My main publications are the novels The Fisher Child (London, Picador, 2001), The Water Star (Picador, 1999), and The Fabulists (Dublin, The Lilliput Press, 1994/ London, Serif Books, 1995).

A fourth poetry collection, Dialogue in Fading Light, was published by New Island Books in November 2005.

I’ve completed a children’s novel, The Tins & the Pale Lady, and I’m delighted to say that a chapter will be published in a prestigious Brazilian journal in November 2011.

My current labour of love is a non-fiction work which should be completed Spring 2012, after which I hope to be immersed in a fourth novel.

I’m a member of Aosdána, which was established in 1981 to ’honour those artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland, and to encourage and assist members in devoting their energies fully to their art.’

My other publications include a chapbook, The Planets and Stars Become Friends, (Gorey, The Funge Arts Centre, 1974); and three collections of verse: Those Distant Summers (Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1980); After Thunder (Raven Arts Press, 1985); and The Year of the Knife Poems 1980-1990, (Raven Arts Press Dublin, 1991).

See Literary Bio including Short Literary bio for editors for greater detail.

for an alternative bio, see Philip Casey on The Parlour Review

Follow @Philip_Casey

He becomes better acquainted with his father, with his family history and with the history of Ireland, a country he’s never before thought of as his own. Kate, his wife, is left to cope with two children and a new baby. Dan’s behaviour is enough to make the reader want to give him a good shake but Casey explores his motivation with such sensitivity that it’s impossible not to be on his side too. In the midst of this emotional agonizing, the action moves two hundred years to the Irish Rebellion of the late 18th century and Caribbean island of Montserrat, where even Irishmen could be landlords and slave owners. In its own quiet way this novel is unsettling and even shocking as it challenges the reader to step into Dan’s shoes: are you as open-minded, as trusting, as loyal as you think you are?
–Kirkus UK

a beautiful, evocative tale of love tested.
Sue Leonard, Irish Examiner

this wise, tender novel.
Paul Magrs, TLS

The novel’s final image is startling, enigmatic, beautiful and challenging. Through it, Casey appears to urge a re-examination of that which we assume to be philosophically ordered, and to confront our own dreams just as Dan does: which implies that nothing is separate and that the world has a wild inter-dependance that rises even from the genetic, cellular mine of our own bodies.
A fresh and intriguing book that many writers would love to have written.
Mary O’Donnell, Amazon.co.uk

See review page

The Fisher Child can be bought online at Amazon UK

The Fisher Child, the final volume in The Bann River Trilogy, is published by Picador of London
ISDN 0 330 48301 3 hardback

ISDN 0 330 48302 1 paperback

Picador Hardback blurb

Growing up in Irish families in London, Dan and Kate first met unenthusiastically as children in the 1970s. Now, years later, they are on holiday in Italy, married, in love, parents to a boy and girl. And when Kate discovers she is pregnant again, it seems they will be closer than ever.

But when Meg is born, their lives are changed utterly. Trust is replaced with suspicion and anger. Dan flees to Ireland and to his father, seeking to understand what has happened to his family and to himself. It is clear, however, that his bewilderment has much older roots. We are taken back to 1798 where Dan’s ancestor, Hugh Byrne, is fighting on Vinegar Hill in the Rebellion. Troubled by the violence done to his family, and the violence in himself, Hugh goes into exile in the tropics, where he gradually overcomes his prejudice and remorse and begins a family with a young woman, Ama.

The Fisher Child is the third novel in Philip Casey’s Bann River Trilogy and is his best fiction to date, demonstrating, with acute sensitivity, the threads of the past that exist in every family. The Fisher Child is a touching and at times, agonising, exploration of the constantly shifting nature of love. It is a book that will linger long in the memory.

The Water Star is, somehow, haunting.
John Kenny, The Irish Times

Casey has brought alive the dilemmas of a lost generation and made them vivid and memorable.
The Good Book Guide

…those fine intense moments – and there are many of them here – show Philip Casey to be a compelling writer.
John Tague, The Times Literary Supplement Full Review

An intelligent, memorable, moving novel.
Arminta Wallace, The Irish Times

This series of love-stories told from individual perspectives resonates with authentic feeling.
Sharon Barnes, IMAGE

The Water Star, volume two of The Bann River Trilogy, was published in hardback by Picador of London, April 27, 1999.
ISBN 0 330 37190 8
Picador paperback published February 4, 2000.
ISBN 0 330 37191 6

The Water Star is available from
amazon.co.uk

The Picador Hardback Description

“He cursed and sat up on the damp rubble. Although in the centre of what had been the building, it was exposed here, where the roof had collapsed through three floors. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing, and a fresh star blinked at him as a cloud moved away.”

London 1950. Houses seem to rise out from the desecrated landscape, their rooms laid bare in the cold city light. Out of this fractured world people restore their scattered lives: Hugh, desperately lonely and lost in an unfamiliar city, struggles with his memories and with his father, Brendan, whose dreams are founded on the Irish mountain that was their home. Brendan stands in his North London bedsit washing off the dust from the city’s building sites, stubbornly refusing to see his son’s youth and the hope that is offered by Sarah, the Irishwoman who teaches him to read.

Then, it seems, Hugh’s life is overturned. He meets Elizabeth, a woman who has lived through the Blitz and whose nature seems to dissolve the despair that threatens his spirit. And he meets Karl, a German in exile, a man who shares his life with Elizabeth but buries the horrors of his past. Will these terrified lives at last find comfort in the fragile city that surrounds them?

In a narrative that is both lyrical and passionate Philip Casey captures his characters perfectly, shining light on lives rocked by war and loss and on relationships overshadowed by unspoken feelings. The Water Star is an extraordinarily intimate and sensitive exploration of people trapped between their isolation and their hopes.

Read or Download The Fabulists under a Creative Commons licence

The Fabulists is the first volume in The Bann River Trilogy, and was published in trade paperback format in October, 1994, by The Lilliput Press Dublin
ISBN 1 874675 30 9
The Fabulists can be purchased from
The Lilliput Press
Amazon.co.uk

Some review excerpts

“a passionate, erotic, mature novel.” Ronan Sheehan

“…stands shoulder to shoulder with the very best Irish fiction of the last few years.” Colin Lacey, The Irish Voice, New York

“This is a book I’ve read now three or four times, and it has that really magnificent quality that great novels have, where you find yourself thinking about them a few weeks after you finish reading them.” Joseph O’Connor, RTÉ Radio

“An Irish love story for the 1990s.” Anthony Glavin, The Sunday Tribune

“Philip Casey’s brilliant debut novel” Gerry Smyth, in Contemporary Irish Fiction Themes, Tropes, Theories Edited by Liam Harte and Michael Parker (London, MacMillan, 2000/New York, St Martin’s Press, 2000)

“This will lie around for a few years and then be declared a Modern Classic.” Amazon.co.uk reader

See more reviews at The Fabulists Reviews
Read or Download The Fabulists under a Creative Commons licence

Dialogue in Fading Light: New and Selected Poems
published in November 2005.
Publisher: New Island Books

with gracious permission of New Island Books Dialogue in Fading Light is now available as a freedownload under a Creative Commons Licence at Irish Literary Revival

In his first collection in almost fifteen years, Philip Casey blends re-worked older poems with new reflections on love, death and the times we live in, ranging in tone from the light-hearted to the contemplative.

Praise for Philip Casey

˜Casey gives physicality to abstract ideas with great assurance and he has an eye for things which do not clamour for attention” Susan McKay, Sunday Press

“…he has a poet’s delicate ear and a playwright’s eye for direction.” Erica Wagner, The Times

˜Casey writes in a language which is supple, accurate, sensitive and immensely strong.” Ros Cowman, GRAPH

with gracious permission of New Island Books Dialogue in Fading Light is now available as a freedownload under a Creative Commons Licence at Irish Literary Revival

Long After I’m Gone

Screenplay
adapted from the novel The Fisher Child

Rights available

photo credit: Mike Schinkel Creative Commons license: some rights reserved.

Long After I’m Gone Synopsis

In a minor battle of the 1798 Rebellion in Wexford, HUGH Byrne kills the black drummer of the Ancient Briton regiment. Sickened by the carnage, he leaves it and his belovéd CATHLEEN behind, but is captured, ending up as an indentured labourer or white slave in the Irish-dominated island of Montserrat, in the Caribbean. He falls in love with a black slave, AMA, and when he is freed he brings her with him to farm impoverished land rented from the plantation. They have two children, a black girl, BRIDIE, and a white boy, MUNGO, the apple of his mother’s eye. After the tragedy that befalls Ama and Bridie, Hugh is left alone with his son, and twelve years later returns to Wexford with him to face his old love.

The Tins
and The Pale Lady
Rights available.

They looked up to see Miolmór, with his peaceful eyes, and Niamh, who was almost as big as the whale, floated up to kiss him. Then they sang to each other.

Miolmór was too brave to complain, but they understood that all was not well in the Western Ocean. The mortals were taking over everything from the top to the bottom, and the ocean was so full of noise there was hardly anywhere a whale could find peace.

He wasn’t grumbling. It was just the whale song of the present day which would be passed down the generations, as it always had been. The mortals would soon learn the value of silence. He had lived long enough to know that disasters happened when the mortals forgot their way, but after a while they learned it again, and all was well.

the story

Kate and Danny are twins, who live on the Western shore with their father, Cormac, a fisherman, and their mother Estrella. When they are small children, they pronounce ˜Twins” as ˜Tins,™ so they become known as The Tins and are so close that they speak to each other by telepathy, or what they call ˜telepy.”

Estrella dies when they are two, leaving them confused and lonely. As they discover from a schoolyard bully when they are seven, ˜she walked into the sea.” So they listen more and more to the old stories which Mrs Janey, the woman who looks after them when Cormac is fishing, and by the time they are eleven, they imagine their journeys to the heaven of olden times, Beg Ara, The Land Beneath the Sea. They go there with the aid of Miolmór, the Great Whale, and a family of dophins who surround them with protective light.

But is it their imagination, or are they really the children of Niamh, the twenty-five thousand year old Sióg who became human as Estrella for three years because she fell in love with their father, Cormac? After they have had their adventures in the Five Isles of Beg Ara (The Isle of Many Fears, The Isle of Dancing, The Isle Enchantment, The Isle of Forgetfullness, and The Isle of Victories), they are ready to hear the true story of their mother from Cormac, and why she walked into the sea.

The Tins and The Pale Lady

CHAPTER ONE :: THE TINS LEARN SOMETHING TERRIBLE

Kate and Danny Joyce are twins, who live on the Western Shore, and are known to everyone as The Tins. They share the gift of telepathy, which they will call telepy.

The Tins are just over two years old, and their story begins now because it is important that you know what happens at this time, so you will understand why they meet the Pale Lady and go on their adventures to Beg Ara, The Land Beneath the Sea, when they are eleven.

They live in a beautiful but lonely place on the Western shore, with their father Cormac, a fisherman and small farmer, and their mother, whose name is Estrella, which means star.

Kate has red hair like her father, and Danny has golden hair like his aunt, but their mother says she had golden hair once, too, so he gets it from her. Estrella has dark skin and long black hair now.

Estrella travelled to the Western shore from a sunny country. The Western Shore is often wet and misty, but she fell in love with Cormac, and stayed to marry him. Cormac owns a fishing boat which Kate and Danny call Pudda, because the sound its engine makes is pudda pudda pudda.

Estrella has been on the Western shore for three years, and she has been happy, and so the Tins have been happy, but as our story opens she is sad, and this frightens the Tins. But at the moment they are asleep for their afternoon nap.

They wake to the sound of Mama crying. She is tidying up their toys, and as she stands up, the sun comes out and fills the room with light, and Mama cries even more. They rub their eyes, and sit up on the sofa. They don’t know what to think so they start crying and Mama sees them and rushes to them.

‘Oh, dear Tins,’ she says, hunkering down and brushing the hair out of their sleepy eyes with her hands. ‘Don’t pay any attention to me. I had a scary dream, that’s all.’
‘Scary, Mama?’ Kate asked.
‘Yes, my darlings.’
‘Scary?’ Danny asked.

‘Oh, I dreamt I was very old,’ Mama said, and she laughed, and she read to them from their favourite book, The Green Lion, and they were happy again and they toddled out to the sunny yard to play. They stopped to listen to the sound of the sea falling on the shore. They loved the sea.

A few nights later they couldn’t sleep. They knew something was wrong with Mama and Dada, so they slipped out of bed and went to the landing from where they could see the livingroom. Mama and Dada were talking quietly by the fire, but the Tins knew they were sad. Dada had a book in his lap but he closed it.
‘Are you sick?’ he asked Mama.
‘No,’ she said.

Dada stood up and put the book on the table and looked out the window.
‘So you’re going to leave us,’ he said.
‘How did you know?’ she asked, and she was crying quietly.
‘I just did,’ he said.

Kate and Danny looked at each other, and their hearts started to beat in a way that wasn’t nice.
‘Are you homesick?’ Dada asked Mama. ‘We could go on a holiday. I know times aren’t good and money is scarce, but we’ll manage somehow.’
‘It’s not that. I don’t miss home.’
‘Then you don’t love me anymore,’ he said, turning to her.
‘Oh Cormac!’ she said, rushing to him and putting her arms around him. ‘I love you so much.’
‘Then why are you leaving?’ he asked, and his voice was like when you cry with your mouth full.

She turned away from him.

‘Please sit down,’ she said, and it was then that she saw the Tins, who tried to hide but it was too late.
‘Go to bed!’ she shouted and they scampered away and pulled the bedclothes over their heads.
So they lay there in the darkness, trying to think of something nice, but they couldn’t because their hearts were going pudDA pudDA pudDA.

After a while, Mama came in to see them, but they telepied each other to pretend to be asleep and she went away. They wished Mrs Janey was here to tell them a story. Mama and Dada told them stories, but Mrs Janey, who was a widow from a house up the road who minded them sometimes – she was best. Her eyes would open wide and her face would scrunch up, and she could be a monster or a fairy or a horse or a crow all in the same story.

But Mrs Janey wasn’t here tonight, and so their hearts kept thumping, and so they telepied each other to think about Dada’s Pudda coming home on the sea, with lots of fish, and when they thought of Pudda going up and down on the waves, with Dada inside, they drifted off to sleep.
Mama was there when they woke up the next morning. They were scared but they said nothing in case she’d get angry.

When Mama and Dada brought them to Lake Ailinn to see the four swans who lived there, everything seemed like it had always seemed, and when Mama was still there the next day, and the day after that, they forgot about their fear that she would go, and went back to being happy again.


© Philip Casey, 2009

Cover illustration
Liam O’Connor

author photo
Paddy Doyle

with praise and thanks to my family

acknowledgements are due to The Gorey Detail, The Funge Broadsheets, The Pleiades, The Cracked Lookingglass, The Stony Thursday Book, Cyphers, The Wexford Art Centre Broadsheet, Icarus, TCD, Aishling (San Francisco), Quick & Cheap (New Orleans), Hibernia, and The Cork Review, RTÉ Radio. Six poems from the collection were published in Feathers and Bones, an anthology of 10 Irish poets, The Mudhorn Press, Santa Barbara, ed. Sevrin Housen.

Special thanks to Mick, James, Paul, Liam, Paddy and Eileen.

cover photo: Tony O’Shea

for James Liddy

Cover Endorsements

Things that please me in poetry are precision, compassion and images that surpass the common run of language; also that the poet must have an ear for language as a musician has an ear for music. The work of Philip Casey, especially The Year of the Knife, possesses all of these in abundance.
Michael Hartnett

The splendour of Philip Casey’s work is that it is rigorous and hard; and somehow also at the same time bright and kind. It’s this unique mixture that sets him apart. Jubilant, edgy, ordered, wild – a New and Selected Poems as good as gold.
Sebastian Barry

Certain poems were previously published in Cyphers, Hamburg International School Yearbook, Evening Herald, Ireland of the Welcomes, New Irish Writing (The Sunday Tribune), Voicefree, Nord Deutschlander Rundfunk, The Observer, Poetry Kanto (Yokohama), Stet, Stand, Quarry (Ontario), and Poetry Australia.
Thanks are also due to The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Élaí­on for a Bursary in Literature; to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annamakerrig, where some of these poems were written; to Paddy and Eileen Doyle, for the use of a computer; and to those who gave their time and wisdom in reading the poems in manuscript.
Designed by Dermot Bolger & Susanne Linde. Cover design by Rapid Productions. Cover photo by Tony O’Shea. Printed and bound in Ireland by Colour Books, Ltd, Baldoyle.

A one-acter, it was first performed in the Internationale Schule in Hamburg, and was thereafter transferred to the west end, otherwise known as the Shamrock Bar in Feldstr.

It was directed by the redoubtable Terry McDonagh and his then cohort in drama, Joachim “Joggi” Matschoss. Staging it in the Internationale Schule meant in effect that it had an international audience.

Cardinal, which in a towering performance was acted by Barry Stevenson in the eponymous role, and Guelma Lea as the Policewoman, is the story of a Cardinal, an effective prisoner in his own palace during a revolution, and guarded by an uneducated policewoman. Over a period of time, she learns a great deal from him, and being intelligent, is soon a match for his pious certainties, especially when her prolonged presence intensifies the needs of the flesh.

Note: Guelma Lea is now also an established jazz singer and her website is here

Parody of the Father

aka Sediment Rising
This actually received a rehearsed reading on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in front of an invited audience. It was directed by John O’Brien (apologies to the actors for mislaying the cast list).
The reading in the Peacock was quite successful, but as it is a very visual play, more than half of it was lost in the reading. Requiring seven actors, (two of whom can double up), and one of whom must be a large, imposing yet ebullient man, it is a tragi-comic cartoon in two acts, on colonialism brought to its logical conclusion.
I recently found a cast list, signed by all participants, headed

Reading of Sediment Rising, Peacock Theatre, April 22, 1989

Larcus Vincent O’Neill

Sudari Niall O’Brien

Penelope Fidelma Cullen

Lujius Frank McCusker

Otera Cornelia Hayes

The Sybil Má¡ire O’Neill

Narrator Jonathan Sharpe

Director John O’Brien

ASM Miriam Coleman

Author Philip Casey

Thank you, people. It was a nice experience, with fine actors.

Comfort & Reward

This has never been staged, and in truth is a dead loss.

It was juvenilia, of course, but I’m proud of it as such, and because it was part of the whole rich history of the ground-breaking Funge/Gorey Arts Festival, which cries out to be published – as a website, perhaps? The reverse, not shown, is illustrated by a fine, if sad portrait of yours truly, by that master of portraiture Paul Funge.

See The Dunleavy Collection of Irish history and literature at the University of Miami Richter Library for listings of these and other chapbooks published by the Gorey Art Centre.

The Art Centre’s other publications included the annual literary and art journal, The Gorey
Detail. It was, among many other things, great fun.

for Ulrike

This book received a grant from the Authors’ Royalty Scheme of The Arts Council/An Chomairle Éalaíon. The author acknowledges a travel grant in 1981 from The Arts Council/An Chomairle Éalaíon.
Acknowledgements are made to the editors of the following where many of the poems in this book appeared: After the War is Over – Irish Writers Mark the Visit of Ronald Reagan; The Beau; The Blue Canary; The Brooklyn Review; Cyphers; Disarm; The Gorey Detail; The Gorey Broadsheets; Icarus; North; Philomena’s Restuarant (cassette, Grapevine Arts Centre); Poetry Ireland Review; Wordshop; Writing in the West (The Connacht Tribune), and Sphinx International (Paris).

Typesetting and make-up by Má¡ire Davitt (Vermillion), Dublin. Design by Dermot Bolger. Cover etching Don Quixote: An Adventure at Dawn by Brian Bourke. Cover design by Syd Bluett. Printing and binding by Confidential Report printing Ltd., Dublin. Hardback binding by Tom Duffy, Dublin.

See Poems from after thunder

Things that please me in poetry are precision, compassion and images that surpass the common run of language; also that the poet must have an ear for language as a musician has an ear for music. The work of Philip Casey, especially The Year of the Knife, possesses all of these in abundance.
Michael Hartnett

The splendour of Philip Casey’s work is that it is rigorous and hard; and somehow also at the same time bright and kind. It’s this unique mixture that sets him apart. Jubilant, edgy, ordered, wild – a New and Selected Poems as good as gold.
Sebastian Barry

A PAGE FALLS OPEN

A page falls open
and the reader’s name
is there.
It always has been
and will be always.
Over the years
he opens the book,
wondering about doom
and heaven,
how they fade into
each other,
like a sensual woman
walking into the darkness
on a beach, leaving her man
to listen to the tide
as best he can.

MAKING SPACE

Sometimes, when looking at the stars
on a clear night in summer,
I wonder about light
and the energy that keeps me upright.
What does the Principle
of the Conservation of Energy
say, and does it apply to me,
and when I die
will I be transformed into a thought
travelling at the speed of light?

Perhaps, you will turn me on at the flick
of a switch, to bathe your smile
while you nod off over a book.
My light and how lovely you look
will describe a time and place
as you reach out, making space
in your calm sleep
for your lost black sheep
whose molecules keep your bedroom lit.
I will burn for you all night.

THE FREEDOM LETTERS

Your pen moves under an expansive hand
revealing your abandon to being loved.
Such a delight suggests
you hadn’t hoped to be cherished
more as you grew older,
as if dreading the tissues losing elastic
had made you forget
that others will always find you magnetic.

Your subsequent letter sees your script
panic across the page in hellish doubt.
One day in raptures,
the next in turmoil, the next fighting back -
you draw on your grit,
and sex, to find equilibrium and respect;
the need to feel secure
blacked out in a night of sensual touch.

BODY LANGUAGE

Again your body seems so light
as you enter the garden and hesitate
over what to choose for my floral gift.
Watching you, my solicitude
which shielded us both from an old wound
lifts as I marvel how you’ve forgotten
you exist, alive only to your aesthetic.

I leave, carrying your token
of a night we might have spent as one
but for concealed reasons – its scent
a potent reminder of one more pungent and heady.
Days accumulate to no perceptible avail,
and our passion, which amounts to a false trail,
goes into itself, quieted by love and pity.

THE BLUE TENT

Light filters through the blue sheet,
like it did once as you lay
beside your loved one. Then,
you raised it with bended arms
till it bellied like a tent
in the Arabian Nights, wherein
the warm light floated,
you both floating in it
and in your laughter.
That was free of its past and future,
unfettered bodies and emotion
flowing in the blue tent scented
by her presence, when you saw each other
differently for those flushed moments
that lodged in memory, forever.
Wakening slowly into the strange,
you stare at your bended arm that lies
so motionless, so heavy, and detached,
you wonder if it has been severed
during the night by a dreaming axe -
a thought no stranger than once,
when you turned to lie
with your belovéd
and cramp gripped your thighs.
You stared at her in surprise.

TOLEDO, ENCORE

O Toledo, I am parched
beneath your Moorish arches.
It’s too cold a morning
to wake abruptly from a dream.

My love bit my lip in anger
when I looked after
everyone but her,
fulfilling bogus obligations;

but I could not free
myself to be with her.

O Toledo, I am parched.
My sense of sensual self
ebbs to a vacant point.

There was a time
when I could feel
in gracefully spoken sentences.

Toledo, you have done for me,
it’s too cold a morning
to wake abruptly from a dream.

I cannot ask of another
what she cannot give,
when all I have to give
is my fullness of her.

No wonder if she turns away
in anger when I wake.

O Toledo, I am cold
in your Moorish station,
waiting for the outward train
that will never come.

All I want is happiness
for my belovéd.

I have nothing left to give
as I grow old.
My love for her has stolen
all I knew and owned.

THE PROPER AND ONLY SPOUSE

I
Time passes, and you resolve nothing.
A marriage is made in heaven
with much feasting and Country & Western song.
It’s a day to remember, of blushing terror,
aunts with lumps in their throats, and lost uncles.
You are tied to a stranger, when there is nothing
stranger than the unlawful desire to be alone.
Although not alone exactly, but at one with that
which demands that its space is not crowded out –
that it’s the proper and only spouse
with whom to do battle, to make love
and children with, in your own image.
Take off the garter in full view of everyone
and throw it to the spinner and virgin.
To wild cheers, cut the flaming tie into portions,
then share it among the sagging men.

II

You wonder again why you can’t settle down,
being unable to accept the difficult terrain
of defining your life by its limitations.
You must break through and live on the wild edge
where usually nothing accretes into achievement.
lf by a fluke it does, you are near to panic
and put it down to mischievous magic.
What had you to do with the making of children,
other than being the object the other desired?
lf your body moved and trembled at a given moment,
on that night just as on any other, there was no smile
in your mind’s eye, only the grimace of physical release.
What keeps you going is pity for the one you are bound to,
whose day is founded on, and held in place by belief in you.
But day is added to day and you deny and are denied
that all you crave is to be away from where you are.

III

Don’t gather possessions, or be weighed down by gifts.
After the break, it’s essential to travel light.
No one, least of all you, foresaw the end
as you played out a role instead
of lamenting the years you neglected.
Now you want to forget what drove you to this,
and make the haunted equations material
in a series of lovers who care about no one,
least of all you.
They know how to laugh, and are the most true.
For a time you will join in the laughter
that’s crowded with glasses and ash,
hurting until you forget you exist.
There’s no place in your wariness
for anywhere else, though you long to say yes
without thinking, to a random question.

THE FREEDOM OF JUNE

A buried gun has rusted for years
somewhere between the apple trees.
Washing hangs from the orange line,
awaiting bodies or a strong wind.
A rose hidden by weeds releases
its musky perfume to the snails,
to the cloudless suns that shine
on a yellow carpet of dandelions.

DIRECTIONS IN ONE

This or that flash of memory:
ebbing flood, gust of wind before silence
in a sweep of land from hills to the sea.
Waiting, always waiting, the probable rendezvous
and relentless clock tick on. .
Words peeled off – strips of honey-cured ham,
pulled away from a reluctant, stubborn mass,
this mound, lost in itself, keeper
of histories, hoarding, jealous of freedom. Jealous
of not being afraid of what to walk and to see
and to feel mean, of being on the midge-hung path
by the river with nothing to do; the echo of a voice.

WHERE MUSIC COMES FROM

i
Zebras at night,
attentive to grievance,
trot softly through streets,
nuzzling drunks
to keep them upright
as a key finds its lock.

ii
Plop of tar blister
on the remote boreen.
As long as l live
I will understand nothing.
The tar blister knows
what the answers are, now.

iii
It started with seed
drilled into moist soil
and a germ in an egg.
Swirl of dish water
will finish a meal
that ladened a ritual table.

iv
Carillions are pealed
till they alter the heartbeat.
A walnut clock runs fast.
Love letters found in a sofa
are read and misunderstood.
A low candle is snuffed.

v
On the wood floor, moss
is traversed by a spider.
The whine of a chainsaw
dries sap in the trees.
Ten maidenhair ferns
cast a 5 o’clock shadow.

THE WALKING SHADOW

Cows are not milked by hand
anymore and so will never again
swoon to the rhythms of Shakespeare.

O Macbeth, I learned by heart
your soliloquy
against the warm belly of a cow,
every syllable matched by a rich
swish into a frothing bucket.

– In that sharp dark morning
my brothers grasp
adhesive stars of frost
on the aluminium milkcan.
The number 28 sways,
the milkcan bangs
against their ankles.

As the step of one rises,
the other’s has fallen
onto the frozen gravel
towards the stand
And then is heard no more.

LYNWOOD, WET SUMMER
-for Philomena

Sixteen rectangles, sixteen window panes,
through these
I see a bank of white roses, and
behind those, an elder tree, its fruit
burgeoning.
Beyond that, a wild garden:
apple trees, red roses, pink roses,
lilac.
Rhubarb
hidden under convolvulous -
that everywhere
in the wet summer, and
snails everywhere. A voracious plague,
they seem to crave the lilac,
but the tiny young are on
almost every apple leaf.
The sun breaks through,
lights the crown of the apple tree.
How romantic,
yet unromantically beautiful too.

Cloud, mostly grey,
has dulled the flowers and trees,
the walls and granite steps –
this sliver of the world
through sixteen panes –
for many weeks now.

THE YEAR OF THE KNIFE

This voice speaks because it must,
when it overflows with endless night,
its jaws strained tighter than a Norman bow.

It is a denizen of darkness;
a drugtaster; a subject of the knife.
It lies on boards like a specimen:
caged, betubed, unmasked, outnumbered.

It dwells in a clenched fist,
outside of what it was, and speaks
with sober lips, knowing it is alive.

Its brain is sealed in green ice.
Its spine is stopped with jagged morse.
Its bones roar in rebellion,
its mouth will not open.

This voice speaks because it can.
In the sleepless reich of phantom pain,
it struggles to name the nameless.

It baulks at forfeiting its reasons.
It burns at the flight of will to have them.
It drunkenly swims in exhaustion.
It joins in the chorus of moans.

HAMBURG WOMAN’S SONG

Time has gone slowly by the hour,
by the year it has gone like a day
and you and I are of a sudden old.
But behind my bright eyes, papa,

I will always be a girl of ten,
and you, a grown man of twenty
when you cheated the dreaded police
who wanted to take me away.

I was born in a time and place
to a woman I look like now,
but fear grew like mould on bread
in my mother’s love for her slow girl.

I remember the sirens and cobbles,
then waking at dawn by a stream
where you left me with a countrywoman
and time went slowly by the hour.

She who was my mother
died in the Hamburg fire,
and he who was my father
never came back from the east.

My hands hardened and my bones grew long.
I trusted what I could not understand
until one morning you came up the road
and happiness changed my face.

I am a woman of Hamburg
who walked to the hungry city
side by side with my new father.
I have lived here to this day.

AND YET AGAIN, FAREWELL
for Mairéad i.m.

The Old World is confining, the New,
a giddy expanse, scarred and obese,
but pulsating in its bravado,
its vast, laizzez-faire, sexual gasp.
You go to pit your energies against
the tough dream of eluding a dead end.
And we know there is only so much time.

With each shift in the year I lose a friend,
lured away from parochial Ireland.
I drink with you to two worlds or three; drive
lost country roads after the pubs have closed,
or to a film through a timeless snowfall;
or gasping, just catch the last frantic bus
into the stretching shadows of the past.

DAILY BREAD

This morning, the sky cleared to reveal Spring.
I went to the bakery hard by the markets,
and the streets were vital in the fresh light.
A woman pushed a pram, her son holding on,
and she was happy to be with her children.
We dodged Japanese forklifts shifting oranges
from Jaffa, apples from Spain, potatoes from Rush.
With her sunglasses on, a driver reclined,
enjoying the breeze in the hold of her van.
The district was thronged, and juggernaut drivers
edged their way through on roads made for horses.
I heard some slagging, and a man with a moustache
studied his racing page, brooding on luck
as nearby a drayhorse relished abandoned cabbage.
I bought my two loaves of brown, and on my way home
the glasses were gone, as she loaded her van.

BECOMING A CITIZEN

A lone woman marshalls
her children to their breakfast,
their hair brushed from the scalp out.

They nibble on toast smeared with jam,
their mother’s voice barely distinct
over their belovéd radio music.

Of course they know all the lyrics,
miming and gyrating on a screen
in their sleepy brains.

They ignore their harrassed
mother who must pull and push
against the demon clock –

until dressed, they suddenly
wake and smile and are kissed
goodbye. Be good, be good.

THE CORRIDOR

On the walls are posters,
torn or curled at the edges.
One teaches mothers the stages
of looking after their babies
with milk from the sponsor’s powder.

One posits the question:
Did I drink to do what l did –
or do it because I was drinking?
Yet another gives a number
to call if you think you’ve AIDS.

In the gloom, no one looks at them.
Perhaps we’ve seen them too often,
or have more immediate perils, like
the light bill, or moneylenders,
or a spouse who’s chronically ill.

Old and young, we queue here
on benches and plastic chairs
when the last resort is a cheque
or voucher we may or may not get,
and this is how we spend our days.

BLOOM’S EVE

The windows are sprayed with fine
mud as he squirms onto a seat
from the jammed aisle of the bus.
His journey begun, he sees how he,
like the girl with the limp foot
and eighty others, are motionless,
yet travelling in blind trust
as one, beyond the city boundary
to estates ripe with children.
One of his recurring dreams concerns
how he will meet his son in a brothel.
As he has no son, it will never come true.
A shadow of himself, he goes
to a rendezvous he hopes will open his life,
repeating what happened a long time ago;
and in doing so, haunts a future unwary self -
to the step, to the mute gasp at the glance
of a beautiful stranger in a bar on the way.

STARLING

A green net wheels across a screen
in the pattern certain starlings follow
when they flock before taking off
for the south.

A mathematician has plotted their flight,
as if she had nothing better to do,
knowing the starlings will oscillate
and skim, regardless of calculation.
It gives her a sense of lightness,
as if by juggling her figures she might
grow wings, wavering between choice,
yet flying true to the destination.

What compels her is how they synchronise,
as if they were mobiles of the sky,
a geometry evolving to shadow continents.
“The computer is to the mathematician
what the camera was to the artist,”
she mutters, as if she has coined a maxim,
watching movement and changing shape –
how the equations vary and repeat.

When she was a child she would watch,
entranced, as homing pigeons wound down
their journey before the apartment tower.
For her the sight was a musical notation.
The memory returns like a bar from a song
as she presses a key and a colony of figures
perch on a screen, tense with potential.
The net stretches tight in agreement.

As if she has left her body and intellect
behind, she feeds a cluster of formulae,
which may not make sense, into the computer,
and her study darkens with the noise
of thousands of wings, of wheezing,
chuckling and clicks, of whistling, coughs
and kisses, and a bewildered flock
blunders into the room through a screen.

“I saw a queen in the clouds and she was myself.
Emblazoned on my thighs were triple spirals;
on my arms were stars; on my forehead the eye
of a bird.”

FIGUREHEAD

The consumed turf nestles in the dying fire.
As one sees shapes, or the face of Christ
in clouds, I make out the outline of a man
whose body is thrust forward, as on a prow.
Intense with a calorific glow, he wears a beret
and his mouth is wide with an urgent message.
Along his body there are cavities of red heat
already grey at the edges,
and his eye harbours a restless flame.
He has much to think about in a short time.

THIRST

Revealing its depth, the sky might open,
its longed-for torrents like you imagine
blood roaring over the tiny swimmer
in your brain that you now discern
as yourself.

You continue beyond this double vision,
to where a man you knew could not take
a deep breath and his back arched,
and
he stayed like that until his time was up.
A sense of acceptance passes though you
as you see it was all the poor man could do.

You stand across the dust-strewn road
from the saloon,
and think again how some men are obsessed.

Yes, yes, yes
he was dying for a drink but couldn’t take a deep draught,
the drink to end all drinks (because the river was dry),
and you walk on, and stumble through the sparse grass,
scattering seed on the sealed earth, crushing flowers
that will bloom nowhere else but in this blinding colour,
further into the centre of the city where the slums
were cleared and nothing built in their place.

The light breaks your vision; fragments of children
shimmer away from where they run and stop,
and tumble and skip – one brilliant evening
and they’ve turned away from childhood -
and haunted, you find a mound like his grave
and dash your desiccated boot against it,
and as you weep you glance up at the concrete
and glass office block where the bevelled glass
is a burning amber in the setting sun,
and a lone cleaner comes to the window,
at one with her task, and you stare at her
as if she is the key to what has driven you here.

WAKING TO THE PLAIN

–Here I painted myself, Frida Kahlo, from a mirror-
image. I am thirty seven yeas old, and it is tbe month
of July , nineteen forty-seven. In Coyoacán, Mexico, the
place where I was born.

I tried to understand you through the self-portraits
you began when the collision of a bus and tram
changed your life as time slowed down.

They chronicle the trials of your body’s broken column;
your love affair through two marriages with Rivera;
the miscarriages; your passion compressed
into a high tension and expression.

I must have known it was impossible, but blinded
by what I thought was love – and it was, by some measure -
l made draft after draft, losing my way through your
subtle world of guise and fantasy, through
what is at once concealed and revealed.
The Tree of Hope was my prime enigma:

Dressed in her red Tehuana costume,
she is Kahlo the desert queen,
reigning over her butchered flesh and bone
that lies defeated on a surgical trolly -
where the moon is mistress beyond the orange sun.

The moon, Frida, and that old orange the sun,
that your childhood teacher held in one hand –
a candle in the other – to explain the solar system.
Darkness and Light.
And the fissured desert that stretches to the distant,
eternal mountains is the desert that encroaches when
hope is ruined too often. Isn’t that so?
The images return to haunt,
and I repeat the attempt to write them out:

Bound in plastercast, she paints in
the hair on her lip from a mirror-image,
rapt in search of the meaning of what
she is doing again, and again, and again.

After dinner one night, an artist told me about you.
The house we were staying in was old
and later I sensed a ghost in my room.
I think it was a part of myself, long forgotten.
A few months later a letter arrived
from a friend, postmarked Berlin.
I read the excited hand, unfolded
the black and white copies: Kahlo.

So began the obsession. Spring passed into summer,
and one evening l ambled down Kilmainham Lane,
admiring the elderflowers, the peace of this rus-in-urbe
broken only by guard-dogs and the rhythmic clack
of my crutches. Then an odd thing happened:

A red car stops, a puff of dust
rising before the tyres,
and a Mexican woman asks for directions.
Later, in a bar, I ask her about Kahlo,
who, she insists, painted with colours
which don’t exist in Europe.

The burnt siennas of your Mexican earth, Frida;
your yellows at once pouring out sickness and fear,
sun and joy; your dark blues occupying both distance
and tenderness. Dark green, you said, was the colour
of bad news and good business. There is bad news
and good business in your Henry Ford Hospital, 1932.

In the Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit,
Frida has lain in her own blood
since nineteen thirty-two,
her miscarried foetus spirited above her
like an African fetish – her pelvis, her tear,
the hopes of her famished love – so much debris.

The foreground is green, and the spiritual drama
of your miscarriage is played out against a backdrop
of Henry Ford’s factories delivering Baby Fords.
It took me a while to see humour
where previously I could recognize only suffering.
Now I’m glad to know it was typical,
like your parrot who drank beer and tequila
and croaked: I’ll never get over tbs hangover!

This is a quote from the story of your work
and life by Hayden Herrera.
A friend sent it from New York, while another
gave me reproductions I had never seen.
It was then I realized that all my drafts were false.
I was writing about myself.

I have harassed you for significance for too long.
You are what you have left behind
and the only way to discover what you mean to me
is to forget all I know of you,
and think of whatever comes to mind.
Yet, as if I were in love with you,
you can appear anywhere.

Something as formerly innocent as a cloud
or landscape or as utilized as a polluting bus,
can recall you as if you were seated in them,
a mirror before you, your brush in hand.

So many correspondences where nothing
is strictly itself might unbalance a mind.
How many women limp through a crowd?
Might they have light moustaches,
or eyebrows joined like batwings

They, the correspondences, are sane
because you are unique, like a giant lake
from which rivers flow through the thoughts
and emotions of those who need you.

She floats, asleep
in canopied rest, rooted
high over the earth -
her vigilant companion
a Day of the Dead skeleton
decked in dynamite and flowers.
She has journeyed a long way,
and no one can follow
into the shell
of all she has yearned for.

NB for many of the paintings referred to here, see Frida Kahlo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art review at the California Literary Review.

PROPHET

(The White Cockatoo and The Deep
are paintings by Jackson Pollock)

When he closed his eyes
he saw The White Cockatoo,
forgotten in the ganglia.
Pressing them further closed,
tension induced a magnified
print of connective tissue,
which he dripped onto canvas,
scattering electrons in fright.
He saw what physicists
would predict and measure.
“In the state of spiritual
clarity there are no secrets,”
wrote Frank O’Hara of Pollock.
In The Deep, there are no secrets.

WHITE HORSE

Nights in a hospital cot:
beyond its bars
a great toy horse
that a child’s breath
could rock.

A crab blindly crawls
through blood,
to devour marrow
until the bone is hollow.

There are coloured rings
above the door –
the rings of Saturn:
space falling inward
on a pillow
in dimmed light.

A radium machine hums.
Thousands of Röntgens
are aimed at rampant cells,
burning them and the flesh
which conceals them
down to the bone.

On dirt-tracks
in the back of beyond,
under every stone;
in neon lights
blinking in the low quarter,
in the surprising embrace
at at every turn,
one of the children
will live beyond reason,
to sift long for a sign
of why one might survive
and another must die.

The answer may lie
in the hidden wedding
of things, in the distance
between the X-ray and bone;
but the dead children live
in something of them he recalls
in the story of the rocking horse
lost in Saturn’s golden clouds.

The pale Queen has passed,
astride her white horse.
No one, not even she
knows why she has chosen.

She travels towards the sun
as it rises across the earth
and lets fall one
from her purse of death
into the endeavour of rebirth.

Watch over the sleepng children,
white horse. White horse, rock.

COLD IN THE EVENING HEAT

The Caudillo dies
but the stone-paved streets
still give way
to a dirt-track
down to the river.
In the university,
renaissance graffiti
etched on a stained bench
mean anything a stranger wishes.
Above the seminary,
the cathedral bell
tolls out the hours.
Poor women conduct their business
beneath its blind protection.
Soldiers drink back watery beers,
then go to leer in the neon gloom.

IMPLICATIONS OF A SKETCH
-On seing the Mies van der Rohe Centenary
Exhibition, New National Gallery, Berlin

His brush projects
a crude line
bristling
under
mutinous energy.

A sketch of seconds
decides
the future
of thousands,
of street and skyline.

The sketch matures, drafted
into a network of three
dimensions in blue
suspended in
“a high-rise skeleton frame.”

1ts steel is dredged
from an open pit,
carried by wagon
after wagon, poured from
an open hearth at 1600oC.
For millennia, amorphous
as sand, glinting
in prophecy,
sheet glass is realised
ton by translucent ton.

And in a derelict block
rats and the homeless
up on their luck
sleep as a pencil
circles them on a map.

Then, emigrants from his own
country, from ours,
uprooted Indians
with a head for heights
swarm above vertigo,

diverse cultures feeding
the maw of the new
corporate civilization
reflected in its ‘clear
and rational construction.’

Studied under glass in his line-
perfect Berlin Gallery,
his life’s work unfolds
and returns through a crude sketch
“into the realms of pure art.”

THE RED CATHEDRAL
-on seeing Bella Akhmadulina perform her work

‘The Cathedral is aligned East to West,
a circle on two rectangles
over a blind spring where pilgrims sup.
Its redstone wings spread North and South.
It greets the rising sun,
and accepts darkness as it comes.
Requiring nothing, it is nothing to itself.
To enter into it
is to be given a hard grain as talisman.
Solitude touches its high, bare walls.
Grass has split the flagstones;
dust swarms in light from the stained glass.
The Cathedral is home to terrains and cities
and those who live in them
as they breathe fumes, travel on shunted trains;
and just now, a woman dressed in black and gold
is the swooned instrument
through whom the Cathedral fills with their song.
High in the dome, a swallow loops and skims
to the soar and whisper
of grief, to the little shuffle of the woman’s fun.

ART AND LAUGHTER

The lake gives back nothing to the visitor
who comes down to its shore to be calmed.
If it is iced over, or its surface is chopped,
or the reflection of a wooded hill lies down on it
in a certain light when the wind has fallen,
then this is intercourse with the restless elements
made free by the depth and weight of bounded water.

The lake reflects what the supplicant brings to it.
I could not be at one with you unless I could hear
a voice from my own story answering one from yours,
like black wings overlapping though they can never touch.
But then, over the years, what we do with our stories,
or they with us, is the common wealth of friends
making art or laughter out of the cruellest pain.

ANSWERING EACH OTHER

A voice rises faintly
over the beach as the train
passes, as the sunbathers
turn as one to wave; even
the weekend fishermen wave,
rods knifed into the sand,
friendly to anonymity
passing them by at speed, the sea
to the east, the wetland
and mountains to the west.

Implacably the rails
connect the coastal towns
and groups dismount and
disappear, a stationmaster
pleased, distributing time-
tables, welcoming familiars.
I go in my turn to face
what I was once, once again.

Friends take me for a meal
some kilometers out of town,
Ifield’s rapid yodels
a cue for hilarity as we cross
the invisible river and step
on the gas to the hillside hotel.

Morning over the mountain
beyond the housing estates:
landscape gives back memories
like rock its solar power;
a hawk alights on the gutter
of a terrace as we pass.

Again I talk with friends
over a meal, a metaphysical
moment clung to like
a reason for living, or credence
in heaven, the farmed trout
of the restaurant less succulent
than those a gleaming youngster
caught in a torrent
years before pollution,
the rain light and monotonous.

In the thunderous dark of August
we elect to drink outside.
Two combine harvesters
speed heavily down the street
as if on night manoeuvres,
leaving a faint print of fear.

In the morning we steer past
a field of winter corn
the harvesters have razed,
its grain contained by the ton.

Up past the graves of friends
we drive, then into lush valleys
and woodlands, by a cluster
of trees on the crown of a hill
until we brake on chippings
towards the end of a road,
at the house and farm
which I once called home.
It is faded and sunken.
I carry
this troubled impression
past the river and roofless
cottage of a long dead
and childless couple.

I catch the last train back,
the strains of a silver band
echoing over the town
and falling on the window dust.

We proceed along the line,
sealed from the golfcourse
as from the copper river,
from the industrial
odours of old towns
as the train hurtles on.

A woman with palsy smiles
at a tranquil bay
as we round the Italianate
houses which command it.
She holds her smile.
They answer each other.

COMING INTO PERFECTION

In the beginning,
there were many gods.
When they wept, it rained,
and in this way they gave life,
because to weep
is to give of one’s essence.
When they played,
it was known to be harvest time,
because to play
is to come into perfection.

Then, maddened by thirst
and mirages of dancing harems,
a hermit came from a desert.
His beard was crusted with dead bees,
and when he plunged his staff
into the ground, blood spewed forth.
God, he said, was a solitary being,
thirsting for vengeance and law,
and as his tongue took hold
and the throng quavered,
the dancing harems sank back
into the flames of the desert sun.

Long after this,
there flowered a need made flesh,
and born of woman,
gods walked among children.

Prophets and thinkers
voiced the genius of peoples,
inciting their innermost drama.
There was much suffering
as one fought the other,
holding one truth to be holy,
and all else anathema.

In our own era,
living is glimpsed
through the eye of a camera.
Beyond its lens
a particle will forever
fade ever further,
like the sleek craft
ascending to Andromeda
to sail beyond time.

JUST IN TIME

Cait is always asking questions.
She’s beautiful and young
but I’m past my prime
and therefore cautious,
as the wounds of my foolishness
weigh much and slow me down.
Her latest query concerns

What I would like my last words
to be. I’m trebly cautious,
and questions of my own
plod through my vintage brain.
What does she want to know that for?
Would she like me to make my testament
right away, in favour of her?

Instead I say that everything I say
is copyright. All my lovelorn life
my best ideas have been pillaged
and have made millions of euros
for big ears with notebooks;
whereas I, your cornucopia,
have been left in the silage.

Cait stares at me, dumbfounded,
thinking, no doubt, she could be
conducting her pathetic affair
with a Mister Megabucks
instead of a washed-up poet,
if only her washed-up poet
had kept his false teeth shut.

Ah yes, a dreamer as ever am I,
but it’s such who foretell the world –
from wind-driven electric cars,
to generating pristine power
from the pong of the metropolis
before it mucks up the sea shore
where grannies and children paddle.

All this and more, much more,
if only I’d had the money
and sense to patent my daydreams.
A clever and civilised country
would pay such as I to dream -
but impatient Cait interrupts
my reverie and repeats her question.

Just in time! I whisper, inspired
and delighted, and patently annoyed,
she demands to know what is just in time.
That’s what I want my last words to be,
I coo, and if in the rush I forget
my exit line, would you be a pet
and inscribe it on my tomb?

A CHARTER FOR IDLERS
-for Theo Dorgan

Before they came, you were fine.
You still buzz, shuffling along,
painting a wall blue one day,
another saffron, the next,
if you care to, which you do.
This is a model, not of
being occupied, but of trusting
the morning, your nuzzling brush
finding a new route across
the wall for you to ponder.

An active exploration,
a harvesting profession,
even if they nod, putting
you down as a charlatan,
and perhaps especially then.
It’s a charter for idlers,
they suggest without saying
so, unaware that every
point of your sable and stroke
is an apprentice angel.

When darkness is for us all
inevitable, whereas
light is not; when all true
colour ends in black, you need
to discover the unseen
colour of the wall, to feel
joyous tension in the wrist
as it blooms behind the brush,
like the fresh trail of a snail
in moonlight would stagger you.

But as they lead you away
sunlight catches an eyelash
and flares it a glistening
scarlet, for a fine second.
You hold your breath deep,
as if the glister is oxygen.
To leave your walls behind you
and bring them at the same time:
this is the gift that love gives
to the lover, in the end.

Non-fiction

Slavery & Servitude from the stone age to the 21st century

Reef Bay Sugar Mill photo credit: Jami Dwyer Attribution Share Alike : : some rights reserved.

So here, then, is a hidden-in-full-view epic, its two thousand year old story accessibly told for the first time. Meet with its mug and cumal, its serfs and concubines, its abolitionists and slavers, its mad kings, avaricious queens, and not least, its lovers and heroines.

Non-fiction. Work–in–Progress.
Rights available.

New novel

The most generous of men, who gave everything but himself.

Fiction. currently in planning stage.
Set in Ireland, London and New York.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

TESS is separated but looking after her son ARTHUR, who lives with his father in Fairview, on a daily basis before she returns to her apartment overlooking the Liffey in Dublin.

MUNGO still lives with his wife and two children – though she has frozen him out since he nearly killed them all by drunkenly dropping a cigarette on his son’s bed and starting a fire.

photo credit: isfullofcrap some rights reserved.

The Fabulists at Irish Literary Revival

The Water Star
By Philip Casey
Picador
434pp, £14.99 in UK.

In fiction, it is entirely possible to be in at least two places at the one time. Having fantastically superimposed the worlds of Spain, Germany, Wexford and Dublin in his successful first novel, The Fabulists (1994), Philip Casey has now written a story set in post-war Britain that shuttles back and forth to Ireland in real and imaginary ways.

Developed from a short story, ‘The Mountain’, The Water Star takes Croghan Kinsella, already mentioned in The Fabulists, and turns it into a symbol of the home Hugh Kinsella and his father Brendan wish to return to from a dilapidated London they are helping rebuild. Separating belligerently for a time, father and son gradually come together again after Hugh marries Elizabeth, a Londoner, and becomes a father himself, and Brendan takes up with Sarah, a Clare woman disowned years previously due to an illegitimate pregnancy.

Though there are some clangers (“Sure we’re all the one lost tribe since the Famine”), and though Irish phrases are used in weighted and sometimes careless ways (‘Eiblín a rún’/ “Eibhlín a rún”), Casey achieves a reasonable sense of Irish life in London. By including material on Elizabeth’s family as well as Hugh’s he manages to divert attention from many of the clichés of the subject of the ghettoed Irish abroad. He also nuances his sense of the post-war city generally by including an exiled German character called Karl.

The plot runs from July 1950 to August 1956 and each chapter is given a specific time frame along with a character-name heading which signals different viewpoints on the storyline. While allowing for concentrated character development, this multi-perspective machinery can prove problematic if it isn’t properly oiled. Casey’s structural ratchet is frequently too visible, and he ends up doubling on scenes without any significant variation and even single sentences are repeated. At times, the conglomeration of details appears directionless and formless, and the book generally could have done with tighter editing. Also, the exact sidereal import of the title and the intermittent references to astronomy is unclear.

The surprise of the book, however, is that it manages to succeed generally despite its particular failures. Even in his main poetry volume, The Year of the Knife (1991), Casey relies mainly on narrative line rather than on a specifically literary style, and The Water Star progresses not through any attention to mots justes but through the exponential effect of dialogue, characterisation, and finely observed milieu. There is something at once tough and endearing in Casey’s predominant concerns with making his creations seem like real people, with delineating intimate human relationships, with being, essentially, emotive and compassionate. Even though melodrama rears its queasy head at times, the epilogue, titled ‘Ireland’, where we are moved to Wexford for a funeral, is touching and the final scene is the best in the entire story.

No one should read this book in search of lapidary sentences or shock tactics. Instead, the peculiarly quiet power of its tale should be enjoyed at the leisurely pace demanded by its length. It is perhaps a good thing to be sometimes driven to a blurbish cliché: The Water Star is, somehow, haunting.

John Kenny teaches in the English Dept. at NUI, Galway.

In whatever mood, the writer’s gaze is clear-eyed, observant, unflinching in the face of pain and the awareness of mortality.
Hugh McFadden, Books Ireland

New light on old memories

Belinda McKeon

For Philip Casey, who last published a book of poems almost 15 years ago, the light of experience seems to have changed.

The sun’s rays struggle through dust and cloud, the masks of moonlight are hidden, and the glare of electric bulbs drain energy from the core of the earth; in his new collection, looking again and again to the troubled places from which light now comes, Casey is very much writing in the shadows. From there, he wreathes his words in memory and reflection, breaking through at times to an image or a phrase that is both true and memorable: the moon’s ‘‘chilled zenith’’, a butterfly ‘‘like a hand/ conducting a silent adagio’’, the way a ‘‘child’s yellow gansey jibs/ above the thunderous pool’’, brothers gripping ‘‘adhesive stars of frost/ on the aluminium milkcan’’, or the sight of a bomb victim blasted on to a rock, ‘‘her body on fire’’.

He coats those words too, however, with heavy disapproval of the forces which have dimmed the sky’s luminosity, and the weakest poems are those which declare a concern for the environment without displaying any original or intimate engagement with that environment; there is no advance on catchphrase or common parlance in a poem which carps of how “the sublime/ is hawked to market the superfluous” (Trashed) or in one which contrasts “an ancient, holy place” to traffic jams and profit-seeking (The Time of No Time).

Meanwhile, Casey’s yielding to nostalgia in his interrogation of place becomes a bandwagon even more tiresome, adhering frustratingly to the formula which insists that a sight triggering a memory is, in and of itself, work enough to be called a poem. Nostalgia, in Casey’s poetry, seems either to weaken or to sedate his language, delivering him into the hands of cliche and sentimentality – a waste, given the sharpness of eye which shapes his words at points in this collection.

Skim over the generic homecomings, the misty-eyed homages to a poet
(Eternal Water) or a pastor (In Loving Memory of a Country Priest) and savour instead the force and tightness of poems like An Indian Dreams of the River – ‘‘sleep comes like a caravel of conquistadores’’ – or Starling, with its vision of a mathematician plotting the flight of birds:

. . . her study darkens with the noise

of thousands of wings, of wheezing
chucking and clicks, of whistling, coughs

and kisses, and a bewildered flock

blunders into the room through the screen.

Dialogue in Fading Light: New And Selected Poems, By Philip Casey, New Island, 66pp. €12.99

Belinda McKeon is a writer and journalist

© The Irish Times, April 8th, 2006
[reproduced courtesy of The Irish Times]

[With the gracious consent of New Island Books, Dialogue in Fading Light can be downloaded free under a Creative Commons licence from
Irish Literary Revival]

THE HIDDEN WEDDING OF THINGS

THIS collection of a decade of Philip Casey’s previous poems includes work chosen from two previous collections: eight poems from Those Distant Summers (1980), and fourteen from After Thunder (1985). The third part of the collection, The Year of the Knife with thirty six poems, forms over half of the book, with a selection of work after 1985.

This proportioning of the book reflects a growth in Casey’s work, a development of themes which, in the early work, are not yet explored.

Much of this growth takes place through the increasing power of language, and Casey writes in a language which is supple, accurate, sensitive and immensely strong, and which stretches to develop complexities of identity which were barely stated in the first collection. This theme, the experience of identity, increases in importance in the course of the three collections, its subdivisions, the self in landscape, the self in society, the self in love – unify in lines such as

…The answer may live
in the the hidden wedding
of things
-(White Horse)

… of not being afraid of what to walk and
to see
and to feel mean
-(Directions in One)

The poems from the first collection, Those Distant Summers, are poems of recall, a revisioning of a childhood landscape which, in the nature of such things, is both outer and inner landscape. Through a Glass Brightly is a haunting evocation of lost time:

…a Sunday in June
before the lane was tarmacadumed…
there would be wild strawberries
under the milkstand.

This milkstand recurs in a poem from the final collection, The Walking Shadow, where it takes on an extra dimension.

As the step of one rises
the other’s has fallen
onto the frozen gravel
towards the stand
and then is heard no more

Autobiography recalls childhood happiness, and the seasonal ebb of joy as winter sets the landscape. Discovering Joy, the closing poem of this section, watches the play of a child in a spring orchard. No threat here:

Her transfigured face is worth
the fruit of many orchards

The second poem from the second collection, After Thunder, is titled Into Whiteness; it is a beautiful image of the loss of light, colour and heat in a wintering landscape gradually becoming the dead body of an old woman, discovered by her granddaughter:

a good thoughtful girl who will age
within ten seconds into whiteness
like the century

Here we find five poems of social commentary: Liffey Bridge, Rosa Luxemburg, An Indian Dreams of the River,
Tom Moore’s Romantic Dancehall, and The Irish Wait. The themes of these – poverty, the dispossessed, the corridors of powerlessness – are developed in the final section.

The title poem of the final section, The Year of the Knife, establishes a statement between contradictions, like the propositions of mysticism – what is and is not, what is that and not-that. Here the language has become intensified, tautened to convey the power of the thought:

It dwells in a clenched fist
outside of what it was, and speaks
with sober lips, knowing it is alive

It follows Hamburg Woman’s Song and is aptly placed. Song, establishing an identity through externals and tradition –

I am a woman of Hamburg
who walked to the hungry city
side by side with my new father.
I have lived here to this day

is in strong contrast to the later poem, and paves the way for it. A poem called And So It Continues is a witty and poignant summary of the end of the search for self; its ironic understatement is followed by a glorious poem, Making Space. The title’s play on words is sustained thoughout the poem, where the concept of modern physics that all matter, including our bodies, is particles from a dead star, is reversed, with elegance and wit:

your lost black sheep
whose molecules keep your bedroom lit.
I will burn for you all night.

Art and Laughter and Monsieur Monsieur are two works which explore identity as reflection, and indentity in the killer/victim relationship. I am not a believer in this latter theory which tends to be the killer’s viewpoint – the victim being voiceless – de Sade, Hemingway and devotees of the hunt recall it ad nauseum, and there are sorry echoes of it even in St Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, where the enchanting fox sees the pattern of hunter-fox-chicken as inevitable ecology. However, the closing lines of Monsieur Monsieur need quoting:

the moment when the force of the strong
and weakness of the oppressed are one

The book’s closing poem, Answering Each Other, is absorbing, verbally and rhythmically. The lines, mainly six-syllabic with a strong ending, use an iambic trimeter which suggests the rhythm of the train wheels:

and mountains to the west
… connect the coastal towns
…Friends take me for a meal

And this is the image of the poem – a train journey along the east coast through a remembered landscape (is the cottage of a long dead and childless couple also the cottage where the old couple lived of Through a Glass Brightly?) Through this landscape, then, leaving it to return by another train, with the lovely closing image of the last stanza:

a woman with palsy smiles
at a tranquil bay
as we round the Italianate
houses which command it.
She holds her smile.
They answer each other.

[You can see more reviews of The Year of The Knife]

G R A P H, 1992

Ros Cowman, G R A P H Dublin, 1992.

This is a strong book, as joyful as Edith Piaf’s wonderful song ‘No Regrets’, but for Casey the new beginning is with himself.
It took me a while to see humour where previously I could recognise only suffering. In his homage to the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, the poem he struggled to write is placed within a narrative of obsession. Then the relieving revelation that, all my drafts were false./ I was writing about myself. The poem is released into tenderness for Kahlo, and the unique strength of her spirit.
The Desert Father Greets the Neophyte, from After Thunder,
ends with a leaving of what I feared to know. Lately, the attraction which was thwarted by fear has become irresistible. He has to know. White Horse is a powerful foray into Casey’s own forgotten pain, and what the poem hauls back is a child’s encounter with death. The poem has a knife-edge lyric intensity:

The rings of Saturn are ice,
full ten kilometres thick.
The rings over the hospital door
are rings crushed into a pillow
when the white horse
carries the Queen of Death
above the city in the still night.

Casey gives physicality to abstract ideas with great assurance and he has an eye for things which do not clamour for attention.

There are fine new love poems, and older ones which have benefited from fresh work. Making Space is humourous, generous and dazzlingly full of light. Art and Laughter sings its celebration of the common wealth of friends/making art or laughter out of the cruellest pain.
Although this 96 page collection of mostly new work could have done with some pruning, Casey has brought back armfuls of good poems.
Susan McKay, The Sunday Press, April 14, 1991

Casey is a master of precision but simultaneously manages to be inventive while using rigorous metering. The poet uses compassionate imagery and has a feel for his subjects, which range from death to generation gaps to religion. An ordered but imaginative collection.
Linda Higgins In Dublin 20 June-3 July 1991

This is a passionate, erotic, mature novel that displays many of the virtues which contemporary Irish fiction so conspicuously lacks: an intelligent vision of an adult relationship coupled with an intelligent vision of contemporary Irish society. Plus, he has a supple prose style which is a constant joy to read.
- Ronan Sheehan, The Irish Press, October 1994

Think about it. Why did you enjoy the last book you enjoyed? Five-to-one it’s because you identified with, hated, laughed at, fantasized about, despised, appreciated, admired, or just plain LIKED one of the lead players. Yes, yes, yes – of course other elements contribute to the success of the book. But when you turn the last page of a novel which you’ve savored and begin immediately to miss the company of at least one key character, you know the author must be doing something right, and you know you’ve just finished a certifiable, two-thumbs- up, grade-A Good Book.
It doesn’t happen often. Or not often enough, anyway.
Recent Irish fiction has thrown up only a small fistful of such characters, and you already know who they are because when they do arrive, industry hype machines generate more noise than a low-flying rock’n'roll band. So it’s a doubly sweet pleasure to come across a quietly-published, no-hype novel that isn’t just a Good Book with memorable characters, but one that genuinely stands shoulder to shoulder with the very best Irish fiction of the last few years.
Philip Casey’s The Fabulists, is such a novel, and to a large extent, it’s the author’s mastery of character that tilts it into Must Read Status.
An impressively mature and honest tale of extra-marital love and family obligation on the dole in contemporary Dublin, The Fabulists presents two of the most convincingly flesh-and-blood characters to turn up in an Irish novel for ages, and lays bare with haunting, microscopic precision their struggle to endure profound personal disappointments and grab one last chance at the could-have-been.
Although The Fabulists is his first novel, Casey writes with the even, controlled tone of a much more experienced author, delving so deeply, so completely into his characters that it’s almost impossible to avoid becoming involved, even immersed, in their saga. You’ll wonder about Tess and Mungo. You’ll care about them. You’ll even find yourself going along with the stories they weave for each other, hoping the tales end before the relationship does. Why? Because they’re not flashy high-concept creations, they’re palpably REAL characters, fully realized and drawn with sensitivity and intelligence.
By all accounts, The Fabulists took ten years to complete, and the care Casey took with the novel is evident in almost every sentence. Yes, it’s a little depressing. But it’s also an enormously compelling romance with two characters who’ll still be in your head weeks after the plot details have disappeared.
- Colin Lacey, The Irish Voice, New York, May 9,1995

I first came across Philip Casey as a poet and always admired his work. This is his first novel, published by Lilliput Press in Dublin in 1994. I approached it with some trepidation since it was a first novel, but I found it amazingly accomplished. It’s a book I’ve read now three or four times, and it has that really magnificent quality that great novels have, where you find yourself thinking about them a few weeks after you finish reading them.
You are walking down the street and the characters in the novel are so vivid that you almost find yourself saying, if you see something in the street, “I wonder what would that guy in the novel think about that?” It’s a love story set in contemporary Dublin and that’s a difficult thing to do because Dublin novelists sometimes tend to characterize Dublin as a gas place full of incredibly funny taxi drivers and bawdy nights in pubs and all the rest. But the Dublin that Philip Casey conjures up reminds me of Dermot Bolger’s Dublin in a way, it’s just so real and absolutely recognizable right from the first page.
It’s a very tender love story. What holds the affair together is the fact that these two people meet once a week and they tell each other stories. So as well as the story in the novel working very well on its own merits, it also builds into a metaphor for the power of stories generally. I found that aspect of the novel very moving. It’s a magnificent book and it’s just come out in England and I’m sure it will do very well there for Philip Casey.
- Joseph O’Connor in an interview with Seamus Hosey for the RTÉ Radio programme Speaking Volumes. The transcript is published by Blackwater Press.

I adored it when I read it. It’s an absolutely gorgeous portrait of Dublin. It reminded me of the film Les Amants des Pont Neuf.
- Katy Hayes, The Arts Show, RTÉ Radio 1

a novel of linguistic power and emotional strength.
Hayden Murphy, The Scotsman.

Casey’s main achievement in The Fabulists lies in his skillful handling of the elements of fact and fantasy, realism and surrealism that make up the novel. Fabulous, seductive fictions are anchored in mundane realities and the compulsion to invent counterbalanced by the obligation to confront the truth.
His geographically centred, metaphorically open narrative allows us to read Tess and Mungo’s journey from immurement to freedom as a parable of a maturing Ireland.
The subtlety and ease with which Casey achieves such symmetry between private and public worlds makes The Fabulists an assured and impressive debut.
Liam Harte, Irish Studies Review, 9, Winter 1994/5, p. 49.

Irish poet and playwright Casey makes his fiction debut with this resolutely candid tale of extramarital love and obligation on the dole in contemporary Dublin. Separated from her pornography-addicted husband and emotionally capricious son, Tess sinks into squalor and despair, spending days and nights deliberating wistfully on the might-have-beens in her life. After a chance encounter with Mungo, also in a marriage bereft of affection since his son’s near death in a house fire, Tess is intrigued by the man or, more precisely, by his spurious autobiography. When he contrives to meet her again, the two begin an affair based on the mutual spinning of tales devised to present the teller in a more alluring light. As the romance develops, the stories become increasingly intimate, hinting more directly at the unspoken circumstances of their lives. When family obligations pressure Mungo into moving far from Dublin, the lovers reluctantly become resigned to ending their relationship, but not before concluding the tales they began. Easily overcoming the potential pitfalls of the novel’s bleak setting, Casey has created an involving, mature drama of a man and a woman struggling to endure profound personal disappointments.

Publishers Weekly, USA Reviewed on: January 2, 1995

Fabulists are tellers of fables: improbable tales designed to amuse and instruct. Fabulous, which comes from the word fable, suggests vast, amazing or excellent – all of which apply to this first novel by poet Philip Casey.
An Irish love story for the 1990s.
Anthony Glavin, The Sunday Tribune

This is a deeply accomplished novel. Casey has a penetrating eye for the stuff of everyday relationships and the compassion to turn the ordinary into compelling and vivid fiction.
Eoin McNamee, The Irish Times

Equally important to the development of the relationship between the two characters, Tess and Mungo, and indeed to the structure of the novel itself, is their imaginative tale-spinning courtship involving exotic European locations.
Affecting the entire tone, however, are the women in the story; by choosing this emphasis, Casey creates a “modern” fable which is paradoxically liberating for both sexes.
And let’s not forget the considerable craft of the author. A highly impressive debut.
Sharon Barnes, In Dublin

This is an impressive first novel, primarily for its insight into both the male and female characters. I look forward to more.
Casey Evans, IT Magazine

In his first novel, The Fabulists, the Irish poet Philip Casey is ostensibly concerned with describing a love affair between Mungo and Tess, two unemployed and unhappily married Dubliners. But what makes this novel so remarkable and compelling is not so much his detailed tracing of their intense affair, but the way in which Casey succeeds in integrating the affair with their drab lives, their city, and their stifled imaginations, all three of which are transformed for brief periods by love.
Another important element that contributes to the success of the novel is how the lovers amuse each other by telling tall tales about their pasts. This is done to give their affair an exotic quality and to hide the disappointments which define their ‘actual’ lives. But the stories they tell of adventures in places they haven’t visited (Tess’s Germany and Mungo’s Spain) form a fascinating double narrative, one which allows for deep insights into both of their lives, and which contributes to the novel’s complexity.
Most Irish novels are written in a realistic mode, but The Fabulists is a more innovative work in which Casey shows not only a gift for writing in the traditional manner, but also the imagination and daring to introduce new novel techniques, which few Irish writers have bothered themselves with, into his fiction. It is clear from this excellent first novel that Casey is an exciting talent and a writer to watch in the future.
- Eamonn Wall, The Review of Contemporary Fiction

I just picked up Philip Casey’s The Fabulists, by Lilliput. It won this year’s Listowel Book of the Year,* and quite often books win prizes and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re great books, but this I’m just delighted to say was a really, really interesting, unsentimental, very sharp look at two people, both of whom are on the dole, both of whom are trying to raise children in different ways, and they start having a love affair. (It’s also a great mapping of north Dublin, starting with the Ha’Penny Bridge, Liffey Street, Stonybatter, all around there; shops, different kinds of food – a great sociological study of what people eat who are on the dole and all the rest of it).
They fall in love – well, they’re going to have an affair – but what’s terrific about it is they tell each other stories, which are untrue. She supposedly spent some time in Berlin, and he supposedly in Barcelona, and they recount these stories to each other and both of them know that the other one has never been there. But in order to create some kind of wonderful thing out of what really could be a quite sordid sort of love affair, they tell each other these stories.
Just a beautiful book, beautiful.
[That's The Fabulists] by Philip Casey, who’s a poet, I think, before a novelist, so it comes as a surprise, really, that this book was so interesting.
- Evelyn Conlon Talking about her choice of Books of the Year 1995 with Mike Murphy of The Arts Show RTÉ Radio

* The inaugural Kerry Ingredients First Book of the Year Award, Writer’s Week, Listowel, 1995 (This is now The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award)

incomplete bibliography

Barnes, Sharon. The Fabulists. In Dublin, p.28 November, 1994, p40

Brankin, Una. Rich fantasy springs from harsh reality for Philip (interview) The Sunday Press, November 6, 1994.

Casey, Evans. The Fabulists, by Philip Casey. IT Magazine, October 1994. p112.

Doyle, Martin. The Ties that Bind (interview). The Irish Post, December 17, 1994. p.12

Donavan, Katie. What the Writers are Reading, In Dublin. December 1994. p 41.

Dunne, John. The Fabulists, Philip Casey. Books Ireland, March 1995.

Harte, Liam. The Fabulists. Philip Casey. Irish Studies Review, n 9, Winter 1994/1995, p49.

(unattributed, but based on an interview with Shirley Kelley). Social realism – with a touch of magic. Books Ireland, October 1994.

McNamee, Eoin. Tales of love and damage. The Irish Times, November 5, 1994. Weekend/Books.

Sheehan, Ronan. The Fabulists, Philip Casey. The Irish Press, September 30, 1994, p. 19.

Wall, Eamonn. Philip Casey, The Fabulists. Review of Contemporary Fiction.(USA) Spring 1995. pp 182-3.

Academic

The Right to the City: Re-presentations of Dublin in Contemporary Irish Fiction, by Gerry Smyth
Contemporary Irish Fiction Themes, Tropes, Theories Edited by Liam Harte and Michael Parker (London, MacMillan Press/ New York, St Martin’s Press, 2000)

THE FABULISTS:
TRA FINZIONE E REALTA Tesi di Laurea di Paula Meucci, Istituto Universitario Lingue Moderne, Milano (Anno Accademico 1996-1997)

Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin After O’Casey, by Dr Michael Pierse (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

*Note: I’m indebted to Paula Meucci’s thesis on The Fabulists for much of this detail. I’d never thought to keep records of dates etc.

An ordinary, almost staid, couple are overwhelmed by crisis when their third child is born. The book starts off fairly ordinary and staid too, but this makes the crisis all the more realistic when it hits and easier to sympathize with.

Once the new baby is born, the writing becomes sensitive and involving, the characterization sharper and deeper and it’s possible to really care about what has happened and what will happen. As the trust and communication between the parents break down, threatening the fabric of the family, Dan, the husband, bolts to his father’s house in Ireland. He becomes better acquainted with his father, with his family history and with the history of Ireland, a country he’s never before thought of as his own. Kate, his wife, is left to cope with two children and a new baby. Dan’s behaviour is enough to make the reader want to give him a good shake but Casey explores his motivation with such sensitivity that it’s impossible not to be on his side too. In the midst of this emotional agonizing, the action moves two hundred years to the Irish Rebellion of the late 18th century and Caribbean island of Montserrat, where even Irishmen could be landlords and slaveowners. In its own quiet way this novel is unsettling and even shocking as it challenges the reader to step into Dan’s shoes: are you as open-minded, as trusting, as loyal as you think you are?
–Kirkus UK

Philip Casey at Amazon.co.uk
Philip Casey at Amazon.com

A seamlessly achieved, questioning work

This is the story of two adults forced to grow far beyond the boundaries of their own expectations. It is also the story of history, and how the separation of past and present which we casually insist on in day-to-day discourse, is challenged by chance, one-in-a-million events, in this case, the inexplicable birth of a black child to London-based white parents, Kate and Dan. Kate is fascinated by the presence of black figures in Renaissance paintings, and there is even a hint of her attraction to the black husband of a friend. After the birth of their (black) baby girl, Dan’s blind rage in the face of the seemingly impossible is one of the central emotional notes in the narrative, and thus begins a journey in which he is compelled to look at his own past and how this past has impinged on his present. Nothing is comfortable. No character in these pages is allowed the easy option. Complacency is the great moral failure that almost overwhelms Dan time and again. Gradually, he explores stories and situations which – one imagines – he would never have envisaged. He learns about his own ancestors’ involvement in the 1798 Irish Rebellion, about inexplicable rages and passions equal to his own, and he comes to understand the great, arduous journeys of those forced to flee abroad to America and to Montserrat.

The tectonic overlapping of black and white, of love and what? prejudice? complacency? past and present? continues beyond the novel’s closing words. Casey began his writing career as a poet. One senses that the poet in him contributes to a complex and often metaphoric refinement of the problem of confronting what seems alien and ‘other’. There are no right-on pronouncments in The Fisher Child, no “correct” views on either race or nationality. Instead, the characters are human and as such they explore what they need within their own terms and within the terms of history.

The novel’s final image is startling, enigmatic, beautiful and challenging. Through it, Casey appears to urge a re–examination of that which we assume to be philosophically ordered, and to confront our own dreams just as Dan does: which implies that nothing is separate and that the world has a wild inter-dependance that rises even from the genetic, cellular mine of our own bodies. A fresh and intriguing book that many writers would love to have written.
Mary O’Donnell Amazon.co.uk review, 3 December, 2001

a beautiful, evocative tale of love tested

Philip Casey’s third novel, The Fisher Child, is a beautiful, evocative tale of love tested. Kate and Dan, happily married with two children, have their lives turned upside down after the birth of Meg.
The novel is divided into three parts: the first told through Kate’s eyes and the third through Dan’s. The novel changes style for the forceful middle section dealing with the Rebellion and subsequent life in Montserrat through the eyes of Dan’s ancestor, Hugh Byrne.
The history told in this engrossing section makes sense of the novel as a whole. From its mesmerising opening chapters in Florence, through the shocking climax to the close, the complicated inter-family relationships threaded with echoes of the past are woven with exquisite skill.
Sue Leonard, The Irish Examiner February 23, 2002

this wise, tender novel

Dan is never granted as much historical knowledge as the reader, but even without all the facts he learns he can have a little more trust, in his wife, but also an implicit trust; one shared by the other characters in this wise, tender novel, in the muddled connections and continuities of their lives.
Paul Magrs, TLS November 9, 2001

a careful, diligent storyteller, and, as he has shown here, daring

Casey, one of the quiet men of Irish writing, is a careful, diligent storyteller, and, as he has shown here, daring.
Casey’s attempts to describe the emergence of modern Irish society, its myths, its realities and bitter truths, through his Bann River Trilogy, remains brave and honest.
Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times November 10, 2001

a rare treat

Its linkage to The Water Star is highly interesting (even if occasionally there is a lot of having to explain details of personal histories). The only comparison I can think of is the films The Godfather and Godfather II, which managed to function as both a sequel and a pre-sequel to the original, a difficult imaginative feat which Casey more than successfully pulls off. In doing so he has created a complex novel of contrasts and parallels within the emotions, prejudices and self-awareness of two males linked by a name and a secret and the irresistible pull of a Wexford mountain calling them home. The Fisher Child is a stand-alone novel that can exist without reference to any other book. But read along with The Water Star is to have a rare treat in store.
Dermot Bolger, The Sunday Independent November 25, 2001

pb review by Isabel Montgomery

Dan and Kate appear the epitome of smug marrieds. We first meet them, with two children behind them and a home in Islington, on a weekend break in Florence. So far so dull, as they take in the sights, but Meg, the unplanned fruit of holiday lovemaking, shows how quickly a comfortable, even complacent, existence can be destroyed. Casey’s portrayal of Kate, rejected and depressed, yet experiencing a fierce need to defend her child, is finely realised, and Dan’s sense of masculinity betrayed and his flight to Ireland also ring true.
Isabel Montgomery, The Guardian, August 17, 2002

Philip Casey
THE WATER STAR
434pp. Picador. £14.99
0 330 37190 8

Philip Casey’s second novel, The Water Star, confronts the central Irish experience of the twentieth century: exile. It is distinguished by the finely wrought lyricism that has characterized much of his poetry. His first novel, The Fabulists (1994), won acclaim; his new one confirms that he is a writer with a gift for uncovering the tortuous impulses of his characters with a lucid and affecting eye.

Set in a post-war London still recovering from the Blitz, the novel follows the overlapping lives of five characters who inhabit the ruins of North London. Three – Brendan, his son Hugh and Sarah – are Irish; another, Karl, is German. Only Elizabeth, an East End girl who has moved north to escape the claustrophobia of her cramped family life, is English. All carry the marks of exile: disorientation and melancholy, a sense of rupture in their personal history and a relationship with the past which contains both longing and denial. Loss is the feeling they share: loss of homeland, and loss of family as the war has taken its toll. Cut off from home and family, each labours to reconstruct a new life on the ruins of the old, as Brendan, Hugh and Karl, all building workers, toil on the bomb-sites of Holloway and Finsbury to raise new buildings from the shattered wreckage of London.

Casey escorts his reader through the labyrinth of his characters’ minds, unpicking the jumbled mosaic of mourning, desire and fear. The German Karl, his family punished by the Nazis for harbouring a Jewish friend, is overwhelmed by distress when he recalls again and again the bomb attacks on his home town of Hamburg. His suffering eventually drives him to a lunatic asylum; his breakdown has been caused by the weight of the past. Casey’s descriptions of this process, and of the destruction of the German city, are finely evoked; in his reconstruction of the wartime attacks, the smell of smoke, the mortar and the panic are fully imagined.

The troubled relationship between Brendan and Hugh is also well handled. Casey has a feel for the bitter reality of the Irish exile. Rendered emotionally numb by the death of his wife, Brendan nurses dreams of a return to County Wexford. Hugh, spurned by his father’s inarticulacy and still mourning his dead mother, is so raw in his grief that one evening he imagines he sees her. A gauche, unconfident young man, he is both haunted and sustained by the idea of home, which he thinks of as his father’s small farm in the Wicklow hills. In the novel’s opening chapters, we see the harsh life of the two men renting a single room, labouring all hours on a building site to save enough money to return home. But Hugh, unlike his father, realizes that his only chance of survival is to move away from the past, and to put distance between himself and his heritage. He strikes out alone, leaving his father to establish his own life.

Despite its sombre tone, The Water Star is a novel about reconstruction; it tells how those severed from their roots reconnect and reconcile their atavistic impulses with their need to reach a settlement with the present. A structural weakness comes from its preoccupation with detail. The narrative is a lengthy roster of marriages, fallings out, childbirth, death and grief, which at times overwhelms the beauty of individual passages. But those fine intense moments – and there are many of them here – show Philip Casey to be a compelling writer. The Water Star is a bitter-sweet testimony to the never-ending struggle between exile and assimilation.

© TLS, May 21 1999

Washed ashore in a bomb-damaged land

THE WATER STAR
By Philip Casey
Picador, £14.99
ISBN 0 330 371 908

The water star is a reflection: imperfect, but beautiful in itself. Its darklit image shivers in a breath of wind, or is obscured by the observer’s shadow in the moon, but that mutability, that elusiveness, is part of its arresting mystery. Lean down too close to the pool and it will appear to vanish altogether.

Philip Casey’s second novel, The Water Star, works in the same way. Casey is a poet and a playwright; he has a poet’s delicate ear and a playwright’s eye for direction. The tale that unfolds in this thick, satisfying volume is not particularly complex – any more than the circumstances of any of our lives are complex, which is to say, infinitely and infinitesimally so. London, 1950: the city is a bomb site, a building site, and there is plenty of work for Brendan and Hugh Kinsella, natives of Co Wexford. Father and son, Brendan’s wife and Hugh’s mother Maire is dead, buried near the blue Irish mountain that haunts them in their grey London days, Croghan Kinsella.

The city separates them. Each longs for home, for the past, finds himself strange even when not among strangers. The London of Hugh’s imagination is nowhere to be found: “When he was a child, he had always thought that London had no hills. He remembered this as he walked up the incline of Tollington Park, past the large Protestant church and into Everleigh Street, where the Irish faithful were congregating. Hugh was perversely proud that his church had a corrugated iron roof, in contrast to its grand Protestant neighbour. No matter that Catholic churches in Ireland were of good stone and slate, the poverty of this one made him feel a cut above the Prods, morally speaking.” But when Hugh’s longing manifests itself in a vision of his dead mother, Brendan hides his own sense of loss in a fear of his son’s madness, and Hugh goes his own way.

He finds a home with Elizabeth Frampton, who takes him into her house and her bed. She has another lodger, Karl, a German, whose family was killed in Hamburg in the war. He manages his bereavement by carving their effigies as he sits in the garden – and by loving Elizabeth. When she takes to Hugh he is faced with another loss. Brendan, meanwhile, finds comfort after his son’s disappearance with Sarah, an Irish woman sent away from home when she became pregnant with her daughter Deirdre. Through the interweaving and the overlapping of these relationships, Casey examines how human nature is shaped by sorrow; how people will find a way – sometimes, it seems, despite themselves – to take comfort from others, to make homes where they can, even among the ruins.

Casey’s technique, too, is one of interweaving and overlapping. He will tell the same story more than once, each time from a different vantage point: Hugh’s own experience of his arrival at Elizabeth’s house and then Karl’s vision of the events. Of course, it is not the “same story” that’s told, which is precisely the point. As an idea in the abstract this might seem laboured; in the novel, however, it works seamlessly, simply functioning as it is meant to and unfolding the story like a fan. Karl works as a labourer, too; Elizabeth trusts he will find work for Hugh. As Hugh sees it: “Elizabeth glanced at him across the table. He had been watching a stray hair which had wandered from her well-brushed head. As their eyes met, she looked back again to Karl. “Can you fix a start for Hugh on Monday?” Karl sized him up. “If he’s willing to work hard. Brickie’s mate, Hugh.”

And then, as Karl perceives it: ˜Can you fix a start for Hugh on Monday?” She asked quietly. Of course. Elizabeth had but to ask, no matter what complication or indebtedness to those he despised that it might entail. It was against his interest, he knew simply by the way she spoke of the young man; but Elizabeth had made a request. He pretended to consider. “If he’s willing to work hard. Brickie’s mate, Hugh.”

This style, formal yet flexible, opens the novel out, and the different perspectives made these hardscrabble lives – death is a frequent visitor to this household and comfort too easily found in a bottle of wine or whiskey – vivid. Casey’s tale comes to the reader bearing praise from Sebastian Barry, and, like the author of The Steward of Christendom and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, he has an unsentimental but affectionate view of Ireland and the Irish. His language is more austere than Barry’s; his characters aren’t given to speechifying and a large part of his skill is in the way he digs through their inarticulacy to find the real emotion beneath.

The Water Star is a graceful, gentle novel that does not shy from the truth. Is its metaphor of lives rebuilt from rubble – whether the detritus of the past or the structures shattered by the Blitz – too pat? Perhaps, sometimes. But reading along one finds oneself thinking, yes, but that’s just how things are. That seems a small thing, but it is a fine compliment to a work of fiction.

Erica Wagner
© The Times, London, April 8, 1999

Philip Casey’s second novel, The Water Star, confronts the central Irish experience of the twentieth century: exile. It is distinguished by the finely wrought lyricism that has characterised much of his poetry. His first novel, The Fabulists (1994) won acclaim; his new one confirms that he is a writer with a gift for uncovering the tortuous impulses of his characters with a lucid and affecting eye. Set in a post-war London still recovering from the Blitz, the novel follows the overlapping lives of five characters who inhabit the ruins of North London
. . . Casey escorts his reader through the labyrinths of his character’s minds, unpicking the jumbled mosaic of mourning, desire and fear. The Water Star is a bitter-sweet testimony to the never-ending struggle between exile and assimilation.
– John Tague, Times Literary Supplement
full review

There is something at once tough and endearing in Casey’s predominant concerns with making his creations seem like real people, with delineating intimate human relationships – with being, essentially, emotive and compassionate. …No one should read this book in search of lapidary sentences or shock tactics. Instead, the peculiarly quiet power of its tale should be enjoyed at the leisurely pace demanded by its length. It is perhaps a good thing to be sometimes driven to a blurbish cliché: The Water Star is, somehow, haunting.
– John Kenny, The Irish Times
full review

Philip Casey has recreated a whole era of Irish life in this amazing novel. … If you want to find out what it was like for the Irish in London in the early ’50s, read this book. It is a treat.
– Pat Byrne, The Irish World, 26 May 2000

This elegiac novel casts a gentle – but discerning – eye on the lives and loves of Irish and other exiles in a London shattered by the Blitz. Philip Casey brings the lyricism of a poet and the dramatic sense of a playwright to his tale of lost souls doing their best to glue their fragmented lives back together; his characters are vivid, subtly shaded, often tragic, but there’s no wallowing in misery here – on the contrary, a life-affirming tenacity and humour, reinforced by an elegant cyclical structure and more than a hint of mysticism, makes The Water Star a pleasure to read. The final sequence, set in Ireland, chimes a little uncomfortably with the rest, but then comfort was never going to be a top priority in a book about alienation. An intelligent, memorable, moving novel.
– Arminta Wallace, The Irish Times, Saturday April 1st, 2000

Gentle, metaphorical, totally believable.
– Bristol Evening Post

Derelict bomb sites are a refuge for the lonely, war-scarred characters who inhabit the 1950s London of Philip Casey’s impressive second novel. Elizabeth, Cockney-born and bred, invites Hugh, a semi-literate young Irish labourer who has run away from his domineering father, to share her home. They become lovers, marry, and soon after their son Charlie is born, and Hugh is reconciled with his father, who has found happiness of sorts with another unhappy Irish exile. The lives of these characters become totally absorbing as different versions of important events are related from their respective viewpoints. Casey has brought alive the dilemmas of a lost generation and made them vivid and memorable.
–The Good Book Guide

Philip Casey’s first novel, The Fabulists, was one of the most original of recent years and remarkable for his ability in writing about women. That skill is evident in his second, The Water Star, which follows the lives of an interconnected cast of characters in London during the fifties. The Water Star is a compelling series of life stories at a crucial point in modern history; it is equally compelling as an imaginative analysis of national versus private identity, of how people may transcend the bogus boundaries of their lives through small acts of honesty and kindness.
– Sharon Barnes, IMAGE

Casey’s approach to a hackneyed theme – the sadness of exile – creates original new fiction. Based in fifties London, his story mixes together displaced Irish and Europeans and concentrates on new beginnings in alien territory. This series of love-stories told from individual perspectives resonates with authentic feeling.
– Sharon Barnes, round-up of the year’s fiction, IMAGE, December 1999

The Water Star is a powerful work of fiction, at once passionate and compassionate.
– The Waterstones website review

Philip Casey is one of our most intuitive and interesting writers. …What is most impressive in this multi-layer book is that it captures both the British and German experience of the aftermath of war, as much as the mindset and experience of the migrant Irish flocking to find rebuilding work. The torched buildings of Hamburg in RAF raids are as real here as the improvised mountain slopes of Wexford that its main protagonists, Hugh and his widowed father Brendan, leave behind. Casey is excellent in slowly weaving together these diverse and conflicting strands of human life as (like the city they inhabit) they struggle to rebuild the present, while still haunted by old loyalties and ghosts from the recent past. …This is a lyrical and captivating read in which the dead are as present as those survivors rebuilding their lives and the mental scars of inexpressible wounds find expression in moments of exquisite tenderness …
– Dermot Bolger, The Sunday Independent

Written with a poet’s eye for the intensity of physical detail the narrative unfolds gradually, and time moves in loops with one event being recounted by up to five different voices’…
– Della Nock, Irish Post

… Yet there is something compulsive about the lives recounted in Casey’s flat, slow-moving prose that keeps you reading right to the end
– Alannah Hopkin, The Sunday Tribune

Casey captures the warmth and tragedies of ordinary life with exquisite detail.
– Maurice Haugh, The Evening Herald

The Water Star is a tense moving novel which describes a scene from different perspectives – the author’s eye for capturing even the most complicated and hidden of human emotions make this book an incredibly vivid read… Highly recommended.
– A reader from Dublin , 27 May, 1999 ***** Amazon.co.uk

This is a book about ordinary people adjusting to life in England after the war. It is also a story about the difficulty experienced by exiles, trying to adapt to life in their newly adopted country. It is a love story, and highlights the difficulty of making the right choices, and living with the consequences of those choices.
Philip Casey uses the technique of multiple voices, narrating the same bit of personal history from the the different perspective of each of the characters. However, in each successive narration, one learns a bit more, another facet, of each event as it unfolds.
The “menage a trois” involves an attractive, capable and independent young British woman, in the prime of life: a traumatised and isolated German man, who is a guilt-ridden survivor of war: and a young and inexperienced Irish man, a manual worker. The German has intelligence and depth, and is fond of contemplating the mystery and beauty of Spirals found in Maths and Astronomy. He finds solace and healing in the music of Mahler. The young Irishman has a sexual awakening, and comes to adulthood and parenthood, under the tutelage of the heroine. She herself has to deal with the necessity of making hard choices.
The book is an enjoyable and light read, and involves other minor characters. Towards the end of the book one is given a glimpse of the beauty and poverty of Ireland, contrasted to the life of working class Britain. What I found hard to believe was that in the house owned by the heroine, there is an indoor bathroom! It is my experience that homes from that era usually had outdoor bathrooms. But…read it for yourself, and YOU decide!
June T. Walters, from Grahamstown, Eastern Cape South Africa, May 27, 2001*** – Amazon.com