To celebrate the publication of Claire-Louise Bennett’s first collection of stories, Pond (The Stinging Fly Press), we’re sharing her reading from the essay ‘I Am Love,’ (gorse no. 2) filmed at our launch last year.
Pádraig Ó Méalóid: We’ve been spending a fair bit of time in London, Deirdre and myself. We were over in the British Library last week. I’m doing research into Flann O’Brien, and The Cardinal and the Corpse, all of that.
Alan Moore: Aw, that sounds great. Yeah, I’ll tell you what, I would – this probably wouldn’t help you with your research but, have you read The Whispering Swarm? By Mike Moorcock? Yet?
TRUMPET
I want to believe there’s something in the bunker,
in the cowslip’s bell. stockpiles of shivery paper,
caffeine, nicotine and romance. and not just romance.
onion
juice and doubled tongues for the scurvy and
amnesia.
I want a double ration: The world to keep going;
the world to end in my time. I don’t want to miss it.
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.
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?’