Poem of the week: 'My Grandmother's Opal' by Grevel Lindop | Books | guardian.co.uk

Poem of the week: 'My Grandmother's Opal' by Grevel Lindop | Books | guardian.co.uk

This week's poem, "My Grandmother's Opal" by Grevel Lindop, is a quest to reveal the past. The last line-and-a-quarter sums up the significance and difficulty of the quest: "this one spark / saved from the fiery heart of a lost world". Adrift in attics and cupboard drawers, such tantalising "sparks" may be all we have of that mysterious immensity, a person's life, reminding us how little we truly know the people we're closely related to: the grandparents who died before we properly "met" them; that venerable great-grandparent we just missed. Perhaps they remind us, too, of the future whose past we will sooner or later become – our grandchildren, their grandchildren. These distant relatives haunt Christmastime in our culture. To borrow the poem's words, they offer love we can never return – nor properly receive - but which can sometimes seem profoundly present.

My Grandmother's Opal

Nowadays I can find no picture of her.
I lost the only photograph I had
moving house; nothing else came to me,
so all I keep now is this opulent bead,

milky violet, craggy sugar-white
and crumpled goldleaf fused into the one
hurtfully alluring crystal depth
of opal, her favourite stone,

which like a scrying-globe entraps the eye;
though I should need more than a jeweller's glass
to see what figures might flaw the blue mist
or walk unscathed out of that golden furnace,

distant and enigmatic, bright and small
as now my memories of her: some stories
and nonsense-rhymes she riddled me out of her childhood,
odd scents she used, her sharp, affectionate gaze,

skirts I buried my face in, and the love
which like an animal I could discern,
inhabit like warmth but never comprehend
or, so young I was, return.

So here is it, my grandmother's opal,
centrepiece of a necklace broken and strewn
who now knows where? And of no use to me,
too large for a ring, too splendid to cut down,

message I can't read, riches not mine
to spend or give, unexplained trust I hold.
I keep it: but where shall I set it, this one spark
saved from the fiery heart of a lost world?

Irish poet awarded international prize - Irish Times

Irish poet awarded international prize - Irish Times

ONE OF Ireland’s finest poets, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanain, has been awarded the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize for her most recent collection, The Sun-Fish . At a ceremony in Canada earlier this week, Ní Chuilleanain (68) received the international prize worth $65,000 (€49,000 ).

http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/shortlist_2010.php?t=6

On Lacking the Killer Instinct

One hare, absorbed, sitting still,
Right in the grassy middle of the track,
I met when I fled up into the hills, that time
My father was dying in a hospital –
I see her suddenly again, borne back
By the morning paper–s prize photograph;
Two greyhounds tumbling over, absurdly gross,
While the hare shoots off to the left, her bright eye
Full not only of speed and fear
But surely in the moment a glad power,

Like my father–s, running from a lorry-load of soldiers
In nineteen twenty-one, nineteen years old, never
Such gladness, he said, cornering in the narrow road
Between high hedges, in summer dusk.
The hare
Like him should never have been coursed,
But, clever, she gets off; another day
She–ll fool the stupid dogs, double back
On her own scent, downhill, and choose her time
To spring away out of the frame, all while
The pack is labouring up.
The lorry was growling
And he was clever, he saw a house
And risked an open kitchen door. The soldiers
Found six people in a country kitchen, one
Drying his face, dazed-looking, the towel
Half covering his face. The lorry left,
The people let him sleep there, he came out
Into a blissful dawn. Should he have chanced that door?
If the sheltering house had been burned down, what good
Could all his bright running have done
For those that harboured him?
And I should not
Have run away, but I went back to the city
Next morning, washed in brown bog water, and
I thought about the hare, in her hour of ease.

From The Sun-fish, by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
© Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin 2009