Falling into Monaghan - Softcover

Hull, Gerald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1897648537 ISBN 13: 9781897648537

Publisher: Salmon Poetry, 2000

Synopsis

This collection is a study of the poet's "settlement in the west" in South Ulster, on the border territory near the Slieve Beagh mountains. It deals with the consciousness of a kind of desolation that is sometimes bitter, often vigorous, frequently comic. Filtered through this are commentaries on Gerald Hull's London Irish/Italian background.

About this title

About the Author

Gerald Hull comes from a 'mixed generation' Irish-American family in London and has lived in Ireland for over twenty years, settling in Fivemiletown in Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Wales and in recent years has been associated with the Pushkin Prize, Oliver Goldsmith and William Carleton International Summer Schools. He is poetry editor for The Spark Review in Fermanagh and Northern Correspondent for Windows and First Edition. Gerry Hull has read throughout Ireland and gained bursaries from Poetry Ireland and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. He is widely published and, fitting for one whose poetry is fixated on the border counties, was guest editor for the acclaimed South-West edition of The Honest Ulsterman (HU).

Reviews

Contemplations of Irish land and life by a poet of mixed descent with mixed feelings and mixed results. When a writer directly addresses the reader, as Hull does early in his first collection (I want to tell you of the man with a meal bag . . . I want to tell you of McCarron's dance hall), it is imperative that the poet impress upon his audience at least one of two things: why the thing needs saying, or why the reader needs to know it. Hull never fully conveys either here, which is why many of these largely descriptive poems fall flat; the urgency of revelation gets mired in the act of depicting a lackluster landscape. Much of the book centers on Hull's ambivalence about place, the volume's title referring to his settling just above the border of Northern Ireland, near the Republic's County Monaghan. Although he has lived in Ireland for over 20 years, Hull is of Irish-Italian lineage and comes from a mixed generation Irish-American family in London. Presumably this history, as well as the dynamics of the geographic region he inhabits, underlies Hull's feelings of being Estranged in your own country, but not quite. The volume's more successful moments simply set the scene (Slieve Beagh. A country where maps don't work), allowing the reader room to envision the poet's world and then infer his alienation from it.When Hull separates showing from telling, these poems work, but mostly they leave you wanting. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Poem from 'Falling into Monaghan' by Gerald Hull

Falling Into Monaghan for Margaret

'No hospitality is dangerous because
of the suspicion of murder.'
- Gerald of Wales

A spirit stung your heel between mists,
laminate hexed will: a Tara evening, morninge both sparse and
lyrical, and particularly effective. . ." $
in Tyrone. Your family would pluck us back,
you three parts Eurydice. We turned from
Tudor Park to horses, the old railway.

And penetrated high ground. Aeolus loud
with harmonica, falling into Monaghan,
a Land of Cockaigne. Teasing hard at
Newbliss, Aughnacloy: street signs in
bars, their photos of seedsmen fresh
in our minds. The unknown over hills,
far away; switchbridges, lines awry.
Un-British, a giddy vertigo where cars
hobbled off, bicycles waved and colours
ran ill-defined.

Returning up a scabbed border by Drumfurrer
we smelt the dead, the cattle unburied.
People had emptied, dark holding down.

Then shock of reeling light spread copper
over backing plains. Our heads roared with gold;
translated into birds we fell to a drowning moon.
Countrymen's words gripped our clowning, on
through a hundred townlands.
Annaghmakerrig 1996

Copyright Gerald Hull

Edition details

• Publisher: Salmon Poetry
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1897648537
• ISBN 13: 9781897648537
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96