Skip to content

Due to staff leave and the Easter Bank Holiday weekend there may be some delay to orders and email responses until Tues 2nd April. Thank you for your patience!

WOMEN'S POETRY COMPETITION RUNNER-UP: PAULINE PLUMMER

 

Swallowing Ireland

 

One day, feeling hungry, I swallowed Ireland.

It was intense, like eating raw beef in a steak tartare.

I gulped down the sodden fields and stony mountains,

 

The wind-ton islands and paintbox villages, the famine

ruins in rain, palatial bungalows and stone age chambers.

I sucked in the damp air of pubs, rich with watchful joking.

 

I swallowed the soup of fiddles and bodhran until I couldn’t move,

licked my fingers, scraped the plate clean. Strangers

said you have the map of Ireland printed on your face.

 

But, it was the wedding feast to which I was not invited.

They mollified me with porter and stews,

tasting of insouciance, wit and grudges,

 

even though I could not show off family stories

in a fat photograph album with a lacquered cover.

I pointed out the names and dates.

 

It was wise to ring a bell when I came to their villages.

They lit candles in the windows

to send me on my way home.

 

 

Pauline Plummer is a part-time tutor in creative writing at the Open University. She is also an editor at Mudfog Press, and a cook for a foodbank. She has taught creative writing in universities, schools, community centres and prisons, in the UK and abroad in Sierra Leone and Greece. Her work includes the poetry collection Bint, (Red Squirrel Press, 2011) the verse novella From Here to Timbuktu (Smokestack Press, 2012), and the short story collection Dancing with a Stranger (Red Squirrel Press, 2015). She was the Poet Laureate for Middlesbrough in 2000.

 

Carol Ann Duffy says: Pauline Plummer’s ‘Swallowing Ireland’ contains a fabulous conceit, the idea of coming to terms with the place you come from by making literal the cliché, ‘You have the map of Ireland on your face’. Though she wants to devour the landscape, the people, to express her connection, she discovers she doesn’t really belong. 

 

Older Post
Newer Post
Close (esc)

Popup

Use this popup to embed a mailing list sign up form. Alternatively use it as a simple call to action with a link to a product or a page.

Age verification

By clicking enter you are verifying that you are old enough to consume alcohol.

Search

Your cart is currently empty.
Shop now