The Belfast Review Team | 22 February, 2024
Week 1: Memory & Experience
Featured poet: Diarmuid Cawley
Welcome to Week 1 of our Spring Blog (February - May 2024). Each week feature a small selection of artists, photographers, writers, poets, and song writers, with works relating to certain themes. Certain days of the week will focus on different creative forms, for example:
'Feast Your Eyes' Sundays (art, media, photography), 'Wordy' Tuesdays (fiction, nonfiction, flash), and 'Rhythm-Verse' Thursdays (poetry and song lyrics).
This week we're exploring the theme of 'Memory & Experience' with featured creatives whose work interrogates or portrays the use of memory and personal experience in the arts.
All poetry relies on memory and personal experience, an attempt to capture the being-ness of a moment, a thought, a truth, a loss. Poems are like brief snatches of music heard through the loud hum of our thoughts, to do lists, and life's distractions.
This poet caught our attention first for using literature's most evocative and yet neglected of the five senses (smell) to evoke a journey through the clutter of life's moments. And in his second poem, he carefully crafts nostalgia to evoke the cyclical, year's ending contemplation that winter brings. Though we're quickly moving into spring, we thought it worth including – because endings are always with us as much as beginnings.
Compass
DIARMUID CAWLEY
Smell is not an emergency of forgotten toast
nor is it deeply roasted barley over Dublin’s
inner city. Smell is not lost to virus or pollen
nor attacked in turgid laneways of concentrated
piss, it’s not coffee or pastry or sweet saffron milk.
Smell is not a sticky lover uncoupling in ecstasy
or shame and it’s not the breath of a dying friend.
It’s direction, and passage, symphony of space,
where one thing ends, and another begins,
a recipe for living on this tender map.
Les Mémoires d’un Âne
DIARMUID CAWLEY
On the coldest afternoon
in the doorway of the cellar,
counting wine bottles like some king
two buzzards languid in grey skies.
Winter does this, slows the soul
gifting bare time for reflection,
sipping frothy champagne, wearing
out the memories of a silly ass.
Routine of short days welcomed
fire stacked with dried oak
the pot releases a promise
evening already at the door.
ARTIST BIO
Diarmuid Cawley is a poet and writer from Sligo, Ireland. He lectures on wine, food studies, and gastronomy in TU Dublin. His poetry has appeared in The Martello, Trasna, Smashing Times, Unapologetic Magazine, Moonstone Press, The Honest Ulsterman and Poetry Jukebox. He is working on a first collection of poems.
Special thanks to the author for trusting us with his work.
Thanks to all of you readers for reading! Be sure to like, follow, and share.
Be sure to check out this weeks other posts:
Feast Your Eyes Sunday (18 Feb) with new art from Laura Davis
Wordy Tuesday (20 Feb) with nonfiction from Carol McGill and Christina Hennemann
Rhythm-Verse Thursday (22 Feb) with song lyrics by Madelinksi
Stay tuned for more great art and words next week!
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