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Donny O'Rourke
[email protected]
Biography:
Born and brought up in Renfrewshire, the author of nine poetry collections, I am a graduate
of the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge. Busiest and best known as a poet, I have had
overlapping careers in television, journalism and higher education. Residencies, fellowships
and visiting professorships have allowed me to live, write and teach in Britain, North America
and continental Europe. As impresario, activist and instigator I have founded cultural organisations and directed festivals. Whether teaching at The Glasgow school of Art, Cambridge
and Yale, working with patients, prisoners and business executives or visiting schools and
community groups, poetry has always been central to my conviction that the arts are essential for sane and balanced living. To this end, I have sat on boards, committees and awards
juries across the whole spectrum of artistic life in Scotland. An Honorary Teaching Fellow in
the Education Faculty at Glasgow University, I have devised, developed and delivered many
courses for adults, mostly involving Creative Writing and Film. Poetry, its production, publication, performance and promulgation, remains my passion and priority.For further information
about me and a full CV please visit my web site donnyorourke.com.
About writer's work:
What reviewers and readers seem to notice about my work is its accessibility, emotional
depth and human warmth, the way it mixes wit, poignancy, the satirical and the surreal, autobiography and other voices, dramatic monologues, poems in character, unrhymed poetry
and songs. As a performer, I try to blend songs, stories and stand up comedy, drawing on
the techniques of Scottish Variety and Music Hall, traditional folk music, continental cabaret
and American supper club jazz. But in wishing, unapologetically to entertain, I strive to do so
only with poems that succeed as poems both on page and stage. My poetry is taught in
schools and colleges and features in university text books. There’s a ‘bardic’ element to it, a
desire to chronicle, lament and praise. My Irish background gets explored a lot, and America
is a recurring preoccupation. I have been called a travel poet and a literary archaeologist,
forever excavating lost Glasgow’s of the mind. There’s a questing, protesting Catholic’s concern with spirituality too as well as a memoirist’s need to confide and confess, to rake over
and recast the self manufactured myths by which most writers live. The latest book is the
libretto for a musical in monologues comprising lyrics written in the style of Broadway show
tunes and I am revising my first work of fiction, a detective novel. Awards: Herman Kesten
Stipendium (Nuremberg); Scotland- Switzerland Fellowship. Scottish Arts Council Special
Recognition Award. I was shortlisted for the National Museum of Scotland’s Callum MacDonald Memorial Award for best poetry pamphlet.
BERN(E)
III
V
I
A stand up
Doing my best
Routine
Which always gets
A laugh even
In Geneva but here
Cannot raise a smile until
I see
The orchestra behind me
The conductor waiting
In the wings and the audience
Looking
At what without
Doubt
Are the world’s most
Accurate timepieces
So I find things
A little cool a little
Slow liking my deLiberation without
The DE…
Free?
Maybe
In the abstract
TheO
Logically speaking
Not
world famous for its warmth
Like my hometown is said
to be
Ach but in Marseille Granada
Or Napoli
What a cold fish they’d see
In me!
The Alps
O so milky
Cheese
Dried
Meat, grey
Green arcades
And wine
Verdigris
Parliament
And river
In the city centre
A statue
Of a Jew
Eating
A baby
IV
II
In my dream I am
A sprinter
Crouched
Spikes sharp
In the starting blocks
Ready to be
Off my mark
But every other competitor
has entered
The Marathon and when the
gun goes off
There is no way through
But we have sausages!
Ja!
Sausages we have!
Such sausages!
Superb sausages!
Swiss sausages!
The last word
In sausages
What need could
There be for more
Sausages and German
Sausages at that?
'Tulips' (for Britta)
I wasn't too sad when I failed to find
the tulips she'd seen growing wild
down by the muddy river bed though
I longed to look at those little flames
the fading light could change from orange
top pink to red; instead,as with other things
I've never found, a family, my ideal weight,
the proper way to use my talent, I was
just glad that for others, somewhere,
they did bloom; then today, during my
Easter Sunday walk, on a scrubby verge, by the
ugly bridge that spans the Saale, between
the train tracks and the autobahn, when I
was no longer looking, there they were.
VI
A café table
It’s cloth
The official map
Of Bern
And on it
By the beckoning
Candle
A sign
That says
RESERVED
PAUL KLEE’S ANGELS
For Barbara Hauck at fifty
Paul Klee’s angels just exist
By the grace of the artist’s wrist
Yet they wrap him in their wings
Teach him every note he sings
Paul Klee’s angels space and ink
Are as real as any thought we’ll think
Beings being only loops and lines
Are the wonder and the wonder’s signs
Paul Klee’s angels yawn and yearn
Watching over us in Bern
With their foibles and their flaws
Almost human as the one who draws
Paul Klee’s angels guard our mess
Hate our hatred of happiness
I believe once in a while
A sinner’s saved by a seraphic smile
a trellis table to write at
and a birdbath
blue too
empty at last of August’s unacustomed
torrents where soon
so soon the hummingbirds
will drink
once more
Violets
Lingering like the last of the light
in the Schlossgarten at Erlangen
suddenly seeing a bed of them by the fountain
I remembered how much I love
violets – their intensity – that
wilful way they have of being
neither purple nor blue but
violet. Loveable too that a bunch
of them can also be a posy
and whilst bouquet sounds a bit grand
just one in a tooth mug in any hotel
can make a bare room an arbour,
a bower, a dell.
SUNRISE ON SUNSET
(for Anna)
THE COST OF LOVE
In the wee small hours…
The humming birds have gone now
for them time’s standing still
down Mexico way
while Santa Fe
is up to its old Tiepolo tricks
with blue and the absence/ presence
of clouds
(by the way where are they today
Monterey
who can say)
anyway on the patio there’s
a treasure chest of looted leaves and the winter
timber’s mostly stacked
they say
triangles can sharpen
scissors that pyramids
have power certainly
my morning mind’s as keen
as a box of blades!
for propitiary at each corner
of the garden wall I am blessed
near the gate the bhudda squats
thoughtful as ever and in line
with him a hand carved saint
Francis wearing songbirds
like epaulettes his cowl keeping
out the heat
to complete the trigonometry
to make it true
a horse shoe
charms
from above the door
good coffee abundant blossoms
Sinatra’s powers
Make sorrows all the sweeter
But more and more
The fears of four
Dishearten and defeat her
Night- time’s a curse
It’s when the whisky helps
Make things worse
And she starts to cry
And sigh ‘Why oh why
Do daydreams die?’
She turns a Tiffany lamp on
Chiffon shaded it has shone
Fore years on all that’s gone
As Sinatra sings
About the things
She’s lost
By break of day
Again she’ll pay
The cost
Of love
MILK
I do not care for me
Your custom often
when the house was still
Surely that’s clear
Like this martini here
to brew milky coffee
and reminisce.
Care for another?
Child care experts would have frowned
on my late hours,
the bitter adult drinks
and frothy confidences.
For keeps
For good
She wishes I could
Care for another
Care for another?
Yet your stories stopped my mewling
and continued as I grew
me tending the fire,
you talking of Ireland
GREAT IS THE CAUSE OF MY
SORROW
(from a Gaelic fragment and to the
traditional air for it)
more real to your first born
than the younger ones who slept.
For Eddie McGuire
Those nightcaps Mother,
were our hushed bond.
Great is the cause of my sorrow
Weary the weight of my woe
Will we never be done with despairing
Of what winter has brought to Glencoe?
The king and his Campbells have curdled
The milk in the dead widow’s breast
Clan Donald’s orphaned bairns butchered
Their ghosts and our grievance won’t rest!
And though, for twenty years now,
I’ve drunk my coffee black,
I’m not weaned yet
of that rich, warm milk.
CARE FOR ANOTHER?
A fool
On a stool
Will as a rule
Wild as the wind is our mourning
Empty our hearts as the glen
Gone like the last light of summer
All murdered, MacDonald’s brave men
Great is the cause of my sorrow
I watched my whole family die
Yet love’s the only true vengeance
‘Peace’, the best battle cry
Care for another
That kind of guy
Believes he can buy
A friend or a brother
Care for another?
Don’t mind if I do
Who’s caring for you?
Great is the cause of my sorrow
Greater the need to forgive
In each steading razed without mercy
Justice is all that will live
Can nothing be learned from our losses
Sorrow and sadness so deep?
Wars will be waged without pity
Til our leaders are taught how to weep
Care for another?
Warmongers forever forgetting
What mothers eternally know
Iraq, The Lebanon, Afghanistan
The whole world one Glencoe
Great is the cause of my sorrow
The piper’s lament will not cease
While every child’s a MacDonald
Bombed in the name of peace
When as you can see
Having ordered three
Marriages turned into funerals
In the Highlands or Iraq
Care fo another?
Buddy I swear
You’ve got me there
Do I really dare
Knives in the night
Or stealth bombers
Iinnocence under attack
Great is the casue of my sorrow
Weary the weight of my woe
Will we never be done with despairing
Of what winter has brought to Glencoe?