Storm Song

Eleanor Hooker
The autumn line-storm bears the lake 
to my door, and in the pounding water
is my menagerie of three-eyed fish, and in the 
ardent air – an arabesque of ravens and rooks.
 
This porous house has never resisted,
the wind unknots and all rain in.
Once inside, my fishes and the birds 
resume their routine of swim and storm song. 
 
I find breathing space on a bloated chest,
rise to the rafters with a raven and a rook 
beside me, monitoring the flood. Attic curtains 
spinnaker, and the house runs before the wind.
 
In large dense shoals, my fish dive free
to the deepest available water, drawing
down the broken echoes of my humming,
sending back up the stormy shadows of my song.
Page 59, Poetry Ireland Review Issue 118
Issue 118

Poetry Ireland Review Issue 118:
The Rising Generation

Edited by Vona Groarke

"Best of the current review’s poems show confidence, inventiveness and imagination" The Irish Times

"...the sheer number of highlights would lift your mood." The Sunday Times

One hundred years after a poets’ revolution helped found the Republic, Poetry Ireland Review: The Rising Generation features poems and prose from Ireland’s new generation of poets. 

Thirty six poets who have published a first collection or pamphlet in the past five years are represented by two poems each and by an essay that responds to an original and probing questionnaire about their poetic practice and values.  

Poetry Ireland Review: The Rising Generation  is edited by Vona Groarke and featured poets include Ailbhe Darcy, Tara Bergin, Declan Ryan, Eoghan Walls, Jane Clarke, Victoria Kennefick, Tara Bergin, Andrew Jamison, Dylan Brennan, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Michelle O’Sullivan. Much like The Poetry Book Society UK’s prestigious Next Generation Poets (which is published once a decade) this issue aims to offer the most comprehensive, insightful and enjoyable overview of what we can expect of Irish poetry in the coming times. 

“I believe there’s good and exciting work here, work that will continue to be honoured and enjoyed in all its many shades. They’re not all young poets (whatever that adjective might mean): I’ve always liked how poetry as an artform hooches up to make space for people who come to it late. It is the poems, as ever, I prefer to focus on.  

So why then the questionnaire and its thirty-six sets of prose responses? Call it context. Or light entertainment. Or a new confessionalism. I thought it would help to show, alongside poems, what kind of attitudes new poets strike when it comes to thinking about poetry and how it slips into or chafes against their otherwise lives.”  
Vona Groarke, editor 

>> Read editorial
>> Read some poems from this issue