Robert in the Garden doing his mandatory fashion shoot for Grandmas knitwear

Poetry Pleasure

I love poetry - reading a poem is like reading someones secret thoughts, they are so personal and reveal something of the true essence of the person. Poems ususally touch on something common in mankind and I love it when I go - yes, I feel that way too, or that's the way I see it as well. Its not always possible to complete a book, or find the time to read consistently, but everyone can find time to read a poem at the end of a busy day. Here are a couple of poems which my really cool neighbour brought to my attention.

                            HOW TO GROW UP

                            Hold on to everything horrible.

                            Jettison everything nice.

                            When you are shown something beautiful

                            Look at the price

                            Eat something boring for breakfast.

                            Watch television all night.

                            Stop being scared of the darkness.

                            Start being scared of the light.

                            Start liking money for money's sake,

                            Not for what money can do.

                            Never look out of an aeroplane.

                            Always complain to the crew.

                           Make yourself glummer and glummer.

                           Spend your time scowling and be,

                           Smack in the middle of summer,

                           A grumpy old bastard like me.

                           KEVIN Mc GEE

                           SURVIVOR

                            Everyday I think about dying

                            About disease, starvation,

                            violence, terrorism, war,

                            the end of the wold.

                            It helps keep my mind off things.

                             ROGER Mc GOUGH

They are both from the book 'Real Cool' Poems to Grow Up With, edited by Niall Mac Monagle. I have been enjoying this book as I am in the habit of being an old romantic and reading Keats and Tennsyson and the like and its good to read something modern! Thank you Kathy!

Moving to Kenmare

Kenmare here we come - we are moving this October. It will be tough as there are not many jobs down there but hey, I'm an artist and used to making do and it will be worth it to live in Kenmare. I'm really looking forward to living in an inspiring landscape again and being beside the sea. I didn't know how important the sea is until I left it! It will be a great place to raise our little boy and I'm feeling really positive about the future. 'What larks we'll have Pip!'

Funny but during the sunny weather I felt so creative and now its cold and grey again I feel a creative vacum. I just want to sit beside the fire with a cat and escape into the imagination - I just finished Tolkien's 'Children of Hurin' - which was compelling in its tragedy as Hurin is led inexorably towards his doom - the Alan Lee watercolours and pencil drawings accompanying the text are beautiful.

Its funny Tolkien is such a master that he makes the myth and the land alive - I almost feel that its a spiritual reality - I find myself leafing through Tolkien dictionaries and poring over the map as though the history and geneaology of middle earth are real, (and maybe it is as far as his works are all beautiful pieces of art and so encountering them is akin to spiritual experience). But he was a professor of Anglo Saxon at Oxford and based some of his sagas on real Aglo Saxon and Icelandic myths so maybe they resonate on an archetypal level. Elves wakening under the starlight beside the waters of cuivienen, trees of gold and silver light in the land of the Valar, Beren and Luthien wandering together in the forests of Doriath in the First Age, The seven dwarf fathers asleep under stone for ages long. Yes, in my opinion Tolkien is the high king of the imagination and has given me many beautiful, happy, dark, tragic, compelling and poetic moments for which I am thankful. I seem to remember reading in Jung that when the outer world is quitened the inner world comes alive - but the tele and radio have to be turned off first!

Reality cannot be ignored either, but there is so much supression, deprivation and government sanctioned killing going on that I can't bear to look these days.

I am reading 'The Once and Future King' by T.H. White and this excerpt from the book of Merlin struck me.
Merlin to Arthur in the company of the Animals: " We find that at present the human race is divided politically into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians': the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics or philosophy, while the ninety fools plod off behind the baners of the nine villans, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare.'

It does strike me that White is conflicted about the apparant destructiveness and cruelty of humanity, perhaps because he was affected by two world wars, but how much more reason have we to be now that we are alive to witness a critical period of mans destruction of the environment. Not that I hold myself aloof living amongst the products of consurmerism like most others.

Waite lived for a time in Ireland (an almost feral existance although this viewpoint may be exaggerated by English sensibilities). He found himself rejected by the natives who suspiciously spied on him, which depressed him - another person I admire Gerard Manley Hopkins had a similar experience of isolation and disconnection while living in Ireland which I can relate to having grown up here as an alien (english, non church-going. It wasn't until I read the rare book 'Valley of the Squinting windows' by Briskey Mc na Mara and the works of Edna O Brien that I really gained some understanding of domestic life in Ireland in the past. Thankfully things have moved on with the rise of younger generations, although many are leaving now.

Gap Of Dunloe

I've being getting some paintings done over the Easter Break now I finally have the time!

Spring and Fall

To a Young Child

Margaret are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Odilon Redon