At the Moscow State Circus
Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye
and yes, by three hours in, we’re jaded, frankly. The baby
tiger, stupid with drugs, we fondled and got flashed with,
has been taken away by the scruff of his silver chain and the woman
undressing and dressing herself again inside a fire-filled hoop
without a single glimmer of skin is running out
of costumes. How this cacophonous spectaculum will finish
is anybody’s guess; our kids are so bored and sugared up
they’re about to froth with tears, like soda fountains.
Mozart’s 25th.
Acrobats in wigs in lace in Amadeus cuffs file into place
and we’re staring once it starts. One by one they jackknife
onto a trampoline and using their dear launched breakable
selves as pens, as flares, sketch out for us in air what isn’t there:
a simple X, then denser, higher – cat’s-cradle architecture
strung taught as piano wire, rigging, fountains, the winged
horse in the sky, all his star-points joined together, and as
they angle backwards to land like so many stackable chairs
on their comrades’ shoulders, it’s not just the absence
of gravity we’ll remember – bodies being impossible–
but the way we imagined we could reach out and touch
the co-ordinates for the Battle of Stalingrad.
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 116:
A WB Yeats Special Issue
This essential Yeats anniversary publication is edited by Vona Groarke and includes responses to Yeats’s legacy and readings of his poems from public figures as diverse as Bill Whelan, Neil Jordan, Colm Tóibín, Frank McGuinness, Mary Costello and John Banville, along with new poems responding to Yeats’s work by Irish and international poets such as Margaret Atwood, Sharon Olds, Philip Schultz, Sinéad Morrissey and Harry Clifton. The issue also includes Yeats’s poetry collections, reviewed by leading poets as if just published. Now also available in hardback.
"superb special edition" John Boland, Irish Independent
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