GO TO MLC HOMEPAGE

ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES

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

Create your badge

BORBÁLA FARAGÓ

Borbála Faragó is an academic working on contemporary Irish poetry. She was born in Hungary and came to live in Ireland in 1997. She is the editor, together with Eva Bourke, of an anthology of immigrant poetry entitled Landing Places: Immigrant Poets From Ireland, which was published by Dedalus Press in March 2010. She has work published in Poetry Ireland Review and Open Wide Magazine.

To My Father the Retired Clinical Psychologist

Some tend cactus and chickens before

their time comes, or dream about wheelbarrows.

You go to work on a tram every day, and

negotiate white piles of expectations around you.

A thin layer of dust has already settled

on your excitable brainwaves. You are

forgetful, avuncular and quick to proselytise

about this whole necrotic catastrophe called human life.

But today you stumbled upon a wrinkled old

word, which stuck in your mouth like long

forgotten toothpaste. You enjoyed for a moment

its stale, minty memory before writing to me

‘dear daughter, forgive me for I named you’.

I picture your big hands searching the keyboard

for the letters spewing out your love:

you’re a boy again, your ears filling with white

noise as you’re lazily held in front of an

approaching train by your slapdash father

who named you Francis, never knowing

that on your shoulders birds will come to rest.

©2010 Borbála Faragó

Author Links

Faragó poem in Open Wide Magazine (Issue 22)

Landing Places: Immigrant Poetry in Ireland

'Alcove in the Wind:' Silence and Space in Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's poetry: an academic paper by Farago