Our Red Evening

Emily Holt
Part of every dream, the train, loud, lunatic, 
lifts a din of rail and rim through Greystones, Bray.
 
The sea – a net – sways and wraps
the evening in mist. Faces frost the window. 
 
One woman up the coast, another down. 
Sunset, and skin pales, glows. Is sheer.
 
No blood on the hospital sheets –
all in her head – and you, bloodshot now
 
on the train. Gone Dún Laoghaire, still 
Rathdrum, Arklow – the train marks each exile
 
with a sign. But exile – how it sleeps now 
in your mother’s bones. What you put inside
 
you can’t take back. So bí i do thost, child. 
Let the silhouette of south hill on sea take you back
 
to water. Here, take a glass. Take a cup. Drink
your mother back. Drink your town back,
 
that town of men bent on hill-walking, wrist
-clawing, senseless straying. Gone, you
 
knew it still lived in your bone. Your own
daughter waits in the city. One woman,
 
another. The line of you will stretch –
You will walk together down the coast –
 
whether beside or into the water, hair down,
you will walk in white shifts your mothers made.
Page 101, Poetry Ireland Review Issue 121
Issue 121

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.