Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025
Hayden Murphy – Review of Anton Floyd’s ‘Depositions’.
Gloir/Dazzling Spark Arts Foundation 2024
128 pages. Hardback.
Book available at: https://www.gaelicbooks.org/explore-the-shop/poetry/
To contact the author for interviews, readings, and other events:
castaly19@gmail.com
Living now in West Cork, with his wife, the artist Carole Anne Floyd, Egyptian born Anton Floyd describes himself as “a Levantine mix of Irish, Maltese, English and French Lebanese”. Whatever that makes him biologically, as a poet his adopted language is that of Universality. The eight poems in this multi-lingual publication voice the survival psalms of the displaced, choreographed as “depositions”. Its full title should read:
Teisteanasan/Teistiochtai/Tystiolaethau/
Deposiciouns/Depositions.
The five Major languages of this tiny archipelago of near nations between mainland Europe and the Atlantic are used. The original poems are rendered into Irish/Gaelic (Thaddeus O Buachalla/Seosamh Watson), Scots/Gaelic (Marcus Mac an Tuairneir), Welsh (Dafydd Owen), Scots (Gordon James Kerr) and, by Floyd himself, English.
I carefully avoid the word “translation” preferring the tender designation of Denise Levertov, “Reconstituting”. There is an informative Introduction by Seosamh Watson, Professor Emeritus of Modern Irish at UCD.
The poems start with a “reconstituted” version of St Patrick’s Prayer entitled here as Cry of the Hart or Nabil’s Shield. The poem is also known as both, “The Deer’s Cry” or St Patrick’s Breastplate (attributed to Anon, 8th century, by Kuno Meyer, in my still favourite English version). Added to the original’s plea to the “Creator of Creations” Floyd movingly, and convincingly, rails against:
Incantations of falsehood, against slurs of racism,
Against slogans of bigotry, against the craft of the zealot,
Against vested interests, against every practise that corrupts.
Concluding:
Let a full life return to my homeland. So be it.
The remaining poems are composed in tercets. To the eye they appear to be in Haiku format but many of them are compressed narratives closer in tone and theme to the longer, thirty-one syllable Tanka. For instance, the poem This Story concludes with
the thump of bombs
the random killings
a daily torture
The absence of punctuation lends itself to revealing narrative through subtle enjambment. The same poem opens:
this story
forged on the anvil
this rasping file
distant thunder
black smoke from the village
fringing the hills
unsettling
those sunset hills
hazed blood-red
The sombre tone continues in the second poem entitled Under a Black Star. In an echo of Joyce’s God “paring his fingernails” when looking at his creation (Floyd is a former pupil at Clongowes College) here we have:
of the dirt
under fingernails
paradise lost
We are among the
dispossessed
of all
but our shadows
Stars become “refracted tears” as:
mountains rise
distance silencing
the song of home
Menace intrudes in the shape of “torched homes”:
the cold black eye
of a cockatrice
a pointing gun-Barrel
There are:
tracks
from somewhere
to nowhere
Again, despair reappears in the final tercet:
exile is a forced road
under a black star
it leads nowhere
The bleakness ebbs a little in the third poem The Give and Take of the Sea, though ever present are “the fumes of war”. The presence of water seems to cauterise the wounded spirts. But then we read:
of the rescued
only the body
is unlost
We are back in the “underworld” washed by “brackish tears”. a world where “wave crests snare the moon/and the heart sinks”. Finally comes a “choice of coffins”.
There is a whiff of T.S. Eliot in the title of poem four: A Hollow Wasteland. We are allowed to eat at the table of hope. But “hope is a sin”. Europe is “knifing the sea”. Are there “transgressing borders? Who are the” welcome migrants”? There are no answers. The naming and shaming of it all is inhaled, exhaled: disdain in the eyes.
Asylum abroad feels
like a hollow wasteland
between drawn lines.
Maybe there will be a new kind of hope ahead?
bad weather here
and sometimes bad words
ah but no bombs
direct provision
won’t dot the i
in iota.
We are ready, or maybe just prepared, for the next poem New Omens
to forget
I speak to survive
a survivor’s truth
The exile is not only physical but emotional: I measure the year/by their death-days.
There is a recouping of distance, a reclaiming of difference, a reformation of days past but forever trapped in memory. Mnemosyne is a hard Mistress.
The poet is left
relocating
my childhood
my inner suburb
He populates this new colony in the poem entitled: A Map of Home.
The cartographer’s dilemma is the question of borders. How to keep them from becoming edges. The lemmings of anecdotal despair lead. The opening lines evoke “cradle songs”, leading to “the songs of exile” and the Beckett line “They gave birth astride of a grave” re-enters the mind.
distance cannot
stop my slow tears
even now
“pillaging memory” shifts the mental horizon and “the puppet masters” of memory take over control. Tercets leapfrog into each other:
all that’s left
the photo I carry
next to my heart
words won’t come
the sealing scars
You cannot see
over borders
cross
and double cross
We have arrived at the final poem Dark Times. Viewing a photo from the past “the day that we walked/out past ourselves” demands the poet recall, declaim:
mother tongue
words I can’t translate
exhaled breath
on my tongue
the names for food
I miss from Home
at home sighted
but I saw nothing
in exile home is all I see
That final line resonated with me as I realise that it is nearly sixty years since I first left Ireland to live and work elsewhere. A similar moment to when the soul kisses the body farewell. A small death. Similarly, I have brought with me a childhood custom:
the candle she lights
nightly in the window
That candlelight is solace to the exiled soul.
This was getting close to the heart. I exhaled and read on. The critic in me unwillingly recognised
strokes of a pen
draw scars
on innocent backs
Concluding
all we owned
clasping then letting go
the work of hands
mother tongue
each sound a contour
a map of home
happy once
now we sing of
the dark times
Elected silence. I abandon the pages.
This is being written on the day the clocks change in Scotland. Winter has invaded. Glaciers insert themselves in the mind. Threatening to pierce the heart. I allow myself a moment to pause. Recollect. Respond. The heat from the poems returns. Words thaw. The lights go on. The re-reading starts. Again.
This beautifully produced hardback publication is designed by the poet’s son Aodan Rilke Floyd and Sean O hAnnrachain. The text is interspersed by compelling and evocative illustrations (illuminations to my eye) by the poet’s wife Carole Anne Floyd. Proceeds from sales go to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.
© Hayden Murphy
Hayden Murphy is an Irish editor, literary critic, arts journalist and poet. He was born in Dublin, and brought up there and in Limerick. He was educated at Blackrock College and Trinity College, Dublin. During 1967-78 he edited, published, and personally distributed Broadsheet, which contained poetry and graphics. In the mid-1970s, he contributed reviews of collections and recordings of poetry to the Scottish politics, current affairs, history and the arts review, Calgacus. Selected works include: Flames of History, illustrations by John Behan (1999); Wedded Echoes (1995); Exile’s Journal: A Poem Sequence, with Hugh Bryden (June 1992); Broadsheet: Poetry, Prose and Graphics (1967-1978) & Exhibition Catalogue (1983); Places Of Glass (1979); Considering… (1977); Broadsheet, No.19 (1972); Poems (1967). Latest publication In The Ear of The Owl (2018 Roncadora Press). He lives in Edinburgh with his wife Frances Corcoran.
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, illustrated edition of Depositions translated into Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and Scots with an introduction by Professor Emeritus 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. He is an Associate at the Centre for Poetry Innovation at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.