Boyne Writers Group

The launch of issue 4 of the Boyne Writers Group's magazine Boyne Berries took place in the Castle Arch Hotel, Trim on Thursday 23 October 2008. The large attendance was welcomed by Writers Group chairman Michael Farry who said they were delighted to be able to continue publishing the magazine. He has a special word of thanks for the Meath Co Council Arts Office which had provided a grant to help the venture. He said that the magazine continued to attract contributions from all over the world and pointed out that this issue, as well as having material from Meath and the rest of the country, had contributions from the USA and Bangladesh also.

He said they were honoured to have the distinguished Meath poet and publisher Peter Fallon to officially launch Boyne Berries 4. He went on to outline Peter Fallon's long career in poetry. He founded the Gallery Press at the age of eighteen. This is now recognized as Ireland's pre-eminent literary publishing house publishing, among others, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Ciaran Carson, John Banville and Michael Hartnett. His recent work includes a translation of the Georgics of Virgil, published in September 2004 and subsequently published by Oxford in its World's Classics series. His latest collection of poems, The Company of Horses, was published in September 2007.

Peter Fallon then addressed the gathering stressing the importance of Writers Groups in assisting the writer in what was basically a very solitary occupation. He stressed the supportive nature of writers groups and the importance of the constructive criticism which they offer. He congratulated Boyne Writers Group on their achievements since their foundation. He mentioned their successes in competitions and their involvement of three members, Orla Fay, Brendan Carey Kinane and Michael Farry, in the recent inaugural All Ireland Poetry Day event. He congratulated the group on the establishment of the magazine and complimented them and the contributors on the quality of material it contained. He was delighted to see a mix of established writers and new writers included in the publication. He remarked on the variety of the contributions, in terms of themes and the approach.

Contributors then read their pieces and the evening ended with Michael Farry thanking all those who had made the magazine and the event a success. He singled out Greg Hastings whose distinctive covers for the magazine have been much praised. He promised that the next issue, Boyne Berries 5, would be available in spring 2006. He encouraged those present who had not submitted work to consider doing so for the next issue.

Samples from Boyne Berries 4

Boyne

Curving, sinewy,
The goddess trails
The land with
Measured movement.

Earth rich with history
- the above and below
Gods claiming the
Tumuli - each
For themselves.

The light, a finger
Of creation,
Measuring the
Endless mystery
Of renewal and decay.

Forever knitted to the
Land of Meath.

Brid Fitzpatrick

Good Friday Planting

I release my suitcase
catch you shirtless, shaving,
clay and purpose
in your finger-nails,
a gold-ribboned egg
on the kitchen table.

First earlies
your welcome home gift to me.
I'm away a week
and you're talking about
Red Dukes of York,
Charlottes, Edzell Blues,

the anticipated thrill
of lifting your first haulm.

I lift your fingers to my mouth
taste phosphorus, potassium,
a trace of dibbled tubers;
savour the salty
afternoon drills of your chest.


Later, later we will feast
on Sharpe's Early Express.


Shirley McClure

January
after William Carlos Williams

everything depends
upon

a pot of
marmalade

luminescent
against

the slate grey
garden


Geraldine Mitchell

Silhouette

She heard the tap at the window, sensed two faces looking in at her, sitting in her armchair, asleep. "Sleeping it off," she heard Plunkett say, "leave her, we'll call on the way back". She struggled to come up out of the depths of a dream, to raise her hand, call to them, but a heaviness in her limbs and a loosening in her spine weighed her down. She heard the car start and the sound of it pulling out and moving away down the street towards the mountains. Plunkett and Mary were good, they'd be back, must be away to Castlewellan, to see Mary's niece - could trust Plunkett and Mary. Have to tidy this place before they come back. She tried to move but a deathly feeling of fatigue, not unpleasant, like her body was sinking down into unconsciousness, accepting its new rhythm of lassitude, had taken hold of her. The thirst was terrible. Where was her glass? The top shelf of the scullery, behind the curtain in the kitchen window, the floor beside the bed - yes but the glass she had here - where was it - she couldn't move her arm to reach it. She could smell the vodka, pungent medicine smell making her nauseous - she must have knocked it over, seeping into the carpet. And her book - the new play, Tom Murphy's "Sanctuary Lamp" - what was it he said? "You never feel your soul when you're happy". She liked stuff like that, telling the truth . . .Dear Lord, what's happening to me - I have to get up and put this house in order.

She couldn't tell how long she'd been in this chair, in this room. Her room now, her house. Mammy left it all to me. When I took her to the solicitors in Belfast she signed the new will because she knew it was right. Mairead got an awful gunk when she got nothing. What does she want anything for? Hasn't she got her children and her fancy husband calling her 'darling' and the big place in London. And I was left, here on my own with Mammy.

So hot. Sclerosis of the liver, that's what they said to me in the hospital when I hit that tree on the bend into Bryansford. Black ice, everybody said, ach aye, the black ice, their eyes sliding from one to the other, as if I didn't see them, can't be too careful on that bend, thank God you didn't hit anybody. And kidney failure if I didn't stop. Stop what? I only have a drop of wine most of the time, I said to them, and wine's not drink. And Mairead, coming over from London to check up on me, she didn't see me with as much as a thimble of wine any time she was here. But I know people told her things, private things about me they saw in the house here. I always lock the door now and take the phone off the hook. Stay in here with my books. I have to get up and tidy the place, hide those notes I was writing - too many things about people, about me . . . when I thought I might write a memoir - everybody writing memoirs - all that pain. Have to hide things, put the house in order.

She was so thirsty, so hot. A terrible laxity in her muscles and a choking in her throat. She opened her mouth wide to get her breath - sometimes her breath came too fast, sometimes she seemed not to breathe at all. I want to run to the river Bann, paddle in the shallows over the flat stones, let the water lap over my feet and go up with Mairead to pick bluebells in McCartan's wood. Cooler at the piano, the keys cool one evening under my fingers, playing and singing when it was snowing outside, the fire blazing and the snow coming down soft and thick and lying in the street, drifting up against the door. And Joey Kelly sitting there, looking at me with his eye-brows raised as if he were asking me a question and I was laughing. And Mairead was there too, small, smiling with the pleasure of the room and the snow and our warmth, looking at one another and Mammy coming in, shy, with tea. Joey Kelly, dead in Canada. Poor little Mairead, it wasn't her fault that she got married . . . so nasty to her . . . I think she would have liked a ring of Mammy's . . . see it all now . . . them all drawing away from me.
Plunkett and Mary at the window, "Jesus, Jesus, she hasn't moved". I stand in against the wall, by the piano, and look at Mammy in the arm-chair, her face pale with a sheen to it, hands on the arms of the chair, the priest bending over her, the room full of neighbours, hands to their faces, frightened, tidying, lifting glasses behind their backs into the kitchen.

They don't see me by the piano, looking at my mother, dead. She must be dead. I can see it in her face. But it's my face too. My face is so cold. I feel my mother's coldness, a deadness filling my veins and arteries, creeping in round my heart, my joints and limbs stiffening and atrophying. I never realized I was so like my mother, like we could almost be the same person. My hands are freezing, and bluish, like hers, touching the cold wood inside the coffin as they lift us into the hearse and the night sky draws me up and out from the world, into the slow-moving mists of time and space, my soul a silhouette leaving my body, to stack, softly, like clouds, with all of the other silhouettes, in a corner of space. Waiting until I am needed.

Roisin McDermott