 Welcome viewers to our ongoing program Focus coming to you from the Channel 17 Studio Center for Media and Democracy here in Burlington, Vermont. I'm your host Margaret Harrington and viewers I'm very delighted today to have our show with Angela Patton, the poet and senior lecturer at the University of Vermont. Dublin-born Angela is and we're kicking off the Burlington Irish Heritage Festival with a reading from Angela's poems here in the studio and I have in front of me her books of poetry that have so far been published still listening, reliquaries and in praise of usefulness by Angela Patton and Angela is an award-winning poet and a wonderful a wonderful subject for our title of the show which is the Irish woman's voice in poetry and to begin it I'm going to read from high T at a low table and it's a story of a working-class girl growing up in horse and cart Dublin in the 1950s and 60s and Angela strives to find her own voice amid the insistent clamor of family and clergy and the summer and the summons and lure of an unruly American future so here we are stories from an Irish childhood high T at a low table by Angela Patton and I will start it off and Angela the poet herself will pick it up chapter one on a sunny February afternoon in 1984 I drove into the parking lot at the University of Vermont in Burlington and found a parking space and switched off the ignition then I held my breath waiting for the explosion the Subaru was a real lemon in color and condition I bought it for $500 when I left my marriage and moved into an apartment on my own I was clueless about cars and terrified of driving but I had to be able to pick up my son and deliver him to school I didn't realize I would need to pour four to pour quarts of oil into the engine every day and I cracked the block in my first month of ownership I had to borrow another $500 to get it fixed but the car still had a few disturbing quirks for an intelligent girl you can be very foolish my mother would have said clucking her tongue in disapproval but she was far away in Dublin and blissfully ignorant about my troubles I put the thought out of my head and reflected instead on the romantic poetry class I had just attended and the anthropology exam scheduled for next day I was a full-time English major putting myself through college with the help of a half-time secretarial job in the Center for Developmental Disabilities as a 32 year old single mother in school with 19 year olds I felt somewhat developmentally delayed myself my son moved unhappily back and forth between me and his dad spending exactly half his week with each parent it was a fractured existence but I clung to my poetry and literature studies like a drowning sailor to a spar not sure whether to cry for help or just keep paddling I was walking toward the rear of the building when I noticed a young man coming towards me I registered brown hair slight build faded plaid shirt he repeatedly glanced right and left as he approached perhaps he's lost or has car trouble I thought preparing to offer assistance in my friendly Irish way get back in the car he hissed I stared at him hardly able to believe my ears I looked around quickly noticing how quiet the usually crowded parking lot was not a soul in sight I was about to run in the opposite direction when the man took a gun from his pocket and pointed it at me it was a small handgun that fits snugly in his palm the steel barrel caught the sunlight and shone like a jewel what was I to do this wasn't a story I had read in a book it was the real world cutting in as if the radio of my thoughts had gone suddenly dead the weapon created an immediate intimacy between us there was something obscene about its sudden intrusion I felt the rest of the world the parking lot full of snow dusted cars and the red brick office building gilded in the pale light of the afternoon fall away under my feet my head felt light as if detached from the rest of my body I began to fumble in my bag for the car key don't make me use this the man said in a shaky voice okay okay take it easy I managed to mumble I could tell by his face that he was serious suddenly there was no question about what I should do we both understood the simple universal language of violence I got back in the car on the passenger side he took my keys and started the engine as we drove down the street I kept seeing people I knew but they were oblivious to me we turned the corner onto Colchester Avenue and I thought about jumping out at the traffic lights lock that door the man barked suddenly I obeyed sinking back into my seat please read chapter two and now for something entirely different chapter two it was far from guns and kidnappers I was reared as my father might have said I grew up during the 1950s and 60s in sally noggin a working-class neighborhood about seven miles south of Dublin city this was an era in which the ragman the slop man and the coal man still came to our doorsteps with horses and carts and mr. burn the milkman arrived on his bicycle to laid loose milk from a tilly can in this pre technological world stories were our entertainment and our sustenance the nuns at school terrorized us with tales of leprosy and the foreign missions black babies desperately in need of baptism and sudden appearances by celestial beings the radio brought plays sponsored programs and serialized stories for children there were true stories too like the assault by a priest that cost my father his eye my narrow escape from being sent to an orphanage and my first cousin's discovery that the woman he had always called and Kathleen was really his mother over at all lay my mother's mellifluous but incessant talking that formed the foundation of my literary education my mother and her relations were all great talkers if they had been runners they could have competed at the marathon level my father on the other hand came from silent country people and he was always warning us not to be talking to strangers country people my mother explained were moody and secretive they're too quiet and they never tell you about their affairs she said of our rural relations but they're nosy enough to find out everything about you mother or mammy was born Annie Elizabeth Mary swords in 1913 the daughter of a sailor from the north side of Dublin and a seamstress from the county Wicklow she grew up in glass tulle Dublin cheek by jowl with countless relations and innumerable neighbors a stone's throw from the seaside the shops the red brick harold national school that she attended until the age of 13 and glass tulle church where she married my father in 1948 her relations were all sailors and we loved her stories of their adventures on the high seas with the british navy and the descriptions of the silk fans lace shawls and other exotic gifts they brought back from foreign parts dad on the other hand was a culture born in 1918 in adinstown county mead he grew up in a small whitewashed house on one acre of land his father had been born in the house next door and although his five brothers emigrated to america the move from one house to another was the only one our grandfather made for the rest of his life these fundamental differences formed the basis of our identity as children we were irish we were catholic we were poor and our parents were as different as chalk and cheese i grew up among mammy's jovial Dublin relations in a world that was filled with sounds harsh sweet and various there were the murmured prayers of the priests at mass the hymn singing of nuns at school the shouts of children on the street the rasping lilt of paper boys the rumble of double-decker buses the metrical chuffing of steam trains and the rhythm of dad's infectious fiddle playing but the world came in at my ear most of all through mammy's melodious voice as she recited poems and platitudes dispensed advice sang irish songs retold the novels she read at night and entertained us with the story of her life as she cooked and cleaned and cared for us i was a shy fearful bookish child and it was a long time before i discovered my own voice still longer before i developed the courage to use it for my own storytelling as a poet and writer even within her own loquacious family mammy was famous for her incessant talking her voice was like a radio that was never turned off it was the soundtrack to my childhood as constant and inevitable as the rain dad was always telling us to keep to ourselves don't be gassing and talking telling everyone your business should they live in your ear if you'd let them he'd say but mammy was incorrigibly garrulous and friendly dad tried to reign her in but telling mammy to stop talking was like trying to stop an avalanche with her bare hands although her formal education was brief she left school at 13 to work in lennards greengrocer shop in dunleary she had a marvelous memory and a non-erring ear for language she remembered all the rhymes of her childhood including the one she and other catholic children used to sing to tease the salvation army followers as they rang their bells along dunleary seafond promenade the salvation army free from sin they all went to heaven in a sardine tin there were other rhymes that memorialized the various outbreaks of disease like the one about hoop and cuff my mammy told me not to play with you not because you're dirty not because you're clean because you got to hoop and cuff for meat margarine my childhood memories are inextricably linked with mammy's quotations from long fellow shakespeare and tenison her favorite advice was to thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man she had once played Porsche in a school production of the merchant of Venice 30 years later she recited speeches with relish the quality of mercy is not strange she'd declaim as she cleaned the hearth on her hands and knees it dropped with as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath she entertained us with droll recitations of the owl and the pussycat or acted out the tragedy of the wreck of the hesperous i could just picture the captain lashing his little daughter to the mast her long skirt billowing out behind her and the waves crashing over the deck if i didn't go to school i met the scholars coming back mammy said proudly she was an avid reader of adventure stories which she devoured in bed after we were asleep next morning we'd beg her to tell us about the latest chapter of the sign of the spider set in deepest darkest Africa or the dog Crusoe set in Canada's frozen north mammy seemed to have a bottomless well of proverbs and pithy phrases that she ladled out unexpectedly and with unflagging enthusiasm it's many a man's mouth that broke his nose she'd say and what you don't want is dear at a farthing her plentiful platitudes were irritating when she used them as spurs to better behavior the sun is splitting the stones she'd announce as she maneuvered around our beds to whisk open the curtains in the morning there is a tiding the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune all four of us children slept in the same small room for years fiercely guarding the tiny territory of her individual beds from the others in the meantime however mammy had us all at her mercy let us then be up and doing she'd say as she attempted to pry us out of bed when i was your age i used to be up with the lark riding my bicycle through the wicklow mountains exploring this countryside instead of sleeping my life away there was always an implied comparison between us lazy good for nothing's and she herself who was up earliest and doing the most ah don't be always giving out our susan would plead from her untidy nest in the corner none of us least of all dad could fathom her gift for memorization or endless aphorisms and household hints leave it to annie he would tell us rolling his eyes she'll always have the last word the radio with its pink satin face sat in the cupboard beside the fireplace in the living room it was the center of the household and it taught me early on to love the spoken word it brought us news game shows comedy programs and advice to the lovelorn in a series of half hour programs that were sponsored by companies like imco cleaners and diers jacob's biscuits fry cadbury chocolate and glenn abbey makers of fine nylon stockings mami loved woman's page a sponsored program hosted by frankie burn this is frankie burn with woman's page the husky voice would commence a program for and maybe about you now the problems we were discussing today may not be yours but they could be someday in any event woman's page draws its material from the lives and events of real people i was fascinated by the unhappy housewives who called into the program and the glimpse of a grown-up world full of romance and heartbreak frankie always followed her advice with an upbeat song by frank sanatra by way of consolation or so i assumed when she wasn't listening to the radio mami was always singing one of her favorite songs was the blackbird of sweet avondale about the tragic irish leader charles steward parnell she sang as she washed the breakfast dishes or peeled the potatoes ballads about young men like roddy mccorley and kevin barry who marched cheerfully to their executions so that old ireland might be free the songs made me almost unbearably sad and i begged her to please stop singing before i burst into tears the cupboard under the stairs held mami's treasured cookbooks and handwritten recipes a purple chocolate box full of family photographs and an album with lipstick images of gary cooper and rudolf valentino from her romantic girlhood we kept our own bits and bobs in wooden orange crates beside our beds and we wore our cousins cast off clothes we licked our dinner plates and wiped our faces on our sleeves but mami read aloud to us from charlotte's web and the wind in the willows and we thought we were the luckiest family in creation in marked contrast to mami dad was quiet serious and suspicious of strangers he loved rivers and trout fishing no matter how long he lived in dublin he always referred to county mead as home he had the mead chronicle delivered to the local news agent's shop and he devoured every word of it on saturday afternoons when he sat in his special chair by the fireplace he often went home at the weekends to shoot and fish with our uncle john when he came back on the bus on sunday night he laid his brown cardboard suitcase down on a chair and clicked to open the locks there resting on the sheets of newspaper would be a beautiful pheasant or a fresh speckled trout he had caught that afternoon and wanted mami to prepare for dinner dad also went sea fishing off the east pier and done leery on summer evenings i loved to trail behind and watch him toss the flat fish with their glassy orange eyes into the rock pool by the shore i stared down into the seas black depths and brooded happily for hours at home mami tossed the fresh fish in batter and deep fried them and we feasted night after night on their succulent white flesh dad hated to be cold and like a cat he detested getting wet feet so he would never even put his toe into the freezing waters of the irish sea no matter the season he always wore a tweed cap for fear of getting his head wet the cap was a nondescript brown color that had molded itself to the exact shape of his head hair oil had softened the leather band inside to a kid glove texture dad automatically reached for it every time he left the house set it in place on his head and adjusted the brim with a practice gesture he raised the cap to salute acquaintances on the street on sundays he wore a felt hat out of respect for the sabbath but he always donned the cap again on monday mornings dad loved irish music and he played the fiddle on saturday nights in the backrooms of various pubs although he never touched a drop of alcohol he didn't have mami's gift of the gab but he was a dab hand at making up stories straight out of his head we all loved his story about sonny the black doll i passionately wanted a black doll although the only non-white people i'd ever seen in the flesh were one or two indian medical students in dublin and a chinese doctor at st michael's hospital in dunleary for that matter the only non-catholics i'd ever seen were the protestant girls from clarinda park school in glass tulle when they marched in a long line down to the seafront for their chaperoned weekend walks they were matching dark blue uniforms with funny looking flat hats on their heads they were fairly exotic but i thought black people must be even more so and i insisted that i wanted a black doll dad promised to bring one back from one of his trips to visit his sisters in summer set when he came home with the doll in hand he told us all about the trip you see the trouble was that sonny had never been in a plane before he said handing over my new toy and she wanted to try everything we had never been in a plane either only to the airport so we could easily relate to sonny's feelings it was a twin-engined coat of airplane he went on i sat her down beside me in her own seat and fastened her in with the seatbelt she loved the sugar cubes the air hostess brought for her all individually wrapped in paper they were just the right size for a doll dad always brought sugar cubes home for us from his various trips to england so we nodded gravely at this detail everything would have been fine except that sonny kept slipping out of her seatbelt to go exploring she has a naturally curious disposition dad said i held sonny out in front of me she did seem to have a mischievous glint in her black eyes a drop of diviment was what dad called it one time she disappeared and i couldn't find her anywhere he continued he and the air hostess searched all over the plane and finally discovered sonny down in the baggage compartment i was never so relieved in my life he said dad's story gave sonny so much life that she took on a personality that the other dolls eileen roshin and belinda never achieved a few years later when sonny's eyes fell into the back of her head dad came to the rescue he took her out to his shed pried off the top of her head and replaced the rubber band that held her eyes in place now a lana he said handing me the doll you do well to keep her very quiet for a few days she's just undergone eye surgery i was terribly impressed and followed his instructions to the letter oh i love that angela thank you so much thank you have it do you need a little drink of water or something now before you start now this the first one of your books that was published was still listening yes and that was uh you launched that at uh at the i the writer's center in uh in dublums oh how marvelous that must have been the wonderful thing was my dad was there and he was so proud he was thrilled and um i was delighted to be able to do that you know well you really brought your your young life alive there and we can see you as the little girl with taking everything in and remembering it and describing it so beautifully thank you so much so would you would you start now with with some and still listening sure i would love if if you would read yeah something i just wanted to say um that the memoir in a way is a bit of an introduction to the poems because they overlap and go back and forth between you know that life and the one i have now and um i think of still listening as being probably the most irish of the books you know or the closest to that experience anyway um sure i'd love to read something so you're going to start off with fire song right yeah and i think you'd be able to see some of the um the life that i described in the memoir in in some other ways okay fire song on saturdays the coal man in blackface upended his sack in a dusty heap at our back door father shoveled the jagged lumps into our shed where jackdaws rose beaked and furious to squawk at him from the flapping dark mother acolyte to the gods of the hearth knelt down to rake the ashes after breakfast she carried cinders in a bucket to the yard twisted newspapers crisscrossed kindling erecting an altar of coal and turf that pulsed with a tabernacle light when father arrived at six o'clock we froze in place looking for clues to gauge his mood he stood with his back to the fire rubbing his hands together rainwater pouring off his bicycle cape the poor we have always with us he muttered as steam rolls from his trouser legs and to him that hath not even that which he thinketh he hath shall be taken away she shooed the cat from his chair eyeing us into obedience then raked the fire to give us alphabets on our legs and make our chillblanes burn she fed him with the meat that men must have we gathered around the table to watch him mix colman's mustard in a wooden bowl the spoon trembling in his work man's hands three thousand miles and a lifetime away the radiators hiss and spit like vipers reminding me to mourn that hub of heat around which we clustered drawn together by a light we thought perpetual i love that thank you so wonderful to read with you and you're so well i we we met traveling on a bus we did it was such so serendipitous and now here we are and your and viewers where it's going to continue on just for a little bit and it's so great yeah well i've always loved having conversations with you so um shall i read another yes okay um i i mentioned in the memoir um about the milk man who delivered milk to the door and um and this is about that milk man it's called loose milk mr burn carried a milk churn on the front of his bicycle he arrived every evening at our front door constant as the rain that dripped from the brim of his brown cap he wore a cloth coat in summer and a heavy brown overcoat belted in the middle when the long evenings closed in when she heard his knock you could set your clock by him mother sent us to the door with a battered saucepan mr burn ladled the milk with a tilly can smiling his mild smile as he backed away into the darkness on fridays she took her handbag down from the top shelf to pay the bill and even after the glass bottles caught on she continued to take in the loose milk jack's a decent poor devil father said and the laborer is worthy of his hire in those days the thatch pub was still thatched and joe galler's pig farm reeked familiarly from the top road the slop man collected our leavings on a horse and cart mother washed her hands of dishes and took us to the seaside every day i thought the shapes the rocks took on of armchair sofa table where a secret only i could fathom when we walked home with our tugs and wet sausages under our arms past the bird's nest home for Protestant children and the beehive-shaped bomb shelter on the swans hollow when everyone turned out for the procession on those warm sundays in may the girls in starched communion veils the women with miraculous medals on pale blue ribbons around their necks the dark-suited men's sedality walking fore abreast all of us singing hymns and saying the rosary past the front gardens where the old and sick were set out with the holy pictures among the flowers those were days i couldn't wait to flee convinced that somewhere lay a larger world where bread came wrapped in plastic and milk was cold and cartoned but now in dreams i'm flying over pierce close and ororx park over rollins villas and the shops and factories sally noggin still has fields of bluebells and cow slips and jack burn rides his wobbly bicycle through the rain with the milk churn rattling the handlebars then when i awaken confused by links of flesh and geography i want to suck on that loose milk until the cows come home oh i love i love that angela and what comes i see it's so visual your poetry is so visual and you make the past into the present so it comes alive to us oh thank you and then i'm thinking you know they say a picture is worth a thousand words but for you a word is worth a thousand pictures i suppose you could say that i've always been kind of audio rather than visual and of course we didn't have television until i was about 12 because my father refused to have it until ireland got its own station you know and so he wasn't going to have british television in his house but um i was so lucky to grow up with the radio rather than television although of course we loved television but it was still very restricted back then you know and we all the whole family though loved words right wasn't just myself you know yeah but it's a gift i mean you were taking it all in and you you you have it and and you're giving it to us oh thank you so it's so great okay now what's next now let's see well i'm wondering um this one uh some of these have a lot of similar images in them but i was thinking of reading this one tatch pub okay 1958 i mentioned the tatch pub in the previous poem but it was down the street from us and um and it really did have a tatch in those days now it's a big ugly barn of a place but there are a couple of things about this poem it begins with grand national sunday the grand national is a steeple chase that's run in england i believe every two years right still is so and also my parents didn't drink at all they they were teetotalers or pioneers as they were called in ireland and so my father hardly ever went to the pub and this was just a special occasion and then um uh tato crisps are chips in this country and then wood binds are a particularly vile cigarette right um so with those are i think i think i have to um uh tatch pub 1958 it was grand national saturday and our father never a betting man had put a shilling each way for the four of us on a horse called oxo after his dinner we trailed him to the patch to see the race running a gauntlet of cap shadowed glances as the men looked up from their pints to gawk at the strangers i think the world was completely brown then the smoke filled air the done colored caps of the drinkers the dark oak of the bar and deeper dark of porter chased with a swirl of whiskey the smell you'd sometimes get in the early morning after it rained when you walked over a metal grating and caught the waft of stale ale and wood binds rising up from the depths our father thin as a whipet among stout fattened neighbors beckoned the bar man while we clung to his coattails he brought us orange crush poured sideways into tall harp glasses and tato crisps tasting of smoke and beer the television blared from among the dusty bottles on a corner shelf all eyes were glued to oxo when our sister nervous as a thoroughbred clamped her teeth down hard and bit a piece from the fluted edge of the glass chaos then everyone yelling don't swallow spit it out quick now there there you'll be right as rain in a minute but what struck me then as now was the suddenness with which everything can change one minute you're holding on to your father safe as houses the next you've bitten through some invisible membrane and the world in garish riley is shouting at you while you stand there like a gormless eget you're melt filling up with fizzy liquid and delicate shards of glass actually that word gormless is what started the thing my brother picked that up from the lads at work oh to be an eget is to be really stupid but a gormless eget is hopeless all together you know well let's and now we go into this one the reliquary right i suppose that's sort of in order um yeah i actually have to say that in this one uh because i kept having to explain irish words i actually put a little glossary in the back which was fun um to try to figure out which words might not be known in america or which were irish expressions so that was kind of fun for me to do so you put in gormless then well no that was the in the other one yeah um bunch of things um and this one feels a bit out of date to me at this stage well they all do but um in this one i was kind of experimenting in this book with an alter ego or persona um my original name was goggins and the original form of that was decogan and um uh a norman name apparently uh the original decogan was milo decogan who was a norman knight and went to ireland in 1170 so um my brother loves genealogy and he's done an awful lot of work on it but anyway i was experimenting with decogan as a as a persona to get away from the first person pronoun this one's called extremities ask any woman about her flaws and she'll describe them with enthusiasm ask decogan her slender fingers calcifying under hard up thrusts of cartilage struggling awkwardly with jars and bottle openers all deafness lost and long forgotten impossible not to feel pity for the hands divorced from the rest of the body unattractive harbingers of ruin they're useless as a bent fork or artificial nails on a house cat decogan's other parts have caught the news on shortwave radio her knee bones crack with a sound like twigs breaking underfoot she remembers her mother's hands better now than the rest of her body before she died the fingers swell so that the delicate bones with their flanged tips grew thick their fine intelligence blunted dull how smartly they used to crack the eggs against the side of a bowl smooth the pages of their old black prayer book slip the blue rosary beads between their graceful joints while her lips moved in time with their rhythm her whispered prayers rising and falling like the low drone of insects on a summer's day maturity means knowing that things end decogan knows the day will come when there will be no more putting things on the long finger these aches and spasms say that she's alive so this is how it goes she tells herself i can't get over it i'm noticing at the end of the of the last poem till the cows come home and then i can't get over it at the end of that it that's lovely it it just it just gets you in into it more i love it well of course some my Irish accent is such a hybrid now but it's always in the turns of phrase that you hear it yes yes and they do come back okay so where are we going to let's see i'm just being very arbitrary about what to read here um i spent reliquaries was written after my mother died and so a lot of it is about her and um in fact she died on march 14th 1988 and i found myself talking to her in my head without any belief in an afterlife i had these conversations with her and this is one of them it's called home improvements mother i just have to tell you about my new appliances you wouldn't believe the way i've come up in the world i only wish you were still around to see it my refrigerator has an automatic ice maker and a filtered water dispenser on the door and you know that's not the half of it with my glass top stove my food processor and my dream home laundry room i'm thinking of our tiny scullery at home and the great improvement you thought it was when someone gave you an early model washer there was no more than a dasher in a metal box never mind it took up most of the floor space hopping around like a hen on a hot griddle and you had to boil the water by yourself all the mod cons you murmured as if you were saint an the patron saint of housewives awestruck by a visit from the blessed virgin you were thinking of your own mother's long labor on wash day mondays the two ways stretching and snapping of lace curtains the oppressive weight of wet woolen clothing the scrubbing board and the hard bars of unkind laundry soap still i have days of misery and self-pity there are gray as last week's laundry get out in the fresh air you'd say and thank god for your health and strength your good fortune and you'd be right of course except for the god part which won't wash with me in any shape or form but i didn't come here to argue only to give you an update i'd like to think you're off in the hinterlands still interested in recipes and kitchen gadgets still believing i can be improved oh and you're still arguing i've never stopped arguing you know my son says i'm the most stubborn person he's ever met and actually i've always been like that you know and and often not in a sensible way well at least just stopped here i didn't come here to argue i was lying that's from my teeth so what's wondering if we should move on to something else or should i well you you go with what you want and i think we'll amend we'll cut the maybe the Irish language okay and and we'll just continue on with yours and so all right if you can stand it that's of course i can stand it this is um this is a poem i wrote after my father's death uh my father died um at age 88 on his birthday which was the 12th of may and um uh he had been alone without my mother for a very long time 15 years which he never expected but we all went home for the funeral um i think it's fairly self-explanatory it's called that's all okay in the wake of our father's funeral we visit the cramped house where we all grew up bringing our own children with us to re-enact the receiving line we fled in a body back at the church and cemetery we cluster like bedraggled birds in the front doorway then fan out into hall and sitting room scullery and yard tentative at first because it's odd isn't it to be there without him sitting in his hard chair next to the heater that conceals the old coal fireplace saying close the door there's a terrible draft and isn't the weather very poor for your visit we're not expecting much knowing he threw out everything except the letters and the photographs as if accusing god of unfair treatment after our mother died the grandchildren knows around pointing out the pictures of themselves in all the faunal phases of their lives how small it all appears from the wrong end of the telescope we open drawers to find a pile of letters in our mother's hand our proof of the lovers they have been impossible to think his bones are resting now one up one down in their double storied grave and all her fleshy warmth turned to dust and i don't care what they say he wasn't lovely in his blue suit and blue tie and dry clean suit as the undertaker who was naturally a friend of a relation kept repeating and i can't get over his white hands or the taste of marble forehead on my lips there are the letters we have written over all our years away from home unopened gifts of dress shirts and their crackling packages new socks and pairs like courting couples the sets of fancy luggage he forgot to use sometimes he'd show up with nothing but a comb and toothbrush clutched in a plastic bag where was the leather travel kit i sent you for your birthday you'd ask him but he'd only smile and shake his head there wasn't much he wanted just the odd trip to a part of ireland he hadn't seen in years to admire the changes wrought by e-u grants new houses popping up like toadstools in the west for sons and daughters coming home from exile not like it used to be when he carried water for his mother's tea from the pump up the road then gathered kindling for a fire to boil the kettle before rural electrification lit up the land and all the old ghosts down their tools and fled no there really wasn't much he wanted just the music session down cultus on a wednesday night a lift up to the church for choir practice after mass on sunday his dahlias and tomatoes in the greenhouse a nice slice of apple tart a biscuit with his tea a little company and conversation that's all he's a wonderful man yeah comes through in in that poem and of course then i had i had read about him in high tea at a low table so indeed he was a wonderful man and i argued with him every day of my adolescence and drove him crazy oh would you like me to read the Irish poem or or will i go on to something i think that we will we'll end on on your in praise of usefulness okay sure that's fine and then we'll say you know this is a celebration of of the woman's voice and of your woman's voice in poetry in Irish poetry in poetry i'm the Irish woman's voice in poetry your voice and Angela thank you so much for coming here my pleasure and and viewers we refer you to the how do you pronounce it Karig bin right means sweet rock in Irish um and named after the place we used to live in Jonesville which was basically a rock farm a gorgeous place up in the woods oh that's you that's you and your partner yeah my husband Daniel yeah Daniel Lusk a poet Daniel Lusk um and we we called our place in Jonesville Karig bin and then we decided to keep the name for our website as well of course and um it's stuck so yeah and we share a website but um there are our books are on there and readings and audio and all sorts of and you're both award-winning poets and we are supposed to be wonderful wonderful so thank you so Angela what we're going to do the in praise of usefulness right uh yes if you like the poems from there and let's see now that will be just wonderful think of something that isn't um i'll read this one called signs okay uh i don't think it needs any explanation even after i got over all religion abandoned the very idea of an afterlife i kept looking for a sign some directional signal that would indicate stay or go this man or the other like an amputee's limb that continues to agitate after being severed i wanted answers that were clear unequivocal a mathematical equation a cardinal number the answer it turned out was more like one of those infuriating mystery novels where you get to choose which door your poor protagonist will open as he fumbles for the light switch in the dark i've never found a sign that wasn't wish fulfillment a mock-up of my own creation like last night driving home i found myself meandering down a road i'd never seen before i had no idea which direction i should take and for a while i drove as if lifted out of time cut off from the current of my own existence no tether tying me to either end exhilarating really to feel so free and the sunset which i hardly ever noticed was spectacular all reds and purples deepening to twilight i passed two horses cropping late october grass by the roadside the pond behind them a cup of light that tipped their mains and tails with mercury but i know better than to call that luminous ploy important a sign i've always wondered if my real life was being lived by some doppelganger on another dimension of google.com hang out your shingle they used to say and mine might well read under construction come back later closed for repairs i love that angela i love all the poems and you're so kind and this is a treat for all of us to to read poetry is to listen and poetry is such a private act right there you are alone and but you you need to communicate that's right that's right there's always a reader out there and of course all poets want to be heard listen to and exchange those experiences with other people you know or i think give them that experience or offer it i should say um but yeah i mean sometimes i feel as if all my writing is a homage to my parents and a kind of um penance for all i did wrong but that's another story oh well will you lead us out then with with this last poem oh sure you agreed and absolutely thank you so much angela patin oh my pleasure thank you to help celebrate the burlington irish heritage festival too here in burlington you're living right here and and teaching at the university of vermont and you have such a a communal spirit too with with the other poets also you know that's very important to me yeah being an emigrant and uh i was terribly homesick when i first came here and having people around friends and community is a huge part of my life you know um it's really my security you know and and a pleasure too and not to mention conversation with people like yourself you know okay such a pleasure angela thank you so much i i'm going to end with a rather tongue-in-cheek um poem here uh i have a friend with whom i liked to go occasionally to the spa in stow i haven't done that for a long time but on occasion it's called in which a day at the spa reminds me of the asylum at san rome de provance we loiter in the spa's hushed sanctuary amid the ferns and falderol like hopeful penitence in white robes and plastic sandals waiting to hear our names discreetly called for treatment masquerading as a pair of well-heeled wives with legs long as the pedigrees of pampered house pets we are the utter monkey's uncle the genuine cat's pajamas later strolling in the spa's walled garden among the culinary herbs and flowers i cannot help but think of vincent and his brother theo walking arm and arm around the asylum at san rome de provance was this what tortured him i wonder this absurd disparity between the pampered and the paupers still it's hard to stop my mouth from watering at the prospect of the body butter rose petals and pomegranate polish some faceless staff person will slather on our skins preparing us to act like happy lunatics when visiting our rolls round there you are thank you i can't resist having fun with it thank you so much thank so much and thank you viewers watch this again and again if you can goodbye for now