Jan Carson

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in East Belfast. Her books include a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, a short-story collection, Children’s Children. and a micro-fiction collection, Postcard Stories. Her second novel, The Fire Starters, was published by Doubleday in 2019. It won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019.

Writing In The Stupid Age
Elsinore
David Marcus: A Treasured Friendship
Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily
Meantimes
The Might of Bahari
Days Left to Submission Deadline: Zero
Gallery Attendant, 37
The Waiting House
An Old Friend
Alice Munro
A Fern Between Rocks
Hotel
The Road (Not) Taken
Settling Down
Burn Heart
After the Alphabet: What we do with words
Glorious Exploits (an extract)
This So-Called Writing Life
The Gay Panic is About Me
Clouds of Albion, for Max
We can’t all be a fresh new voice in literature
The Bride
Ice Queen
The Curse
Feeling Gravity’s Pull
Caerphilly Flyers
On community
The Swan Lake Guesthouse
You gotta have faith
Yeah Not Bad
Doing the work
Maenads in the Terminal
Switch Bitch
Fire Island
The Afterlife
An interview with Lisa McInerney
The House That Shame Built
Traditional Music
In remembrance of Maurice Scully
Anamnesis
Not Any Old Hundred Years
Online essays and criticism 2022
Online Fiction Series 2022
What Gets Us Through | 2022
Happiness
Tomahawk
Attempted Rescues: Notes on Writing
Mathematics
[Cue happiness]
On waitressing
Chemistry Read
Fetishes 
Chop Wood, Carry Water
On Rejection
Always Rather Risk
An Industry of Rejection
Do Better
Unfailing
Notes on rejection
Sleep Watchers
Blackbirds
Notes on resilience
Plaster
Four Stories
/
What Gets Us Through
My Life as a Plagiarist
One Night Stands: an introduction
The Baby
Harlow
Respawn
St Alban’s Drive
Diana in a lonely place
Boys, Crying
Poem for Bobby Kendall
The Youths
Any Holidays?
Peter and Jane
A Boat To Bilbao
A Story Of Our Time: Notes on Kafka’s The Judgement
The Strange Kid
The Mountain Lion
Swimming
Conversations With Jóhann
Name Your Character
Trouble
For Someone To Remember Them
Britney Spears’ Sandwich
An Aesthetic Matter
In The End
Mallards
Processing
3 Songs of Separation & Proximity
Leaving Musée Picasso
A Full Study Of Darkness
Naming The Foals
It’s Not That You Can’t Have The Grand Gesture, It’s Just That It’s Meaningless
Hot Dog
9-Ball
from *Conspiracy*
The Understudies
Sonogram
But Who Has Won?
My Father’s Wives
Graceland
Responsibilities
Essential Viewing
Gloria and Max
Words for Things
A Hell Taxonomy
These Are The Tools God Gave Us
The Little House
Memorials
Edna O’Brien’s 90th Birthday Banquet
Magnetic
Make Way, Folks, the Mannion Brothers Are Coming Through
In the Blood
Fumes
Black and White-head
Julio Cortázar’s happy chaos
All Made Through Imperfection
The Dream That Wakes You Up
Sleeve Notes From The King
Night Person
Fly Roundtable: Writers and reading
Didn’t You Have To Be There?
Colonialism With Nowhere To Go
Bad Influences
Caledonia Whipping Boy
Ariadne’s Process
December
Escape
An Unseen Student in the Congregation
Corpse Paths
Chinese Whispers
Fantastic Babies – Notes on a K-Pop Music Video
Forms of Inadequacy
Minotaur by Proxy
Look. Over Here.
My Life in the City
Notes Towards France, or, a list of things that make me nervous
O
They Judged Her Tears As Milky, For There Was Something Them Extra to the Tear
Slip
Sonnet To A Softboy TM (He Microwaved My Heart)
The Enigma of the Bend
This Happy (An Extract)
The Little House
Practice, Process, Product
Theoretical Archaeology
We Are Appalling
Celestial Realm
The Crab House
Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience
i copy vaginas
Food Shop
gremlins
Back When We Talked to the Dead
i want to live up a steel spiral staircase
The Chair
WonderHouse (Some Assembly Required)
Atrophies
What’s in a Name?
905976-14
I had to keep on
The Word & The Kiss Are Born From The Same Body Part
They will come for you
And yet it is all circumstantial
Ghosts
Mother Tongue
In nothing is tenderness as important as here
On the Far Side of the Thornbush
This leads us back to the idea of transcendence
Pathways
Tradition bearer
Going Clear: Sense and Spectacle at the Dublin Horse Show
Big Hen
Five Moments In Sport
A Recipe for Chilli
Harpies
Power Cut
A Short Story But Its Written Like An Internet Meme
I Am Andrew Wyeth!
Ancestral
The Consequences
Waves
from Capriccio
Because I finished something, I thought
Las Meninas
Language Politics
Derrychara
Postcard from Madrid
To Lough Tay
Fragment1
Notes for a Film
Mid-Winter Day
Last Poem
Solely
Temporarily and witlessly
bury the wren
dear comrade
Charm for G
Tender Publics
Rachael’s Coat Inside Out
Pine Box in the Flea Market
Five Leaves Left
Small Yellow Spider
Approach to an Egg
Sons At My Feet
A Truck of Bees Overturns on the Highway
Black Cats
Parasol
Death Knock
Frequent Attender
Exits
Fable Radio
Nothing Can Dislodge The House
Firing Up The Imagination
The True One
Silence, No Surrender
Safe Words
A Stranger Still: In Memoriam Anna Kavan
Distraction from Sadness Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness
The Cultivators
Employment
Germ Dance
I, therapist
The View from Mostowa Street
Parallels | Miracles
we have forgotten
The Coat
Effluent
Hearing The Boatmans Call in a Boston Laundromat
The Pin Tin
[Home is a heart.]
nth
Redesdale Estate, 1956
The Accursed Questions
Advice For Those Who Wish To Know The Future
Kingfisher
#1 Iggy’s Castle
Yoshi’s Island 4
Yoshi’s Island 3
[ghost estates]
[the drowning]
[prosopagnosia]
[clouds on a screen at a drive in n j 1960]
[walking by your childhood home]
[postscript]
The Blue Slip Sway
The Bank Job
Triangle
Loosely defined it was a relationship
Reynold
Crescent
The Space Between Bottles
Overnight
Winter Hours
Sex Pink Moon
Parallel of Past Imperfect
How Did Books Become Clutter?
The Follies
Problem Pages
Bland God: Notes on Mark Zuckerberg
Kaleidoscope Eye
Fist at Full Mast
Philosophy of a Fly
Looking for Business
How They Live Now
Prosinečki
Made In China
Revivalists
Scenes from a Private Life
Lounge
The Good News
Dora Maar quits smoking (and Pablo)
To that other me behind the looking glass
My body, full scrape
Caution Please
Cocoon
Baby, you ask
Saint Dearbhla’s Eyes
Crone Mountain
42nd and Park
That was me
About my dad and his dad and his brother too in places
Memory as a Necessary Pain
She Became Birds, Poems
vol-au-vent
The mean temperature of water
to my mother at my age
wild divine
Meditations on a Vine
piña
Priced Out 1
Priced Out 14
the soul has no skin
Viewpoint
Autumn in Hong Kong
Ditches
Cover
Just Like Nicole
The End of the World is a Cul de Sac
Bullets
The First Real Time
Dromomania
Act Now: An Interview with Una Mullally
Autonomy: An Interview With Kathy D’Arcy
Marinaleda: A Town Less Ordinary
What We Talk About When We Talk About Housing
Patience
Snapshot
Her Last Child
The Night Feed
Rain fall
A Fine Day
Notes On Bleeding
Effects On The Side
Compost
Tonight or Tomorrow
Inauguration Night
Citizens’ Assembly
Twin
Organisational Skills for the Hungry
Pool
If You Go Into The Woods…
Late Harvest
There
Well there is a war on
The Ballydugan Visitants
Embellished
How It Was
In Flew Chaos
Squat Serenity
Austerity
Sold
Notice
How Homeless is Homeless
Donegal
Quiz
Unclean
Liminal Bus Café
Pokey-Out Wire
The mothers
The Breakers
Diarmuid’s Enormous Head
Policy
The Door
Adventure Stories for Boys
Homeless in Belfast A Diary
Sweet Home Under White Clouds
Our Good Dreams
Why I Live In A Shed
Mespil Revisited
No Shelter
Keeping Pace With Reality
Some Notes on Des Hogan’s Story ‘Kennedy’
How To Edit Your Own Lousy Writing
Interview with Sean O’Reilly
On Non-Fiction about Housing and Homelessness
Multimedia Notes on the Literature of Homelessness
David Wheldon
Float Like a Butterfly. Sting Like a Bee.
Daisy-Chained Summers
Nightstorming
Visual Purple
SPAR at 3.30pm
Absolutely Bloody Final
Some biota
The gift of water
I want
What have I lived?
Bleak
Freedom planet
A Foreign Country
Cork
Slow Puncture
Legacy
Aunt Libby
Father Bradley
Ríocht an Chait / Cat’s Kingdom
A Ghazal of Exodus
Starving With Bobby Sands
The Soldier on Clare Island
Syzygy
Holiday
Adeline
A Lesson in Needlework
Being the other girl
To the guy who tweeted, Stop calling crap that ain’t poems poems
Route not found
Stains
Brushing Yonder
Berry Fever
Deluge
That First Year
St Anne’s Cathedral
Samson and Goliath
Egg Breathing
The Kowloon Bridge
The Kerry Foot
Newborn 1984
On Visiting Ellis Island
Wall
Penance
Rorschach Test
Safe in a Box
I believe in the universe
Tech House
Caught in the Blue Beat
Inge
Parlance
Hunter-gatherers
Weapon of Choice
Rustlers
Dogs
77 pop facts you didn’t know about Gil Courtney
Trouble
The Last Stretch
Fly Roundtable: The short story and the novel
Beauty in Broken Things
Delia and Rose and The Long-Winded Lady
New introduction to Maeve Brennan’s ‘The Long-Winded Lady’
Family Walls (An Excerpt)
Smashing The Mirror
September, October
Hunting on the Boundary
Passing Open Windows
The Blind Clairvoyant
Radium Mother
The Shroud
Milltown Cemetery, Belfast, March 16th, 1988
Mixed Media
Creep
There is a Risk of Decay
Ramba Runs On Reddened Gears
I was your Golem
In His Attic
The Town of Checkers
Troll Song
Dollhouse
The Trade
The Guinea Fowl
Bogeyman
The ghost was not a normal one
Gums
Freckles
Dr Jekyll
Joe the Aquanaut and the Aftermath Blue
Amelia Magdalene
‘House of Leaves’ by Mark Z. Danielewski
Katharine
Just What’s For You, You’ll Get It
For Silence
The Boy Who Left
Hallucinating Vividly for Hours
Cute
Short, Sharp Shocks
The Xenophon Tapes
The Feather
The Fire at the Ritz
The Great Hunger
Real Boys
Dead Baby v Dead Baby: The Power of Humanity in Creating Penny Dreadful’s Horror
Forrester
Re-Animator Tales
To Cure a Body
The House of Love
Notes From The Void
The Testimony of Elie Wiesel
Translating Colin Barrett into German
Interview with Mike McCormack
Afterthought
Postcard
Frog
Filament (an excerpt)
Uilleann
The Tree
Amsterdam
Glenveagh
Persimmons
Ode To Love
October, Cork City
Rapture
Prayer for a Happy Death
To All Their Dues
How Do You Know Them?
Salivator
Leckerdam of the Golden Hand
That Is All
Show Them A Good Time
In a World That Dreams of Ending
‘First Love’ by Samuel Beckett
Casualty
Bird Man Spawns (reprise)
Blessed
After 1916
One Hundred Years
War has been given a bad name
The same people living in the same place
i measc mo dhaoine
Mivarts Hotel, 1847
The Philadelphia Frocks
Éamon de Valera
The Long Road
Recovering History
Martial Law
#Rising
Remembering at a Civil Union
Oak
Grace Gifford’s Wedding
Grip
Nocturnal
Hairy Jaysus
Appropriations of Michael Collins
Tomorrow Never Knows
All The Children Equal
The Multimedia Revolution in Poetry
The Butcher’s Apron
A Liffey Swell
1916, you’re asking me?
MiseryLit
The Names
Some Notes on Names and Deeds
The Black Proclamation
Frank O’Connor’s 1920s Cultural Criticism and the Poetic Realist Short Story
Poblacht na Hero
Walking Through Truth Land
It Could Be You
Making Fire
Hard Up For Heroes
Transition Year
Aiséirí
How Do We Know What We Know?
Marching Season
Danny
Roll-Calls and Role-Play
Brothers – 7th May 1916
Now We Can Talk Openly About Men
Muirdhreach
The Rage of O’Malley
Remembering C.D. Wright
The Shadow of the Word
On literary anxiety
Interview With Alan Gillis
‘Mis’ by Biddy Jenkinson
RECORDING-150319182512
Clips from an old apartment
Wobbly on the beach
Doon Lough
Firemen Waiting
Motorway
Eighteen
The Black Heralds
Sushi
Cultivation
Catullus Turns to Michael Hartnett
Crocus: A Brief History
Colourplates
Rock-a-bye
Market Prayer
Writing Poetry at 5AM
Resuscitation
Work Out
Pace
The War Reporter Paul Watson and the Boys That Dragged the Body
Lisheen
The Taxidermist’s Lover
the wolf of Ossory (OR: Of the prodigies of our times, and first of a wolf which conversed with a priest)
In Our Cabin
From Zero
SHE SAID / HE SAID: Field Notes
Urbs Intacta Manet
Going to the Wedding
Dance, Sing, Earn Your Keep
Via Lactea
Novel extract: ‘The Abode of Fancy’
Raising the Devil: The Unspeakable Fictions of Liam O’Flaherty
The Page As Existence
Three Love Stories
The Other Woman
Together On One Page
Anonymous Is Best
The City
Number One Haircut In Town
It Takes An Ocean Not To Break
How To Be Irish From a Distance
On the South Bank
High Street Kensington
Letter From the Republic of London
A Zoology of London
Death Trap for Beauty
London
MacNeice’s London
Terror and Wonder: London Chronicle
Downstream
monologue for cabman
Tell Me About It (An Extract)
Silhouette
A Woman in Transit
Some Notions of Home
Six Addresses
Suddenly a Duck
Ghastly
Days of the Lamb
Those London Visits
Les Papillons De Belsize
‘Well, there was the Irish’
From the Heroic to the Elegiac: Portrayals of the Post-War Irish Navvy in London
Pádraic Ó Conaire: Finding sanctuary in exile
‘Autumn Journal’ by Louis MacNeice
In the Wake of the Rising
On ‘Pond’
What Is In The Other Hand
‘Still Life of Peaches and Figs’
Scaffolding
Enough For Keeping
Nocturnes
‘Do I Dare Disturb The Universe?’
My Mistress’s Sex
The Load
Rings
Hump
The Glorious Heresies (An extract)
Eat or Be Eaten: An Incomplete Survey of Literary Dogs
Slim Pickings
Bearings
Night Drive
From ‘Camino’, a work in progress
Leaving You
Have I Been Severe?
The Unicorn Children
It Is Monday
Hades
An Account of Vital Clues Which Appear To You In A Dream
Seven AM in April
The Most Amazing Live Instrumental Performance You Have Ever Heard
Fireflies
Tale of the Boy & the Horse Head
The Melting Road
Prologue
‘Fresh Air’
Flavour
Eden
Forest, Snow, A Train
Memory Wintering
Whose Dream Are You?
A you I speak to
Milf
Jessica
Depiction
First Kiss
Pomegranate
Autumn
The Quiet Entanglement
Breadwinners
For The Time Being
Mouth
Hymn to the Reckless
Issue 29 – Editorial
Night Watch
Codladh
A History of Film, Vol. 1:
Gallows Green
The Heist
Unholy Hour
Sirens
The Electric City Of Heck
The Morning After
The Price of Flowers
Tales of our Time
Bottles
Bittersweet Nightshade
Finishing Touch
Trolleyboy
Strong
Sligo Occult: On Dermot Healy’s Radical Style
Notes on Jackson and His Dead
Lay Down The Dark Layers
Let’s Go Kill Ourselves
Intimacy Issues
On Learning (And Stealing) From Joyce
During the Russian Blizzard
Berlin
Shaping Air
The Winter Child
The Tailless Cats of Hannover
Temporary Art
Slinky
My Aunt Maggie
Last Holiday
Flight of Imagination
Mothers
Industrious Saints
Creed
The Pervert’s Guide To Modern Fiction, by Mrs Pimple
Chauncey
Intimations
Three Ways of Waking Up A Person
Back on the N81
‘Even Greenland’, by Barry Hannah
The Fair
Black Dog
The Indian
The Devil’s Castle
Dust
English Lesson
Favourite Son
Five O’Clock Shadow
Throwing Out My Father’s Tie
Track
Anniversary
A Glass of Red
Commute
Aesthetics
Poem for Oscar with Stars in it
After a Road Traffic Accident, Chennai
Cuilithíní
Úlla
Anathema
The Astrophysicist’s Party
Weighted
Van Gogh via Bacon
To A Boy Blowing Bubbles in the Rain
‘Keeping Bees’ and The Body (or why I will never f*ck a man who is not a feminist)
Bad Advice: 10 writers on the tips that did no good
A Tingling Pleasure
Before a Map of Russia
The Beast
Edward McGuire’s Portraits
Messines
Someone’s always losing someone else
The Door
Your Box
Cherry Blossoms
Göring and Göring
Late Spring
Nature’s Place
Nutshell Infinity
Cut
Today
Breathing Room
The Faces My Mother Makes While Driving
The Stache
Ecstasis
Cross-dressing with Paula Rego
The Meat Factory
Bone Collector
Flies
Peach Season
love is stuck
Ovum
The Science of Hands
And Time Was No More
Music To Drive By
Until They’ve Hatched
What He Did With The Insides
Grollicking
The Sound of Swallows
’44
Medulla of Hair
Two new happy endings and an old one
Kit Kats and Collins
FA Cup Winners on Open Top Bus Tour of My Village
Monday
Eat!
Heather and Chopped Liver
The Suicide Detective
The Woman In The Port
Outside, Bright Lights
Against Joy
The Meaning of the Rabbit
Ways of Seeing
The Lawrence Tree
Cadaverus
The Lunar Deep
Five Angels for Mil
Habitation
Eel
Fiachu Lethderg
The Story
Sleep in a Blue City
A Family Matter
Interview: Edith Pearlman
‘New and Selected Poems’, by Patrick Galvin
Davy Byrnes Short Story Award – We’re Open for Entries
Snorkel
Through the Eye of a Needle
Strictly Nil By Mouth
No, Mon Amour
Ida’s Porch, Sweden
Concentration
Winter City Food Market
Three Drunks (A Letter to Greg Trooper)
The List (A Letter to Phil Lynott)
Crisis Stabilisation Unit
Atheist’s Grace
On The Cavan Bus
Tea With Novelists
Easy on the Ankle
Late Night in a Cabin on the Head
Forgiveness
Redress
Gregory Corso’s Suit
The Beautiful Agony of Blaise Cendras
To See You Again
The Churching Tongue
Underneath The Sky
Vigil
For all those who wait for loved ones to die
Diagonally Opposite
Deviation Road
A Thousand Bars
Raid
The Present
small steps
The Magic
Henry Ford
A letter from Rebecca Cartello in Scarborough, England, to her sister Carla in Longreach, Queensland, 15 December 1955
A Form Of Love
Luck
Vestments
From Which Our Ration
Revisiting
October 30, 1938
Multi-storey
The Cavalcade
There it is
Taiga
The Boy from Petrópolis
New York Impossible
Fifty Year Winter
Constance
The Good Mother
Randomer
A Different Country
‘Tales from Bective Bridge’, by Mary Lavin
Editorial – Summer 2013 Translation Special
Taboo
People are strange
Bare Feet Like Animals
The Public Scribe
The Tale of the Woman who Fell in Love with the Wind
The Wardrobe
Eight Days
Q&A With Hans-Christian Oeser
The Flying Chairs
Trespass
The potential of literature in translation
Q&A With Daniel Hahn
Q&A With David Colmer
Q&A With Donal McLaughlin
Q&A With Sinéad Mac Aodha
Q&A With Giuliana Zeuli
Interview: Robert Chandler
The Intrigue
Grandfather and the King
death and ophelia
One of These Days
Editorial – Spring 2013
Doppelganger
My Mother’s Salmon Skin Nightdress
Fauverie (III)
Sense Memory Cares For Us Like A Mother
Golden Plover
Parchment
Since 10 o’clock
Walls
Poem for Tennessee Williams
Look Who’s Talking
Saluti
Watertight
Fear Bréige
The Singer
Gomera
Gare du Nord
Signatures
The Art of the Poetic Line
ICU
After You Died
The Dead Blue Tit
After Poetry
Wind Flower
In The Field Of Shells
The Emerald Swallow
For Your Secrets
Strange Country
Kindly Forget My Existence
A Little Before Seven
À la Descartes
The Story of Dahnash and Ma’aruf
Eustace Madden is breathed upon once more
Jeopardy
Beatsploitation (An Extract)
‘The Parts’, by Keith Ridgway & ‘The First Verse’, by Barry McCrea
When the world ends
August 30, 2012
The Waking
The Stillest Horse
Security
Six Months
The Black Lark
Fuascailt Nell Crane
Tesco
An Casán Dearg/The Red Path
Mass
Homily (or The Odd Couple)
Lighting Fires on the Moon
Insomniac Mothersong
Mill Wheel At Bantry
Sonnets of Despair: apologia pro vita et arte mea
The Lost Notebook
dream for sale
the court of the red queen
Now
The Rest of the Day
Interpretation
Downturn
The Situation
The Question
The Watchman
Wave
The Whole Shebang
Moby-Dick
Once A Blue Moon
The Pain Index of Writer’s Block
The Night of the Silver Fox
Ostrich
I Can Do This
Fine As Feathers
Morning, 1908
Main Street, Underworld
Pilgrimage
Transition
Return
Always The Stranger
‘My Lord You’, by James Salter
A Most Shameful Inspiration
Not Prolific, Just Creative
The Shelter of Words
Wooden Horse
Little Creatures
OWL MAN IN BAD FORM
Danny McCarthy’s LISTEN hEAR
Laethanta saoire
Tromluí
Summer Nocturne
Departures, Destinations
Monaghan Mosquitoes
Dyslexic
High
Prelude—The Flaggy Shore
Paradox
Down Pub
Coroner’s Court and City Morgue
Humans
Who Killed Bambi?
Asimo—On Prime Time TV
The Voyager Mote
I dream of being a robot in Labrador City
Zugunruhe
*
The Executioner’s Confession
The Long Lost Father
A Small Thing Indeed
*
clay
sleepless
The Agreement
The Order of Things
An American Road Trip in Ireland
Film Noir
In The Dark
White Tent City
market square
shadowgraph 73: no longer magic (poetry detected in maria goeppert-mayer’s nobel physics lecture, 1963)
Messiaen in a field near Lille
cub
Till the Crack of Cock
The Election of Kieran Sealy
Mulcair
Protesting the Tornado
La Nausée
Depression
She Was Found
On Wine Street
I Know The Sound
Autumno
The Sneezer
Hypothesis
Sirventes
SECTION 3: THE UNSEEN POEM (100 MARKS)
Lament for Christy Ring
Incipit euangelium secundum Wat Tyler
Due North
Mexico Drift
Flâneuse
Editing ‘The Stinging Fly’
Diamond Days
Writing The City
How a Magical Rambler named Margaret saved me from the funeral of everything and prepared me for the Cork Spring Poetry Festival 2012
Scent of a Salesman
A Sin To Tell The Naked Truth
All About Alice
Hancock Park
Stasis
Alzheimer’s
Sweet Pea
The Sewing Room
The Iron Lady
Bigler
Both Sides
The Boxer
They shall not grow old
Imitation
London
the seagull smashes against the glass
Love Seems Unlikely
Going Out
Impossible Not To Think Of Him
Between
Fógraí Báis / Death Notices
none the less
Blink
Three Minute Moments
5/2/2012 – The Guardian Angel
3/2/2012
18/1/2012
At Your Local Spar
She Wishes
Looking For Light
Horror Story
We Are Far From Home
The Puppet Son
Dublin After Rain
The Canal
There Could Have Been Sparks
Dumb Poem
RE:fresh | Joseph Campbell
The Quiet
Another Drift
In Praise of the M6
Jessie
Some Notes From Winter
Editorial Statement
American Dreams
The Bone House
Shouting at the Windows of the Night
Long Island
The Same Place
Aspect
Fist and After, El Cinzano
A Maça no Oscuro
*
*
September 11th
The Testing Word
The Soothing Word
The Norman Keep
Poet
Somewhere Between
Truffle
The Cow
Taking Off Billy Collins’ Clothes
Quarry
In the Diner
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
Pershing
Envoi
Immoderate Grief: immediate notes
Joining
Yeats Country
Euclid Avenue
Eclipse, 1999
The Man in the Duck Suit
The Spider and the Angel
On Revisiting the Lifework of Joseph Cornell, 1903-1972
The Third City: Maeve Brennan’s imaginative home
I Already Missed The Start
Spoons
Going Underground
All Day And All Of The Night
All this coming and going
New York Perceived
New York Odyssey
Keep The Wolf From The Door
‘Enormous Changes at the Last Minute’ by Grace Paley
My ugly lovely town
Can Creative Writing Be Taught?
Starting Over
The Twinkle in Edna’s Eye
Prehistoric raves, the Irish Spoken Word scene, and why it’s best to have no plans.
Mary Costello’s New York Diary – Part 3
Mary Costello’s New York Diary – Part 2
Mary Costello’s New York Diary
I Just Know That Something Good Is Going to Happen
The Inscribing Hour
Promises, Promises
Every Dog Has His Day
On Behalf of the Dead
Tar liom, a ghrá
Deoch an ghrá
Cluain na hEorna
Sleight
Visitor
The Cat and the Man
Mute
Night Duty
Braids
Sea Life in Saint Mark’s Square
Off Bantry
Peru Is Calling
Hope
A Beautiful Day At Birkenau
India
Accidents
Romance
Sunnyside
Son Of A Gun
Safe House
Keen/Caoineadh
Highlands
Samhain/All Hallow’s Eve
Mam
Nocturne
Forgetting
sleeping with an atheist
Strangers
The Woman With Too Many Mouths
Girl on the Steps
Relics
The Abyss Staring Back: Shock in Literature, Literature in Shock
You Just Wouldn’t Know
Deep Fat
The Cold Eye of Heaven (An Extract)
Unhealthy Intersection
‘The Poetics of Space’ by Gaston Bachelard
Pandora’s Box
Sodom and Gomorrah
Family Real Estate
A Country Girl
Geimhriú
Bealtaine
St Nick’s
Essay on the Toucan
Orange-Bellied Parrot
Harness Room
Honey
Haunting my Daughter
Go gentle
Not to Mention the Dog
Zippo, Delay Unit, Fender Esquire
July The 14th
The Bridge
Luke Chapter Eight Versus the Mundane
Bela Rada
Going Back
The Day Not Yet Spoiled
Mirrored Belly of the Sea
Night
Somewhere Else
Baucis and Philemon Retold
Listening to Kings of Convenience
London
Eight O’Clock on Sunnybank Avenue
Autumning
Lagan from the Ormeau Bridge, on a Good Evening
Thinking of You on an Evening Walk in January
A man died in the valley today
Duty
Revenge
Guilt
Two Entries in the Annals of Wayfaring
Antique Cabinets
Waiting to Happen
The Moon
Stringing Up The Brides
Insomniac
I Bought A Heart
Grace
Waiting For Bread
Long Time No See
Different Trains
‘Blood Meridian’ by Cormac McCarthy
It Goes Like That
Face
His first year tilts to winter
Rubble
Cat Schrödinger
Tearmann
An tSochraid
Milleán
The roots of the myth
The Soul of the Piano
Tracks
Maybe He Just Slipped In
My Father in the Wooden Plane
Demons
Sea-Stallion
da capo
New Year’s Greetings
Rattled
Missing Persons
This is All
About
It Takes A Worried Man
To the boy who sat beside me in the library yesterday
This is a True Story About Falling in Love
The Afterlife
Names
For Lauren Who Named Her Goldfish after Ted Hughes
Cast Off
Dams Hold Back Water
Countdown
Witness
[OE byrgan]
The Lady Meets The Mob
Unsaid
Cana Wedding
Flight
White Room
The Black Rock
Reading and Writing Ireland’s Past and Future: James Joyce (1882-2012)
Faraway
Still Turning Slowly
The reasons I know of that we are not allowed to talk to our grandmother
Things I See
One Owner Only
Her Way of Saying No
Shadows In A Glass
Micro-Cosmopolitanism
Ye Dancer
One of us
Echtrae Conlae
Sliocht as Turas na mBolcán
Watching
Toes
The Monster Surely
A Report from the Mapparium, Boston
Observations upon hearing she was leaving Australia
The Waking of Eimear Kinnane
Shoes
Socks
Bud
*
*
*
*
*
*
Feast Days
*
Concealment
Hide and Seek
Teenage Rebel Poem
Basking Adder
Kennedy
Thady and Alice
The company that night keeps
there were all these birds
Appraisal
The Room
Enough
When You Left
Electric Face—The Second Meeting
Come Over To My Place Electric Face
Some Strange Language
Bullies
friend of a friend
1984 Revisited
Room of Red
Tírghrá
Impossibilities
The Stick
Whale
The Boy, Ian
A Right Heart
All Five of Us
Bandoneon
Lost city
Blind Road Blues
Seeing Believing
Fusing
Kalypso’s Step-Me-Gaily
Antinoos Puts the Boot in
Bag Lady
Ping
Haiku
Cell Phone
Nightmare
Herald
Her Lucky Black Cat
Vanishing Act
Belgian Blue
There’s An Awful Lot Of Coffee In Brazil
Gaff
Tree Law
Wardlesmake
The Judas Kiss
Pappin’s Tower
Self-Assembly
Hay
Skippy Dies (An Extract)
Up For The Prize
Recession to Recession
Road Trip
Body Clock
oranges, window, snow
Concerns
Beneath the armour the soldiers are dying
Phone
Visitor
A Poem Only In Translation
Grapefruit
Dreamless
A Little Knowledge
Where there is no Time
The Couple
Snow
Night Watch
Late, Late
Ghastlymake
This Is The Street
Attendant
Pipeline
Animal Biscuits
Mary in the round
A Poem in Rage Speeding North on Highway 395 in a Pontiac GTO
Fossil Fuel
The Last Lonely Place
Distance
Black Horse of the Liberties
Get Those Feet Moving
The Devil
Beginning of Trust
Cuas a’ Bhodaigh
Unrhymed Sonnet
‘A Forest’
Dancer (Flamenco)
Lawrence, KS (5 p.m. Tuesday, 4th November, 2008)
Interview: Deirdre Madden
When Childhood Broke
Unsettled (extract)
Elevation
Circling The Shoreline
Just the Thing
Legs
Café Bohemia
Gathering Spiders
Writing Home
Bees in Amber
Letter – ‘… the joy of tranquillity’ (father’s letter)
Kissing Cousins
Stones
Late Cycle
The Real in Poughkeepsie
Red Perch
Another Place, Another Time
In Her Shoes
St. Lambert
Topography
By The Sea
After Your Going
Kyoto Koan
Who Says You Can’t Go Home Again?
No Place like Home
Borderline
Quantum Politics
Pastoral Symphony
Spitting Image
Midsummer
The Alsatian of Milan
Because of that morning in 1983
Yesterday, I Failed
Hurt Her. Hurt Her. Hurt Her.
Bones Part I
Suffocation Prelude
Apple, Pear and the Body Running Through Them
Reservations
Oklahoma
The Centre of Excellence
Death and the Post Office
Live
Left Luggage
Osip Mandelstam
Great Northern Divers in Ballinskelligs Bay
Doctor, My Dear
What do I almost remember?
Bait
The Chair
The Mahogany Desk
Concerning Divine Light
Gravity
In Solidarity
The Widows’ Prayers
About Visions and Voices
The Change
What I Learnt Watching Archeology On TV
American Internal
Teaching Myself Arabic (Lesson #7)
A Postcard from Berlin
Amsterdam
The Shoes
The Hat
The Pockets
Matins
Choreography
Scripture
Equinox
The Photos on the Wall
Waiting
An Old Woman Weeds a Grave
The Carpenter’s House
Love at first sight
Exile
Murambi
Ntarama
Rosalina Silva
Cow Goddess
Mango
Ice
El Niño
On First Drafts…
On First Drafts…
Waiting By The Lutétia
The Break In
On First Drafts…
The Profligacy Show
On First Drafts…
The Worst Person in Ireland
On First Drafts…
Justice for One
My Struggle… To Grow Up To Be A Writer
First Passions
A Time For Everything
The Quotidian
The Statue Artist
Water
A Curl In The Lip
Runt
First Passions
Old Swords
The Scandal
legend of the walled-up wife
just that
Arctic Opera
The Sarah M—Named After His Mother
Molesworth Street 6 p.m.
Balscadden
Winter Light
Phone Call From Finland
Baba Yaga
More Space Than Stars
Basement Corridor, St James’s Hospital
White Chickens
A Prayer for Nikos Kazantzakis
Your Arms
We Are What We Eat…
The Names of Donkeys
Lambs
Master Butcher
First Kiss
A Poet and an Uncalled-for Ending
Signs
Blue
Irreversible
My Father Shows Me How to Sharpen a Bush-Trimmer
Crazy Love
Why Put the Lid On It? He Asks
Lunchtime Survival Guide for Second Years Who Are Small
Test
The Lake
White Van-watching on Stocking Lane
Kalle Metro Graveyard
Summer Haze Parade
Swedish Room
Bachelor
Landscapes
Sligo on a summer night
Enclosure
Vowels
Visiting Hours
Meditation on a Couch
Flight
He Asks She Explain Love
Flower Girl
Renaissance Portrait
He Is Gone
The Farm Stand
Woman riding on a Cock
Sea Monsters
The Palace
Midsummer
Shelter
After Emergency Surgery
Oh, This and That
The Hill of Shoes
Latch
Solo for saxophone and geraniums
A Tall Tale
First Passions
At The Dark Stroke Of Midnight
Out of it
Following Frida
lamb
Anniversary Wish
Departed
The Rescue
Germination
From Basho in Riyadh
Ultrasound
Guarding the Flame
The Red Petticoat
Descartes’ Daughters
The Literalist
Translations
Wasp-byke
The spaces in between
Grammar
‘Love, the Nightwatch…’
Coming of Age in the Musée d’Orsay
Blue Hour
Carcass
Glenn Gould’s chair looks ahead
The Music Room
Allegro
Well, Look At You
Oh, Romeo
Wilderness Elsewhere
Eleven Ex-Boyfriends Have Yet To Be Identified
Pascalʼs Wager
Madonna Irlanda
For Scrap
Interview: Anne Enright
The Buzz of The Poem
First Passions
So, Where Do You Expect To Find Poetry?
Love Scene In The Rambla
Going Down Into The Metro
Yesterday’s City
Blame It On Breakfast
After Intimacy
Enda And The Bride of Christ
Canair In The Afterlife
bully
Four Corner
Crows In Winter
From ‘A Fool’s Errand’
National Holiday
Platform
Becoming Paper
Wife Swap
November Day Trip
Shooting O’Connell Street—February 2006
The Feather of Truth
jealously on the cusp of commitment
Dusk
The Melt
Exodus
Dawn Sun
Troublemaker
The Curse
The Fall of Saigon
The Roses: A Triptych
Benedict and the Lost and Found
Jesus on the Boulevard
Midafternoon
Luminous Blue Nightie
High and Low
Heart to Heart
Anaesthesia
Letʼs go make some noise!
First Passions
Hunting the Cloud
Stiltwalker
Learning to Swim
Getting a Headache
The Exquisite Courtesy of Fawzi Karim
Vespers
The Pugilist
Alone
Old Canal Waters
Ack! Ack! Ack!
Celebration
The Roadside Crosses
Torturing The Young Primitives
He Knows No Artichokes
Distance from the Dream Self
The Valley
On My Sixty-First Birthday
Hanging Threads
Sun-stroked
My Secret War
Kid Falling
In the Slipstream of a Christ-like Figure
Whole Family With Young Children Devastated
Interview: MJ Hyland
The Other Broadway
First Passions
Hard Times
Stockpile
Just Listening
The Cardigan
Nemesis
Pig Farm
L.I.V.I.N.
Cardioversion
Sonnet
Family History at Sea
A Barnacle
Watching Cormorants
Jellyfish
Cliffs
Death by drowning
Sunday Walk
At My Door
Drift
The Half-Door
Fishing for Mackerel
Holy Hour
Menhir
Acclamations
Death of a handyman
Parents’ Wardrobe
Early On
On Seeing James Malton’s Powerscourt-House, Dublin 1795
The Good Story
No. 13 Baby
Daddy
Sisters: Chapter 3
Mr Loganʼs Weekly News
First Passions
Last Days of the Buffalo
First Response
Li Po
Fastening the gaps
When You Died
Rural Petrol Station
The Toys
Just once
Bad Reception
Words to Form my Mother
*
The Snowflake Album
The Snow Crab
Misery Hill
Romantra 69
Sex Without A Face
Butterfly
the perfect night
Exotic Dance
Damascene
Learning To Name
Mahal
Household Plant
City Twilight
Presbyterian
Fair, occasionally good
View of the island
Fogbound
Clap Hands, Clap Hands
Coyote Dawn
Thread Mark
Interview: Claire Kilroy
Double Tub
the focus of attention
Our Lady of the F Train
Catholic Boy
First Passions
She Fed Her Heart on Fantasies
Your Star Is In The Ascendency
Like Fish
The Complicated Architect
tourbusting4
The Elephant as a Public Symbol
Words Spoken
Red Truck
A Week of Little Deaths
The Dead Hotel
Hen Night
Bancher’s Daughter
Avenging the Stilts Man
Holding Hands
Xavier
Desire
Dark Horses
Calais
A Very Unsettled Summer
Speechless
Party At Helen’s
In Praise of What We’ve Lost
Looking Back
Iodine
Rayon* (Sukharevskaya)**
Sonnet
Bog Woman
Wildflowers
Cora, Auntie
Magnetic Resonance
Scan
Where Things Touch
February Fog, Driving to Boston
Heather, in Miami
Turn on the Radio
Into the Evening
Uncles
My Mother’s Aunt
All Souls
Touch
A Sentimental Education
Vico Road
Initial Appraisal
Number 8
Seven Significant Trips to the Bathroom
Japanese Row
Tourists
Vitamins
Small Things
Interview: Nick Laird
Young Woman in Williamsburg
A White Christmas for Momma
Speaking with Tongues
The Seat by the Sea
Priory Street
The Gong People
Tidying Up, Tying Down
Early Morning in Smithfield
First Passions
The Housebuilder
The Little Italian Place
Those were the Days
First Light, Late Winter
The Long Night
Sunlight of Love
The Inheritors
Pike
So we got out of Lebanon
A Whitened Sorry
In Dodder Winter
The Damage Done
Simulation
Daytrip
Third State
Conservation Of Feeling
Alright?
Unreal Focus
Down Down They Fell
Someone Like That
#3
#2
#1
Defrosting a Chicken
Diary
The Glories of the Caesars
Quality Sixteen
A Paucity of Light
A Patch of Blue
Onions
Clementines
Untitled #2
Untitled #1
Cows
It’s Spring
The Team of Alienation
Six Flights Up
Tidal Dreams
Choose a colour
Deadlocked wedlock
The Big Empty
Pollen
Calculus
Electrical Storm
Shrine
Solace
Honking
Interface
Penguins
First Passions
Watermark (An Extract)
Dimitrie
The Frame
Anxiety
To Birds
Evolution
Picturehouse
Looking For Life
Order
When I Was A Famous Poet
Dance
schadenfreude
Read My Lips
Q.E.D.
Breath
Breaking Even
The Spider
Absences Also
Oranges
Home Thoughts
Rutland Sound
On Finding Dad’s Rosary Beads
Clipping for Quarters
First Love
Vocal Chords
Where poems begin…
Window Boxes
Visiting Eastern Europe
The Problems of Globalisation and Small Countries
The Beast
Opening Submissions
Wee Sleekit
Maybe Grace
Knowledge at Angkor Wat
Menace
Tempting, Tempting
Twisted
Making Do
The World
Hanging Around
Tony Blair’s Schooldays
Beat
Gale Force
Night Starvation
Going through the motions
Confidants
Your Kitchen Floor
After The Achter Huis
The Journey
Poem for my Son
Grand Mal
A Scattering of Symmetry
Dry Mouthed and Melancholy
Sight, or Island No. 5
Someone who dies in a vision
Soul Journeys
Stations of a burnt out landscape
Backwards & Out
Gliding down the Slaney exalted
The Hand
Fallen
On high
Prometheus
Anxiety
Enlightenment
Poetry
Unyielding memory becomes
Sight Reading
Alex Lowe in South Africa
Tomorrow, she whispered
A poem about rioting
The Beds of Europe
Paradise
from ‘The Short Story’
Catacombs
Decent Skins
Primitive
Babylon
Dead Letters
touch
Auto da Fé
Poem
Under A Pomegranate Sky
To High Heaven
Build Your Own Home
Hag Poem
European Wife
As I Sink Down
Squash
The Day I Brought Water
A History of Italy
C haste Hands
Friendly Fire
All Summer (an extract)
The Suit
Flathunters
Interview: Colum McCann (2003)
Crane
First Passions
Fruits at the Brink of War
Knocking Back
Bone Deep
Doctors, daughters
The Henna Ceremony
Dublin Memories
Dream On
To Sunday Evening
Before the Lid
Finches
The Getaway
The Calling Angel
Child’s Play
Rocket Science
Bible Story
The Queen Of All Ireland
Exile
The Rock in the Bog
Rowan
The Notebook
On Being Excluded from a ‘New Poets’ Anthology on the Grounds of Age
And they say time is like a river
Conversation with a Corncrake
Cutting Hair on St Stephen’s Day
Deer
from ‘Rhythm and Destruction’
Gravastar
In Praise of Salt
Our Flower Garden
Interview: Sinead Morrissey
The Rift
The ibis tamers
Pixels
A Good Guy
Moses
Gallivanting
Interview: Molly McCloskey
Night watch
At The Turf, Evening
Gas Mask
Sandman
The Caress
FM, A.M.
No Stake in the Future
View from Inside the House
Still Life With Storm
After noon
You Take What You Can
Thank You, Cat
After an Italian Movie
Croan Lodge
Stoop Your Head
Watching, Now
Late Autumn in the Estate
Family Man
Letter to Canberra
Graduating
About the Days
Broken Teeth
The Portal
Out Of It
Fatso
Interview: Pat Boran
The Weirdness of Dead lnfantas
Forgiveness
Icarus
Old Edson and the spirit
Lavoisin and Lavigoreux
Sweets
I Fail You
Relationships in a Landscape
My Woman
Boy
Wheeling
The sixties wives: a photograph
Small Interior
Strength
At the End of the Day
History of Flowers
A Man Is Only As Good…
The Magic Roundabout
Looking for Petronilla
News
The Head of Red O’Brien, or The Last Monologue
Counting Backwards
Interview: Emma Donoghue
Moon Calf (Black Mountain, Belfast, 2000-1)
In the Province of Tchang
The Figurehead
Listening to Beethoven
La Preghiera / Prayer
La Serenità / Serenity
The Act
Nine Lines
Windwalk, Cape Clear Island
Beside tall engines
The Bridge
The Reconstruction
Dublin Unbuilt
Stitched
Early Lessons
Catkins
Heaven
Women Combing Their Hair
From Venice
Die gestundete Zeit / Borrowed Time
Take Two
The Shape
Novel In Progress – Chapter 8
News from a January River
For Ever and Ever
Interview: Kerry Hardie
Morning on Lahinch Beach
The Leader
Black Coffee
A Sign of Peace
Silence
Eclipsed
Eulogy
36th Midsummer
Split
Big Issue Seller Dreams of Home
You Never Can Tell
At the Night Porter’s
Commonplace
Potemkin
Two Snapshots for the Inner Eye
Sheets
Watching for Signs
Buying Seeds in the Snow
Bosses of Morning
The Broken Mirror
Hankering
Border Crossing
Dubliner
The Story About A Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God
That Snowman
Crool Schuel
Grace at the Wall of Death
Dearcan
Outside the Redhead World
The Dreams of Mary Cleary
Interview: Colum McCann
Honey
Heroes, Just For One Day
From ‘The Fisher Child’
Spud Dinners on Potato Picking Day
Cows
The Road to Termonfeckin
Summerhouse Dream
Late Spring
august dervish
Beautiful People
A Gypsy Woman In Ireland
The US Holocaust Museum
The Wyoming Cattle Growers’ Association
Glitterball
Discovering America
Spring clean
The Change Worshipper
Eden Quay
Harvesting
Oral History: Mary Byrne
Bosnian Housewife (from a news photo, Visoko, 1996)
Time Will Come There’s Nothing Left
Winter Orchard
Heading Off
I’ll tell you my poem about killing a pig
The intimacy of the house
Epilogue
The Director’s Cut
Jeanne Hébuterne
Proust’s Bellerophon
Plath on Prozac
Passage
Tap Tap
Domestic
The Giving and the Taking
Things the Body Remembers
Everything but the Goblets
Memory Lane
June 18, 1998
Bloomsday
Perfect South
Blip
Twenty-Eight Days
An Engagement
After Life
Die Birnen von Ribbeck
Fillin’ Holes and Floggin’ Fenians
The Fight Game
Consumption
Marathon
Cloud Ten
Inland
New Year’s Day
The Goldfinch
Waiting
Sisters
In a Train
Why our goldfish swims
Stone Quarry:
Visiting Dachau
Happenstance
First Traces
Cork, for me
Letter from Seville
Preludes
Up into the Woods
From Where You Sit Tonight
Stoney batter
Phoenix Street
The photograph:
Government Plans Cheap Homes
Last Post
Asleep At The Switch (Extract)
But Your Mother
Summer Job
Horse
A Meeting (Extract)
Lament
Carer
Genesis
Not the Favourite Child
Swan Lake, Kenai Wilderness, Alaska
Fasting
The Cells of Night
Blueprint
Frenchman
Ouch
In Dawnlight and Early Frost
The Secret Life
Touches
Liffey Dream
Pub Scene, with Taggart
Morning Service
Caught
City after Dark
Alstraomeria
My Father’s Brother
Inland
Monsanto Shuffle
Woman’s Work
‘The Pause Between Dances’
Piano Lesson
Bad Friday
Both Pacific
First Notes on a Connemara Poem
Tableau
Elegy
a way
The Twelfth of July
Approaching Dusk
January, 1994
Spring Haiku
Ljus av ljus / Light from Light
A Discussion of the Weather
Buttering the Mountain
Old Russian Photograph
Nocturnal Predators
Becoming Invisible
Ballymun: A New Beginning
Dichotomy
Ulysses: The Executive Summary
Deck-Chairs
The Meadow
Wonders of the Green Line
DIY Blues
Affair
Darkling
Cuauhtemoc
Fist
The View from Under the Table
Eniwitok*
The Libertine
Hide and Seek in Berry Bog
The ghosts of dogs
Sojourner
‘Just Blow!’
Dear Mr. Yeats
Monopolylogue I
The Blarney Stone
The Secret Chord
Fishguard
Liffey Swim
Untitled
Hopperesque
In China
Waterfall
Killarney
He remembers
Anglo-lrish Boy
The Defeat of Destiny
Bluebells
Monolith
A Twentieth-Century Edition
I
Gone With The Wind
The Optimist
Reconstruction
Sara
On The Lake
Blackberries
Young Man of the Curling Hair
The Mind Tastes
Epitaph for a Poultry-eater
The Drum Lesson
ETceterA
Back in Ballycotton
Alexander Calder’s Mobile Phone
Patient