Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real

Padraig Regan, Rachel Piercey

• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781910139738
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Padraig Regan's poems delight in the sensual and the visual: this pamphlet is alive with the textures of paint, sweat, sugar and overripe fruit. Regan riffs on art history in a way which is playful and inquisitive – Johann Zoffany drinks mojitos with David Hockney; Caravaggio outrages and compels; Queen Elizabeth I is effortfully glorious. Many poems focus on the representation of the human body, discovering alternative histories in responses to paintings where the gaze of the male artist is directed towards the male figure in queerly erotic ways.

Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real

after Caravaggio’s pictures of Mario Minniti

BOY WITH A BASKET OF FRUIT

A boy instead of table: Mario hitching the joist

of his collarbone to his shoulder, & holding up

this outlook of swollen fruit. A peach & an apple

imitate the rose-on-yellow complexion of Mario’s face;

his eyes seem punched into the wrong place,

his mouth redder than appropriate.

That pomegranate can’t wait to escape itself.

The leaves turn patched & lacy. I forget the convention

was not yet established:

no one even thought of tables then.

THE LUTE PLAYER: BADMINTON HOUSE VERSION

It is a question of gloss. Mario’s hair, so jauntily bunched

with that swatch of white silk, flaunts the wonder

of a good conditioner: some natural oil, linseed perhaps.

& the white standards of the irises — which appear so proud

of themselves at the apex of that bouquet

whose crux of stems seems to hover in the crisp reflections

skimming over the glass jug — what do they correspond to,

the silk, the pages, Mario’s hand as it pins the strings?

THE FORTUNE TELLER: CAPITOLINE VERSION

Mario told this story to the young painter,

how he went to see a woman once.

Though he didn’t quite believe what he’d been told

about her gifts, he did believe the rumours

which circled around her unconventional dress.

She asked for his hand & he woke hours later

with his head heavy as a wet sponge, the feathers

in his cap bent, his ring missing but his clothes intact.

THE MUSICIANS

At the unveiling party the cardinal served pheasant,

& insisted the musicians arrange themselves exactly

as the young painter had arranged them on his canvas.

It was a neat trick. Their song jumped out the window

& ran through the hot streets of Rome

just as the young painter had, until late,

run naked through the streets of Rome — as the story goes —

‘with nothing but a few brushes & a knife’.

The cardinal asked each of his guests in turn for their opinion.

One praised the expression on the central figure’s face,

the textural accuracy of the half-peeled peaches.

He did not mention that the self-portrait

the young painter has sneaked into the back

unbalances the whole;

that the foreshortened fingerboard of the violin sticking

straight out is rather a crude joke.

BOY BITTEN BY A LIZARD: FLORENCE VERSION

Mario’s shoulder again, thrust up like a mound,

& his hands making such elaborate shapes.

His face grotesque with shock, but not so grotesque

as the lizard — not really a lizard but more a salamander —

dangling like a catkin from his middle finger

& sucking the colour from his skin. It took all day

for the young painter to coax Mario’s body

into these strange angles. Mario swayed like a mast;

all his joints protes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other Titles From The Emma Press
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Contents
• Glory
• Johann Zoffany Paints Himself as David with the Head of Goliath
• Johann Zoffany & Howard Hodgkin in a Hotel Room in Venice
• Johann Zoffany Goes for a Swim with David Hockney
• Johann Zoffany has Dinner with Hans von Marées & Adolf Hildebrand
• Johann Zoffany Paints Himself as Johann Zoffany
• Viande
• Rose Garden with Men
• Aubade
• Hibiscus
• Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real
• Glory
• Acknowledgements
• About the poet
• The Emma Press
• Other Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets