Benedict Kiely, a writer in whom are joined magnificent lyrical and comic gifts, is one of the most admired of literary figures in his native Ireland. Although a number of his novels have been published here and his short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere, he has not had the kind of…
There — but for the clutch of luck — go I. At daybreak — in the pitch, arctic fog of a February daybreak — Shoulderlength helmets in the watchtowers of the concentration camp Caught me out in the intersecting arcs of the swirling searchlights: There were at least a zillion of us caught out there…
I wish I could walk deep into a field of spiked wheat reaching my waist and not ask that question, where the sun laces my chest with its indifferent heat, and the sky seems only a backdrop for sharp birds that tuck their wings and glide, where each step pops crickets into quick arcs like…
There is no Simple circumstance, As when a boy hiding In a closet Beside a manikin swoons In the mist of A grandmother’s sachet. The crooked White sticks of the legs And arms bent around Him, as he imagines He is older, Standing in a wooded field, The beads of lavender Rolling In the yellow…
(from a novel to be called: Nothing Happens in Carmincross) Below them is the sweep of the valley, widening from nothing in the grey-brown mountains down to deep green pasture-land. The river winds in the most approved style. The farmhouses are square and white and solid. No poverty in this part of the world. Never…
Emptying the teapot of tealeaves I moped at the kitchen sink: Thinking of thinkers who think that they are the only thinkers who think. The teapot was red enamel and the daylight outside was dark And the appletree at the end of my cabbagepatch was peering back up at my cottage Quite unable to budge…
Wanting leads to worse than oddity. The bones creak like bamboo in wind, and strain toward a better life outside the body, the life everything has that isn’t human. Feel the chair under you? What does it want? Does lust bend it silly like a rubber crutch? Tell a tree about the silky clasp of…
She re-enters her life the way a parachutist re-enters the coarser atmosphere of earth, exchanging the sensual shapes of clouds for cloud-shaped trees rushing to meet her, their branches sharp, their soft leaves transitory. She notices smells, the scent of pines piercing the surface of memory— that dark lake submerged in pines in which her…
Spain frightened you. Spain where I felt at home. The blood-raw light, The oiled anchovy faces, the African Black edges to everything, frightened you. Your schooling had somehow omitted Spain. The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum. You did not know the language, your soul was empty Of the signs, and the welding light…
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