Category: Publications
Save the Date! – Launch of my third collection.
Book Launch!
‘It’s Time’
by Eamonn Lynskey
Wednesday 10th May at 6.30 pm
at Books Upstairs, D’Olier Street, Dublin
Save the date! Thanks to Jessie Lendennie & Siobhan Hutson at Salmon Poetry, my third poetry collection ‘It’s Time’ is launching at Books Upstairs, (introduced by Ross Hattaway), alongside the wonder-full Anne Tannam with her collection ‘Tides Shifting across My Sitting Room Floor’, (introduced by Alvy Carragher).
We hope to see you there.
Publication in ‘Skylight 47’, Issue 8
This Galway magazine has done me the signal honour of publishing another poem of mine, ‘Survivor’. I am very pleased to find myself in the company of some fine and well-known writers such as Kate Dempsey, Michael Farry, Brian Kirk and John W. Sexton, as well as some others I have not seen before.
I liked very much the precise demestic details of Kate’s ‘No.1 Mum’ and John’s series of terse tercets. Not sure if the latter could be classed as a sort of haiku selection but they work very well:
how easily the snail
holds starlight
on its skin
and Brian Kirk’s ‘Immanent’ has an immediate appeal to me because it captures that moment (when night is about to ‘fall’) about which I have often written myself.
… The night is ready
like a cat to pounce,
and idly, like a cat,
it paws the moment …
Another poem of twilight time (favourite time of poets!) is from the pen of Michael Farry. ‘Waiting for the Train’ is the title and that is what the poem is about (Michael writes that ‘down to earth’ type of stuff that I like a lot). he catches the atmosphere of the old station, now falling somewhat into neglect where the dying sun casts
a brief drench of rusty brilliance,
kindling the few last clinging beech leaves,
their fallen fellows thick on the disused platform.
My own contribution is a poem written after an illness in which I suggest there may be some similarity between myself and its long-legged subject:
Survivor
Driving down the Belgard Road
I see again the gossamer evidence
of my sitting tenant, snug
behind the glass of my wing mirror.
–
Rare the glimpse I’ve had of him
the time we’ve been together, I
so sure the wind would put an end
to his arachnoid acrobatics
–
but this tiny wight is match
and more for zippy morning breezes,
keen as elephant or moose
or mouse (or me) to cling to life.
–
In dead of night and lit by streetlamp,
undisturbed by prowling cat
or busy milkman he will toil
to realign his damaged lacework
–
and, come day, will venture out,
negotiate his deadly silk
to reach his breakfast, all the while
remembering to place his feet
–
along particular threads he spun
dissimilar from the others, ones
he left bereft of gum. But he
and only he, can tell which ones.
The next issue of Skylight 47 will be launched in Autumn 2017 and submissions will be accepted between 1 June 2017 and 1 August 2017. Send three (unpublished) poems plus bio (60 words max.) to skylightpoets47@gmail.com
Poems up to 40 lines and sent as both an attachment and in the body of the email. Submission detail can be found on skylight47poetry.wordpress.com
Full marks again to Bernie Crawford and her intrepid editorial team on a great issue! And congratulations to Patricia Byrne on her wonderful illustrations (example above).
Publication on-line in ‘Southword’, #31
A poem of mine appeared in the online poetry magazine ‘Southword’ last month (issue 31) and it is very good news to be published alongside some really fine practitioners of the art. Hard to pick out particular favorites but the ones I found most striking were Geraldine Mitchell’s Remote Capture who wrote out of a photograph depicting a group of actively energetic young people. The energy is caught brilliantly in the poem. Sinead Morrissey’s Platinum Anniversary also took me in, and her use of space to let the poem breath is really good. And Matthew Sweeney’s Owl Song and its restrained sense of loss I found very appealing. My own poem also speaks of loss, especially during ‘Those First Evenings’.
All 32 the poems can be read on the website http://www.munsterlit.ie Enjoy!
Publication in Stepaway Magazine #22, January 2017
I am very gratified to be included in the on-line Magazine ‘Stepaway’. In its own words, ‘this is an an award-winning online literary magazine which publishes the best urban flash fiction and poetry by writers from across the globe’. Contributors lead their readers ‘through the streets of his or her chosen city. They do so in one thousand words or less.’
This issue #22 includes poems set in places as diverse as Dublin (me), Moscow (Liz McSkeane), Paris (Seamus Hogan) and several more. Some, ‘Dwelling on Decay’ by Michael Schiffman for instance, do not name the actual place and they are not the less effective for that, perhaps even more effective. Anonymity allows a degree of universality. Michael’s poem is my pick from among the very good material on display in this issue. It is a type of list poem that is not merely a list poem, with people’s histories moving in and out of it. And, despite its title, it has some lyrically luminous descriptions (‘ … a pair of small butterflies / flit among these autumn blooms / (what nectar will they find)’). A really evocative piece.
My own contribution He Walks His Several Cities is a nostalgic piece, which tries to

convey my feelings as I walk today through my Dublin realising that it isn’t quite my Dublin, so much has changed. I came across an old photo in The Irish Times in a piece by Arminta Wallace showing the corner of Westmoreland Street in the 1950s with the old Leyland buses taking up people and I then took a photo of the place as it is today. Unfortunately it’s not a good photo because the view is dominated by roadworks for the new Luas (i.e., metro) line but I did mange to capture a modern a bus. Think how amazed the people of the ’50s photo would have been at the sight of it! The two photos show something of the changes I see around me as I walk the street now, but with that old-photo scenario still playing in my sixty-eight-year-old head! And lest you think I am harking back to ‘the good old days’ well, No Sir! Dublin is a much brighter, cleaner place today than it was back then.
You can view all the poems on the Stepaway site at http://www.stepawaymagazine.com

and congratulations go to Darren Richard Carlaw (and his team) on producing such a clean, uncluttered website which forefronts its content so well. As you will read on the site, contributions are welcome. Send one story or poem at a time to submissions@stepawaymagazine.com All submissions should be contained within the body of the email. No attachments.
StepAway Magazine is a nonprofit organization, edited and maintained by volunteers.
Publication in Flare 02, Jan. 2017
Very much indebted to the Sunflower Sessions (which are held in Jack Nealon’s Public House, Capel Street, Dublin, every last Wednesday) for including me again in their FLARE publication. The editor, Eamon Mag Uidhir, has declared it will be issued four times a year and we have all learned that Eamon is a man of his word. A bright, spacious, sparkling offering, this: 33 p0ems from 33 participants in the monthly sessions, some well known, others new on the scene, all worth a look.
I particularly liked Anamaria Crowe Serrano’s ‘Apple – 7’, with its unusual and very original lay-out. Anamaria’s innovations are impossible for me to quote on the page so you will have lay hands on a FLARE02 to appreciate how near the cutting edge of experimental poetry she is. Alice Kinsella’s short and economic piece ‘Starlight’ concerns the necessary slaughter that lies behind our veal dishes:
In late summer almost winter
they’d lock the cows up for the day
to take away their young …
and Anne Tannam’s ‘When We Go Shopping’ is also one of my favourites. It’s that kind of ‘domestic’ poem she always does very well, this one concerning the relationship between an elderly mother and her daughter.
When we go shopping, just the two of us
I get to be the child again, out with my mam for the day…
Writing a poem is never easy (well, Shakespeare maybe …) and writing a an optimistic, upbeat one I have always found particularly difficult, and so I admire Liz McSkeane’s ‘Remembering the Child’ . Liz is a long-time friend but that won’t prevent me declaring her poem a very fine piece of work. One feels BETTER about the world after reading it. And those awful things that you fear might be coming your way? —
… and just between
us — that won’t happen. Now, the sun is bright,
please step aside. You’re standing in my light.
So many good poems. A flash-back to times of church oppression in Ireland from Ross Hattaway and a curious, disturbing poem ‘Eve’ from Natasha Helen Crudden which weighs out its words and lines carefully.
My own offering is a rather nostalgic piece which harkens back to the time one could see the Guinness barges on the Liffey. The poem tries to merge those long-forgotten scenes of the past with the present haulage system of container transport by imagining a meeting between the present day drivers and the ‘bargeymen’ of old.
The Liffey at Low Tide
The Liffey at low tide
this evening at Kingsbridge
reveals the ghosts of jetties
built for barges bringing
Guinness down to port.
–
Jib cranes swing and strain,
men work with ropes and winches,
loading wooden barrels
into swaying holds
and friendly banter drifts
–
along Victoria Quay
where juggernauts line up
and drivers sleep alone
and wander in their dreams
down to the bargemen, talk
–
till morning when they yawn,
climb from their cabins, peer
across the parapet
at faint remains of timbers
drowned in rising waters.
If you wish to enter some work for the next Flare the only requirement (apart from
quality, of course!) is that you must have read out something (prose or poetry) at the sessions. So come along some evening at 7.30 pm and join our merry throng, at the Sunflower Sessions, every last Wednesday of the month, except December, at Jack Nealon’s Public House, Capel Street, Dublin (7.30 pm), and get your name on the evening’s reading list.
FLARE02 is available for €5 at the sessions and also at Books Upstairs and the Winding Stair bookshops. The cover shows a detail of Eddie Colla street art, Capel Street, photographed by Declan McLoughlin (our genial open-mike MC). For more information, join online at meetup.com or email sunflower_sessions@yahoo.com. Also on Facebook.

See You soon!
Publication in The Stony Thursday Book #15. Jan. 2017
Very honoured to be included in #15 of The Stony Thursday Book, Limerick’s long-running yearly collection of contemporary poetry, this year edited by John Davies. About 1800 poems were submitted, we were informed at the launch, and so John had what must have been the herculean task of selecting the 98 poems eventually included in the book.
And so it is hard to pick out my preferences, but here goes –
Evan Costigan’s ‘Memo’ (p.13) is very short (all of 8 lines) and has the concision and attractiveness of a William Carlos Williams piece. Usually I don’t like cat poems, but exceptions prove the rule. I loved the final lines which indicate what this particular moggie has been up to:
… to the pond
where two goldfish
no longer flash.
And what a poem is David Lohrey’s ‘Muddy Water’ (p.39). I read in the bios that he ‘grew up on the Mississippi in Memphis’ and all I can say is that he has written a poem worthy of that historic region of the USA. One can get a feel of the people and their way of living and the constraints they had to deal with. Going up to northern Mississippi for a ballgame wasn’t a journey undertaken lightly:
They were greeted upon arrival by the local sheriff
And his cow-shit-stained deputies who aimed their shotguns
At their heads and shouted “Niggers don’t play ball down here,
So y’all better git back yonder.”
Edward O’Dwyer’s ‘Going’ (p.60) is a sad poem about someone taken ill in a car at a traffic lights, all the more effective for me because I witnessed something similar one time. I thought the restraint of the last few lines was admirable:
Some people too are moving towards
the man’s car in a tentative fashion,
the way people do when they are expecting
to find something disturbing.
I also liked another rather sad poem dealing with an older person’s forgetfulness: ‘Testing’ (p.114) by Martine Large.
She knows the name of the prime minister,
it’s right there, give her time …
Ron Houchin’s ‘The Crows of Ennistymon’ (p.14) captures that sinister aspect that clings to crows and which was exploited so well by Ted Hughes and Hitchcock:
… the crows who keep a little to themselves,
who feed on death so often, know this and their wailing gyre
tells of each new vapor rising, a spirit they must rail about
from each night’s vantage above the Falls Hotel …
And there were so many others I liked very much. Anamaria Crowe Serrano’s ‘Cauthleen‘,Paul McNamara’s ‘Little Bits of Processed Nature in Small Locked Boxes’, which was very enthusiastically received on the launch night, and ‘Elephant’, enacted by the redoubtable Norman King.
One of my poems ‘Kilmainham Elegy’ deals with the 1916 rising, or rather the aftermath thereof. During a walk some years ago in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham cemetery, I came across the graves of some very young British Soldiers who were killed during that Easter Week. My sadness at the loss of their young lives is no reflection on the lives lost by the insurgents, nor on their cause. I hope this comes across in the poem because I would be seriously upset if there seemed to be any criticism of the Irish rebels. I am no revisionist in matters of the fight for Irish freedom. Still, the death of a 19-year-old, whosoever they are, and in whatever circumstances must always be a sad event. You can be sure that someone somewhere grieved the loss of his young life.
Kilmainham Elegy
for two soldiers, aged 19,
of the Notts & Derby Regiment
As in life, now at the last
we are together, side by side,
two English boys who disembarked
to angry streets at Eastertime.
–
We who thought to ship for France
to fight for freedom of small nations
lie with dust of older wars
in this Royal Hospital Kilmainham.
–
A century has driven past
along the St. John’s Road. Nearby,
Kilmainham Jail remembers those
were conscripts of a dream and died.
–
Two English boys fresh from the Shires,
we fought and fell, our long decay
now equal part of Ireland’s soil
with those who raised her flag that Sunday.
My other poem ‘An Emigrant’s Return’ is rather long and deals with some personal family memories. I am particularly grateful to John Davies for including it in the anthology because it can be quite hard to get a long poem published. And I was particularly grateful to be afforded the time to read out, complete, on the night.
Contributors receive two copies of the book and it is available from the Limerick Arts Office (artsoffice@limerick.ie) for €10, p&p free (+353 407363). The cover art is ‘Heterogeneous’ by Beth Nagle and the overall design is by Richard Mead. Submissions for #16 are now being considered and should be sent to Limerick Arts Office, Limerick City and County Council, Merchants Quay, Limerick.
Publication in Orbis #177 (Autumn 2016)
Lots of good things in this issue of Orbis and congratulations to editor Carole Baldock and her team. Not often one sees Alexander Pope appear in the pages of a modern magazine, but here he is (by courtesy of Stuart Nunn in the Past Master section), the Great Curmudgeon himself laying waste around him at the low standards he sees everywhere he looks:
‘See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heaped o’er her head!
Philosophy, that lean’d on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause and is no more…’
Ah, would he were alive today!
Unlike other magazines, Orbis comes down from the heights of Parnassus and invites readers to participate by nominating their favourite pieces. This provides the entertaining and informative section ‘Readers’ Award’. My own four choices were:
-
Remembering Capel Celyn: Liverpool 1965, by Kathy Miles, about her Welsh village flooded to create a reservoir. I know no Welsh and yet I can hear the lilt of that beautiful language echoing in the back of my mind as I read this sad poem with its wonderfully-placed Welsh words:
‘For we were Welsh too, our names cwtched
away by marriage, loved the hidden lyric
of our streets: Rhiwlas and Pows, Dovey …’
-
Forms of Embrace by Christopher Allen, attempts the capture the essential construction basis of visual artworks: the circle, the block and the curve. The third stanza brings to mind (one might almost say inevitably) Hokusai’s great wave:
‘A smooth black curve
proclaims a solid solitude
shaped like a Japanese wave
cresting a great silence …’
– She Died Today, by Cristina Harba is an excellent treatment of how long it takes for loss to manifest.
‘ … It is a week later that I lie face down on the bed,
willing it to swallow me whole.’
-
Picture, by Anne Banks is an attractive, quirky poem, reminiscent of Magritte’s great surrealistic painting ‘ Not to be Repoduced’ (1937) of a man looking into a mirror and seeing himself, but not as he expects to see himself.
‘I intrude on the space, my reflection
Bright and photographic in its clarity…’
I also liked very much Contained by Alison Chisholm and Guidewire insertion, pre-surgery by Jan Whittaker and indeed many more.
My own contribution is A Professional in Charge, a poem referencing the fate of one of Henry VII’s unfortunate queens. The story behind the poem is a wonderful portrait of a woman who stoical in the face of injustice but determined not to have her final moments laid open to cruelties inflicted her enemies. When I read of her fate many years ago I was impressed by her courage and presence of mind in the face of such injustice and my admiration has not lessened in the years since. For true horror stories, the Tudors were well ahead of the genre.
A Professional in Charge
I know the way of things:
the talk of justice, law –
But there is also vengeance, spite
and marital inconvenience.
Other heads were left
to dangle by their sinews,
took three cuts or more
before the deed was done.
–
As token of his mercy
or, some would say, his guilt,
my Royal Lord allowed
an executioner from France
because I was too much afraid
the heavy-handled axe
might fail at separating head
from neck in one swift slice.
–
The man who waits to sunder
Henry’s second Queen
discreetly hides his sword blade
as my Ladies help me kneel.
A sorry end, but not prolonged
through cruelty, or botched.
There will be dignity. I have
a professional in charge.
Orbis #177 contents:
Orbis is a quarterly journal. Full details re submission and subscription at http://www.orbisjournal.com
Pre-Launch of Skylight47, issue 7, by Robyn Rowland at Clifden Arts Festival 15 Sept. 2016.
A great time was had by all at the pre-launch of issue 7 of Skylight47 at the public library in Clifden on Thursday 15 September as part of the Arts week. The magazine is the result of some very hard work from the Clifden Writers Group and the accomplished poet Robyn Rowland was at hand to officiate. A number of the contributors attended and read out their pieces. I was very taken with Anne Irwin’s ‘Omey Island Races 2015’ with its vivid description of the event; and ‘Elegy to Some Mysterious Form’ by Ria Collins was quite a moving and unsettling poem on a very personal and traumatic decision that had to be made. Indeed all the contributors must be congratulated on a very fine selection of poems. There are prose articles too in the magazine on topics ranging from poem-writing itself (Kim Moore’s ‘Poetry Masterclass’) to reviews of recent books published.
The venue of Clifden Public Library contributed enormously to the cordial atmosphere of the proceedings, especially the three skylights overhead which, Tony Curtis assured us, were put in specially for the occasion and at great expense! Congratulations to all the Skylight Team on such a fine magazine and compliments to the library staff on the wonderful venue.

As mentioned, Australian poet Robyn Rowland did the honours and I was pleased to meet up with her again. I remember well her reading from her collection ‘This Intimate War’ recently in Dublin at The Sunflower Sessions in Jack Nealon’s (Capel Street, every last Wednesday, 07.30pm. Come along!). It is a most impressive book dealing with the terrible Gallipoli engagement in WWI and is a hard read since it eschews any self-serving attempts at ‘glorification’, and conveys much senselessness and absurdity of war. Robyn gets down into the dirt and blood with the soldiers and the sense of verisimilitude is stunning. Extra-fine poetry, then. And what a great writer she is and what a great thing to meet her … twice within a very few months!

My poem, Day of Judgement, was the last to be read out, and just as well too since it is a poem about ‘last things’. Not the kind of poem one would like to hear at a Christmas party (or any party!) but poems like this do have their place in the Great Order of Things to Come (but not to come too soon we hope!)
Day of Judgement
They who come to clear this room
will show a ruthlessness unknown
to me. The histories of my books
and how they came to claim a space
along these shelves will be unknown
to them. The brush and vacuum cleaner
will probe every corner, frames
will leave rectangles on the walls
and files of half-formed poems will bulk
black plastic sacks. This desk and chair
and radio/cd/clock will find
our long companionship concluded.
Half an hour will be enough
to sweep away a life, to feed
the hungry skip, allow the skirting
run around the room again
unhidden; there will be no mercy
for old pencil stubs, news clippings
yellowing in trays. Each spring
I tried, but never could be heartless,
emulate that day of judgement
when my loves must face the flames
or crowd the local charity shop,
forlorn— hoping for salvation.
Single issues of Skylight 47 are available at €5.00 plus postage, from skylight47.wordpress.com or come to the launch in Galway City Library at 6.00pm on Thursday, September 29 and pick up a copy.
Submissions for Skylight 47 issue 8 (Spring 2017) will be accepted between 1 Nov 2016 and 1 Jan 2017. See skylight47poets.wordpress.com for details.
‘Cyphers’ at Strokestown, 2016.
Following a time-honored tradition, the Spring/Summer Cyphers magazine was launched in April in the elegant surroundings of Strokestown House, Longford, during the Strokestown International Poetry Festival. Eilean Ni Chuilleanain officiated and, as always, the launch itself was a festive occasion, combining the debut of Cyphers 81 with that of two new poetry collections, On a Turning Wing from Paddy Bushe and Music from the Big Tent from Macdara Woods (both from Daedalus).
This Cyphers edition features a selection of New Zealand Poets, among which are fine pieces from Dinah Hawken (Haze) and Bill Manhire (Coastal). Among the rest of the poets I particularly liked Mary Montague’s The Road back and Where the Brown River Flows by John Murphy.
A poem of mine also features in this edition and I just cannot believe that it is thirty years since I first had a poem in Cyphers. Thirty Years! A Connaught Man’s Rambles is a poem about my father, one of that ‘lost generation’ of Irishmen of the 1940s and 50s who worked in England for practically all of their lives, sending money home to their families. Besides being a hard-working miner in the coal pits of Lancashire, ‘Sonny’ Lynskey was also an accomplished Irish Fiddle Player who shared many a session with some well-known names, such as the great piper Felix Doran (pictured with him below) This is the only photograph I have of my father playing. It was the age before Facebook and camera phones.
A Connaught Man’s Rambles
(in memory of Eddie (‘Sonny’) Lynskey, 1914-1972)
1921:
and Michael Coleman cuts the discs
will guide the bow a generation.
You in Mayo find the tunes
are slowly forming in your fingers –
Miss Mc Leod’s, The Creel of Turf…
1928:
to Holyhead and Lancashire:
a collier’s life of dust and dirt.
Your bow has split the resin stick,
your fingerboard has lost its black –
The Munster Jig, The Frost is All Over…
1947:
back in Dublin you will try
to leave behind the life you’ve lived
since first you lied about your age
to take the cage with pick and lamp –
The Sheep in the Boat, The Morning Star…
1953:
and tired of jobs on building sites
you’re back in Manchester to rooms
and mineshafts, ever shorter letters
to your family of strangers.
Toss the Feathers, Cherish the Ladies…
1972:
in Meelick cemetery someone
pours a naggin on your coffin
just before the sods are shovelled.
Old men watch, remembering –
The Sailor’s Hornpipe, The Kesh…
2013:
I hear Tommy Peoples play
and hear you chase the slurs and slides
with Michael Coleman’s 78s –
I see you raise your shoulder, bring
The Connaught Man’s Rambles to a close.
Cyphers, Ireland’s longest running poetry and prose magazine (with some artwork as well!), is available wherever good poetry magazines are sold, as are the two Daedalus collections by Paddy Bushe (On a Turning Wing) and Macdara Woods (Music from the Big Tent).
And hearty congratulations also to the Strokestown International Award winners John Murphy, Beatrice Garland and Jed Myers.