Today’s lunchtime reading at Chapters Bookshop featured three poets, Anamaria Crowe Searrano, myself and Karl Parkinson. First up, I had some new stuff to try out: two rather grim poems on a rather grim subject: gangland crime. ‘Bread’ is arumination on the recent killing of a

man delivering bread to a shop and ‘Deposition’ is about a young chap found dead on waste ground in Finglas some months back. I had originally titled this poem ‘The Women Watch’, after one of its recurring lines, but now I have reverted to its first title to bring in associations of the ‘descent from the cross’, the theme so often treated by Giotto and many other masters. I then lightened things up a bit with a few less forbidding items, one of whichwas ‘Sports Interview’, which deals with those inane, and sometimes quite lengthy, interviews that football managers have to give to TV reporters where evertything could be condensed into one sentence: ‘We lost the match because we were crap’. Next up was Karl Parkinson, whose work I particularly like, as I have said

 so often on this poetry blog. He gave his great poem about the sufferings of the artist from times past until now, and also that poem about meeting Walt Whitman in the supermarket. He also had a new one (well, new to me) called ‘Ode to Myself’ which is really humorous and very cleverly written (he wrote this ‘Ode to me’, he says,  because he felt it was ‘Owed to me’). Anamaria Crowe Serrano informed us that she had had a stressful week and read us some poems about stressfull experience. Also some untitled pieces, among them a striking poem which began ‘Horoscopes remind me’. A very unusual poem was ‘Sile na Gig’, allowing the goddess to speak for herself. Some other new ones and then a selection

from her ‘Hemispheres’ book. Anamaria has a very busy home-schedule but yet manages to present something new every time she reads, as does Karl.  They really put it up to the rest of us!

A really enjoyable reading.