Frank Golden
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poetry

                                                 IF YOU TOLERATE THIS

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BOOK LAUNCH - IF YOU TOLERATE THIS will launch at the Ennis Book Club Festival March 4 2022 6.30pm at the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis, County Clare. The event is free but ticketed. Please go to the Ennis Book Club Festival site to book a ticket! (Click on the image above to enlarge)

'Frank Golden’s new volume  IF YOU TOLERATE THIS is a complex, dark and shimmering book that claims a huge territory for its concerns and its lens; a book which sings about dark times.  IF YOU TOLERATE THIS is an extremely unusual book when we consider the ‘usual’ Irish poetry volume.
 
While the book does ramble from Brazil to Libya to Greece to Mexico to Iran it does not function as a travelogue, this is not the travel poetry of exoticism where any life unlike our own is presented in a way that shows our own adventurousness and sophistication. I once heard it said that most poetry books function as the poet’s love letters to who they want the public to think they are, but that can’t be said here.
 
We are lucky to have artists like Frank around if we have to have dark times, we need the singers to sing us through them.' Sarah Clancy/The Truth & Other Stories



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 gotta get a message to you - published by Salmon Poetry - Launched March 4 2017 - The Ennis Book Club Festival -
"A poet to get excited about. This is a startling and exciting collection." Afric McGlinchy/Southword Journal
"I have rarely been so moved by a book of poems," Grace Wells
"Gotta Get A Message To You has floored me like no book of poetry has in a long time. Golden has an uncanny ability to touch on the things that move us most deeply." Phil Hanrahan/Bookish

"The Tom Waits of Irish Poetry" Aidan Murphy/The Irish Press
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Lorca Sings A Canto On Ludlow
(short excerpt)
I'll hit out for Gleninsheen
Rather than heel it on First
Blow bills and blush kisses
To the revenant on Seventh
Carburet my lung packs
Fill my stomach at Katz's
Watch the kosher be kosher
Fill their suburban princesses
With hot dogs and sauerkraut
And jewel-jellied cheesecake
While their seeded blood-mothers
Get pressurised and hot
Settle their boobs like buttocks
On the counter top
Chomp on flame-fingered burgers
Slake their thirst with seltzer
Try to eat to the point                                                  Where it solaces the hurt.                                           These women are big                                                  These women are fur-bound                                      Bulging at the seams                                                    With lurid fat contours                                                 Rippling jowls                                                                 And ice-cream temptations                                         On the tips of their tongues.                                       "Chocolate chip, buddy,                                               An' hold the fudge sauce!"                                           While their fingers clink                                               Glass beads 'n baubles                                                Gifts from their honies                                                 Whom you'd think must be sweet                            As only honies can be sweet                                       But they're not, not really,                                           Not anymore.                                                                 They do their business                                                 With liquorice wallets                                                   Slide down to the river                                                 Looking for something more sacred                         Than peppered beef 
                                                  Their eyes on Essex                                                    Lips on barrels of brine                                               Hands with an action so sweet                                  They crank an old song from a good girl.
                                                                    .............................


The Men Of Clare Now Drink Their Porter On The Pallisades


With the yellow flesh of mussels from Poulnaclogga
still rotting in their cavities
they board the Number One on Broadway 

for Inwood and the Bronx.
Big boys with tier mother's eyes in their eyes.

Limestone eaters, cave dwellers, with heron feathers 
stitched like scapulars into their buttocks,
and Toonarossa holly sprouting from clay packs
between their toes,

and salt water from Dunbalcaun Bay
passing for urine through their bladders.
On windless days their scale Channin, Chrysler, and 
Rockerfeller,
overview this canyon terrain with chemicals stacks
on New Jersey wasteland,
and gangland shells blistering the South Bronx.
Visions of ridges and defiles among the pencil Avenues
scoring the city,
recalling silver outcrops past Loch Aleenaun
and stone escarpments on the crest of Black Head.
It leaves their heads thinly present,
memories pecking the cranial shell
on the subway list and rock to Marble Hill,
where they buy six-packs of Guinness,
head down Independence Avenue to the Conrail line,
and from their perch on Devil's Rock,
spit their ferocious yearning
into the water of Spuyten Duyvil.




"It would be naive to expect an easy read; indeed Golden threatens to overwhelm us with the darkness that can lie inside. The discomfort is, however, balanced out by moments of extreme lyricism, and by the author's unflinching honesty." Andy Robinson/The Galway Advertiser/The Interior Act(Salmon Publications 1999)
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The Flaggy Shore

I have walked the Flaggy Shore a thousand times,
ten thousand times, infinitesmally eroding
fossilised crustaceans, clusters of calcified weed,
delicate evidences locked in time.
I lick the salt stone & whisper to its eerie space
words it will carry more or less
as it carries the memory of waves - imperturbably.
I release my words and touch 
as stone releases the soft, memoried lives
of molluscs and winkles - millions of generations
fluent in this rock, in its inanimate memory.
Does space hold such companionable eternities,
and will we find there is a time in space
and space in time replete in memory of what was and is?


from The Xavier Poems/The Interior Act


I was born on a blue day
    While Father sat with an ash rod
Astride the sea,
    Thinking of his sunflower harvest
As the season's first surge of mackerel
    Thrashed after white bait.
My memory is like an accretion
    Of cobalt grains - a ball
Seized in my head
    And bowled along blue tarmac,
Rolled to shore
    Washed out in the sea-curled surf,
A leaded weight 
    Cast back in my father's eye
Blinding him with the truth
    About himself and me.
We are brothers 
    I realise that now,
Blue-eyed gardeners,
    Archaeologists of the air,
Accordionists of water.
    I trust him and trust 
Him as a guide.
    Now that he is dead
He remembers my life,
    He arrives,
And I await him.
    He hovers over me
And remembers
    Being born on a blue day,
A mackerel sky,
   His Father playing sweetly
To a distant woman
    Leaning through a blue window,
Dreaming a life to fill a space.
    He kneels - my Father, my Father's Father, I
Kneel and pool a palmfull
    Of mirroring water,
Casting my image home to the sea
    My music to a spell of time.





"In Daily Accord is a satisfying experiment. It remains very much an anarchic patchwork of perceptions, but one through which certain threads are patterned. Recommended." Billy Ramsell/Southward/In Daily Accord(Salmon Publications 2009)
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Slip into this
Life  River  Death
Always fall to your deepest kiss


We drive westward
Into the swollen land
Our dreams behind us


Some lives never rise
The mind illuminates
No anchoring space


To start with understanding
The predicate of love
The desire to imagine an end

                                                                                           We sit to each other's eyes
                                                                                           Bleeding
                                                                                           As the light degrades


 In Partial Settlement(Wiffle Press, New York 1987)
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Rescript On Seventh

There are signs
    It seems inevitable
Everything will come around again.
    I can feel my home walls
Throb in their mannered way
    The atmosphere swinging my head 
For a day or two,
    My Father elegiac and remote
Whispering snatches from
    The Hound of Heaven,
Looking at his bald head
    In the airport lavatory,
Like a mystical protuberance
    Rising towards the heavens.
It was the cortozone that did it
    The marginal remains falling out
 At the altar rail on Christmas Eve,
     His pubic hair too so he looks
A little like a boy, beautifully flaccid,
      Full of junky recollections,
Reaching towards Mama
      In a fusion of silence and desire,
Remembering her in the fifties,
      Tight in her wide curly perms,                                                    
Her staunch rump, her stately breasts,
       Her Catholic Herald's tone
When he made it inside.
        I could never imagine him
Humping to make me 
        Or any of the rest of them.
Their eyes were too oblique

        Their tongues too solid,
Never discovering the crimes of their household
        And except for zippers and bathing suits
I never saw him touch her in daylight.

         Still God shone in their eyes
Like a sweltering Fantasia,
         Their whole lives in the eyes of God
Their wisdom tending to the cracked plaster
          While I trounced myself silly
In a bout of anorexia, visualising my bones
          In a mirror turned to see nothing but excess,
Leaving my ribs and buttocks blue
          From the rigors of a reforming zeal.
They always maintained a "Good Parent"
          Distance, from me, their most difficult son.
Memorialising my last words at sixteen,
           Falling slantwise like Chatterton 
Across his hectic bed,
            Filling the apple cart with lead piping
Stolen from the great poets,
            Who romanticised the dangers of poetry.
Mother felt that poetry was cruel, remorseless,
             It was the life she meant, visualising the gutter,
Seeing me Beyond the Beyonds,
             Uprooted, ridiculed and alone, a man
Clambouring up Sunflowers in Bolivia,
             Or worse still infecting generations
With lunacies they'd be better off without,
             Better in fact if you'd never been born.



ANTHOLOGIES
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Circus Europe(Salmon Poetry 2013)  Four Dutch poets and four Irish poets respond to eight large collages by the Dutch artist Machteld van Buren. The collages are illustrative of the struggle for survival being waged in various European countries. The Irish poets are Jessie Lendennie, Jo Slade, Patrick Chapman, Frank Golden. The Dutch poets are Arnoud van Adrichem, Martin Reints, Lieke Marsman, and Peter van Lier.
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THE LURE


Some glorious madness was demanded
Some necessary miasma of belief,
A patch of ground, a bond, or ponzi scheme,
A tulip - Semper Agustus or Admiral Lieffkens perhaps,
Shares in AIB, a 500k council house in Cabinteely,
A pied-a-terre in Aigue Morte or Vaison de la Romaine.

The problem with humanity
Is we seek out destruction 
As much as we seek out salvation -
Abrogating a golden age
Revelling in hugger mugger crisis calls
Prizing mercury from cordate teeth
Pulsing solutions from one sump to the next
Landing on humpbacked gods
Dreaming of casual ascension.

For the polder girls and boys
No religion ever came above money,
You need cohesion for good commerce
Isn't that the truth?

Ants are a good model,
Males balling for the Queen
Bawling for the Queen.
The drone of differentiated togetherness.

Is altruism key?

Will we intelligence our way to a collective everything?
Will we all dress in orange,
Be responsible for our own little dyke?
Knowing that if one dyke goes they'll all flat pack like dominoes.
Slaper and waker, waker and slaper.

We Irish loved the Bling Bling in Excelsis Deo,
The excess and successness
All discharged now
A terrible fuddle is born.
Maybe there's the elemental heart-start,
De-class, de-god, de-state,
De-state, de-class, de-god,
De-nationalise, de-homogenise, de-commercialise.
But remember!
DUM VIVIMUS VIVAMUS!
WHILE WE LIVE, LET US LIVE!


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