Cork Poet Laureate

The Cork Poet Laureateship is an initiative of the Munster Literature Centre, funded by Cork City Council. During a period of historic upheaval the laureateship is conceived as a project where a Cork poet can respond personally to themes and issues of public import affecting Cork City and County. These can be sporting events, current affairs, social issues, historic anniversaries or anything else the laureate believes concerns the people of Cork as a community. The laureateship runs for ten months from May 2021.

In 2022 the poems will be collected into a chapbook to be launched during the Cork World Book Festival. William Wall has been appointed as laureate.

The Irish Examiner will publish each poem in the first week of every month and Cork City Library will print posters of the poem each month.

The Irish Examiner: William Wall: Cork's Poet Laureate on capturing the Covid era and teaching Cillian Murphy

About William Wall

June Poem: Hometown blues

July Poem: Burning the Boats

August Poem: In Geological Time

September Poem: Strike the grey sea and fly

William Wall has published four collections of poetry, six novels and three collections of short fiction. His fifth collection of poetry, Smugglers In the Underground Hug Trade – Journal of The Plague Year will be published by Doire Press in October 2021. He was the first European to win the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in the USA (2017) and was awarded the Premio Lerici Pea Angloliguria in Italy in 2021. He has won numerous other awards including the Virginia Faulkner Prize (USA), The Seán O’Faoláin Prize (Ireland), The Listowel Writers’ Week Poetry Pamphlet Prize (Ireland), and The Patrick Kavanagh award (Ireland). His 2005 novel This is The Country was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has been short- or long-listed for many more, including the Irish Book Awards and the Manchester Fiction Prize. His stories and poems have appeared in magazines and journals from the USA to China including Poesia (Turin), Granta (London), Southword (Cork), The Stinging Fly (Dublin), Ninth Letter (Illinois), and Studi Irlandese (Florence). He holds a PhD in creative writing from UCC. His work has been widely translated and he translates from Italian.

June Poem:

Irish Examiner Listen: Hometown Blues by William Wall

Hometown blues
i.m. Rory Gallagher

as I step the boards

feeling that familiar bounce

I hear the shouts 

the stamping feet 

I am back in ’71

my best friend and me

up from the country 

for the homecoming

Rory’s mama in the kitchen

his dad saying get a job son

a million crazy fans

stamping out the rhythm 

the whole floor a drum

(you can’t fight city hall) 

hair and flares and crazy shirts 

I’m going to my hometown

the whirligig of time 

declares me old enough

for this round of vaccine 

two young soldiers marshal 

me to my stall

(you can’t fight city hall)

a young nurse gives me the talk 

and waves a hypodermic 

they’ll be holding me a while

ambulance crew guide me

to my seat among the geriatrics 

I look at all the waiting 

sixty five year olds and think 

how many of us were here

in this place fifty years ago

when Rory played my hometown

(Cork City Hall Vaccination Centre, May 2021)

July Poem:

Irish Examiner Listen: Burning the Boats by William Wall

Burning the Boats

On the fishery protest, Cork Harbour

i

the river is glass today
the big boats come up
steaming at five knots
as slow as a trawl
sounding their horns
the haunting noise
of the dying days
when the great tide
of capital turns
let go your lines
not far from here
six thousand men
worked for Henry Ford
till the tide went out


but you’re the fighting kind
you spend your days
out on the banks
at the landing winch
decks awash
the trawl warp coming in
they want to burn the boats
the Brian Eoin
the Buddy M
Star of The Sea
but boats are villages
families townlands
more than the crew 
they’re whole harbours 


on the Porcupine Bank
you know you’re alive
tracking the mark
along the deepwater edge
ten metre seas
Hy-Brasil on a bad day
twenty tonnes of whiting
in the trawl
if a cable parts
you’re a dead man
quotas the way they are
it’s go or bust
tied to the wall
you catch no fish

ii
everyone is down to see the boats
cars line the quays
like in the old days
when they came to meet the Inisfallen
uncles and aunts
with cardboard suitcases
old Erin sending her youth away
and pulling them home for the two-week spree

and once again I see the boat in people’s eyes
maybe Australia this time
do they need lobstermen or seiners in New South Wales
we sold our seas to save our farms no one ever said old Ireland
could see beyond the next bend
never mind the horizon

we sold our seas and all their fish
and now it seems we’ll sell the boats
we’ll sell the people too
we’ve done it more than once before
they who know every rock in the roadstead
who will buy what they cannot sell
every wreck and every bank and deep
the names of the changing sea
the half-tide rock where the seals sleep
the holding ground

August Poem:

Irish Examiner Listen: In Geological Time by William Wall

In Geological Time

Galley Cove, July 2021

i
into a steely still sea
one bright and windless morning
every shell and stone
the kelp and sea-grass
luminous and hyper-real
like some new art form

and thirty yards away
a big seal head breaks the glass
the huge dark eyes
assessing my ridiculous
progress through its element
with severity

these old worn bones
are free in the cold water
in every dimension
but I pray for a seal’s oiled skin
to glide through space
a seal’s big eyes to take the light in

ii
after fifty years of winter
we deserve a day like this
a blue dome over us
only the late rising moon to mark it

in the stony fields they’re making hay
like there’s no tomorrow
the good sweet smell
of childhood summers

my father breathing the seed head
walking the fields
his delighted disbelief
that weather and crop agree

on the full belly of a spring tide
the world is doubled
every thought and its reflection
balanced like an equation

but time is a falling tide
memory rising from the dark deep land
oarweed stones old broken bones
to trouble its going down

iii
from Dursey Island
to Youghal Bay
the vitreous sea
not so much as a cat’s paw
fin whales and dolphins
pass like shadows

this gull-speckled main
would be a sheet
of ice in winter
an iron fate
but for the Gulf Stream
due west of here
at the same latitude
the Strait of Belle Isle
Newfoundland
sea-iced half the year

all along this broken shore
the works of time and sea
a raised beach
a ruined tower
a fossil ammonite
a rock fall bleached white

we speak of dry land
and terra firma
but the ground
we stand on
is a phrenology of movement
the casual sinking and rising
the cracking and folding
the land is a wave train
a frontal system
a dialectic of surrender
and we are falling
into the high tide
in our own good time

our foothold is friable
our tenure uncertain
though all our imagery
of rock and stone
is of permanence
endurance
time will tell a new story
in which we will not be
the dramatis personae

iv

a hundred yards out
I am out of my depth
where I have always been
only the big sad eyes of the seal
to warn of danger

we are drowning on dry land
poisoning the world
with disease and noise
and toxic aerosols
and too much light

the microscopic clarity
of the undersea
feels more like home
slightly larger than life
a pardonable exaggeration

we came from here and lost our way
a few billion years ago
we are still lost today
though the sea fits like a second skin
and by the time I turn again

I’m no longer alone
the strand is dark with people
children greet me curiously
as I walk out of the sea
and back to humanity

September Poem:

Irish Examiner Listen: Strike the grey sea and fly by William Wall

Strike the grey sea and fly

On the Olympic gold medal in rowing

‘See how much my ships excel all others, and what magnificent oarsmen my sailors are.’ - Homer, The Odyssey

oars are wings over water
bound to their thole pins
by twisted strips of leather
strike the grey sea and fly

pray with your oars at rest
consult the oracle for hope
make hecatombs for the best
strike the grey sea and fly

 
we have been away so long
no one will know us
but our names will be songs
strike the grey sea and fly

 
look neither left nor right
the sweet blade cuts clean
feathered in flight
strike the grey sea and fly

 
think of the river Ilen
  still glass between banks
downstream to Sherkin
strike the grey sea and fly

 
from Germany and Italy
they come but to chase
Donovan and McCarthy
strike the grey sea and fly

 
a great capstone of cloud
on fields of greening gold
the hills throw back the cry
strike the grey sea and fly

2021 Competitions

Gregory O'Donoghue
Poetry Competition

Deadline: 30st November

Cork International
Short Story Festival

October 12 - 16

2021 Publications

Southword 40

Includes O'Faoláin Prize stories
& O'Donoghue Prize poems

Felicity Sheehy

Fool for Poetry Winner

Vicky Morris

Fool for Poetry Winner

Queer Love

Fiction anthology

YouTube Videos

Poetry-Films

O'Faoláin Short Story
Prize Reading Playlist

O'Donoghue Poetry
Prize Reading Playlist

How to Write Titles

Workshops

Cork Events

Essays & Blogs

Munster Literature Centre
is a constituent member of

Frank O'Connor House, 84 Douglas Street, Cork, Ireland.

Tel. (353) 021 4312955 Email info@munsterlit.ie