Live Streaming

By Conor O'Callaghan

Conor O'Callaghan's Live Streaming is a volume of many styles and themes, whether it is the life of a caravan park, an ode to marriage, or a schoolboy empathizing with Petrarch's love for Laura and idolizing a heavyweight boxer. O'Callaghan's typical flair for the contemporary, for the live stream of the virtual, is also abundantly apparent. The centerpiece is the long multi-genre "His Last Legs," which dramatizes the troubled inheritance from his father and finely balances other more condensed and lyrical poems. This volume is an unflinching display of an impressively skillful poet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781943666218

Conor O'Callaghan

Conor O’Callaghan was born in Newry, County Down, in 1968, and grew up in Dundalk. The History of Rain, published by The Gallery Press in 1993, was shortlisted for the Forward ‘Best First Collection’ Prize and won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Seatown was published in 1999, Fiction, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, appeared in April 2005. The Sun King, his fourth collection was published in 2013. He has been co-holder of the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies, Villanova University. From 2005-2010 he was poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Conor O’Callaghan lives in Manchester and currently works both as a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and as a tutor on distance learning MA at Lancaster University. His novel, Nothing On Earth (2016), was shortlisted for the Listowel Novel of the Year and was the choice of the Irish Times Book Club in April 2017.

Book preview

First North American edition

© Conor O’Callaghan, 2018

Edited by Peter Fallon and first published by The Gallery Press in Ireland in 2017.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

For permission, write to

Wake Forest University Press

Post Office Box 7333

Winston-Salem, NC 27109

wfupress.wfu.edu

[e-mail]

ISBN 978-1-930630-86-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-943666-21-8 (epub)

Library of Congress Control Number 2017963574

Cover design by Nathan Moehlmann, Goosepen Studio & Press.

Publication of this book was generously supported by the Boyle Family Fund.

for my four brothers

Hearts of one purpose…

GRACE

They’re coming to collect

the table I’m writing on.

They texted a while ago

to say they were leaving

a suburb four miles south.

Midweek, early evening:

traffic should be light.

I thought of sitting here

in gratitude, once more,

as long as supper lasts.

VINTAGE JOB LOT. My ad

hung weeks unanswered

in the whole foods co-op.

Then yesterday they called

to ask if I’d sell piecemeal.

Happily. The sun has drifted

slantwise of our building.

In the back lane behind me

two kitchen porters smoke

in what could be Cantonese.

For six years my things have

waited for the party I was

always threatening to throw.

There’s the door…

                             They’ve been

and gone and bought the lot!

They were tremendously sweet:

her, Flemish, full of chat;

a fiancé with beard and bearing

of some prince in waiting.

They came for my table just

and took a shine to everything.

We laughed and lugged it all

to her employer’s truck

parked running in the lane,

shook hands, wished luck

and hugged for heaven’s sake.

I came indoors to find this

notebook open on the floor

beneath my broken bread.

Thank you sideboard fetched

halfway across the Fens.

Thank you captain’s chest,

handmade plywood bed,

mess benches from the war.

Thanks to all those friends

I shipped on for a song.

Thank you rooms in shade

that might yet prove to be

night already happening.

Thank you echoes echoing.

I have more hope in me

than I’d have ever guessed.

TRAILER PARK ÉTUDES

The Stars

The nights midweek are secrets kept.

No soul on site, no signal/bars,

and zilch for company except

a zillion bright disarming stars.

I’ll flit through ambers, quicker, higher.

I’ll break each