I will be reading from my collection The Colour of Extinction and discussing it on Sunday 9 February at 5pm Irish time (12 noon ET) on the podcast of Rattle, one of the leading US magazines. Link below:
Four Poems
SIDE EFFECTS Back in the slanting, tilted days we tore great chunks off each other and then crept slowly apart, not looking back, like sidling crabs over cooling sands and wrote with bloody fingers on the walls words that still drip down to acid puddles. I wish I could cry in my sleep and wait… Continue reading Four Poems
Machine Learning and Hopetoun
MACHINE LEARNING The heron skyline of construction cranes preys on buildings being repurposed. A flour mill becomes an office block and a church develops new careers while the message ripples through their shadows: adapt and retrain, move, change and reboot/ what you were is no longer good enough/ swipe left/swipe right zero/one off/on I am… Continue reading Machine Learning and Hopetoun
A YELLOW-CROWNED NIGHT HERON IN MAYO
Many refugees keep the keys to their home, hoping to return. This one never will: more and more storms will seed the clouds with birds and might even bring her a husband, but the Atlantic is wider than hope. She seems happy enough here, watched over by the god of three o’clock in the morning… Continue reading A YELLOW-CROWNED NIGHT HERON IN MAYO
Lookouts
Poolbeg Power Station, Dublin The Poolbeg chimneys are two giant barber’s poles still advertising when the shop is closed and the scissors of pollution are blunted. Maybe from two hundred metres up they see beyond the incinerator’s smoke many more decommissionings to come, a cleaner future with nothing like themselves and they will become gigantic… Continue reading Lookouts
Migraine
Space closes in as time and light narrow,assassinating every imagein the full truth of the pain,its cruel, inexpressible poetry.As the strap around your head bites deeperyou try to recall that other world,the place of calm and darknesswhere dreams waited on luggage racks,but there is only this momentof stark energy with hollowed centre,a neurochemical exoskeletoncarrying the… Continue reading Migraine
Poetry Book of the Month
I am really pleased to say that my collection THE COLOUR OF EXTINCTION has been chosen by the Observer, one of the leading UK newspapers, as its Poetry Book of the Month. Their review is really positive: “Pulsating with tidal energy…”. If you have not ordered a copy of the collection, you can do so… Continue reading Poetry Book of the Month
Eight Months
You might have thought its batteries were flat, but the drone of disillusion flies at dusk at dawn at noon. It would have you believe your life is a shred of scattered margins around a collapsed centre under an egg-shaped sun, and that reality is an unreachable cobweb in the past; don’t believe what that… Continue reading Eight Months
This Evening
There are so many details to choose from, but these are the ones we will notice. Autumn has turned back, but winter walks on in chilly loneliness, a signpost leading to an abandoned garden where fruit trees, once carefully tended, keep producing for as long as they can and the vegetables support the snails that… Continue reading This Evening
The Longest Day of the Year
Lucky gull chicks on a city roof take food from their parents and snuggle for warmth; for them, life has begun as well as it could. The flightless chick who fell from its nest above and is abandoned by its parents on a hostile gull family’s roof is shut in a large, bright, open room… Continue reading The Longest Day of the Year
S.C. Flynn 