Foundation Song

By Eamon Carr

'Poetry casts aside the superfluous, so that what's left is reduced to the essential, the urgent, the truthful. Eamon Carr performs this paring back with a tender but unflinching eye. His work contains the unexpected, the lyrical, the shocking – a combination that’s the mark of a poet.’
— Dr. Martina Devlin
Eamon Carr’s latest poetry collection, Foundation Song, showcases his lyrical flair, the influence of classic Gaelic verse, his great sense of rhythm and, most of all, his sensitivity to the suffering of the dispossessed, the homeless, the oppressed in a time of war and displacement. Yet there is still hope and faith in the enduring power of love and friendship. This is a book of vivid dreams, startling aislingí.’
— Hugh McFadden
‘This provocative and important collection distils Carr's lifetime of experience as a journalist, musician, traveller and activist. His poems are imbued with myth, from Homer to Cú Chulainn, and themes of dispossession, trauma, love and addiction. Despite his unflinching words and often harrowing themes, Carr always leaves us with hope – ‘I have walked among the dead/but never lost belief.’
— Catherine Ann Cullen

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215233115

Eamon Carr

Eamon Carr’s artistic career began when, inspired by the Liverpool Scene, he returned to Dublin, set up the Tara Telephone collective with Peter Fallon and, in 1969, began editing and publishing Capella, the Book of Invasions broadsheet and Gallery Books. With Tara Telephone musician Declan Sinnott, he became a founding member of the pioneering folk-rock group Horslips, with which he co-wrote and recorded a series of ground-breaking albums. His published work includes The Origami Crow: Journey into Japan, World Cup Summer 2002 and a verse play Deirdre Unforgiven, A Journal of Sorrow (Doire Press). DUSK, a verse drama, was staged in Dublin at the GPO and the New Theatre in 2016 by Red Iron Productions. A journalist and art historian, as part of the Festival of Politics in November 2019,He presented Seeking Refuge, an exhibition of his photography documenting life in refugee camps on the Kosovo-Albania border in 1999.The short verse drama, CúChulainn Awakes, filmed remotely during lockdown in 2020, featured in the St Patrick’s Festival 2022 and other events. His poetry and lyrics have been recorded by a number of musicians including Henry McCullough (Poor Man’s Moon) and Eamonn Dowd (Songs from the Fever Ship).

Book preview

The raw reality of having lived through inhumane times and natural disasters permeates this collection of poems and the poet’s humanity shines through like a beacon of hope amidst the ravages of earthquakes and wars, death and destruction and the plight of refugees. I am thinking particularly of poems such as the opening section When They Never Return, Evergreen and the poems in Seeking Refuge. Fragments is a case in point (from The People Who Drank Snow):

Despite a young girl’s song, all was not well.

From the steady world, we’d come to the gates of hell.

Places are mentioned as in the chilling Meadowlands which confirms Carr’s preference for honing in on detail and capturing the threat that lies in the seemingly idyllic. In poem after poem, he identifies with the people who suffer, the uprooting of lives, assassinations and the destruction of their homes and lands. The other ‘theatre of war’ is also dealt with, the one of exploitation.

The collection moves into the personal and he gives full reign to his mastery of ballad, song (see my favourite The Heron’s Wing) and poem-prayer as found in Private Grief, Blessed Be and The Merchants of Bordeaux:

Always the hangman waiting

to call you by your name.

There was no purchase in being valiant,

for your fate would be the same

as bones that filled the butcher’s pot

or the call of the lonely crane.

Love is here also, and its absence, in the Beckettian-like poems I Planted That Tree, Dead Lovers Wait and I Had Wished For A Sweetheart’s Song. A more consolatory note is struck in When We’ve Grown Old Together. The ghosts of Pearse Hutchinson, John Jordan, Leland Bardwell and Macdara Woods make an appearance in the cameo piece War Cabinet, Sinnott’s Bar, Dublin and in the re-examination of events in the Dublin of 1916 Those who would dream… Carr shows his prowess for recreating drama and that enigmatic ‘gan solas, gan chroí’ (without light, without heart) is haunting.

There is more of that city to be found in other poems, not least the title poem Foundation Song and in Moore Street, Before Christmas, 2013 wherein the downside of market life, with its drug problems, is acutely observed:

she shoots to kill

and waves of brightness

on brightness

anoint her sore body

as all heaven breaks loose

and the anguish of now

disappears in a roar.

The poet’s forays into Italy and its immense culture provide relief from the unrelenting highlighting of humanity’s degradation, as do his travels in Japan and an obvious liking for the Haiku form, in the style of traditional and untraditional Basho:

mysterious landscape,

sign language in taxi,

searching for Basho.

(Japan Notebook)

in the morning breeze,

billowing cherry blossoms.

snow drifts in April.

(Quarterly Haiku)

The inclusion of the chant-poem, written in Irish, Iomann Na Marbh (Hymn of the Dead) is a gem and since Carr is no stranger to Irish mythology and legends, from his days with Horslips and the recording of