Some Integrity

By Padraig Regan

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023 Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2023 Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023 Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023 Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022 Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021 In 'Minty', one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects: whatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room we happen to be sitting in is dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whatever portion of the sky that happens to be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. The weather also happens, as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other places where it falls into the orbit of the glass. 'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world,' writes Vahni Capideo, praising Padraig Regan's 'awesome originality and honesty'. The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition. ,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781800172098

Padraig Regan

Padraig Regan is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. They hold a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. This collection is the recipient of the 2021 Clarissa Luard Prize, awarded by the David Cohen Foundation.

Book preview

Cover: Some Integrity by Padraig Regan

Padraig Regan

Some Integrity

CONTENTS

Title Page

50ml of India Ink

I

(Studies)

The Understudies

Pitcher Plants

A Machine for Harvesting Olives

Rehydrating Mushrooms

A Roast

Risotto

Minty

A Snail

Katsu Ika Odori-don

II

(Reproductions)

Life Drawing: Jacob

Poem for Bobby Kendall

Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox

Vermeer’s Supper At Emmaus

Two Cabinets

On the Principles of Alchemy

Our Personal Papers

The Barberini Faun: A Partial Reconstruction

III

(Capriccio)

Glitch City

IV

(Still Lifes)

A Grapefruit

Pavlova

The Meat-Shaped Stone

Study of a Tomato

Three Poems After Ori Gersht

Pomegranate

On Reflection

Falling Bird

Fidelity

A Pumpkin

V

(Landscapes)

Salt Island

A Terrible June

A Small & Important Thing

Ireland

A Forest in the Czech Republic

History

It Only Remains

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

‘this is this’

Gertrude Stein

SOME INTEGRITY

13

50ML OF INDIA INK

Opaque, & black as gravity,

the ink is perfectly unlike

the small glass pot

whose shape it occupies

so passively. It is

something’s burnt remains

that makes it black.

It is the sticky leavings

of the lac-bug

that makes it shine.

(The name of the lac-bug

has nothing to do

with absence, but means,

in fact, a multitude.)

It performs its tiny fractal

creep through the paper’s

knitted capillaries,

& finds itself astounded

with significance. It means

I am not yet dead.

I was not untempted

to leave this blank.

I

(Studies)

17

THE UNDERSTUDIES

All night some finches have disgraced themselves

by singing their desires through my open window;

I suggest we abolish the tree they’re living in.

I have no desire to write about Laika, nor

the greyscale picture of the world she glimpsed

for five hours from a window, which, regrettably

was not left open. I want to write about the brave

& red-haired fox, the little bee, the starlet,

the coal, & the light breeze. I want to write

about Bobik, or the untamed substitute thereof

who ran like a joke around the barracks.

They who were subject to the same diet

of laxatives & jellied protein. It didn’t help

that they were all, in temperament, phlegmatic,

& therefore Cancers, or Scorpios, or Pisces, though

the circumstances of their births went unrecorded

in the streets. Their mothers were abolished

because no-one & themselves desired otherwise.

They had seen some stuff & so Oleg Gazenko

thought they could bear to see some more.

I desire to abolish all desires & live

like a monk, divorced from the world.

I desire to be less sublunary. The secret

of their deaths was kept long past the abolition

of the state they died in service of.

It’s hard to think Oleg Gazenko was a person

& desired. In 1998, he spoke

of this again; he said ‘we did not learn enough’.

18

PITCHER PLANTS

I loved them, when I was too young

to think of condoms as I saw them

bunched & hanging from the iron

skeleton of the old greenhouse.

Like quicksand they occupied

more space inside my head

than