Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2026
Uileann, poems by Arthur Broomfield.
Uileann
A man on a kitchen chair
Is playing a lament
on the Uileann pipes.
You hear the sighs, the
intakes of breath.
The dirge.
.
A figure, in a gown
that shimmers from her shoulders
kisses the unruly vetch.
She’s drifting five or six sheep
from the shadow.
Her back the last rays of twilight.
Then the curlew’s cry—
a purge gushes from Glenbarrow—
anoints the melody
that curves and stretches
on the eider fleece,
as the sun dips below Upper Sconce.
You are one
with the cryptic moon
that presumes
a situation beyond Cullenagh.
After Francis Bacon
Portrait of John Edwards, 1988
Picture a rectangle
raised in the ensign of Treblinka
set in a surround
of smouldering vegetation.
A man is balanced, cross-legged,
on a two-legged bamboo chair.
He is the written question.
The answer –
from the clatter and jostles
of the steam train,
its carriages crammed
with poets and harlots –
is belched out in hisses,
eerier smoke,
and lurches on.
His body burns upwards,
from his melting
to a pink puddle left foot,
to his charred ribcage
[the passe memory card],
that had jumped and danced
to the rhythms of who knows what,
the hands that painted his last hues
on noon’s molten bones.
Is this the son of man
in his click clock hour?
Even if his eye is closed
his Sphinx stare looks
beyond the hellish sun.
Does he sense the love flame,
its colours,
that nicks the soft tissue,
below his head stone?
© Arthur Broomfield
Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer, novelist and Beckett scholar from County Laois, Ireland. He has published six collections of poetry including At Home in Ireland: New and selected Poems. (Revival Press, Limerick. 2023). His study on the works of Samuel Beckett: The Empty Too: language and philosophy in the works of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014) is a recognized work on Beckett. Dr Broomfield is a regular contributor to academic conferences and journals. He delivers workshops writing poetry and short stories. His poetry has been published in journals in the UK, USA, Canada, China and India. Dr Broomfield’s current work is the novel An Ireland of Snakes and Bollards Savoy Press, Limerick.