Body and Soul

Anthony Cronin

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781848404014
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this exciting new collection, veteran poet Anthony Cronin draws on his years of writing experience to create mesmerising poetry. Resonating with history and memory, Cronin's elegant writing and consummate poetic skill shine through in the poems in Body and Soul.

A Spiritual People

The Irish go on pilgrimage

To Santiago now.

They like the sunlit walk

Which is good for the health.

When they went on pilgrimage before

It was nearly always to some place

Where the bitter wet wind

Blew from the north-east,

And where, sustained only

By hunks of stale dry bread

And mugfuls of strong black tea,

They crouched all night

Awake among the rocks

Reciting the Sorrowful Mysteries.

The misery of it all

Was presumed to show their spirituality

As was the intensity with which they prayed

For what was uppermost in their anxious,

Often desperate hearts –

That Daddy would give up the drink,

That Aunt May would be cured

Of the sciatica,

That Jim would pass the exam and become

A permanent and pensionable

Civil servant.

They prayed too that they might get

An uncle’s farm,

A corporation house,

A man,

A woman,

That lovely coat in Monica Dowd’s

In time for Statia’s wedding,

Their new teeth done in time

For Statia’s wedding.

Even on the road to Santiago

We do not pray so much now,

Having lost our faith

In the all-powerful Father

Who could change things at a nod,

And in the loving Mother

Who never refused

To ask him,

And to whom he always listened.

But if we did still pray

For what was uppermost

In our anxious, sometimes

Desperate hearts

That you might think were beating

Their wings

Against the bars of the temporal,

It would belong to the temporal,

Not the spiritual world.

The temporal is our sphere,

We know no other.

Whatever walls and halls it may have

We are condemned to our temporal yearnings,

For Statia’s wedding

And the coat in Monica Dowd’s.

New poetry available from New Island Books:

The Venice Suite
Dermot Bolger

A sequence of poems that no writer would ever wish to write ...’.

Written in the aftermath of the death of his wife in 2010, The Venice Suite is a deeply personal sequence of poems that charts the author’s experience of sudden bereavement. It explores the stages and states of loss in an irrevocably altered world, where one partner is left behind to deal with the ongoing business of living while trying to comprehend the enormity of the severance of a shared life suddenly rendered into the past tense. They manage to be richly tender love poems while trying to map the unknown new territory in which any bereaved person finds themselves.

‘The memories contained here are unique to me, yet the voyage of loss it tries to chart is undertaken by thousands of people every year ...’.

– Dermot Bolger

About the author:

Born in Dublin in 1959, Dermot Bolger is a poet, novelist and playwright, whose novels include The Journey Home; The Woman’s Daughter; The Valparaiso Voyage and The Family on Paradise Pier. His most recent books are his collection of plays, The Ballymun Trilogy, his young adult novel, New Town Soul, and his novella, The Fall of Ireland.

Dream Country
Donna Sørensen

A sublime and original collection of poetry from a talented and exciting new voice.

In this, her début collection of poems, writer Donna Sørensen explores a wide range of ideas that are thematically connected by a common th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Praise for Anthony Cronin
• Contents
• The Lesser Yellow Celandine
• Nikolaus Nikolayevich
• The Madness of Mammon
• Endangered Species
• The Life of Man
• Talking
• Shining Through
• The Supreme Commandment
• Blessings
• A Recession
• God
• Forgiveness
• Body and Soul
• Impossibilities
• After Thomas Moore
• Memories of a Lifetime
• Community Spirit
• Final
• Spring
• Adam Expelled
• A Spiritual People