Skip to main content

Poem By Donald McGrath

Eyewear is pleased to welcome Donald McGrath this Friday.

McGrath is a Montreal-based poet, short-story writer and translator. He has had work in a wide variety of Canadian periodicals and reviews including Grain, The Antigonish Review, Prism, Poetry Canada and The New Quarterly, as well as on www.nthposition.com and www.danforthreview.com.
He has published a very good volume of poetry, At First Light (Wolsak and Wynn, 1995).

His work is characterized by arch wit and verbal exuberance, leavened with recollections of a rural childhood.


Washday

The glass was blueish green, like the sea
and furrowed like it, too. Unlike the sea's,
its waves all rose to the same height
and never broke, holding in their smoke
like a bunch of grapes. Braided like rope,
rough to the touch, they rubbed
the woman's knuckles raw as she scrubbed
clothes up and down, down and up, in
the wooden iron-hooped tub, spilling
fluffy suds upon the grass behind
the house where the white clothesline
tipped and tilted on its long green stick.
The woman next door would step up to the fence
and, palm on reddening cheek, praise
such industry as this that kept poor Hannah
busy until all hours. But soon she'd flee,
driven by some sudden recollection, or by jealousy,
back into the house. Then a finned car
with fierce shark teeth would ever so slowly
grumble up the gravel of the lane. The boy
would be there, too, next to his mother,
guiding his own little car or peeling dark
strips of bark off speckled chips of wood
piled by the chopping block, where the bright red noodle
leaped out from the chicken’s neck that special
day his father took down the axe.


poem by Donald McGrath

Comments

Dave King said…
This is a very fine poem which I shall be coming back to. There is much subtlety, I think, too much to take in in one visit.

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".