Skip to main content

Poem By Nigel McLoughlin

Good to have Nigel McLoughlin (pictured) as the featured poet this Friday. He's one of the impressive new voices of his generation.

He is also Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire and his work has been twice short-listed for a Hennessy Award, and placed in The Kavanagh Prize and The New Writer Poetry Prize.

McLoughlin lectured in Traditions at Poets’ House from 2000 to 2004 and has worked as a tutor with the London School of Journalism and as a Senior Tutor and Curriculum Design Consultant with the Open College of the Arts. He holds an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing and a PhD from Lancaster University.

He has written four collections of poetry: At The Waters’ Clearing (Flambard/Black Mountain Press, 2001), Songs For No Voices (Lagan Press, 2004), Blood (Bluechrome, 2005) and Dissonances (Bluechrome, 2007). He also co-edited Breaking The Skin (Black Mountain Press, 2002) an anthology of new Irish poets. His New and Selected will be out soon, from Templar, I hear.

Most recently, McLoughlin became editor of the revamped Iota magazine.


After The Battle

Night cursed its way along the valley,
lay like a malartán in the cradle of two hills.
The moon like a burst of ore had shot through
the streams’ seep between the stones
and sifted ferric flakes downhill
from the battlefield where the weapons
rust their way to their oblivion
of soil and shattered bone.

Even the grass is vaguely ferrous,
the sharp blade hides that underhand
green, flicks it from the frosty
underside like a switchblade of colour.
Dew shod, I make my crossing
across a treachery of stones
my feet defy by gripping
before the crack splits the blue air

wide open and through it something
vast and dark at the corner of my eye
approaches, flutters, passes. Again
and I look down into the whiskey-
coloured water a long while before
I realize the ore that colours it. I drop
my gun – a splash – a crack off stone,
I feel the iron heat half-cauterise my side.

Who’d have thought that blood
could have been that colour.


poem by Nigel McLoughlin
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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....
3 comments
Read more

"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...".
1 comment
Read more

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise...
1 comment
Read more