March 2015

Father of the Man

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Terence Davies’ Trilogy by Bobby Seal.

Children, Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration move relentlessly through the three stages of Robbie’s life. But Davies consciously breaks the rules of linear time as he moves backwards and forwards exploring the jumble of Robbie’s memories, his youth, adulthood and old age. Davies does not want us to just look at Robbie’s life, he requires us to witness it, and presents each fragment as if part of a body of evidence.

Medicine

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By Darragh McCausland.

At eight forty-five in the evening, I stood at the hatch window of the medicine room, doling out little paper cups of pills to the loose queue of patients in the corridor. It was fifteen minutes from the end of my shift, my fourth twelve hour shift in a row. I was jacked tired. Of course, Gerry noticed.

‘No snoozing on the job Nurse Nally. What if the right pill goes to the wrong man and the wrong pill goes to the right man? What then?’

A Fine House

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The Irish & Their Bungalows by Oliver Farry.

I was two years old when I saw what was going to be our new house, and it is one of my earliest memories. We were living in rented accommodation—an old victorian terraced house—in my father’s native village, Ballymote, County Sligo, and by the time my parents had managed to scrabble together the means for a mortgage there were three children—my newly born younger brother, my older sister and me. One Sunday afternoon in November, my mother’s aunt and uncle were visiting from Mullingar and my father offered to show ‘Uncle Mick’—a man we all loved because of his amazing ability to perfectly replicate the sound of almost any farm animal—the new house that was then under construction. I must have canvassed strongly to be brought along, probably by threatening to cry, and I was allowed come.

Limbed

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By David Hayden.

A journey of light ending and ending and everything feeding off this, in one way or another, but the light just arriving, warm and buttery, letting us see; shapes, shadows, colours and a cottage and a field and a cottage garden with cornflowers, eye blue, heartsease, winking violet, delphiniums, risen purple, primroses, tooth yellow, upgazing, sightless, calendula stars, thyme, tight green spicing curls, and daisies, scattered wings, open palms; over all, fattening bees swing boozily in the warm air. A man or a woman stands smiling once upon the day. All the motion of the living world above and the worm-turned earth below and the breath of life rushing from warm to cool, from damp to dry, adds up to a seeming stillness, a closeness to silence in which one may be wise, be idiot, be almost nothing. If not for the faint tapping, heard and then not heard, and then the man—it is a man—turns to the sound, which is where it is not, and turns again, to where it is not, and turns again; but the knocks have stopped.