She left her religion in our care.
Her old prayerbooks and Bible, lapped by mould
And intoxicated by time.
Immediately, we felt the flutter of her anxiety.
We all agreed, the books were too far gone.
Their words tumbling to the floor, detached
From their sacredness.
As we piled them high in the hearth,
I was vaguely aware of something wrong, remembering,
I suppose, old tales of hate against all books,
When even thoughts were set on fire.
It was many days before I put a match to them.
And even then I wasn’t sure.
As the blaze took hold of the Bible, something small
And worm-like-wriggled from between the pages of Genesis
And the illiterate flames roared with unthinking joy
As they burned the beautiful, perfumed trees of Eden.
Commendations for 'A Storm in Arcadia'
‘Sometimes you will find me working on the edges, / with all the love and intensity of a zealot, /a thrilling of words lighting my room’: Ron Carey states in his ars poetica, “The Trade“. Fables and legends from Abyssinia to Ireland that haunt him are woven through these lines. His prodigious imagination investigates the perception of scientists, filmmakers, and philosophers with a keen sense of wonder. In the process, his love of living, love of the world, of those dearest to him, joy in the moment, is palpable in poem after poem.
Catherine Phil MacCarthy : Winner of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry and the Yeats Thoor Ballylee International Poetry Prize.
And though there might be A Storm in Arcadia, Ron Carey’s astounding new collection elicits the magic, mystery and mischief in the extraordinary business of being. Carey’s exquisite poetry, line to line, poem to poem, reminds us that joy and a readiness to be surprised are enough “reasons to believe in the everlastingness of all things”.
Eleanor Hooker: Winner of the Michael Hartnett Award and the Markievicz Award for Poetry.
