Some Integrity

Padraig Regan

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

Shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023

Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2023

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022

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 happensto 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