The Mermelf

Martian Matriarchies and Metaphors.

Many readers will be familiar with Ray Bradbury's ' Fahrenheit 451 '. For those that are not, it

is a dystopian novel first published in 1953. Books are outlawed and ' firemen ' burn any that

are found. The book's tagline explains the title ' Fahrenheit 451 '-the temperature at which

book paper catches fire and burns...' The lead character Guy Montag, is a fireman who

becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge,

eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of literary and

cultural writings. The novel has been the subject of interpretations focusing on how book

burning  suppresses historical ideas and on the historical role of book burnings. In a 1956

radio interview the author said he wrote it because of his concerns at the time about the real

threat of book burning in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a type of

commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature. ' Worldsoul ' was

published by Prime Books in 2012. The twenty-first century will be remembered by many

readers of the future as being the century where social media posts shrank the attention span

of the reading masses. Will libraries survive? And if they do what form will they take ? This

novel hooked me in its opening pages by taking a different slant on the burning of one of the

great wonders of the ancient world: The Library of Alexandria. Instead of having been lost

to the flames of antiquity, it is moved with the aid of a moving spell. We then meet one of

the most visually and interesting liibrarians of the future-one Mercy Fane.

.." Mercy Fane, librarian, a chess-piece study in black and white.."

The novel is set in Worldsoul, a nexus point between Earth and the many dimensions

known as the Liminality. In this place old stories gather, forgotten legends come to fade

and die-or to flourish and rise again. Once ruled by the Skein, who have now vanished, a

Barquess has left in search of them carrying Mercy's mothers. The city is being attacked

with lethal flower bombs from an unknown enemy. Things keep breaking out of ancient

texts and legends and escaping into the city. Mercy pursues one such nightmarish creature

and teems up with Shadow, an alchemist for aid and Duke. One of the hallmarks of

Williams' depiction of character is the strong female bonds that are forged between the

unlikeliest of groupings. Characters that are not whom they seem is another. One such is

Johnathan Deed, Abbot General of the Court, who is in reality a disir, as is his minion,

Darya. The name disir means '  the ladies and they are essentially ancestral spirits, but

some stories are not meant to last..." They have curdled and gone foul, like sour milk.."

He is under thrall to Loki, that old trickster god, whom he meets by taking the

Dead Road, not the only storyway, but one of the most dangerous. There is the most

delightful leonine creature called a ka, whose name is Perra, and who is Mercy's

ancestral spirit. Perra can enter storyways and gaps in stories that Mercy cannot cut

through, even with the aid of her Irish sword. Metafction -fiction in which the author

self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or

departing from novelistic conventions and tradtiional narrative techniques-is quite

evident in this novel. Take this passage for instance:-

..." Perra and ka-kind along with others used the secret routes: the little-known

pathways of forgotten stories, the backdoors of tales, the null-spaces between

lines of text and sub-text. The route that Perra now took had brought the ka through

an ancient tale of a winged bull and the sun, a fragment of poetry from an Elizabethan

noble woman's writing desk, and a folktale about fox witches from nineteenth century

China..."

The cognitive estrangement that Science Fiction writers achieve by creating a world

that is dissonant with the reader's experienced world is taken to a new level in this

novel. It is as if the author is searching not just for the lost text from Section C, but

is also searching for a new way to tell stories, a new way for us to receive stories,

and a new way of looking at our perceptions of the other. As the left closes down

dissent and as the right capitalises on the gaps that those silences ferment in, it is

to Science Fiction writers that we will look to more and more for a space in which to

find new models of co-operation. 'Worldsoul' makes literal the metaphor of the book

and the story as a living entity, as a person if you will. The suppression of stories is

tantamount to the suppression of a person, and so I read her handling of Shadow's veil

with great interest. When books are suppressed, when stories are suppressed, we all

suppress dialogue. When we suppress dialogue we replace social interaction with

war.

                 

Where other writers have failed to emotionally engage me with their vision of Mars,

Winterstrike succeeds. This is a truly seminal novel. Hestia Mar is a Winterstrike spy.

She has been sent into enemy territory-Caud- to recover details of an ancient weapon.

She is aided in her escape from capture by the scissor women, the excissieres, one of

the best imagined female warriors in all of Science Fiction.

.." the excissieres, as they call themselves, do not use speech if they are within sight

of one another, but converse by means of the patterns of holographic wounds that

play across their flesh and armour, a language that is impossible for any not of their

ranks to comprehend.."

 All of Hestia Mars family look the same, as a result of ' snobbish and conservative

selection in the breeding tanks...straight black hair, grey eyes, sallow faces..."

She works for Winterstrike's  Matriarchy who are opposed to the Caud Matriarchy.

Her cousin Essegui is preparing for the festival of Ombre. Her younger sister

Leretui has been locked away and given the name Shorn in a room with no windows

or an antiscribe in case she finds a way of sending a message to the vulpen she was

caught consorting with last Ombre. Vulpen are the genetically altered remnants of

ancient man. They are the Changed. They are forbidden. Shorn has been dubbed

The Malcontent of Calmaretto, and I was routing for her from the start. She, and

her sisters Essegui and Canteley have two of the most horrendous mothers, named

Alleghetta and Thea. This world with lesbianism as the norm throws that reader who

is used to reading through the lens of heteronormative relationships to Mars' red winds.

The technology in this novel is probably the best realised of our futuristic possible

selves. Haunt locks, blacklight matrices, geise performed by a majike, and antiscribes.

Geas is a Gaelic word, and it means to be under a compulsion or spell. It features

largely in the motivations of many characters in old Irish tales. Diarmuid and Grainne

is one such. It was refreshing to find it having traversed into the future. In the

imagined world of Mars as written by Williams it means ' an ancient word for a

hyper-hypnotic suggestion, exchanged for a fraction of my essential being.'When Shorn

disappears again Essegui is put under a geise to find her. This quest introduces a

Centipede Queen from Earth, Mantis the Mad, the library, and the rather marvellous

demotheas. I do not want these blogposts to spoil the reading experience for any of you.

There is much more to think about after reading a Liz Williams novel than the mere

exigencies of plot. What would the world be like without men? Do matriarchies repeat

the same mistakes of patriarchies? Or are systems in and of themselves self-destructing?

Do all things tend towards dissolution? And why do all histories become suppressed?

There is a great freedom the mind is afforded when we read and write about worlds that

are and are not far removed from our own. We are allowed an objective distance, from

which we can look at ourselves and at each other with enriched perspectives.

With ' Bloodmind' we come full circle. We return to Mondile, the world we met in the first

of Liz Williams books. The novel opens with a corpse, the corpse of Vali Hallsdottir's friend

and mentor-Idhunn. Vali is an assassin for her homeworld of Muspell.

.." Whoever had committed this murder had taken pains to cover their tracks in the non-

      physical world, and if that was the case, then the likelihood was that they had also

     gone to the trouble to hide more tangible evidence, too.."

Her nation is in chaos, preparing to face invasion from the neighbouring country of Darkland.

Vali is held captive and under suspicion of murder by the invading Morrighanu, specifically

by the commander of the Morvern Morrighanu-Rhi Glyn Apt.

.." The person stepped forward. A black-and-silver uniform encased a tall female form.

   Her hands were gloved, but the dataflow of enhancements ran across the exposed

   skin of her face. Blue eyes sparked silver, set in a gaunt countenance. White birds

   , like albino crows circled around her head..."

Vali is rescued by the selk-a semi-sentient species who come down with the arctic melt

water and sing. The selk bring Vali across the northern ice field to the hostile glacier

territory of Darkland, where she meets Thorn Eld, one of the vitki. Vali's ex-lover, Frey

was vitki. In her ingsgaldir initiation she was sent to her death by Frey to kill a fenris.

Vali killed the Hierolath on Nhem where women are kept like the selk in a seni-sentient

state. The three planets and three women who interconnect with each other and with

whom this story is interconnected are Hunan from Nhem, Sedra from Mondhile and

Vali from Muspell. Who we are, why we are, and where we come from underpins the

plots of many Science Fiction novels, but what I loved about this one was the way in

which three women from three different planets come together to try to find the killer

Skinning Knife in order that they can help her or kill her if needs must. This tension

of chase and quest and query coalesces into a page-turning read. High octane thrills,

indeed.

.." The edge of Muspell's sun Grainne touched the horizon's line and a quick

flare sent a thousand suns into my sight......It was said to have been melting icecaps

and changing currents  that had led to the drowning of the world, forcing my own

ancestors to flee outward. They had found Muspell...something in me still mourned

old Earth..."

It transpires that Skinning Knife/Skadi is not vitki, but Morrighanu. Williams often

uses two names for her characters and this adds richness to the pictures she draws.

Skadi was created and born on Nhem. Her mother was Mondhaith. She was bred

with another girl pathogenetically. This is not the first novel where Williams looks

at the issue of genetic engineering. Here in Bloodmind she pushes the boat or the wing

out a little further, and asks a question by providing a fact, albeit a fictional one. Or

maybe not quite as fictional as all that.

" We sold information to the women of the Nhemish resistance -we hoped they could

breed in into the next generation of Nhemish women, release it as a mutogenic virus

so that when the women reached puberty, they would turn on the males. It has not

had time to work yet.."

What fascinates me about this answer are the questions that haunt its edges. Is this a

virus that is being worked on somewhere in some secret lab? What is intelligence?

Are those women who are held in thrall only to their biological functions part of an

experiment? Questions that do not hold sway in traditional discourse are allowed air

in Science Fiction. This is important. In fact it is vital. Science Fiction as it is written

by women like Liz Williams allow us a safe place to air these questions, to meet with

strong and complex women from the future, to remember that as we desecrate our own

planet with toxins and pollute the four elements Nature will give us consequence. That

consequence could be the converse of all that we have struggled for to date. Why is

the genome project only charting the male? Is a future being engineered for us? And

what part do we all have to play in it if we like the cattle women from Nhem acquiesce

in propping up semi-sentience/? Is political correctness like the computer a double-

edged sword? We have a lot to think about and much to celebrate when we enter the

worlds imagined by Liz Williams. In the Gaelacht of Darkland, in the Gaelic of my

own home county Donegal on the North West of Ireland-Buíochas.

The Alternate Worlds of Liz Williams

Science Fiction in general has repeatedly represented time as a spatial expanse, which

can be explored backwards into the past, into the future, or laterally into alternate histories.

Alternate Histories came into its own as a genre after World War Two, and that war, together

with the persistence of Byzantine or Roman Empires and the USA Civil War have persisted

as the most frequent subjects of this fiction. Liz Williams ' The Poison Master ' is for me a

classic in this field. The novel had its genesis in the short story ' The Banquet of the Lords

of Night', which first appeared in the June 2002 edition of Azimov's and was republished

in her first collection of stories entitled ' The Banquet of the Lords of Night & Other Stories'.

It is exquisite. Liz Williams is a craftswoman par excellence when it comes to character and

to plot, but there are layers upon layers in this novel that draw the reader back to re-readings.

The book opens in 1547 with John Dee's staging of Aristophanes ' Peace', which necessitates

the construction of a flying dung-beetle, on the back of which the hero of the play reaches

Olympus. This mechanical contraption brought into being with the aid of ropes and pulleys

coupled with the rage of Arabic arithmetic and the publication of De Revolutionibus with its

intriguing notion that the earth journeyed around the sun prompts Dee to achieve his real

work-that of a working flying machine. Alivet Dee is an alchemical apothecary who lives in

Latent Emanation, a cruel world where the mysterious Night Lords rule the Nine Families, the

Nine Families govern the Unpriests, and the Unpriests govern the rest of the people. Hundreds

of years ago, the Night Lords had spiralled down above the World River delta in a drift-boat

with a hold of human captives. It is the duty of every ordinary citizen to partake in the Search.

Dreaming menifew combined with opium is the drug of choice in the barn Alivet goes too in

the opening Section of the novel to see if she can find out where the humans on Latent have

come from. Each dream or vision is recorded, but Alivet chooses not to record the vision she

has of her twin sister Inkrietta, who has been enbonded to the Night Lords. She is devoting her

life to making enough money to buy Inki back. To that end she lives in a rookery and sends all

of her saved monies back to her aunt Elitta. She works for Genever Thant and when a client, a

certain Madimi Garland dies in the fume room after experiencing the drug sozoma, Alivet has

to flee. Pursued by the Night Lords, the Unpriests and a dark force that haunts her dreams,

she is rescued by Ghairen, a Poison Master from another world who offers her a chance to

save her sister-and humanity as well. How can she trust a professional assassin? The novel

is divided into eleven sections, mirroring in many ways the alchemical process itself. All

Science Fiction writers must world build, but it is the attention to detail here that marks it

above many other lesser writers. There are the anube with their ' brass cogs whirring in the

implants in its throat, below the bold jackal's jaws'. They are not interested in money, and

exemplify the dignity of work. There is the food served at the Night Lords banquet :-

  .." She prepared fondants of gloom, sorbets of shadows, and sherbets of dusk, each one

gathered from the unseen corners of Latent Emanation.."

There are the dangerous water-children and liches, the monsters of the marshes. There are

the Unpriests scarab fliers. Against this world, there is the past of John Dee, his escape

from the clutches of Bishop Bonner's desire to burn him as a sorcerer, and quite simply the

best description of rescue by an angel in literature today:

...." Its face was blank and cold as marble, and as Dee stared, it turned slowly on its own

axis so that he could see that it had not one face, but four. Two of the faces were female,

the lips set in an awful fixed smile. The other two faces were male. It wore robes and it

was transparent, as if made of some vitreous substance. Its mouths stayed closed and it

continued to revolve slowly, like a planetary orb..."

The Elizabethans took from the Middle Ages the modified view of the universe, which

Platonic and Biblical in origin, radically differed from our own. For them all creation

was ranged in an unalterable order from the angels down to man-for whom the world

existed-and thence to the beasts and plants.Dee's search for meaning in the fields of

mathematics and devotion had ramifications for Latent Emanation and its citizens quest

for their origins. Liz Williams has called this her kabbalistic novel, and there are echoes

of the most ancient book of the Kabbalah- ' The Book of Creation ' in her novel. There

is an assertion made by many Science Fiction writers that they are not writing about the

future, but that history in this fiction is actually giving ' distortions of the present'. This

is certainly true of ' The Poison Master', but it transcends this distortion too by offering

its readers an alchemical experience of their own, reflected in the structuring of each of

the eleven sections of the novel, named after the alchemical processes themselves. I am

stunned that this book did not garner every available award at the time of publication. It

certainly deserves wider readership, and will I think remain as one of my favourite reads

of all time. A classic on every level.

From the mid nineties until 2000, Liz Williams lived and worked in Kazakhstan. ' Nine Layers

of Sky' reflects upon her experiences there. Elena Irinova now cleans office buildings, but she

was once a Soviet rocket scientist. She crosses paths with Ilya Muromyets, an eight-hundred

year old bogatyr. Bogatyrs are stock characters in medieval East Slavic legends, akin to a

Western knight-errant. Ilya is now a heroin addict dreaming of a death that will never come.

The rusalki prevent him dying.. Rusalka are female entities in Slavic folklore, resembling our

mermaids.All Science Fiction texts are intertexts in that they generate their meaning with

reference to other texts. The intertextual dimension is particularly strong here. The Epic of

Manas is a traditional epic poem dating back to the 18th century, but claimed by the Kyrgyz

people to be much older. Manas is not quite as heroic in this updated version of him. Ilya and

Elena are brought together by a mysterious artefact, a piece of technology, which offers a

glimpse into another dimension-creating a dangerous breach in a world Elena thought she

knew. One of the most recurrent themes in Science Fiction is its handling of new if not

bizarre tecnhologies, allowing us to confront our fears of displacement and on a more prosaic

level our simple technophobia. The standard tropes of stepping into a parallel world, and

immortals living among us belong very much in the field of fantasy but Williams wields a

powerful sleight of hand with her pen, and we believe the conceit. As in all of her novels,

there is an acknowledgement towards the power of the poet and poetry in general. This can

only improve interstellar relations in all our uncertain futures. The imagery in her writing is

strong enough to transcend the page and be presented in film form in I hope the not too

distant future.

....Dreams of technology and the future are as powerful as any fairy story ever was.."

         

Mars has been imagined over the years by writers as well known as Edgar Rice Burroughs,

Arthur C Clarke, Alexander Bogdanov and more recently by Kim Stanley Robinson. The

subject of Mars continues to attract Science Fiction interest due in part to the wealth of

information sent back from the landers tantalizing writers with the possibility of life on that

planet. ' Banner of Souls' is one of these imaginings of Mars, and is a worthy member of

the field. In the far distant future a flooded and shattered Earth is governed by the iron hand

of the Martian Matriarchy. A Martian warrior, Dreams-of-War is despatched to Earth to

guard a young girl called Lunae form an unknown threat. Lunae ages with unnatural speed

and has the special talent of being able to bend time. At the half-ruined city of Fragrant

Harbour, where Lunae resides with her malignant grandmothers and a kappa ( kappa are

genetically modified) Dreams-of-War encounters a host of intrigues centring on the very

sinister presence of an alien mission nearby. When her protégé is nearly assassinated, the

Martian warrior is forced to flee with Lunae to the flooded norther waters of what was once

Japan. When the child and the kappa go missing en route Dreams-of-War is determined to

return to the plains of Mars to discover the truth about Martian rule over Earth, and the

nature of all the secrets behind it. There are a host of fascinating characters. I loved the

animus that was attached to the assassin Yskatarina Lye, and the malevolent Aunt Elaki

from Nightshade.Haunt ships and excissieres, Dragon Kings and gaezelles-women with

speckled skin and tails...It would ruin your entry into this female dominated planet if I

were to reveal too much more. The way in which Williams plays with our received truths

and forces us to look at things from a slanted angle is essentially the poet's skill. I think

that is one of the main reasons I am attracted to her work so much. Take this passage for

instance:

.." What would you say if I told you that there is a legend that it was not you Martians

who colonized this world, nut the other way around? Men and women of Earth who

travelled to Mars in distant antiquity, before the Drowning, and set up settlements? Who,

over the course of a millenium, created an atmosphere and terraformed the planet until

what had been barren, freezing desert became the lands of seas and plains and cities that

you know today? That there were no great canals, only ancient stories, which were later

held up as truth?"......

                                          To be continued.................







 

The Science Fictions of Liz Williams.

               Part the First.

At a lecture in 1970, Theodore Sturgeon compared the history of Science Fiction to the handle

of a suitcase. Science Fiction it would seem had emerged from the body of literature, the body

of the suitcase, and like the handle, would eventually emerge back into it. There is no

doubting that the output of one of England's most prolific Science Fiction writers would need

a suitcase to carry her oeuvre. The first book I bought on Kindle was the first in her Detective

Chen series: Snake Agent. I read it one sitting, and was immediately hooked. The novel is set

in Singapore Three. The city is the supreme embodiment of technological construction, and

for this reason Science Fiction has been a heavily urban literary mode. Different renderings

of the city means that Science Fiction authors can use it as a laboratory for technological

change. What Williams so cleverly does with Singapore Three that is refreshingly different

is to use it as the locus point between the here and now of Earth, Heaven and Hell.

When a soul goes missing, Chen, the occult detective is called upon to go to Hell to retrieve it.

..' To Chen's experienced eyes, everything seemed to be in order: the immigration visa

   with the celestial authorities, the docking fees of the ghost-boat, the license of passage

   across the Sea of Night..'

The case has also attracted the interest of Seneschal Zhu Irzh of Hell's Vice Division. Even

in Hell taxes must be paid, and the ghost trade that the missing soul of Pearl Tang leads

this unlikeliest of pairings to uncover cost the perpetrators much more than tax. One of the

skills of an accomplished writer is not to paint their characters in monochrome shades of

black and white. To this end Zhu Irzh is the most delightful demon in literature, being

afflicted as he is with a conscience, of which he hopes a remedy maker will help him remove.

."You've got two souls...one is called the hun, and the other is called the p'o. The hun tries

  to find its way to heaven-usually it just wanders about until it gets reincarnated. The p'o

  used to remain with the corpse for about three years, before the other worlds speeded up

  their bureaucracies more in line with modern times.. "

Both Chen and Zhu Irzh use spells to aid them in their quest for the truth. Chen is under

the protection of the goddess Kuan Yin, although his relationship with Inari a demon on

the run from hell makes this problematic. One of the more delightful touches is the

character of Badger who is Inari's familiar spirit and who transforms into a kettle on a

regular basis. The title of the book comes from the sobriquet given by the Vice Squad

to an undercover agent-Snake Agent. The resultant case of soul-trafficking results in

both Chen and Zhu standing on the backward facing feet of some of the most powerful

denizens of Hell. Feng shui, séances and spell casting all abound, as does the most

subtle nod to new technologies..'small phial containing the flatscreen' which is poured

over Chen's desk panel. In the spirit of inter-realm co-operation Zhu is sent to Earth

on a three month posting at the end of the novel. This series addresses the existential

angst many of us have, moves the reader to turn the page to find out who did it and

why in the tradition of the nest private eye stories, and confounds the simplistic

utopic/ dystopic tradition in much Science Fiction writing with its depiction of Hell

and Earth. The series continues with ' The Demon and the City '  ( Zhu works his

first homicide case and meets Jhai Tserai, the deva who will become the love of

his afterlife), ' Precious Dragon' ( Chen and Zhu accompany the Heavenly Mi Li Qi

to Hell on a diplomatic mission, but soon after they check into their hellish hotel

Miss Qi vanishes. The bowels of demonic bureaucracy have to entered to avoid

a political incident with Apocalyptic implications), ' The Shadow Pavilion' (Chen

is called to Heaven to find out who is trying to kill its new Emperor, Mhara) and

' The Iron Khan' ( The Book is missing-It has wandered off from Heaven taking

the secrets of the Universe with it). In these novels, the nature of difference and

the limits of identity are interrogated. Science Fiction is famous for doing so, but

the literary technique of explaining the supernatural slots into the Gothic genre

more readily. The hybrid mixing of forms works well in the Chen series. Much

of the power of Liz Williams' writings lie in the ways in which they destabilize

the polarities of life/death, human/ alien and time and space. The many and

varied controlling intelligences at work in the universes at play in Singapore

Three show the reader that there is something in the fictive world that is

dissonant with the materialist world. And a what if begins to coalesce as

part of that reader's lived experience, a what if that expands the inner world.

Strong characterisation is not a feature of all Science Fiction writers.Williams

is almost stand-alone in her depiction of strong female characters that will stay

with you long into the future.

'The Ghost Sister' ( Bantam Spectra) memorably brought some of these to light.

Mevennen is out of tune with her people's bloodmind on Monde D'Isle. She is

the narrator Eleres' ghost sister.

 ..." Her right hand was bare, apart from one little sign of her name around her

thumb: the road to the star. The other members of the family had their personal

signs given by the world. Mevennen wore rings to cover the lack,,"

The Mondhaith seek out the weakest of their prey at the time of the hunt, and

Mevennen worries that even Eleres will succumb to his when the time comes.

The landblindness Mevennen suffers from has precedent in the myths of their

land.

.." The only person I had heard of who had been cured of such a sickness was

said to be the lover of  Yr En Lai, that ancient Ettic lord who plays such a part

in the legends of the north, but maybe that was just a myth.."

Her brother, his lover Morrac and his sister Sereth set off for Outreven to find

the elusive cure, watched over by the two moons Elowen and Embar, and the

sun Damoth. Shu Gho is an anthropologist who has arrived on the ancient

colony of Monde d' Isle as part of an expeditionary force from Irie St Syre.

Her journal entries allow us the reader to learn that the colonists who came

to Monde d' Isle had terraforming equipment with them and that ReForning

should have occurred -

"...no evidence that the colonists kept to our Gaian Path of placing their new

environment in harmony with themselves.."

She is accompanied by Dia, her young acolyte Bel Zhur, the daughter of one

of Irie's most formidable priestesses, and the exobiologist Jennet Sylvian.

Three delazheni accompany this quartet, biomachines. Worldbuilding is an

essential part of good science fiction writing, and at this Williams excels. Ghosts

abound in the telling of this tale. Shu Gho is thought to be a ghost by Mevennen.

She promises to cure Mevennen, which is a promise that carries with it a terrible

price. Monde d' Isle is engineered to preserve the delicate balance between human

and animal. The question that was asked in much postwar Science Fiction on

computers was whether they facilitated or entrapped, The Ghost Sister answers

this in a rather chillingly satisfactory way.

Alien encounters on Earth are given an unusual twist in this novel. Millions of years ago alien

beings seeded Earth with their genetic strands to create a new outpost of intelligent life. Their

descendants are drawn back to Earth's skies by a human with the ability to tap into their

communications. That human is Jaya Nihalani. At the opening of the novel she is in hospital

ageing rapidly. A conjurer's daughter she has been a prophet, a crusader and terrorist for the

rights of her own despised untouchable caste. Alien encounters are frequently used as a

strategy of encounter, whereby readers are encouraged to examine their self-conceptions

as a result of confrontation with the Other. This novel continues that tradition with a central

female character who is neither cipher nor symbol..

                              To be continued..................

The jnani in the poetry of Shanta Acharya

When I was a child the only thing I really associated India with were elephants, tigers and a 

Ladybird early reader on which gleamed phantasmagorical an image of The Taj Mahal. 

I lived in a small town on the North West of Ireland without an Indian restaurant or any 

other cultural signifier of the presence of the other. We had an International Folk Festival

every August during which visitors from other places would perform in the Town Square. 

 My friends and I were avid attenders.

I remember trying to copy the hand movements of some Indian dancers. We surmised

that this grace was synonymous with all Indians, and were more than envious. After all,  

what other country had as symbol a testament of a husband's love for his wife? India had it all

for the girl that I was : tigers, elephants, dancing, and the certainty of adoration in the hazy 

marital future. All these years later, life has widened my lens. Scant knowledge replaced

by the experiential knowledge of writers as diverse as Kipling, Chandra, Seth, The Bombay 

Review until I arrived at the shores of Shanta Acharya. 

This journeying was the backdrop to my own efforts in the fields of poetry, and resulted in a 

trip to London to read from my first book of poetry " The Language of Coats' in Lauderdale

House. This reading was hosted by Shanta, the series of monthly readings called 'Poetry 

in the House'  that took place between 1996 and 2015. And so began for me a journey that

looked at India through the female lens and also as importantly through the lens of reconciling

the differences between two cultures. Born and educated in Cuttack, Odisha, Acharya won a

scholarship to Oxford, where she was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy for her work on Ralph

Waldo Emerson. Harper Collins India has just published " Imagine", which brings together 

poems from her first five collections and new verse, from which the book takes its title.

                                                                                                     

The poem the collection opens with is from ' Not This, 

Not That' published in 1994, and is titled ' Faith'. 

                 "There are things

                  you need not know

                  my mother once said .."

This is the answer the young poet receives when she
pricks a balloon to discover what is inside. It is the
same answer she receives when she pricks her finger
to discover how she bleeds. This fatalistic worldview
is reiterated in the final verse of this stunning little
poem when they both tell their questing daughter:

                 " There are things

                    you will fail to find..."
The poem's title is in direct opposition to such advice. Although the trope of flying the
nest is well worn, it is the jnana she sets off to find that is the lynch pin of many of the
best poems throughout this book.In many ways, this book is a narrative framework of
a dialogue between Shanta Acharya and her guide and charioteer Poetry, as opposed to
the dialogue between Pandava prince Arjuna and his guide and charioteer Lord Krishna.
As such just like in the Gita, there are thematic repetitions that bring us the reader into
an ever deepening understanding of the illusory nature of reality, the beauty of that
illusion, the search for love and connection and the brilliant colours that the illusory
nature of reality is painted with and the part that jnana/knowledge plays in that journey.
The leper that sits in lotus pose ' under the shamiana of a tree' is likened to the crippled
imagination waiting the 'toss of a coined idea' in the poem titled " In the Jagannath
Temple." Jagannath is a non-sectarian deity and is worshipped in regional traditions
of Hinduism and Buddhism. He is ' Lord of the Universe' and his icon is made from
wood, without arms or legs. It is from the annual procession of this deity that we get
the word juggernaut. The last line of this poem ' as gods emerge out of decrepitude'
create a frisson of excitement in the reader, as we realise that the leper is Jagannath.
Seeing deity experiencing suffering is somewhat different from seeing deity in that
same suffering.
In the first of the sixteen ekphrastic poems in this collection, Acharya uses
Rembrandt's painting of " Belshazzar's Feast" to comment on her own version of
' the writing on the wall'. She is in self-exile, and worries that she will emerge from
god's gift of suffering unbalanced. The painting materials and technique used by
Rembrandt in this painting do not compare with any of his other works.Perhaps
the same may be said of the poet herself. The title " Not This, Not That" comes
from the poem ' The Night of Shiva'. Written in seven sections it begins with the
poet celebrating Shiva's commemoration night in the solitude of her Highgate
maisonette. She eats a ' feast of fruits/from foreign shores' as she chants the ritual
words to transform sins into nirvana. The power of words to transform reality is
one that all brought up with belief can relate to. In this case the words are :
Om Namah Shivayam. The poem moves in recollections then of other Shiva nights.
Nights when her parents were traditionally dressed as opposed to her brothers in
the cultural apparel of globalisation, namely 'jeans/T-shirts, Seiko watches, Nike
shoes'. The temple of Shiva houses the god in the image of a ' munificent phallus
erect on a yoni'.
            " In all the temples of Shiva tonight
               women will kiss the lingam without shame or thought.."
The erotic in the midst of worship is particularly striking for any modern reader.
Aids had not yet entered the vocabulary of that time, not yet the language of identity
politic. Like many poets that recollect the past can seem a place of simplicity and that
could be why she suggests she will thank Shiva for her childhood naivete. The smell
of the incense and camphor and the sounds of the many praying pilgrims permeate
the next section of the poem bringing us the reader into a visceral experience of this
holy night. Shanta has a wry humour as evidenced in the line:
 " bananas gone rusty brown, limp like deflated members-"
We are not surprised to learn in the next section that -
" ..those who can focus their thoughts on Shiva
  can always achieve knowledge and powers divine.."
And the knowledge she seems to have had conferred on her by this special night is
that her notions of humanity may have been stretched by myths and legends, but
that ' Atman' had revealed itself to be ' not this, not that'. All xenophobes take note.
All life is flux. Humour takes over in the next section when she imagines Shiva
visiting London with his dread locked hair and tiger-skin mini-skirt. The poem ends
with the phone ringing and Shiva is on the other end.
This rather surreal ending is an apt lead in to the poems from Acharya's second
collection: " Numbering Our Days' Illusions". There is nothing quite as surreal
as enduring violence by a partner, in that everything you thought and felt about
reality shifts. Everything looks different and everything feels different. There is
a much heavier weight than the concerns of the deities in these poems, although
Acharya lightens the load with some gentle and exquisite lines.
Lines like ' Look stranger/you can hurt no longer./ The dappled moth escaped
/trembling/waltz-winged. in ' The Dark Hours'.
Or in ' Sometimes' with its epigraph from Eliot the wisdom of these haunting
lines:
 .. "  You always preferred silence,
        refraining from words to fill me
       with your infinite loneliness.."
Once again her quest for knowledge appears as over-arching theme in the lines
that end this poem: ' Knowing it not, whatever one desires/one is. Knowing is
all.' The familiar mirror trope makes its appearance in 'No Longer Do I Frame
Myself' and is a rather ironic play on that same trope. She floats across the
mirrors that once ' caught her in multiple images'. The multiplicity of the many
selves that construe an identity is given a beautiful homage in ' Hindu Women'.
They are the heroines that aid the poet's journey through an unsteady and shifting
world. I loved it. Sita's escape gives hope on the page and when hope is written
on the page it can transcend into reality, illusory or not. The title of this collection
comes from a poem of the same name, and although Acharya says 'We grow with
the sun,/ numbering our day's illusions' I think the poems here also say we grow
with the moon too.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the butterfly calls the beginning.
In the poems from ' Looking In, Looking Out' Acharya flies on larger wings as
she alights on art work after painting after Hindu fantasy and fable after flowers
after origin myth after ars poetica after political commentary until she reaches
the attic where the book's title is gleaned. This is a much happier series of poems.
Much has been sloughed and the lines are leaner and more honed. She is more
sure of herself and of her identity as a poet. The humour is as wry but is married
with a gentle tone. This is a writer who is cognizant of pain, and who does not
wish to confer it in any way.
In ' Of Poems' she announces:
  ".. They seldom arrive at your door, ringing your bell
       like the postman with a registered letter or parcel,
       friends invited for dinner, Friends of the Earth,
       or even the truant monsters from hell."
The transformation Mrs. Kafka has in ' Mrs. Kafka's Dilemma' is apparent in
some of the writing here. The humour of ' Dear Tech Support' is ironic and the
poet appears to be having fun with the tropes of the web. Its answering poem
" Dear Customer' made me laugh and these two poems would go down well
with the demography that have attached digital technology to themselves like
another limb. In 'Looking Out, Looking In' we are not surprised to learn that
the poet's attic is an art gallery. Perception is one of the ways in which we
attain knowledge of ourselves and of the world we inhabit. The narrower the
field of vision the narrower the worldview. When she says ' The jharokhas
of my mind are magical looking glasses' we are also expanded in our own
perceptions of the worlds we inhabit. Incidentally, a Jharokha Darshan was
a daily practise of addressing the public audience at the balcony of the forts
and palaces of medieval kings in India. I love that Acharya has conferred
regal authority onto herself and the perceptions of her mind.
In the poems from ' Shringara' ( 2006) the journey to jnana is one that enters
the valley of death. The poet has lost her grandfather and father and the two
elegies that remember and celebrate them are ' Aja' and ' In Memoriam'.
The title of the latter was made infamous by none other than Tennyson, but
Shanta makes it her own. In many ways this is quite a political poem in that
she elevates the Indian father to a position in the canon of poetry previously
unoccupied. It was here that I began to see that we cannot truly appreciate
the other unless they have a line on the same page. This poem prepares us
for one of my favourite lines in the whole collection. From ' Learning' the
poet states ' Learning to reconcile difference is poetry'.
Many of the poems in ' Shringara' focus on remembrance: ' " Remembrance
Sunday", " 9/11", " London: 7 July 2005", " 11 July 2005 (On the tenth
anniversary of the massacre in Srebenica", " Bori Notesz", 'LIFE? OR
THEATRE?", " The Final Act" ( for Wislawa Szymborska) " Remembering
Gandhi"" Remembering" , " Almost" and my favourite " On First Reading
The Bhagavad Gita", which is dedicated to the memory of the poet's
grandfather. He gave her a copy of the Bhagavad and urged her to' see things
as if for the first time.' Books encouraged her to find life's meaning. This is
a beautiful poem with lines that you the reader will remember at the strangest
of times. I was paying for my groceries earlier in the week and the teller
asked me to give him a line of poetry to stave off the boredom of the day.
The opening lines of this poem sprang to mind.
" From an ancient land we came,
  a continent vast as memory".
Sringara is one of the nine rasa, usually translated as erotic love, romantic
love, or as attraction or beauty.The poem from which the collection takes
its title is also called " Shringara". The poet prepares for illusion by putting
on make-up and it is as if grief has removed the last of illusions. She ends
the poem and the poems from this collection with ' The days become my
shringara".
It is no surprise that Acharya was drawn to Emerson, who said that his
central doctrine was ' the infinitude of the private man'. Acharya seems to
have as her central doctrine ' the infinitude of the private woman'. Emerson
led the transcendentalist movement of the mid nineteenth century. His views,
the basis of Transcendentalism, suggested that God does not have to reveal
the truth, but that the truth could be intuitively experienced directly from
nature.

The poems from Acharya's fifth collection " Dreams that Spell the Light" (2010) are poems that tell of journeys to other places and to other cultures. The one that spoke most directly to my multiple selves was most definitely " The Sunderbans".
The Sunderban is a vast forest in the coastal region of the Bay of Bengal which is one of the natural wonders of the world. Its literal translation is ' beautiful forest'. It is an important habitat for the endangered Bengal tiger. Lines like ' A twelve-year-old tigress, one canine missing/ patrols the village with a gap-toothed grin.' bring the tiger back from the metaphor of
Blake into the here and now.
She says that only the pure of heart enter its labyrinth and that ' all migrations leave scars'.
I loved the similitude between our own human migrations and those of the animal kingdom.
I must also admit to not knowing what an apple snail was until reading this poem. What an
apt naming though. I also did not know that elephants retreat when they hear the approach of
bees from the honey trees. Imagery that is rich in concrete detail and at a slant from the
humdrum marks Acharya from the crowd, but she surpasses herself in this poem. The last
lines :' The Sunderbans may one day disappear/leaving no man fit to take the measure of
another' are also characteristic of the deep wisdom of her philosophy.
Acharya comes full circle in her quest for knowledge. In " Black Swans" she asserts that
' There is no way of knowing what we don't know'. There is nowhere to go then but
to ' The Wishing Tree", where mother and daughter ' cast dreams that spell the light'.
In the final section of the book the reader is treated to new poems from 'Imagine'.
It is no surprise that this title poem focuses on the natural world. All boundaries have
dissolved and all borders too. She asks us to imagine a world after a succession of
images of nature and her creatures bereft of nature's blessing. This poem softens the
blow of the previous poem " Nirbhaya", which means fearless one. This poem was
inspired by the death of Jyoti Singh Pandey who was gang raped on a bus in Delhi on
16 December 2012. In accordance with Indian law, her name was not publicly disclosed
as she was raped.She was dubbed the fearless one by the Indian media. Her father wanted
the world o know her name and so he revealed it.The last lines bring us back to that central
tenet of knowledge but this time we know that the jnana women bear and reveal is
one which requires jnani.
.." As long as I can summon the strength to pick myself
   up when cast in the gutter, and rise like a phoenix-
I'll let the universe know it does not exist without my dreams".
Like the yogini in the forest in " Spring Fever" Acharya is in splendid possession of her
poetic craft and the knowledge she has accrued over the years culminates in a conquest
not of her animal self but of all the multiple selves she and we are. In the poem that
concludes this collection, Acharya returns to a figure from her country's history in a search
of the answer to the question' what makes a good leader?' " Ashoka" is her answer, and in
its 335 lines Shanta Acharya not only narrates an important life from her country's history
but also asserts her right to write it. The confidence in the poems that conclude this collection
show the jnani that is such an integral part of the belief system of Hinduism.
My initial romantic notions of an India that builds palaces for its beloveds, and that is roamed
by elephants and tigers was a beautiful illusion. Without that illusion I would never have
been prompted to journey through finely wrought tales of life across the waters. I would never
have acquired my own jnani of the country that gifted me many happy dreams without having
read the deeply wise poems of the yogini that is Shanta Acharya. And all this without never
having visited the country that gifted us one of their finest poets.

'
















   

Ireland Edition: The Bombay Review Literary Event.

Sometimes when surfing the web for possible homes for poems or fiction your eye is caught by an editorial that impresses. Reading that ezine may confirm your initial instinct. There is then an especial delight in having work accepted by a magazine whose previous contributors you admire and in whose ethos you believe. By the time my poem "Wing " was accepted for publication in "The Bombay Review" in January 2015, Issue 5,
the magazine had achieved a lot since its inaugural issue in August 2014.

Founded by two journalism students, Aravind Jayan and Kaartikeya Bajpai, this magazine not only helps writers find an outlet for their work, but its fanbase of 1,200 readers on their Facebook page gifts writers readers as well. And that is worth its weight in words as at some level the subject of any story or poem is always the reader. The process of one writer leading to and influencing another is one which this magazine has ensured, as it has moved beyond national boundaries and religious divides, beginning with a small literary
event at a neighbourhood cafe to doing cross border collaborations to International Events, of which Letterkenny was honoured to have been a part of on Thursday night in partnership with Cafe Blend and North West Words. Without the hospitality and support of Cafe Blend  and the generous vision of North West Words the event would not have been as easy to facilitate. The Ireland Edition of this five city tour would not have occurred without the participation and contributions of all the participating writers in Saudi,
India, the UK, India and Ireland, specifically Letterkenny.

The common place of origin in all of us, to which Imagination is the only native, is Art. 

It can never be curtailed by borders, politicians playing marbles in the playgrounds of opinions, or by the smog of Hatred's chimneys. Good writing allows us to widen our eyes again, to see each other afresh using new symbols and metaphors, to begin to forge a language free from slogan and spit, a language that is as inclusive as the sky's range and as ever present as the face of the moon.

The stories and poems that were read forged new alphabets of communication between listener and writer.

These meetings that took place between words, readers and listeners remind us of Yannis Ritsos's lines -

Every word is a doorway

to a meeting, one often cancelled,
and that's when a word is true, when it insists on the
meeting.                                                                                   The Meaning of Simplicity.

The first half of the evening treated the audience to poems written as part of a Poetic
Challenge. The group of three named themselves "Poetically Challenged" , and are
made up of Ineke Abbas, Donal Kavanagh and Kieran Devlin. I particularly enjoyed
their response to the prompt 'Muesli', as did the audience, especially when they took
out their ukeleles. Their particular strength lies in the tongue-in-cheek delivery and
response to what have become entrenched as authentic poetic themes. Each poet
in the group handles line differently, however, which prevents them from sinking into
uniformity. Patricia Morris is a singer, songwriter and poet. Her voice is as haunting
as the selkies so prevalent in the folklore of her native Scotland. And as sonorous.
Many of her poems contained maritime imagery and I look forward to reading them
in book form.
After a brief interval, the second half of the evening belonged to the writers, who
performed their poems and pieces of short fiction to the appreciative audience.I
had asked each performer to give me a hard copy of their work at the start of
the evening. Two pieces were to be chosen by me for publication in "The Bombay
Review." All in all there were fifteen poems and two pieces of fiction.
Pat O'Doherty's piece, entitled "Humble Man" and written in the third person was
a beautifully heartfelt piece of memoir. It reminded me of those early pieces in
Dermot Healy's Force 10. Written as spoken, it had the quality of verisimilitude
that Healy so admired. Caroline Mohan's piece, entitled "One for Sorrow" had
a quality reminiscent of a Kelly Link story. Chekhov's argument that if a pistol is
introduced at the beginning of a story, it must be fired by the end of the story is
skillfully played with here. Nothing is quite as it seems, nor should it be seen to be
in Mohan's skilful hands, and this was the piece I chose.
Sorrel Mae Florence's poem "Celtic Cross Falling" offered a different take on the
symbol of the Celtic Cross, tying it to soul memory, rejecting the norms of social
acceptance and giving Biddy Early a mention. While there were beautiful lines,
my favourites being "I will feel the pulse of music/and the magpie's lonely call"
the poem's length, 52 lines in all, made it harder for the metaphor of the cross to
be consistently functional rather than decorative.In complete contrast, Andrew
Galvin's  'My Father is a sweetheart anarchist" offered a surrealist take on the
poetic trope of  the father. I liked the wordplay with 'in the Father, the son and
the holey vest' but the interconnections the surrealists so loved by placing distant
realities together only apparent to the creator was shunned in favour of a narrative
that although moving would have worked better if the poem had finished a little
earlier and didn't try to encompass as much. One to watch. A gentle lyric that
recorded a moment of despair at her powerlessness over the outcome of her
husband's accident impressed. Poems that recall an event are difficult to carry
off, but Taryn Gleeson managed it in "Untitled." Nick Griffiths has an anarchic
humour that never fails to engage an audience, and his poem "Mixed Marriage"
didn't fail to amuse. In a poem that uses free verse the effect of surprise is one
that allows the writer to play with tension, and if we guess at the intent earlier
than the poet intends, the poem can lose some of its strength. I would have
preferred a different title. A title can establish a context, or it can create a
tension. The poet James Wright's titles set the tone, locate the poem and
create suspense. Here is one to ponder-"As I Step Over a Puddle at the End
of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor".Brian Smeaton's title
really impressed. I loved it. "No One Better No One Worse" sets up many
expectations in the listener, and Smeaton chose to centre on a baptism, but
we need to know this from the poem, and not from an introduction. Still, who
wouldn't embrace the concept in "We're all the one /and all different".
Claire mc Donnell read a poem "Maytime Woodland" from her book.Her
descriptive abilities are excellent, and there were lines that brought the poet
Alison Brackenbury to mind. Mc Donnell has the most gentle of voices, and
could lull a hornet's nest to calm. Lovely. The poem Patricia Morris read had
a title that evoked a painter's palette: "Where Blue meets Blue".A poem has
emotion, idea, physical setting, language, image, rhythm and tension. At least
one of these must be made important to the reader/listener as soon as possible
and Morris chose the physical setting of Five Finger Strand as her focus in the
opening lines "The backbone of the Bay has broken/ along the fault line". The
metaphor of a broken coast and its imagery is a difficult one to maintain in a
poem as long as this, and again I thought the use too rhetorical, although this
is a poet with a keen eye and a deep understanding of pain. In a lyric poem
pacing is integral. Whatever it was that drove the poet to write the poem is
what moves it forward and clarity is vital. Donal Kavanagh's poem entitled
"Chimney Sweep" plays with stereotype and subject matter. He says poetry
is "about mothers, potatoes, turf smoke/you know/authentic shite like that"
and although these tropes are almost cliched they rejected Yeats idealising
of the peasant and fought against privilege of birth. It is his tone that saves the
poem, and I think there will be more parodies to come, maybe with a sly
jab at some of the more dangerous tropes. Great fun. Jean Murray's poem
"Garden Shenanigans" adhered to a mostly regular rhyme scheme of every
second line rhyming in five quatrains. There is a misconception that modern
poetry spurns rhyme. It doesn't, but it must be there for a reason, if nothing
else than to further the poet's vision. I liked the fey feeling in this poem, but
balancing of content resulted in us finding out too early who "She" was. In
Alfie Bradley's "I have climbed the mountain, Dr. Zee", inspired by none
other than Dr. Seuss' "Oh, the Places You'll Go", the poet makes great
strides in six six lined stanzas leading to his meeting the Owner at its apex.
As there is a great playfulness in the language that Seuss is infamous for
the poet has made it difficult for himself with this referent, and I would
have liked a quirkier take on the lambs and ewes he met along the way.
Brid Brady's "Statistic" understands the power of less. In short lines that
cleverly play with our need for repeating patterns she addresses the way
many react to news of illness. There were two epiphanies in this poem,
and this was perhaps one too many.Kieran Devlin's "Door Opener" used
one of my own favourite images as metaphor. I wanted more historic take
and less truism. Who owns the keys? There's the rub. Great opening line
"A lot of things can open a door". Ineke Abbas' poem "I lied to you today"
explores the honesty of dishonesty, but could have been shorter. There
is a great energy and zest to her lines, which is refreshing.
The poem that I reacted to viscerally was Guy Stephenson's "I wait". This
was a persona poem.Persona poems allow poets to write what they don't
know, in order to find out what they do know. Stephenson chose as his
persona a baby. Based on an article from the Donegal Democrat in 1956,
which reported a verdict of murder against some person or persons unknown
on the body of an unknown infant, the poem intersperses the voice of the infant
with a narrative line which may or may not be the mother or a whale. We are
not sure. The opening line of the poem "My bones lie still" are suspense laden
, but the poet opts for a recalling of the infanticide rather than surprising us with
a denouement that unsettles us even further. The metaphor of a dead child is one
which has resonances in the culture and there was a palpable frisson in the room
when it was read so well by Brian Smeaton. The image half of a metaphor, in this
case the baby, needed to give additional meaning each time she speaks, and he
almost always gives this. The last verse echoes the first and kills the suspense he
had so painstakingly built. An excellently crafted and chillingly macabre poem.

The process of writing is one of discovery. Sometimes that process can lead a
poet to break new frontiers. James Finnegan's "philosophy of the face" (for artist
Helene Schjerfbeck 1862-1946) stunned, and was my Poetry choice. Ekphrastic
poems are now understood to focus only on works of art, Homer's description of
how the blacksmith god forged the famous Shield of Achilles in Chapter 18 of The
Iliad is among the earliest examples of "ekphrasis". Modern ekphrastic poems have
tried to interpret, inhabit, confront and speak to their subjects.Finnegan is inhabited
by the opus of his chosen artist, an artist I didn't know prior to reading and hearing
the poem. When a writer gives us a poem he/she presents us with a metaphor that
represents some aspect of his/her world. Finnegan embraces his multiple selves and
discards gender divides in his ability to enter and empathise with the sea and snow
of this artist's life.
The repeating pattern he sets up in the first line is that of the face-
"there is your face your face your face"
The face and what it echoes allows us to guess she is a portrait painter, and I do
not think I have ever read or heard such a chilling portrayal of the rise of fascism
as I did in his third stanza. The black mouth and the one eye protruding are omens
of fear and terror, and although the simile in this verse is slightly jarring, "like a
tintin cartoon" it works, as there is nothing quite as macabre as the cartoon, where
violence has a throwaway quality.
When Rilke was praising the painter Cezanne, he said that painting is something
that takes place among the colours, and what Finnegan does is bring us to an
emotional epiphany through the melancholy of what was obviously the increasing
isolation of this woman's work. The broken lines, the haunting quality of a face
when looked at, really looked at, the break up of the rhythm all match the emotional
epiphany at the end of the poem. I was moved to tears. In old Irish bardic schools,
poets were expected to understand the world from the point of view of a  stone,
a leaf etc,, If men can look at the world from the point of view of a woman's life
in paint and be changed and moved by it, and by so doing change us to become
less binary in our gendering, then there is hope indeed. Maith thu James.
This is a long blogpost, but one I wanted to do as a way of saying Thank You to
all those who participated and made Thursday night possible. I think that every
one of the poets and fiction writers who performed will make it into print in the
very near future. I would like to thank Kaartikeya Bajpai for asking me to
co-ordinate this event and to congratulate he and his team for making their magazine
a part of the history of the literary journey of Letterkenny, and the wider world.And
finally, I would like to give an especial thank you to Eamonn Bonnar of North West
Words for his photographs and continued support. And to my mother, Grainne, for
stepping in and reading Sorrel Mae Florence's poem so beautifully when she was
too ill to attend.

Spray painting, Assassins and the Immortal Poet..

Although Patrick Kavanagh is best known and loved for his poetry, he had another less well known side. His prose was luminous in its truth and honesty, exposing many of the criminal activities of his time. For the most part his prose appeared in he and his brother Peter's publication 'Kavanagh's Weekly', The Irish Press, and in The Farmer's Journal.

One column in that particular journal prompted an assassination attempt on the writer's life.

He had written of his experience of spray painting barns. The reader was able to infer that the whole business was of an illegal nature. A lawsuit from the gentleman referred to threatened libel. Libel laws then meant that almost any critical comment on a person could be construed as libel under the law. It was common to hear the law of libel explained in the phrase: 'The greater the truth, the greater the libel.' Patrick informed the complainant's lawyer that the gentleman referred to had a criminal record, and therefore hadn't a character to be threatened. The Dublin Underworld of that time were not satisfied.

One dark November night in 1959, as Patrick left Searsons bar at closing time to make his way home, a car pulled up. Its occupants invited him to come to a flat for some drinks, and to make peace with the aggrieved crime boss. Always keen to appease hatred of any sort Patrick agreed. However, he blacked out after one drink. He was brought to Baggot St. Bridge, the intention being to drop him over the edge and leave him to drown. As the wall was over seven feet in height, the two assassins were confident that he would be unable to scale its side, even were he to come to. It was not an incident that would have to be investigated, as the verdict would assume it to have been an accidental death.

However, just as he was being pushed over the side a very personal spiritual force intervened. He came to and saw the faces of the two brothers who were pushing him and felt his father around him. Mr.Kavanagh Senior had died in 1929, and Patrick had always had a special type of spiritual relationship with him.

As soon as he hit the water, he was fully conscious and clambered out. It must be remembered that although Kavanagh was a giant of a man he was missing one lung. On the first of March 1955, he had survived lung cancer by having it removed. It is, therefore, even more remarkable that he was possessed of the physical stamina to climb the wall, and make good his escape. He went to the house of a friend of his, a woman doctor, called Dr. Patricia Murphy in Wilton Place. She put him to bed after treating him and drying him off. The time was 1.30am. He had lost one of his shoes and his spectacles in his determined bid for freedom.
He was able to retrieve his hat on the canal bank the next morning.
That afternoon, Kavanagh and Dr. Murphy went to Mc Daids to celebrate his survival.
They were sitting at the bar, when in the mirror Patrick saw the reflection of one of the men who had tried to kill him. The man paled and fled. Kavanagh likened him to Macbeth on seeing Banquo's ghost.

Patrick wrote two accounts of the incident: one for Walter Carroll, the State Solicitor and one for the Farmer's Journal. He titled the piece for the Journal:" The Man They Couldn't Kill".
He refused, however,to allow proceedings against his assailants. The reasons for this were twofold. In the first place, he was concerned for the welfare of his brother, Peter. He had supported him spiritually and physically at various times throughout his life,and he feared for his closest sibling's life.

In the second, he had had enough of the legal profession and the Courts. To understand
why one has to look at what happened in 1954, when he had decided to take a libel
action against the publishers,printers and distributors of "The Leader". The article that
had incensed him was titled "Profile" , and was unsigned. It certainly defined him as a
barfly. His lawyers were so certain of winning that they accepted the case pro bono.
His defence involved the re-invention of his character. A non-drinker who frequented
coffee shops. As the case consisted of cross-examining the injured party for thirteen
hours it was no surprise when he lost it. Although monies for the winning Appeal was
raised from a committee which included literary luminaries such as John Betjeman and
T.S.Eliot, Kavanagh left the courts exhausted and sick.
His response to his assailants, therefore, was one worthy of his great Imagination. He
befriended them. Two years later, one of his assailant's wives gave birth to a differently
abled child. Patrick was asked to lay his hands on the baby as the parents believed
that this was the result of attacking a poet. Belief in the poet's curse was prevalent.
He wrote : "Words like Eternal Judgment or Contemplation are so loaded with
associations that we are inclined to think of God as pompous, whereas even the
facts that we know show the opposite to be true."
The next time you read the lines of his infamous" Canal Bank Walk", whose opening
lines read-
"Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me..."
or read, the opening lines of "Lines Written On A Seat On The Grand Canal,
Dublin"
"O commemorate me where there is water
Canal water preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer...." you may find an extra resonance in their meaning.