"I like the poems.. I keep hearing something in them that I'm always listening for..and rarely catch" - Ted Hughes
"A master of form" - Brendan Kennelly
"I have listened to (Flight into Reality") with a lot of pleasure.. I think it is quite beautiful and very thought-provoking - Brendan Glacken
EXPLODING THE MYTH OF THE GORGON
The snake-locks anemone
Hungered as she gazed on the green
Of eternal movement
Against the calm, cold,
Ignorant rock
Of pain and insecurity.
In the foam was splintering
Like actuality, her love dreams.
A moon
Turned masculine, he would
Govern her heart, mind
And spirit – computer
King-bee, to mimic her power over life,
Her terrible beauty franchised,
Petrified in the daily example of love.
Yet the dashing seaspray moves continually
In an infinite aubade, evensong,
A choric hymn to the sea mother;
She knew him whose
Imploding eye
Would haunt her for centuries.
THE MERMAID
Could it be called a distance or a closeness
A tincture like faith when our bodies hurt
For each tied arm or breast of hopelessness?
Sun-starved without real love, sea-girt,
Gulled by the sea’s obedience, could our needs
Like the stranded pellet of your off-wind eye
Mark in sea-grass the uncharted deeds
Where time believed your oars just drifted by?
Now rocks are the landscape of my dreams,
Their wimpled arms, their blighted eyes
Clams open to my gaze are screams –
Instruct my usefulness, with lies.
Imperial solitude! Past predicating
My eternal days are without retort
The shadow of his impossible bones
Like battening drams, a consort.
