Note: some of the links in this post will bring you to amazon.co.uk

Just under a year ago, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Marion Kelly for her Parlour Review on what was then known as FM 103.2 Anna Livia, but is now known as Dublin City FM, on the 103.2 FM band. (It’s Dublin only, I think).

Well, last night, to my surprise and pleasure, Marion came to interview me again, this time also recording a reading from The Water Star.
She spoke about matching my reading with Timothy O’Grady, reading, I think, from I Could Read The Sky.

There are a few wheels within wheels here. Just last week, I finally got around to buying the dvd of I Could Read the Sky, starring novelist and poet Dermot Healy, and while I’ve only managed to see about 20 minutes of it so far, both Healy and the film are amazing.

Also, I think I was introduced to Timothy by Matthew Sweeney in the Barbican in London many moons ago. As it happens, Matthew’s recently published poetry collection Black Moon has been shortlisted for this year’s T S ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY, and he has just taken up the position of Writer in Residence in Cork, which I think is in association with the Munster Literature Centre.

And here’s the final wheel: The Munster Literature Centre has just published Best of Irish Poetry 2008, edited by Bríd Ní Mhórain and Thomas McCarthy, which to my surprise and pleasure, includes a poem by yours truly, The Warm Stone. As it’s freely available on the web as part of my last collection under a Creative Commons licence, I’m sure the editors won’t mind if I post it here by way of an ad for Best of Irish Poetry 2008.

THE WARM STONE

Beneath the starlit sky
after the heat of the day,
we are talking quietly
of beliefs
which matter to us.

You’re seated on the porch,
wrapped in a shawl
against the chill.
I’m slouched
in a wicker chair.

For a precious interval
we have found the ease
of hard-won simplicity.

As when, in a heat haze,
a butterfly, like a hand
conducting a silent adagio,
comes to land on a stone,
then is still as the stone.
-Philip Casey



This work is licenced under a
Creative Commons Licence.
Included in Dialogue in Fading Light, available for free download from Irish Literary Revival.

But wheels within wheels aside, back to Marion’s Parlour Review.

103.2 Dublin City FM is now on Bebo
WWW.BEBO.COM/DUBLINCITYFM
and Parlour Review goes out at 1300 (1pm) on Tuesdays. Always worth a listen and I’m practically sure that if you tune in to
103.2 Dublin City FM you can hear it on the web.