A year's mind for John McGahern and Cootehall marches forward (supposedly)

One month after a death, there is the "month's mind" Mass. Here, that is. Well, this week it is a year's mind for John McGahern. The first winter with him not among us was very, very wet. But the spring arrives even more welcome. Yesterday was a cracker. After four dry days, only one corner of Regan's field required wellies to venture into to retrieve the ball.

As I write this, the thundering booms from the diggers resound all around me. In Cootehall, 100 plus new homes are being constructed. All in the name of rural renewal, but for that you should read "whopping tax break". The village could have done with a bit more life. A few more dwellings and shops. But, oy vey. You wouldn't recognize it. The spring weather brought all the Cootehall denizens out of hibernation. And we just stood around on the road and gave out about all the building and our dirty windows and about how we should have done something about it before it was too late. Well, it's too late.

The photo here was taken while I was standing on the riverbank beside the Barracks in Cootehall, looking across to the Oakport side. Can you believe how close these houses were allowed to be built to each other?? Asking price: €650,000 yo yos. And The Barracks appears on the publicity brochures created by the property developers. Come summer, imagine the 42 new speed boats (some of the houses come with one "free") roaring by in the foreground.

Riffs on Reading

Have picked up One Art, one of the books I swim in again and again – collected letters of Elizabeth Bishop, skillfully edited by Robert Giroux. Picked it up this time in order to find a few specific Herbert poems that were favourites of hers. I'd been reading Herbert and wanted to see if any of my favourites matched hers. The games we play, huh? She mentions "Love Unknown", which is wonderful. Then try reading Bishop's "The Monument" or "One Art" after that and see the affinities.

Then I took out Bishop's collected and swam in that for a while. "Arrival at Santos" is still my favourite. Has been since 1981. From the opening, "Here is a coast; here is a harbor./Here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:" to the close, "...either because the glue here is very inferior/or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;/we are driving to the interior." Perfect. Yes, yes I know that's what everybody says about EB. I agree with everybody.

I imagine Seamus Heaney was dead chuffed (as they say here!) when EB's letters were published and she mentions that he's at Harvard and that she thinks his work is very good.

While I'm at it, I'll recommend a poem of Glyn Maxwell's in the latest issue of Poetry Review (you can find it online at their site, click on link). It's called "Flags and Candles".Very thoughtful, careful, clever poem. When I heard Glyn read a few years ago at Poetry Now in Dun Laoighaire, Seamus Heaney was sitting in front of me and nodding his head a lot, clearly enjoying Glyn's reading. So a line of nods down the years here: Bishop to Heaney to Maxwell... (Heaney's white hair was so fluffy and so copious, it took quite a bit of restraint on my part not to muss it up from behind!)

And more connections: the Poetry Now festival, last weekend of this month, features Alice Quinn, poetry editor of the New Yorker, speaking on the newly found poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Enough riffs.