Here's a piece I wrote for The Magazine about a tiny disappearing desert in Poland.
Dennis O'Driscoll
Dennis O'Driscoll was an Irish civil servant who wrote poems about death, misery, and office life. Maybe no surprise when you learn that he went to work at age 16 and was the sole supporter of his five younger siblings when his parents died just as he turned 20. By all accounts he was a generous friend and critic, and a great proponent of the poets he admired. The third issue of The Honest Pint acquainted me with his work and his death on Christmas Day 2012.
His poems are dark, sly and funny, many set during the commute to work amid pinch-faced office drones, advertisements, and the stink of packed lunches.
I especially like "Someone" which concerns our final day, usually unknown to us:
someone is writing a cheque that will be rejected as ‘drawer deceased’
someone is circling posthumous dates on a calendar
someone is listening to an irrelevant weather forecast
someone is making rash promises to friends
someone’s coffin is being sanded, laminated, shined
who feels this morning quite as well as ever
I read "irrelevant weather forecast" three times because I liked it so much. Oh gosh, and "Normally Speaking."
O'Driscoll's lengthy interview with Seamus Heaney, (maybe my favorite [probably everyone's] Irish poet), was published as Stepping Stones in 2009.
The Dream of a Ninety-Five
in photography, reading
My favorite slip of nonfiction is the chapter "Oasis" in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars, a loosely connected set of essays about Saint-Exupery's early experiences as a pilot.
"Anonymous," a photo set by Argentine photographer Sofía López Mañán reminds me of that chapter, in which Saint-Exupery lands in Argentina and spends a night in a ramshackle mansion inhabited by two shrewd little girls whose secret inner lives become clear to him over the course of dinner. They are snake-charmers, princesses, friends to foxes, monkeys, and bees, and cruel judges of dinner guests, who they watch silently and judge, reminding Saint-Exupery of his own sister, who rated strangers at the dinner table on a one hundred point scale.
"The drawing-room had about it something extraordinarily intense, like the face of a wrinkled old lady. The walls were cracked, the ceiling stripped; and most bewildering of all in this bewildering house was the floor: it had simply caved in. Waxed, varnished and polished though it was, it swayed like a ship's gangway. A strange house, evoking no neglect, no slackness, but rather an extraordinary respect. Each passing year had added something to its charm, to the complexity of its visage and its friendly atmosphere, as well as to the dangers encountered on the journey from the drawing-room to the dining-room."