The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2005 | Judges' Comments on The Boy In The Ring

This poetry is full of energy, and is immediately engaging with its vivid language, imagery and passion. The poet speaks in many voices and is obviously an accomplished mimic and ventriloquist, and yet has a strong personal vision and music, which binds the disparate parts into a cohesive whole.

There is formal inventiveness and risk. There is humour, often black. There is exhuberance and theatricality in the way the poems perform themselves as poems. There is a real relish in language for its own sake. There is a kind of savage indignation in the work, of a Swiftian order. This masks a truly compassionate heart, and compassion is one of the most appealing of this poet's gifts - there's a big heart open to the human adventure, and willing to take the risks that articulating our dark side involves.
It is brave work, both in its subject matter and in the way it handles that subject matter. We believe the poet to have both the courage and vision to make poems of the highest order. It is compelling poetry, and a great pleasure to read and savour.

and on the Patrick Kavanagh Award

The Patrick Kavanagh Award is the most illustrious award for a collection of poetry in Ireland. It honours a great poet, and it has been awarded in the past to many poets who have gone on to make considerable reputations. Most importantly, the award is made to a poet in a time of beginning; it has been for many the first sure sign from the world that they are on the right path.

Paula Meehan and Theo Dorgan

http://www.patrickkavanaghcountry.com/html/competition_judgesbiogs.htm

Three Poems from The Boy in The Ring

Helicopter

A tomboy, always climbin trees and walls,
scrobbin apples, robbin nests.
The likes that got herself into trouble
with the priests and the nuns and the guards
and the people who counted their apples.

She couldn't care less, not a bit,
for all the warnings,
for all the hidings from her father,
even the scalding print of my hand across her back
over and over couldn't stop her doing what she wanted to do

She just kept on climbing like a squirrel, a spider, a monkey,
a great amusement for the soldiers in the barracks
who used to joke she was just what they needed in the army,
with her long white legs and her spindly fingers and her hair clipped short,
and the way she could take all the knocks and the falls.

Like one of us the soldiers said,
falls down and gets straight back up again,
dusts herself off and on to the next thing,
like one of us .

When the helicopters came, the commotion,
the wind and the dust like one of Moses' plagues.

There was no end to the pleading
Mammy Mammy Mammy
Mammy please Mammy please Mammy
I'll be good forever I'll be good till I die
Mammy please mammy please mammy please

so i let her off
i let her off for a ride with the soldiers
in the bastarin helicopter
not once or twice but maybe a dozen times.

that one of them called to the door for her
a dozen helicopter rides
with soldiers dressed up to play war in their armour,
a dozen times a little girl taken away alone into the sky

a dozen times I let her be held in the shadows
in the belly of that roaring monster

so hot so cruel so loud so dark

not even god himself
nor all the electronic eyes staring down from heaven
could look at what was going on inside there.


Today John Lennon will die

Cold enough for gloves.
A sky the colour of tripe
Clings to Clonakilty’s rooftops.
Our two spires hide in fog.

At school we warm our fingers
twisting little figures out of mála,
The last flecks of rainbow congealing
into shit-brown as we roll.

At small break the big boys beat
the babies up. At big break
they beat us up again. My belly hurts.
Mrs Crowley scolds “Only Cows Have Bellies“.

At home a young woman is suddenly old.
She stretches on the settee weeping.
A man on the telly keeps standing up and falling over,
standing up and falling over.


Fishing Trip in Gatsby’s

After a while leaning out over the balcony railing
and peering down
through strobes and dry ice
at the dance-floor
swarming with underage drunks
you swim back towards your seat
quizzing yourself:
now that I have put my fist through the jukebox
and the sleeve of my finest white shirt
is a sponge of blood
what is the worst?
Are these people whirling beneath me
or are they only fish?
Are they only fish
gagging to be netted
And gutted by the bucketful?
And do fish have feelings?

You’ll answer these riddles in Gatsby’s tonight,
A fish or two will tell
how much or not it hurts

Though you'll goof for a while
on the way
the rotating lights warp
like spooky luminous fish
in a bowl
on the fat jags of a smashed pint-bottle

before flipping it over your shoulder
into the shoal.