poetry this summer

Since soundeye in July I have read poetry as the start of the working day, that is, five o'clock in the afternoon onwards listening to Don Giovanni or Schubert. Mairead Byrne, Randolph Healy, Fergal Gaynor. Later Peter Manson came by post. We are Mallarmé confederates.

I remembered Anne Carson's Plainwater which I first read in the pink room upstairs at the Beckett Atelier looking over the Seine, drinking choco tea and writing my diary at length. 

Then Lena Tsykynovska came to stay in the cabin, from Odessa via Boston and Chicago. She was sure there must be a poetry bookshop in Dublin if not in Cork. I gave her a cucumber in the greenhouse and she bit the end off straightaway like a character in Tchekov.

Si la beauté n'était la mort was one of my favourite Mallarmé lines.

I told Lena about the old man who lived up at the reservoir and didn't know if it was beautiful or not. Many people are uneasy with beauty, I said. 

One way or another I have been driving through beauty and her acolytes this summer. I have caught my breath and run on as best I can through differing fracture and dispersal. This selection of the day and night. Your concerns, your reading, your innerness, your onwardness, your trepidation, loss, your breakfast.

The face of Mallarmé on the cover of the September 22nd New Yorker is calm, thoughtful, wrapped and ribboned. M. Kalman finds a thinner younger Mallarmé than the plaid suggests. Halfway to Proust perhaps.