Editorial: 15 November 2010

November 11, 2010 Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh is an Irish-language poet, who follows in the footsteps of previous generations of Irish writers, yet embraces urban themes and settings in her poetry alongside attention to traditional concerns, such as the decline of the Irish language: “Some days, let’s admit it, / I tire / of rallying to her defence // I weary of being rooted / here by her bedside” she writes of “this language / that has been violated” in ‘When One Despairs’. Irish – the language of her upbringing, her formal education and her poetry – may be tiring to nurture, yet it is clearly still central to Ní Ghearbhuigh. Livia Brennan, who introduces Ní Ghearbhuigh, sees this young poet’s work as being a “testament to the language’s singular expressive capabilities and its capacity to render the excitement and difficulties of modern living”. Poems such as ‘Citybound’ and ‘St Nick’s’ are indeed successful, insightful evocations of modern city life. Out of the selection of Ní Ghearbhuigh’s work chosen for PIW, however, it’s the quiet, punchy melancholy of ‘Wintering’, with its fantastic opening lines “I caught a stomach-sorrow / while traipsing October’s fogs” that grabs me the most – perhaps because of its timely suggestion – in the wake of the end of daylight saving two weeks ago – to “give in to wintering”.

The Irish domain also features Patrick Galvin, a long-time figure on the Irish literary scene, having co-founded and chaired the Munster Literature Centre in Cork City (PIW’s partner organisation) alongside other literary pursuits including setting up the Poetry Now festival and writing plays, songs, memoirs and poetry, for which he is best known. The selection of his poetry for PIW includes his well-known ‘The Madwoman of Cork’, alongside ballad-influenced poems such as ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ and the rather disturbing ‘Little Red Knife’. Deep social and political concern is evident in Galvin’s work, and ‘The Prisoners of the Tower’ is particularly unsettling and acerbic in its darkly caustic depiction of oppressive regimes:

All prisoners
Are entitled to death
All prisoners
Are entitled to a speedy death.
Any prisoner
Who is not capable of committing suicide
Will be shot
Any prisoner
Who fails to report
A desire to commit suicide
Will be shot.

On the Colombian domain, we also find politicised poetry with the work of Pedro Arturo Estrada: “The poets insist. / Say the same thing again. / Don’t surrender” he writes, and it’s the refusal of poets to “take the hint” and stay silent that poses a threat to oppressive systems, as well as deploring the destruction these create. In ‘No Man’s Country’, for instance, he laments the dispossession and alienation of those who “lose all homeland”, the homeland which has been “seized in airports, / banks, multinationals, as uselessly wrinkled as the / valueless banknote that displays it”. With imagery at times lucid and simple, at others enigmatic and abstract, Pedro Arturo Estrada’s poetry seems to have at its core a deep, sad emptiness, with themes of exile, silence and absence running through his work. The first person of ‘Shadow Passenger’, for instance, is a “blind traveller of the lunar heart”; in ‘Country of Silence’, “Someone dares to ask after him who has not returned. / And the shadows answer: nothing, nobody, no one”; while in ‘As Cioran Goes Silent’, the “rotundity of a body, / desire” gives way to “the rotundity of its void”.

Pedro Arturo Estrada himself introduces our final poet this month, George Mario Angel Quintero. The son of Colombian parents, he grew up in California and writes in both Spanish and English. The selection of Spanish poems published here on PIW have been translated by the poet himself, with close attention to representing the imagistic brevity and rich aural qualities of the originals in English. The onomatopoeic opening of the lovely ‘Tath that . . .’ (in Spanish “Tat tat”) evokes the sound of doves’ wings, for instance, and the rhythms of the short, airy lines of ‘The moth stutters . . .’ are gorgeously rendered into English.

We hope you enjoy the variety of original work and translations in this issue. And don’t forget to let Marc Kregting, who is currently writing a book about coffee, introduce you to the social and cultural aspects of the drink through his PIW archive tour and accompanying introduction.