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Best of Irish Poetry 2010
Editor: Matthew Sweeney

Songs of Earth and Light
Barbara Korun poems translated by Theo Dorgan

Done Dating DJs
by Jennifer Minniti-Shippey
Winner, 2008 Fool for Poetry Competition

Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Edited and translated by Aidan Hayes

Munster Literature Centre

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GERARD SMYTH

Gerard Smyth is a poet and journalist. His work has been published widely in Ireland and internationally, as well as in translation, since the late 1960s. He is the author of six collections, including A New Tenancy (Dedalus Press, 2004) and The Mirror Tent (Dedalus Press, 2007). The Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems (1969 - 2009) was published by Dedalus in 2010. He is a member of Aosdána.

THE UNEASE OF CLOUDS

The unease of clouds

is there to see in the sky that touches

Three Rock Mountain. Last night we heard

the weatherman’s announcement that hearts would freeze

in the falling temperatures, the blast of the easterlies.

This, as Bly in one of his snow-poems says,

is the sort of snowfall that starts in late afternoon

when the sky is crepuscular and threatening,

sending soft flurries at first,

then the heavier stuff like a pointillist’s spectacle.

To the hillsides of myrtle and walls of the prisons,

it brings the glow of the Far North,

the solemnity of the shadow of the Cross,

this snow that sweeps into foxholes,

that blows through the bogs, making everything abstract.

©2009 Gerard Smyth

Author Links

Gerard Smyth Home Page

Poems and bio at Poetry International Web

Audio, poems and books at Dedalus

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