Torchlight

Peter McDonald

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781847770912
• eBook ISBN: 9781847779359
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Torchlight explores the haunting persistence of memories, and the acts of remembrance which preserve and shape them. In his fifth collection, the Northern Irish poet Peter McDonald ranges across a wide poetic landscape, from Belfast in the troubled 1970s to contemporary England, from personal recollection to a fragment of Sappho's memory of her youth, eloquent across millennia; from ancient myth to rock music. At the centre of Torchlight is a major new translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, a Greek text which, in McDonald's hands, resonates with the concerns and discoveries of the book's shorter poems, and brings the mystery cult of Eleusis into an unnerving conjunction with the losses, recoveries and revelations elsewhere in the collection. McDonald's powerful lyric poetry is both complex and memorable, light and vigorous. His is an original and distinctive voice in Irish poetry.

II

Augury

A sound from above like ripped material,

but the bright level clouds are nearly too bright

for me to see what’s moving there, the small

dagger-stabs and arrows of birds in flight,

hurling themselves, and pausing, and shooting by:

a dozen swifts unravelling the sky.

A Castaway

When he was washed up naked on the shore

Odysseus improvised a suit of leaves

and clothed himself in that: with nothing more

to lose, with nothing to conceal from thieves,

in one sense, if no other, he was free:

the ground was moving still with the waves’ sway;

all his belongings were across the sea

and unimaginably far away;

his body, in the glare of early sun,

was solid, battered, with scars everywhere,

and his face, where so much salt water had run,

was creased to the touch, fragile in the air;

his arms, that lately held a woman close

and hooped her waist, and pressed her to the bed,

the hands that touched her where and how he chose,

that stroked her breasts, and felt her lips, now bled

where splintered wood and rocks in a great storm

had torn them; right down to his shoulders hung

the straggly hair, brittle with salt; his form

in its sand-shadow was bent, no longer young,

for he could not see himself as she had seen him,

although she knew he was a mortal man,

and he searched for fresh water that would clean him,

washing the sea from him, and the leathery tan,

but nothing now could rinse away the years

that clung to him, or those pains his body kept

close as its welts and bruises, close as hairs

on his strong chest, where Penelope had slept.

The Difference

Resourceful as he was, he seemed destined

to be always at the mercy of some

fate or other, his wily spirit twinned

with a targeted body, lashed and battered numb

by the sea, or whatever made the sea move

against him resolutely, tirelessly,

and put him always at one further remove

from the far island where his home might be;

now wet sand with its lines of twigs and stones

like fragments of an indecipherable text,

feathers and shells, seaweed and cast-off bones

wherever one wave stood in for the next

said nothing on this earth is a substitute

for anything else (warm light, a dab of rain,

the tide advancing backwards foot by foot,

flowers in the dunes not coming back again),

so he stared at the face of a faceless ocean

which never would hold still or clarify,

dark to look at, but flashing back the sun

like wine pouring itself out endlessly,

alone with all his plans and his misfortunes

distinct in the light and untranslatable,

knowing himself to be what he thought once

absurd, a man whose cunning and sharp will

were useless, and for all his intelligence

a prisoner in his own life, with no key

or no lock to turn: it was the difference

between the sea and his words for the sea.

The Harbour

Later, he thought about all the disguises

that worked for long enough to do the job,

the dirt and a tattered coat just compromises

with how things might be, once the seasons rob

someone of all their human shape and height,

no matter how upright they were or brave,

tear them with hunger, sap them of all fight,

and set them destitute beside the grave;

those roles of his, and all the assumed names,

details of lives that he could still recall

but never lived, life-stories that made games

from people who were never him at all

seemed less important now, now he was back

at some point after the whole story ended,

only himself again, on that worn track

between town and the harbour, with clothes mended

like his bones, searching the skyline all day

but seeing only sunlight over the waves,

odd shapes on water coming or going away,

never those shore-spirits from sandy caves

or girls standing beside freshwater springs

in conversation, watching...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• I
• II
• III
• Notes
• About the Author 
• Also by Peter McDonald from Carcanet Press
• Copyright