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6"x9", 338 pages, perfect bound paperback

ISBN 1903090 46 6 

See below for the extracts LOG and MATURITY

Click here for biographical note

Click here for Rupert Loydell's review of Prelude, Interlude and Postlude.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Maurice Scully was born in Dublin in 1952 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He has been editor of a number of influential magazines and chapbook series, and through the 1970s and 1980s organised readings and literary events. Among his books are Love Poems & Others, Five Freedoms of Movement and the recently completed Sonata.. Several sections of the present volume appeared through the 1990s as separate books from Pig Press, Writers Forum and Reality Street Editions. Similarly, several chapbooks of work in progress appeared through the 1990s from Staple Diet, Poetical Histories, Tel-let, Form Books and Wild Honey Press. What is the Cat Looking At?, a children's book in collaboration with the artist Bianca Grünwald-Game, appeared in 1995.

As the English poet and critic, Peter Riley, writes:
"Absolutely authentic . . . Every episode of explanation collapses into peace and war, phonemes like bullets ricocheting off the present tense. Pain, disregard and distance chop the continuum to bits and the bits roll around the wasted fields of Ireland and Africa chiming together into a brilliant suspended hope, which is where we really are."


from Livelihood

LOG


listening
If you throw away your weapons
some less scrupulous person
will pick them up - but


what is the name of the sound of the rain?


(none a bell)
or anything echoing
between
one thing & another

one thing
of course

one thing

cedes to another
& stored
in

as a matter of

certain

coarsely sometimes
strangely
of

(tap)

course

one thing leads to another

fine
through certainty
in a sort of constricting ring.

I thought the other hammering
was the echo of another(tell/told)
until the first(which?)stopped

(watch)from under which continues(which?)
the other. thing. in time.
as if sound were
visible
to us.

zero is the opposite of one
yes?

& one thing bleeds
one thing leads
in

into another . . .

water falling from the sky
is one of the most
important of all
of all phenomena that make life
life possible on land
possible


from Livelihood

MATURITY


Daybreak: patter of feet to bathroom and back.
Quiet. Contemplation can come from the toes up
to meet child-energy in the head. Rosettes of
data embed the crystal, shattered similes,
useless blurs but . . . spalling, advection, cloudtrails,
tidemarks, a swallow in autumn. Mid-day:
bees, wasps, hoverflies tamper at the nectaries I
myself bend to examine looking for stimulation
in the garden. We go out for a walk my kids and I.
(Fat bananas clustered where the flower was, troughs
and pockets in the head.) Life, bright and brief !
Tiny meandering pollen shadows, pocked, minute
circles, diced geometric figures, deeply gouged
brilliant identity-echoes, under the flightpath, up,
wheels dip, flaps down, a steady waver in the great
machine where jets make landfall and go on. My children.
One by one by one. The trees' canopies curl over us,
bend and sway at the sky's lips. Of course. Our
children fly. Fragrance rises. Stem wavers.
World turns. One. Back from the retina shoals of
information slot into place and, from the stone out,
one pollen-grain, one, the fruit's flesh swells.
Delicious! Yellow, the daystar; green is begin.