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    Return of the Gift
    Return of the Gift
    Return of the Gift
    Ebook123 pages40 minutes

    Return of the Gift

    By Michael O'Neill

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    About this ebook

    Michael O'Neill's Return of the Gift is a volume about what is given and what is lost. Writing unsentimentally and with insight about powerful subjects such as the death of his mother, caring for his father, and his own recent diagnosis of cancer, the poet speaks of and to his personal and historical life and also explores themes of elegy and friendship. Memories are woven vividly throughout a thematically varied yet coherent collection, in which a witty and moving pleasure in living and language is always to the fore.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArc Publications
    Release dateJun 18, 2018
    ISBN9781911469483
    Return of the Gift
    Author

    Michael O'Neill

    Michael O’Neill was born in Aldershot in 1953 and moved to Liverpool in 1960. He read English at Exeter College, Oxford, and from 1979 he lectured in English at Durham University, where he was Professor of English and Assistant Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics. He co-founded and co-edited Poetry Durham from 1982 to 1994. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 1983 for his poetry and a Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1990. His four previous collections of poems are The Stripped Bed (Collins Harvill, 1990), Wheel (Arc, 2008), Gangs of Shadow (Arc, 2014) and Return of the Gift (Arc, 2018). Michael O’Neill died in December 2018, leaving a wife and two children.

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      Book preview

      Return of the Gift - Michael O'Neill

      Contents

      Dazzle

      Porthmeor Beach

      Scene

      Reverie

      Janus

      Not That Only

      Canareggio

      Ibridismo

      Pruritus

      Trios

      To Do List

      Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2

      (Peggy Guggenheim Collection)

      Chapel

      Postcard

      Care

      Revisiting

      Show

      Maze

      The Trick

      Fantasia

      Values

      Variations

      Echoes

      First Light

      Stalker

      Calling

      Turbulence

      Two for Friendship

      1 Ash-Wednesday

      2 Acrostic

      Return of the Gift

      Endings

      The Swan (after Baudelaire)

      Prefix

      Hodegetria

      The Coronation of Poppea

      Earthly Paradise (from Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 28)

      Celestia

      Far

      Nothing More

      Bit by Bit

      In an Hour

      Help

      The Thought

      Hint

      Bookshop

      Two Rooms

      February

      The Missionary

      I was walking

      To the Moon (after Leopardi)

      History

      In that city

      Station

      German City Songs

      1 Muenster

      2 Wuppertal

      Criss-Cross

      Roman Fountain (after Rilke)

      From the Cancer Diary

      i Scope

      ii Just as

      iii Ironies

      iv On Hold

      v Wine and Roses

      vi Mists

      vii Paths

      viii Diet

      ix Medical Physics

      x Those days

      xi Case Review

      xii Sunday

      xiii Company

      Biographical Note

      Dazzle

      Dazzle when headbeam after headbeam crosses.

      Cessation of laughter in the back seat.

      He presses his foot down, hard, then harder. The car squeezes

      through a wind tunnel charged with darkened heat

      that flanks the flying metal till they come

      out the other side of what had the air

      of high-speed death and, mercifully, the same

      is true of each too close for comfort neighbour.

      And the summer hurtles on: New York apartments,

      eyes ‘like glass ready to smash’, drugged smiles, the Doors…

      I travel back this evening to that hill

      between the city and the forest, pause

      beside the tarmac, awaiting myself, tense

      and careless, deaf to any ageing call.

      Porthmeor Beach

      The waves could get to haunt you,

      growing longer and whiter,

      greener and bluer,

      driven in more strongly

      past the Island, chapel

      exposed on the top,

      or urged this side of

      the spur of headland

      where a path

      climbs towards Zennor

      and a gull or two flicker

      only to swing back

      across boarders

      in wetsuits, flailing

      a limp front crawl or if

      more practised riding

      foothills of surf as

      people dawdle, some

      looking through lenses

      for kittiwake or chough

      – one at least on

      the track of Woolf

      and her primal memories,

      waves breaking, filling

      the ‘bowl that one fills’;

      others trailing the painters,

      thermals, windows, jumbled

      perspectives, worlds ready

      to be drowned, masts

      jutting their verticals…

      The waves would get to haunt you,

      drawing you back

      to the sands and the sky,

      to the blue and the green,

      to the wet and whiteness

      of crests you’d watch

      lapsing into foam, lost

      soul-essences in

      quest of God knows what

      past the horizon.

      Scene

      The Adriatic spreads to the horizon.

      Our balcony gives on to the latest dawn.

      It’s very early, yet a boy is up and curving

      into wet sparkle from a pier-like spit.

      It’s well under way again, this ordinary

      wonder, rotated curvature of light,

      event the previous lot kept witnessing

      when they were the ones who loved, who thought they sought…

      There’s a low clap from where the waves collapse,

      and yet a silence can be heard.

      When, as I do these days, I let them catch

      up on me, inklings of a final lapse,

      I set them wish-fulfillingly in such a scene,

      people turning sleepily or waking up,

      waters extending for miles, a boy diving,

      the looker on no longer looking on.

      Reverie

      I was leaning on

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