The Giant’s Footsteps at the Rock of Dunamaise

By Arthur Broomfield

These poems demonstrate the influence of the surrealists' on artists and their appreciation of nature and beauty. Broomfield's imaginative kaleidoscope offers an insight into the associative connections that work in our subconscious, and their real value is in offering a very different perspective on the world in which we live. ... these poems are literature of the highest order. - Eugene O’Brien

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Oct 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005607210

Arthur Broomfield

Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, novelist, publisher and Beckett scholar from County Laois. His previous works include When the Dust Settles (International University Press) The Poetry Reading at Semple Stadium (Lapwing), The Empty Too: language and philosophy in the works of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing) and Mice at the Threshing (Lapwing). He is editor of the online poetry journal Outburst, and delivers occasional lectures on the works of Samuel Beckett. A Room of One’s Own is his first full collection.

Book preview

After the prize-winning exhibition Bridging the Gap

Flaxen- haired, more arch than bridge

it draws me towards

the pledge of a mythic poise.

The unkempt carex, its sweep and flow -

each strand defiant in its prickly,

disinterested, sun-blessed way -

confers with the grace

rooted in the grand ascent,

reflects the light of the early chords

of a Mozart nocturne,

the life of space and time itself,

its very bend.

It shelters mauve grey masses

of marshalled sedums,

darkened replicas of itself,

tucked within the folly of its proposition,

that have eyes only for the identifiable,

the occasional slice of sky.

They march to the strains of useful chores,

and may never know the deception,

their hours and days, their destiny.

The arch carries me from the escapable

to a notion of reality that mystifies the senses

I at first avert; its plastic rectangles, their rigid outline

its sole concession to civilised discourse,

at odds with their translucent, eerily blue

interior that resists presentation.

They waltz in conviction to an air ethereal

beyond the convocation of ceremony and element,

intoning an idea that taunts curve

at the pregnant sun, the fallow stars.

The Bee Woman Works At Her Hive

After a painting by Mansfield

During lulls in the natural order,

when the dead have been buried

and the laws of seed time and harvest

are reinstated, look on me as

with the right tenants,

popular in business in quiet times.

In concord with the will of the