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
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)
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)
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)
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.
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! |
