Mary Noonan is an Irish poet and academic. She lives in Cork, and is a lecturer in French literature at University College Cork. Her poems have been published in The SHOp, The Stinging Fly, The Dark Horse, Wasafiri, Tears in the Fence, Cyphers, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, The Cork Literary Review, Penned: Zoo Poems(2009), The […]
No matter my dream of you will not – you rang, out of the blue I was tumbling about moiling as usual the phone stopped me in my tracks I had long since stopped believing in a world that could take my breath away but there you were phoning and asking to meet me for […]
He took me mainly to places of leave-taking – Bahnhof Grunewald (Auschwitz, Belsen) the grave of Heinrich von Kleist at the Wannsee and airy galleries hung with paintings of death – pulled me, running, through the tunnels of the S-Bahn as if our lives depended on some west-bound train we were about to miss. […]
Saint Brigid’s Day has come and gone and I am unbound from my tomb, adrift in chambered earth, listening for sounds – dull drubbing of dryads in leaves, twitching of bone-dry twigs, dripping of ice-water from rock. But nothing moves in the earth above my head. I feel the dull weight of trees, mute […]
There is a sea of people in the church the ceilings are high I have made the long walk to the golden railings on my spindly legs in my white Communion shoes and socks. The crowd pushes to the big swing doors. Outside it’s a bright, bright day the white sun flashes at me and […]
I.M. Albert Serceau 1993-2007 How did the tawny owl get into my dream? A speckled ball of fluff, rusty orange and white, with a small, oval white head and yellow-flecked black eyes — he tumbled in, flitted and dipped round the room, light as air. Children were there, trying to catch him in […]
For Matthew That December night, she raced down the unlit path to the frost-covered gate, shouting to him to hop across, to duck and dive in the traffic and he called back that he ran the risk of being flattened by cars, by the black stream flowing between them. But the rush-hour and […]
The women here are of a certain age their doubles hang in black and white on the walls – photos showing the wailing women of 1930s Lisbon hair set in bird’s nests, eyebrows pencilled. The ancient […]