Flip Sides

By Michael Durack

The poems in Michael Durack’s Flip Sides are set, for the most part, in Ireland’s rural Mid-West with occasional ventures, physically or imaginatively, to Dublin, London, Wales, Amsterdam and the United States. Childhood memories, rural traditions, vanished landscapes, love and loss, sport and music all the familiar themes from his previous collection, Where It Began – reappear, and the mundane and the surreal lie cheek by jowl. Poems are “interrogated”, Sean Bean morphs into the Shan Van Vocht of Irish folk-lore, a suburban rail commuter experiences Groundhog Day and the Rosary is interrupted by the Great Train Robbery. Flip Sides could be compared to a juke box which, as often as not, plays the B-Sides of the 45 rpm singles, providing the reader with a series of unexpected treats.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Aug 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005476694

Michael Durack

Michael Durack was born on a farm near Birdhill, Co. Tipperary. He was educated at Nenagh CBS and UCD and worked as a teacher for 36 years. His work has been published in journals such as The Blue Nib, Skylight 47, The Cafe Review, The Stony Thursday Book and Poetry Ireland Review as well as airing on local and national radio. With his brother, Austin, he collaborates on a programme of poetry and guitar music, and they have produced two albums, The Secret Chord and Going Gone. His memoir in prose and poems, Saved to Memory: Lost to View, was issued in 2016, and in September 2017 his first poetry collection, Where It Began, was published by Revival Press. Michael now lives in Ballina, Co. Tipperary

Book preview

Before The Age of Science and Reason,

before The Enlightenment, there was light.

Before astronomy and astrophysics

mapped the flight paths of the planets,

the sun came up and the sun went down.

Before optics and prismatics, the firmament

was arched with gold-bearing rainbow.

Before the lighthouse and the Fresnel lens,

beacons steered our mariners safely home.

Before the long eye of the Galilean telescope,

the northern sky was ploughed by silver stars.

Electric light now seeks out dusty corners,

our fairies scattered to the four strong winds.

Taper and lantern, torch and flambeau

give way to floodlight, flashbulb, neon, strobe.

Newspapers divine the spot-on times

of sunrise, tides and sunset; our screens

give notice of arrival of comet or meteor shower

so that a grandchild spread-eagled on the grass

can witness for free a primal fireworks show

and wish upon a choice of shooting stars.

In our post-modern heliocentric world

the sun still rises and the sun still sets.

SPITTING IMAGES

In childhood I was a Moroney. The spit of my mother,

as the elders put it. I couldn’t see it, but I do now:

1930s, school uniform, Leeds, St Mary’s;

front row, third from right, her face my face.

My brother was a Moroney too, so like his Uncle Christy,

the handsome boy cut off in his prime 1942,

thereafter Christ’-the-lord-ha’-mercy-on-him.

Posing on scaffolding by the roof of Cragg House,

Grandfather Moroney, two workmen and a young Uncle Mick

in tradesman’s overalls. Looking at the photo for the first time,

my brother was convinced he saw himself.

Leningrad, the death throes of the Soviet Union,

where a Nevsky Prospekt street artist sketched me,

others joining in the exercise, scenting my dollars.

Three portraits: one so-so, one a caricature,

the third the spitting image of my brother’s face.

HANDIWORK

We mended fences, my father and I,

during the off-season, in the Well Field.

Now, whether good fences made good neighbours

or merely kept our cows out of Ahern’s meadow

it didn’t much matter. He stood on a boundary ditch,

half-sliced angry whitethorns with his billhook,

bent them to his will, trained them across gaps.

Come night time his rough hands chafed,

infested with splinters and micro-thorns.

He handed me a sewing needle, deferring to my keen eye

and sure touch. I eased the needle’s point

under the skin, probing, pinching, nudging

until I had teased the buggers out. He never flinched;

I had his unconditional trust.

The barbed wire fences were another thing,

the strands of wire stapled