Heather Brett and Noel Monahan - poet-editors - have been working on Windows Publications, from Ireland, for 20 years now, and have now published a celebration of this two-decades of effort to support local and wider poetry. Such work is usually thankless, so I thank them here. And note the anthology is worth buying, to support their work, and to read some very good recent poems by Irish poets known and new (perhaps) to you. I am in the book, I should add, which is lovely; many others too, including Paul Perry, Patrick Chapman, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Nessa O'Mahony, Pat Boran, Leland Bardwell and Medbh McGuckian.
A poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.
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