

bloom, perfumes the air - so that we breathe
with the ease of a camphor-scented chest
from which congestion has just lifted.
Lack of woe equates with rapture then,
though not till death will pain take full leave

of our senses, grant us permanent relief.