Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2025
The Body Politic, 1982, poems by Anne Fitzgerald.
The Body Politic, 1982
after her shift at St. James’s,
nurse Bridie Gargan heard July’s
birdsong and bees flit
from daisy to clover until a bow-tied
gentleman with a lump
hammer, Malcom MacArthur
bludgeoned her to kingdom come, on
the feast of St. Mary Magdalene.
Three days later following a small
ad to Edenderry for Dónal Dunne’s farm
shotgun, he emptied the twelve
bore into Dunne’s cavity chest
wall. On the road back, a paper seller
spots MacArthur at Blackrock,
days before Garda arrest
him at the Attorney General’s Pilot View
pad. Rumours abounded.
Still government does not fall, despite
a Teflon Taoiseach’s GUBU remarks: Grotesque,
Unbelievable, Bizarre, Unprecedented.
Mac Arthur pleaded guilty only,
to nurse Gargan’s murder. The State
entered a Nolle Prosequi plea
for the life Dónal Dunne had
lived. Ensuring no public trial ensued
nothing came out in the wash.
Mac Arthur kept shtum.
Yet rumours abounded. Government
does not fall till, throwaway
phone-tapping talk, on television’s
Nighthawks brought it down
hook line and sinker, a decade later.
A released Mac Arthur
still speaks silence.
Yet, rumours run on.
Nolle Prosequi the normal effect of it is to leave matters as if charges had never been filed. It’s not an acquittal, which (through the principle of double jeopardy) prevents further proceedings against the defendant for the conduct in question.
This acronym GUBU (Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, Unprecedented) coined by Conor Cruise O’Brien, on foot of Taoiseach Charles J Haughey’s comment on this double murder, a phrase occasionally used in Irish political discourse to describe notorious scandals.
Nighthawks was an Irish television series (1988-1992), whose informal a late night café style content was current affairs and comedy.
Hitler in the Shelbourne
Eighteen-year-old
Bridget Dowling caught the eye
of hotelier Alois,
at the 1909 Dublin Horse Show.
Touring Europe
he claims before eloping to Stanhope
Liverpool. She bagged
a bragger in Alois,
former Shelbourne kitchen porter.
Handy with his fists,
he splits their marriage, fights
for the Fatherland.
Bridget sees out her days on Long
Island, reinvented.
Her brother in-law,
the failed artist, leaves us questioning
if Yahweh really exists.
The Little Club, Mayfair
— Albert Pierrepoint, 1977
* plentyn, is the Welsh word for child.
* Albert Pierrepoint was an English hangman.
© Anne Fitzgerald
Anne Fitzgerald was raised in Sandycove, Co. Dublin, Ireland and educated at Loreto Abbey Dalkey, Trinity College, Dublin (Law); and Queen’s University, Belfast (MA in Creative Writing).
Not to Scale (2024) is Anne’s fifth poetry collection. In 2006 Anne founded Forty Foot Press in addition to two Schools’ Publishing Houses. She is widely anthologised and has edited, produced and designed four anthologies of young adults’ poetry.
She is a recipient of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Writer-in-Residence bursary at The Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco. She has taught Creative Writing extensively across Ireland, Iceland and the United States of America. Anne lives in Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, Ireland.
For biography visit Forty Foot Press at http://www.fortyfootpress.ie/anne-fitzgerald.html
A fabulous CV
Very clever poem Body Politic
Says everything in punch and yes he still speaks in silence
My dad often spoke of Ruth Ellis
Fabulous punchy way you have of bringing history, tragedy and crime of passion into the prism of poem with hangman name,
dubious lover and Ruth Ellis,
You juxtapose the gift of Easter egg along with the wild despair of a woman scorne
2nd poem will have to do my homework on, factually but love the style of writing
Severely talented
Patricia