Some Integrity

Padraig Regan

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781800172081
• eBook ISBN:
  9781800172098
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021 In 'Minty,' one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects: whatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room we happen to be sitting in is dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whatever portion of the sky that happens to be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. The weather also happens, as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other places where it falls into the orbit of the glass. 'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world,' writes Vahni Capideo, praising Padraig Regan's 'awesome originality and honesty.' The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.

II

(Reproductions)

31

LIFE DRAWING: JACOB

Your knees are facts,

miraculous,

& full of bones.

Your feet don’t prove

that God exists,

but imply it.

Your left elbow

is a question

about muscle

asked in shadow.

Your right is much

the same, rephrased.

You are a tree,

a piece of fruit

or furniture

& none of these.

You are not Keith

or Scott, or Lee.

You are a text

I must translate

from one language

I can only

half read into

a language I

only half speak.

You are a man

standing. You are,

& have become

biography:

my own. Thank you.

32

POEM FOR BOBBY KENDALL

who does not exist & who is lying on a bed

whose frame is a diorama of swans

advertising their monogamy. Whose robe

would be dangerously sheer if he

or his ass existed. Who is lousy with pearls

& dancing. Whose décor would put to shame

the most libidinous of courting birds.

Who by the candelabra’s orange light

is seductive as meringue & pliable as metaphor.

Who maps according to its johns, the city

that does exist beyond the window

of the room he lives his made-up days inside.

O Bobby, the street is a rat’s nest of contingency

& neon & steam from the subway grates.

A storm is blousing in from the mad Atlantic

& pitching the world to its own diagonals,

& Bobby, this is the least of our concerns:

the future is as futures often are

just history we haven’t memorised

& I cannot say if you survived it.

33

REMBRANDT’S SLAUGHTERED OX

is slick, brown, & almost yellow.

He seems to understand how colours

might invoke a smell, & here

even the wood of the panels & beams

could tell such stories of blood

as his anatomists won’t comprehend

for years, stuck — as they are —

with the humours, with their faith

in the liver as the sanguine valve

that keeps the flow of the body in check.

The cow’s four legs are drastically stubbed;

its belly yawns like a hessian sack.

It is a question made flesh: at what stage

of disassembly is ‘cow’ replaced

with brisket, sirloin, flank & rump?

34

VERMEER’S SUPPER AT EMMAUS

There is the old white jug

& a whisper of glass in front of it.

There is bread with its mottled interior

& the slurred reflections on silverware.

There is a window cut into the whitewashed wall

whose corner rhymes with the folds

of the cloth that hangs from the table

& remembers the cupboard where it was stored.

There is a figure in yellow & another in blue,

& if you dug a biopsy from each, you’d find

the yellow is lead & tin,

the blue is ultramarine.

Which is just as you’d expect.

What’s there is there

& people always wa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• 50ml of India Ink
• I: (Studies)
• II: (Reproductions)
• III: (Capriccio)
• IV: (Still Lifes)
• V: (Landscapes)
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright