Anton Floyd – Nostos

Floyd LE P&W 2 Nov-Dec 2024

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two November-December 2024

Nostos, poems by Anton Floyd.


Hey Richard Culmer

for James Harpur

Hey Richard Culmer
Puritan divine,
iconoclast, hater
of painted glass,
say, if you want
white light, go outside.
A stand of broad oaks
can be your cathedral.
Or would you there
shed summer leaves
and sever branches
make nature bend
its knee, conform
to your austere worship?


December Solstice Gougane

for Joe and Anne Creedon

The mountains are in command.
They solemnise the dusk.
They wear a vestment of heather,
the hues accented by slants
of purple light in the evening sky.
The waters round Gougane’s
holy island brim with winter.
Stop here with me. There
in the treetops, where mist
clings to the branches
like a lacy surplice
the breeze might be
the sound of ghost-brothers
chanting vespers, and here,
the lakewater’s shoreline whisper
the antiphon, O Rex Gentium.


A Small Island Somewhere
– on reading Akhmatova

A small island somewhere beckons –
a world of rock and fields and secret trees,
where the eye is drawn seaward,
and the weather daily changes habit.

A life beckons where of an evening
islanders stop to chat or empathise.
The murmur of voices is something
foraging bees might understand.

On the mainland we live pressed,
governed by crude formalities
and skewed agendas like hard winters
break into our sentences.

So yes, I could forgo the city
with its gaudy rumours of fame.
In crowds like a shifting gloom
the Muse is stifled and barely audible.


© Anton Floyd

Anton Floyd was born in Cairo, Egypt, a Levantine mix of Irish, Maltese, English and French Lebanese. Raised in Cyprus, he lived through the struggle for independence and the island remains close to his heart. Educated in Ireland, he studied English at Trinity College, Dublin and University College Cork. He has lived and worked in the Eastern Mediterranean.  Now retired from teaching, he lives in West Cork. Poems published and forthcoming in Ireland and elsewhere. Poetry films selected for the Cadence Poetry Film Festival (Seattle, 2023) and the Bloomsday Film Festival (James Joyce Centre 2023), another, Woman Life Freedom, dedicated to the women of Iran, was commissioned by IUAES. Several times prize-winner of the Irish Haiku Society International Competitions; runner-up in Snapshot Press Haiku Calendar Competition. Awarded the DS Arts Foundation Prize for Poetry (Scotland 2019). Poetry collections, Falling into Place (Revival Press, 2018) and Depositions (Doire Press, 2022); a special edition of Depositions translated into Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and Scots with an introduction by Professor Seosamh Watson (Gloír, 2024). New collections On the Edge of Invisibility and Singed to Blue are in preparation. Newly appointed UNESCO – RILA affiliate artist at the University of Glasgow.

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