Are you familiar with Adam White's poetry? If not, you should be. For me, he's one of the best poets to have emerged from Ireland in recent years. His first collection was full of wonderful poems about carpentry, roofing, fishing and other pursuits. Adam's second collection, published by Doire Press, will be launched in Charlie Byrne's on Thursday 16th Feb at 6.30. It sees Adam spread out into some new territory without losing track of his poetic skills. Check out the poem below, "Mare Nostrum", from the new collection. It describes a boatload of hopeful immigrants as ants which "eclipse a slice of apple let fall/ on the front stoop of our building".
You might also be interested in this poem/brief interview with Adam that I did a while back: http://poemsinprofile.weebly.com/the-poems/8-strike-by-adam-white.
So, come along, meet Adam and hear him read his work. Pick up a copy of his book, and I guarantee that you'll want to share it with someone.
Mare Nostrum
North-westerly course out of Tripoli.
(Re)Provision of foodstuffs and water
to the offshore rig Zagreb 1,
fifty miles (nautical, mind) off the coast
of Libya. When one of my officers
spyglassed what looked to be an agitation
of gulls over a small craft, I gave orders
to tack and when we closed and saw
it was of course men hailing us with their shirts,
yelling in the unintelligible,
sent my second in command, an Egyptian,
to sound out the crew in Arabic.
Well I saw ants once, when I was a child,
eclipse a slice of apple let fall
on the front stoop of our building,
and that's what it is:
one hundred and fifty souls overcrowding
the deck of a fifty-foot wooden vessel,
and as many again squatting below
between the boards, you learn subsequently.
That they badly lack water and food
is relayed, that they're about parched for petrol,
or adrift under a big midday sun,
and never a rudiment of navigation
or a lifejacket amongst them.
Now, international regulation
on sea rescue prescribes such persons
be repatriated to the nearest port,
which means a U-turn to Tripoli,
but some demand you tow them
to Italy, and the whole boatload boil over
to a frenzy when you have to refuse,
threatening to fling themselves into the sea.
Considering women and small children
are in the hold, the middle ground
is to bid them board, the orchestration
of which veers perilously close to mayhem,
but it's a mayhem you just get used to.
Water, chocolate bars and first aid
can thus be duly administered.
Some of those we treated for pussed-up
bullet wounds and knife cuts, just blushed
like men and women showing their private parts;
the more mouthy there raged at paying
thousands of American dollars for passage
to Europe and being abandoned
in the middle of the Med like a pail
of kittens. Evidently there's money
to be made in promising a man
some crackpot impracticality
he has fantasized,
or that was once engraved somewhere in his head.