Ciaran Berry
Visiting Poet
In the opening poem of Ciaran Berry’s acclaimed third collection, Liner Notes (The Gallery Press, 2018), the speaker’s engagement with the past is first compared to a film playing backward, then to reading the liner notes on a familiar album raised “grail-like into the wayward light.” In Berry’s work, there is no one way of engaging with the complexities of the past that could ever be sufficient. Reaching back into the recesses of a life growing up in Ireland that seems at once familiar and othered, these poems—both celebratory and elegiac—veer, rewind, and roam between subjects as diverse as the death of Elvis, a visit to a butterfly garden and Dolly the cloned sheep. Berry is also the author of The Dead Zoo (The Gallery Press, 2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and The Sphere of Birds (SIU Press, 2008), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Originally from the West of Ireland, he lives in West Hartford and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Trinity College.
Select Poems
To every rose its thorn, to every bird
the broken wing we take up in our hands
and try to splint. Because the heart is half
and half again, a lighter held aloft,
its flint burning the skin. Because the heart
is dark and chambered like a gun, guitar
solo, the susurrus of drums, the ex
that marks the spot we dress up in spandex,
a poodle perm. The heart all arms and legs,
fingers and thumbs, the most and yet the least
abstract of nouns. What it is, what it wants
beyond our ken. Unless it’s sonnets,
unless it’s silicone, and candles in the wind,
the heart all sediment and sentiment.
FROM Liner Notes (The Gallery Press, 2018)
Outside, the snow
does whatever it is snow does. Banks, I suppose, drifts,
and perhaps swirls.
Throws a fresh sheet over the asphalt and the cars. Stretch
out here, it seems
to say. Lay down and make a pillow with your hands.
And stopped forever
in those four quatrains, Frost’s horse, his man, stand still and
watch it fall
between the pines, one seeing perhaps the rag tooth of
his own gravestone,
the other winter with a bridle in its hand. The bell a Salvation
Army worker
rings has me thinking of them, the horse’s nostrils
steaming like a wet engine,
his master lost in his reverie, his swoon, and nothing to be
done. His eyes
on the snow, my eyes on him, like the eyes of the
cameraman who can’t seem
to drag his gaze away from those souls who, forsaken, climb
the rails.
FROM Liner Notes (The Gallery Press, 2018)
Or pick, quick
between
one finger
and a thumb,
what strums
the strings,
catgut or
nickel-wound
sounds off
in the sound box
the chord
the other fingers
struggle
to hold down.
FROM Liner Notes (The Gallery Press, 2018)