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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
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MARK ROPER
 Mark Roper was born in Derbyshire in 1951, and brought up in North London. He went to a boarding school in Surrey, to university in Reading and Oxford, and lived and worked in Sussex, Swansea and other parts of London. In 1980 he moved to County Kilkenny with his partner Jane. At first they shared a cottage with friends, then bought a cottage of their own in Tobernabrone, where they’ve lived happily ever since. His collections include The Hen Ark (Peterloo/Salmon 1990), which won the 1992 Aldeburgh Prize for best first collection; Catching The Light (Peterloo/Lagan 1997); a chapbook, The Home Fire (Abbey Press 1998) and Whereabouts (Peterloo/Abbey Press 2005). He was Editor of Poetry Ireland for 1999. Even So: New & Selected Poems was published by the Dedalus Press in autumn 2008, and he was recently anthologised in Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland by the same publisher.
19.9.08
Today would have been
your ninetieth birthday,
so I lie in bed and listen
to the wood pigeons,
their cou-cou-rou
drifting through trees.
I count ninety rounds
to keep in mind,
a sound bath,
a sonorous envelope
to cover my head today—
like the headscarf
you’d tie under your chin,
or your wedding veil
blown above your head
as you wait in a photo
to enter the church.
But I keep losing count.
Or when I get to ninety
the pigeons keep going
and their calls decline
to add up to anything.
©2010 Mark Roper
Author Links
Roper at Dedalus Press
Poetry International Web poems and bio
Review of Even So in Southword Journal Online
Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland
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