Jean Bleakney was born in Newry, Northern Ireland in 1956. She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Ripple Tank Experiment (Lagan Press, 1999) and The Poet’s Ivy (Lagan Press, 2003). A third collection, ions, is due in autumn 2011. Her work has appeared in several anthologies including The New North(Wake Forest University Press, 2008, and Salt Publishing, 2011). […]
Facing up to the truth of shooting stars —that the earth is a whirling medieval flail, making fire and dust of tiny remnant worlds— is a terrible flicker of how the black-and-white of things can sometimes leave us inconsolable.
Taken on its own, the fickle doorbell has no particular score to settle (a reluctant clapper? an ill-at-ease dome?) were it not part of a whole syndrome: the stubborn gate; flaking paint; cotoneaster camouflaging the house-number. Which is not to say the occupant doesn’t have (to hand) lubricant, secateurs, paint-scraper, an up-to-date shade-card known by […]
After the storm, when the sky to the east was still black, but the wind had eased and the evening sun clung to the raindrops that had appeared like incipient buds on the still-bare branches (fuchsia and birch); droplets that quivered, not nervously, but showily working their way through the visible spectrum like fairy lights, […]
for Michael Longley Keep a steady hand on the burette towards the end of the reaction: a single drop of titrant at a time, the teflon-coated magnet whirring, so when it finally happens, when the exact amount required to shift from one ionic state into another (that’s the endpoint) has been added, let it […]
Or so I thought I heard, whispered by my elders. Distinct from the ‘poor crittur’ whom circumstance had whipped, ‘noddity’ corralled the wild-eyed, the loud, the cowed, the always head-scarved women, the hidden from view, the ill-at-ease with themselves. It comes back to me these days when I catch myself visibly agreeing with myself. […]
The day John Wayne died we kept the radio low. You asked about the batteries. We lied.
Godfather of the equation, superscript, optics, vortices and ‘I think, therefore I am’, René Descartes took the credit for lots. Irrevocably splicing algebra and geometry, his lettered crosshairs, x and y, complicated the Euclidian plot of dots and planes, rendering straight lines to curves and triangles into waves. Even Isaac Newton was baffled, allegedly. Where […]