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Patrick Kavanagh
To a Late Poplar

Not yet half-drest,
O tardy bride!
And the priest
And the bridegroom and the guests
Have been waiting a full hour.

The meadow choir
Is playing the wedding march
Two fields away,
And squirrels are already leaping in ecstasy
Among leaf-full branches.

 

Stony Grey Soil

O stony grey soil of Monaghan,
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.

You clogged the feet of my boyhood,
And I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick-tongued mumble.

You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life-conquering plough!
Your mandril strained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.

You sang on steaming dunghills
A song of cowards' brood,
You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
You fed me on swinish food.

You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan,
You burgled my bank of youth!

Lost the long hours of pleasure,
All the women that love young men.
O can I still stroke the monster's back
Or write with unpoisoned pen

His name in these lonely verses,
Or mention the dark fields where
The first gay flight of my lyric
Got caught in a peasant's prayer.

Mullahinsha, Drummeril, Black Shanco —
Wherever I turn I see
In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
Dead loves that were born for me.
from the book SELECTED POEMS / Wake Forest University Press
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"The Syntax of Sedimentation:
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"I wouldn't say it's an 'attempt to describe' that is somehow thwarted or endangered by the instability of language; I would say the poems come closest to the real—or to what Oppen called clarity—when they make us aware of the presence of language in perception and experience. Literary discourse tends to reify place in a way that particularly needs and deserves interrogation and fragmentation. Disrupting the expected experience of language also disrupts the expected boundaries of place as an idea, returning to its status as a process in time, interruptible, but also experiential."

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Dana Levin on Reading Prose


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