Falling into Place

By Anton Floyd

I welcome this first collection by Anton Floyd with open arms because it is a breath of fresh air on the Irish poetry scene. A long time in the making, the reader will find between its covers touchstones of Homer's Odyssey, O'Grady's Wandering Celt, Serrat's Mediterranean, the poet's own spiritual journey, love of family and friends, Cyprus and, of course, Ireland with its social and cultural diversities; worked on and brought together under the shadow of An tSeithe Mhór, from where it all falls into place. - John Liddy

'With its foot in the political and civil strife of Cyprus and its head and heart in the spiritual and physical peace of the West Cork hills, this book is an Odyssey for our times. Love, loss, family and displacement are its themes. Floyd has a gift for music and precision that makes this collection both delightful and illuminating.- William Wall

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Mar 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005944261

Anton Floyd

ANTON FLOYD was born in Cairo, Egypt. He is a Levantine mix of Irish, Maltese, English and French Lebanese. Raised in Cyprus, he lived through the Cypriot struggle for independence and the island remains close to his heart. With the outbreak of intercommunal hostilities in 1963, his family was evicted at gunpoint from their Nicosia home by Turkish militiamen, making them refugees in a divided capital. Despite this trauma, Nicosia has remained a cosmopolitan city.Educated in Ireland, he studied English at Trinity College Dublin. He continued his post graduate education at University College Cork. Having lived and worked in the Eastern Mediterranean, variously as a teacher, school principal, artistic director and producer, he now teaches in Cork. With Carole Anne, his Limerick-born wife, he lives in West Cork where they garden organically, transforming a rocky and watery place into their own Eden.Poems have been published in The Stony Thursday Book, the Ghent Review, Live Encounters, The Shot Glass Journal, Crannóg, Visual Verse, Contemporary Haibun on Line and haiku in Shamrock. He won the IHS (Irish Haiku Society) International Competition (2014), prize winner (2016), honourable mention (2015) and was runner up in the Snapshot Press Haiku Calendar 2016 Competition. He’s a member of Irish Haiku Society. A selection of his haiku is included in Between the Leaves, edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky, an anthology of new haiku writing from Ireland (Arlen House). Poems have been selected by the Limerick Writers’ Centre for the April Poster Poetry Trail 2017 and 2018 and a selection of his poems appeared in the poetry trail of the Kilkenny Arts Festival Fringe, the Inisheer Zibaldone Notebook and Drawing on Joyce, an installation by Nickie Hayden at the Olivier Cornet Gallery, Dublin. He has edited Remembrance Suite, a chapbook of sonnets by Shirin Sabri and an international anthology of poems, Point by Point, both forthcoming in 2018.

Book preview

waiting

in the sheaths of ice

blades of grass

mountainside

waterfall pours

colonnade of light

the wind

spilling starlings

into the sky

nightswim

in mountain water

touch of the moon

Tracks

The ground is all memoranda and signatures;

and every object covered over with hints.

In nature, thus self-registration is incessant,

and the narrative is the print of the seal.

Ralf Waldo Emerson (1850)

Each footstep marks the dust,

leaves a hint in mud or snow.

The footfall disturbs the stones,

pressed down the grass

there where the path is worn.

Unknown where the search is leading,

all the winding tracks we follow,

all rituals of farewell and greeting,

we map the imprints as we go.

Pilgrims all of every temper,

the tracks we cover keep a trove,

tell of songlines and their singers.

We scout then reconnoitre inwards

made by the world in which we move.

The Nature Table

It was in middle three

or upper one perhaps

at The Junior School

when Art became a subject

with Geometry and Latin.

Science evolved from

the show and tell displays

on the nature table recording

the random interests of the class:

fragile papery coils

of a snakeskin and

an ammonite fossil curled

beside a pearly nautilus shell

and crystal fists of iron pyrites

sheer as the scorpion in a match box.

Someone's appendix suspended in a jam jar,

a pile of Egyptian cotton bolls.

We arranged pressed leaves

into patterns, their filigree armatures

beginning to show.

Next to them the vibrant green

of the fresh mulberry leaves

we fed to insatiable silk worms.

This was a life cycle observed

an ancient tale told like

the spinning of their golden threads.

Our world was being divided up

into a Systema Naturae

worthy of Linnæus.

We, too, were being graded,

and while our storylines unwound

delicate mimosa flowers outside

like miniature yellow suns

were blossoming into light.

Through Slatted Shutters – December 1963

The days before Christmas

were clear and cold.

It was all week.

Time enough to perfect cornering

on my racing-green Raleigh bike

the pedals sparking the tarmac.

That morning with Mikis

and Erol promised the art

of look no hands riding.

Sunlight poured

through slatted shutters

shadows raked the walls,

the pattern as defined

as the bullet-holes in the veranda

from the night's street-fighting.

And I slept through it all:

the strafing of houses,

the cackle of gunfire,

the shootings and reprisals,

Cypriot neighbours – Turk and Greek

cowering in our basement.

Through the slatted shutters

I saw them – Turkish militia-men

a moving line owning the field.

They came to commandeer

our house – allowing us

our last breakfast at gunpoint.

The weight of my father's hand,

I feel its imprint on my shoulder

the fret my mother carried.

That December morning

we left by the kitchen door

passing under the orange tree.

My father looking up said

no other oranges

will ever taste as sweet.

And I saw at that moment clearly

how the ripe oranges gleamed

blossom and fruit on the same tree.

At Checkpoint Charlie – Ledra Palace Hotel Nicosia

You're a reckless woman, he said.

We can't just leave them in Neapolis,

she replied, we have to fetch them south

I'll badge the car with a Red Cross flag -

they wouldn't harm a woman and a boy.

1

A stone's throw from here

at a makeshift roadblock,

manned with guns,

the ice factory on our right

every window shattered,

a loud young Turk edgy for revenge

threatened my mother

pressing a knife against her neck

as if he'd draw a crescent moon

in red across her throat.

Between sobbing sisters

Mikis sat in the back seat

clutching his leather football.

His mother crossed herself

praying in a frantic Greek.

If anger bangs

behind the eyes

like a bag of blood

and terror's

a suffocating veil of black,

when mother refused

to unlock her door

her knuckles grip -

courage at that moment

turned bone white.

I know now

what crisis means

words like balance and knife-edge

but then it was the wince