An Essay on Typography

Kevin Cantwell

Hopkins would say they fettled these flecks of light from alloy

as steel dust – these jewellers who cut letters of type from stock.

With a bird’s tongue file, they shaved the burrs and nicked

the chaff they puffed aside to make the slant font display

a book hand meant to imitate Petrarch’s script.

They set without kerning one wavering page of Nature

wedged in a proofing tray by wood-block furniture

and shimmed quoins – but first they waved each glyph

through candle flame, smoke-pressed it onto wet paper.

One apprentice touched a hot italic to his forearm,

and his inky boy, so cold, so soon, so this forewarns,

in their rooms above where the town’s rank sluice would fall and disappear,

let his fingernail, in a chipped polish dubbed Purple Seed,

pick the scab to make the letter bleed.

Poetry Ireland Review Issue 121:

Edited by Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland's first issue as editor of Poetry Ireland Review aims to encourage a conversation about poetry which is 'noisy and fractious certainly ... but a conversation nevertheless that can be thrilling in its reach and commitment'. There are new poems from Thomas McCarthy, Jean Bleakney, Wendy Holborow, Paul Perry, Aifric Mac Aodha, and many others, while the issue also includes work from Brigit Pegeen Kelly, with an accompanying essay on the poet by Eavan Boland. Eavan Boland also offers an introduction to the work of poet Solmaz Sharif, while there are reviews of the latest books from Simon Armitage, Peter Sirr, Lo Kwa Mei-en, and Vona Groarke, among others. PIR 121 also includes Theo Dorgan's elegiac tribute to his friend John Montague – a canonical poet, in contrast to the emerging poets Susannah Dickey, Conor Cleary and Majella Kelly, who contribute new work and will also read for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series as part of ILFD 2017.