Liam Carson

Lovely review of Belfast Twilight in latest issue of Fortnight Magazine, by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana.

Latest poetry book booty, looking forward to reading them all.

YouTube video by Frank Stanford It WASN'T A DREAM: IT WAS A FLOOD

This is spectral and beautiful - a 1974 autobiographical 16mm short film about poet Frank Stanford, made by Stanford and his publisher, Irv Broughton. A weave of poetry, talk, shadow images, blues songs.

YouTube video by Cultivating Voices Video Archive Cultivating Voices New Books Showcase - 12Oct202

Film of Cultivating Voices online reading.
It was a great pleasure to read in the company of Catherine Ann Cullen, Lauren O'Donovan and Molly Twomey, whose work it was a joy to hear.

Drawings by Niamh Lawlor of poets at last night's Cultivating Voices online reading. Myself, Catherine Ann Cullen, Lauren O'Donovan and Molly Twomey. And a big thanks to Sandy Yannone for bringing us together for a lovely night of poems, and the stories within the poems, of which there were many.

Brilliant!

a squirrel
leaps to attention
the church bell tolls

bog at night
the old man’s warning
of bottomless holes

Everest
in its melting snow
dead bodies

man scoops
ice from the river
wraps it in straw

buried
in the dark bog
hand-made butter

hands
shaping a symbol
bog body

rainy Dublin
in a doorway’s shelter
lovers chase the dragon

side by side
in the autumn wind
lovers lost in phones

hanging
in a garden shed
dead father's coats

I'm so horrified by the things I read
that I read with one
eye covered
and even then
I skim

because we're only seven months in
and already the country is rolling
over
and no one is
righting the ship

I thought we would
I thought,
ultimately,
we would

I did.

I really thought
the hero
would be us.

Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Keen to have a copy of this, out of print for some time. Luckily there's a new edition from University of Arkansas Press next year. Love the excerpts I have read so far. Hallucinatory, incantatory, gorgeously weird.

Current reading. Sarah Orne Jewett's short novel of life in a small American town is both lyrical and sparse, suspect this was an influence on Ursula Le Guin's Searoad. Nice wee read.

84: New Poetry Collections Reviewed - Books for Breakfast (Ireland) On today’s episode poet and critic Adam Wyeth reviews nine new poetry collections. Under the microscope are Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke; Belfast Twilight by Liam Carson; Harbour Doubts by Bebe Ahley...

Very pleased with Adam Wyeth's nice review of Belfast Twilight on latest episode of Books for Breakfast (Ireland) podcast. At link below.

Brilliant and true.

these are our times:
I weep for my country,
then make a grocery list

fruitless flight
of a wasp in autumn
dead flower to dead flower

eitilt gan toradh
foiche sa bhfómhar - bláth
marbh go bláth marbh

- Liam Carson/Rody Gorman

The Harlan Ellison section. Wrote some amazing stories, seems to have been forgotten about, I think. At his best, a wonderful fabulist with a dark, edgy style that could sing.

The October Country. By Ray Bradbury.

flying out of the hole
in Hank Williams's guitar
a luna moth

Haiku found in Frank Stanford poem.

Otherworldly poetry by Frank Stanford.

Ag tabhairt faoi dánta a roghnú on chnuasach iontach seo le haghaidh léiriú de chuid IMRAM.

Unarmed women, children and elders died in the Wounded Knee Massacre. Survivors witnessed troops chasing down children running away to butcher them. And now the US government calls those troops 'brave soldiers'. MAGA would do it all again. Genocide is on their minds. They tell us what they are.

They are, a while since last one.

The is a huge disparity in dialects in in ANY language. And majority of classes and schools teach standard Irish. All these things you think don't exist actually do exist.

Well, there are issues re state control etc. And what happens in Uk could happen in Republic of Ireland too.

Well, Ireland does include the north....so it does affect a lot of Irish people. And my daughter is from Dublin, but is now in Belfast, so...

Agree. There is also no shortage of online courses for adults to learn Irish, if anyone wants to. Gaelchultúr, Conradh na Gaeilge and so on.

Ok, my mistake. Misused. But my point is that the majority of Irish speakers do not 'misuse' Irish. There was always a powerful anti-sectarian strain in the Irish language movement in Belfast. My father taught Irish to hundreds of Protestants for the Workers Educational Association.