As Tony Curtis launched my third book from Doire Press at
Poetry Ireland headquarters in Dublin last week I thought of Samuel Menashe, who
lived at the top of those stairs. Curtis spoke of his liking for superstition
and went on to explore the linkages that his research and the pop-ups in his
memory had evoked as he read the poems in Milling
the Air.
Seven years ago my Hallow’een poem, Francis Bacon and Samuel
Menashe by Strange Coincidence, was mentioned in a review in The Galway Advertiser. Nothing To Lose In Getting Dressed , a review of my first
book of poetry Whispering the Secrets, was written by Kevin Higgins. Subsequent events confirmed that local newspapers
and radio can have powerful reach.
In 2011 the American poet Samuel Menashe was living what
were to be his final months in a nursing home in New York. His friend, the
author and critic, Nicholas Birns saw the review on-line and sought a copy of
my book to give him. The photo of Menashe reading my book, his encouraging
words relayed to me by Birns and the sad news received, one early morning in
August, that Samuel Menashe had passed away during the night having ‘truly
enjoyed’ my poems and had had my book by his bedside in his final weeks and days
remain with me when I write.
We all need encouragement and I love the poems of Menashe –
a winner of the 2004 Most Neglected Master Award from the US Poetry Foundation.
It was watching Menashe reading those poems on the DVD film Life is IMMENSE by
Pamela Robertson-Pearce that, alongside a visit to the Francis Bacon Studio in the
Hugh Lane Gallery - around the corner from Poetry Ireland - had led to the
poem. The film accompanies his New and Selected Poems Edited by Christopher Ricks
(Bloodaxe Books, 2009). Nicholas Birns later wrote a further review of my first
book Whispering the Secrets –
something that is hard to get for a first, or any, collections coming from a
small poetry press. I’m still grateful for it and to Kevin Higgins and The Galway Advertiser for that first
review allowing significant connections to be made.
Strangely, I discovered a further coincidence while
interviewing the US Poet Laureate, poet Kay Ryan, for Skylight 47 – that has just launched its Galway 2020 project. She
and Menashe were friends. He had discovered the first poem of hers published in
an issue of a prestigious New York newspaper that was left on a park bench in
Central Park where he liked to walk. He rang her to tell her how much he liked it and invited her to visit him
should she visit the city in future. It was several years later, she told me,
before she could visit but they kept in touch thereafter. ‘Superstition’, or
synchronicity – as the psychologist Carl Jung might call it – ‘strange
coincidence[s]’ abound.
I’ll be reading alongside poets Louis Mulcahy & Maurice
Devitt at Galway City Library on Tuesday 30th Octber, at 18.00 (N.B.
6pm). Before that, we'll be reading in Cork City Library 6.30 Tues 23rd Oct and Dublin's Pearse Street library at 6.30pm on Thurs 25th Oct. More on posts below & Come Along!
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