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    The Collected Poems of Driscoll
    The Collected Poems of Driscoll
    The Collected Poems of Driscoll
    Ebook384 pages2 hours

    The Collected Poems of Driscoll

    By William Driscoll

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    Terracom Poets Series: The Collected Poems of William Driscoll with an introduction by Martin Devlin.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilliam Driscoll
    Release dateApr 22, 2017
    ISBN9781370144723
    The Collected Poems of Driscoll
    Author

    William Driscoll

    Born on the shores of Lake Michigan north of Chicago, Illinois, as a boy Will was more at home on the beaches, local playing fields or exploring the woods behind his house than in a classroom. Precocious and free-spirited, he was given to the rough and tumble of sports and other physical activities. All this changed the day he discovered what he would later call--"the magic book; the first book that made the movie go in my head"-- J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Devouring it, the Lord of the Rings and later The Silmarillion in consecutive readings, his life-long love of fantasy and poetry began. During his high school years, now an avid reader, Will became a student of science fiction/fantasy, mythology and folklore and would seek out similar works by Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Stephen R. Donaldson. Graduating from college with honors, he received his first awards in the genres of poetry and short fiction while, all the while, his own fantasy world was slowly taking shape in his imagination. In 1988 surrounded by family and friends he married the love of his life, rock singer and part-time journalist for the Soho Weekly News, Kelly Andersen. Together they have three wonderful children, Shae, Erin and Erik. While Will wrote, Kelly went on to a long successful third career as a restaurateur and is currently a sought-after health and lifestyle coach. Throughout his writing life, Will has always considered himself a poet having written seven books of poetry along with a number of short stories, three movie scripts and an Off Broadway play. At the same time, like some model train enthusiast lovingly shaping an H0 scale paradise in his basement, he was tinkering obsessively with his fantasy world which presented first as hastily written notes in a journal; these scratchings would later become notebooks and then computer files filled with detailed histories, maps, poetry, character sketches and stories. Twenty-two years after that first note was taken, he decided to pull it all together and began Godsfade, a high science fiction/fantasy series set in a dystopian future, The Living Gods, Awakening in the Hollow and The Dark Gate being the first three installments.

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      Book preview

      The Collected Poems of Driscoll - William Driscoll

      About the Poet

      Known primarily as a narrative poet, William Driscoll is above all a storyteller and the guises he affects from poem to poem, as rich and varied as that of an adolescent girl afraid of her own budding desires to that of an old man looking back on lost longing are at once assorted and convincing.

      Driscoll’s poetry falls squarely into that category Emerson once called portfolio poetry, verse produced with little thought of notoriety or allegiance to prevailing style. This stand point gives these poems a fresh quality, a nonconformity, having provided the poet with the freedom to be unconventional.

      During his lifelong search for structures and forms designed to heighten the unique rhythms and music of his poetry, Driscoll’s work is clearly divided into three stages: a callow lyric period influenced by antique verse and marked by the use of archaic themes–often in tetrameter with end rhymes–to a nonrhyming middle period punctuated by short staccato lines and linear stanzas designed to shape the contours and control the pacing of the poems, to a latter experimental period of more free form poems heavily dependent on internal and slant rhymes to achieve their effects.

      In the wide-ranging poetry included in this volume, running the gamut from heroic couplets to blank verse, the reader will discover a quasi-Italian sonnet sequence with ever–increasing lines to swell each stanza to its conclusion, a ballad in pigeon Middle English and a song based on the rhythms and music of a Mozart Mass. These, as well as other contrivances of line, rhythm and rhyme, highlight the poet’s restless search for new forms and novel boundaries constructed to push the language to its limits.

      With disparate themes ranging from social satire to the agony of loss to the search for spiritual meaning–at times filled with invective, anger and slice at other times doggerel or whimsy that cut a wide swath of satire and mockery–the poems in this collection range from the serious to the bawdy and profane.

      Table of Contents

      About the Poet

      Lyrics

      Five Eggs in Springtime

      Were We Once filled with Sky and Lake

      The Visitor

      The Dripping Drops of Rain

      The Many Coats

      Death came Anyway

      Tara

      Passionless Age

      Mystic Sand

      My Love of your Morning

      Creativity

      I Have Known Euphoria and Epiphany

      As the Flower turns to the Sun

      A Song of Autumn

      I Pour Meaning into the Vessel of my Lives

      In the end it is only You and I

      Silence

      I Made Love to my Wife

      I Know Sorrow Now

      I am a Heart

      The Song of the Earth and Sea

      Gone are the days

      Cicadas

      Curdle Friar

      Upon a Wall a Dragon’s Claw

      Curving Pendulous

      A Goth’s Arch

      Naked as the Sunshine

      Red Clover Grows

      We Read to Know

      Will I Live Another Day?

      Square Holes

      A Basket, a Hat

      There’s Something about a Restaurant

      I Wrote that out of Me

      Inevitability

      Grow old...with Me

      There is a Beauty in Age

      The Bitch, the Boss and the Butter–men

      Misanthrope Party

      Lazy Lions

      a–costic–crostic

      There are Nine Holes

      River Views

      Rocking in Endless Motion

      Undressing Change

      Trinity

      The Martyrdom of Cecilia

      When Ga puts ‘is Finga on Ya

      For Michael, 2000

      I Luv a Girl

      Prayer One: The Demiurge

      The Child

      Time’s Test

      Let us cease the Talk of Autumn

      I Search through a Myriad of Phantoms

      Celestial Beings feel not the Things

      I Wonder Sometimes

      To List the Things I Admire

      Young man, Old man

      The Higher you Build

      The Cove

      The Child

      The Poet of Sen Sel-Amar

      Our Poet Remembers Childhood

      Halwin’s Search

      Song of Renfrew

      The Wooden Box

      A Drinking Song

      Rime

      The Academy – The Salon (and Mr. Manet)

      An Eggstremelybad Mentalcase

      not who, but what

      Noblins

      Filadalay

      Mon Captain Naught

      A Bust of Wilde

      Koniology

      I Wanna be a Feminist Man

      All Boxed In

      The Naffoo Bird Sings

      A Plea to the Passionless

      The Rag–a–man

      Dem Beans

      I’ve tried on Shirts

      The Walrus and the Debutante

      Safe Sonnetry

      I Never Conjured your Eyes

      Sen Zala Ben

      Rime

      Mulligan

      Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee

      Househusband

      Rhodes’ Colossus

      When y’touch Things

      A Nigerian Story

      Romantics

      Juliana

      The Graal Gate

      Requiem Mass

      Lochinvar Returns

      Amric Loves the Night

      The Poet of Sen Sel–Amar

      The Golden Bird

      Definitions of a Radical Centrist

      Of Plastics, Pedophiles

      In Defense of the Moneyed Classes

      Born and Raised in a Stinkin’ Dessert

      The Golden Triangle

      If I had in my Hands

      Mourning in Waco

      Definition of a Radical Centrist

      Eat the Elite

      Live, from the House of Pain

      When Principle Dies

      Bread and Circuses

      I am Truth

      A Brave New Day in the New US of A

      I Hate Everybody

      25 Unpublished Poems

      Kaleidoscope Color

      The Universe Encircles

      Cha

      Evolution

      The Stream

      Smiling Wicked Innocence

      The Irish Kings

      Tranquility Base

      Over the Next Hill

      The Sea has Blown Calmer

      Written While Thinking of Christina Rossetti

      Tahiti calls to Me

      They Beat their Swords

      In the Fields

      On the Willows, AD 73

      Within Wheels

      Two Towers

      2000 Good–byes

      Marisleysis

      Symbol

      The Rain Came Pouring Down as Tears

      How the Years lie Beautiful

      Like a Thread in the Darkness

      The Flowers of my Heart

      Understanding Yeats

      Lyrics

      Five Eggs in Springtime

      When the wind blows warm from the south

      heavy with the scent of loam and pine

      the forest behind the old shed

      shudders, cracks under the weight

      of wet snow in spring and expectation

      I close my eyes to taste the bloom

      of springs before, that came and to

      the lover, poet, fool conjured immortality

      Did Whitman, in the freezing blood of young

      boys dying with winter on some distant field,

      taste such sorrow? And sing?

      Did Arnold bear such melancholy by his moon–

      blanched shore and choose to love?

      Human misery is less inspiring amid the maple

      and pine when springtime brings the scent of death

      Across the holt a neighbor’s clearing trees

      rough men balance chainsaws with their bellies

      and callused hands or ride high upon

      smoking machines with claws and teeth chewing

      up the pines, seeing only wood and worse

      As some foreign army in a distant field they fall

      in uniforms of needles and dried brown leaves

      one by one shake the earth and tremble down

      they were here before the roads and houses

      (the difference and degrees) where soft malice

      warms its hands like a Bedouin before a desert fire

      they were here before the fall

      When I stalked those woods in spring, peered

      in its hollow stumps, kicked its rotted logs

      saw dead raccoons with black and crawling eyes

      and flightless birds bent like broken sticks, drunk

      on despair and the liveliness of death and spring

      When under a leaning birch, I came upon a nest

      abandoned on its side and listing

      in it five small eggs bleached as the bark above

      nestled in a pile of twigs, five small prayers

      of peace thrust to the future unrealized

      five fragile dreams broken and consumed

      Were We Once filled with Sky and Lake

      Were we once filled with sky and lake

      and covered with mud?

      blue as a jay and daring as a crow?

      I don’t remember

      something tells me that we were

      in Erin I can see it

      all dancing Erin pigtails and promise

      can I wear a party dress? she smiles

      to climb a tree? I ask exasperated

      to climb a tree...

      Were we once bright as a star

      and open as a field?

      sharp as a blade of grass

      and green as summer?

      we might have been

      I seem to recall

      in Sean I can see it

      all searching Sean eyes and fingers

      that’s a Cosmos there

      that’s Queen Ann’s Lace

      if you say so, so

      if you say so, so...

      Were we once brown as the earth

      and ripe as a berry?

      shifting like a humming bird

      and soaking like a sponge?

      I don’t know

      it’s quite likely we were

      in Erik I can see it

      all smiling Erik all hands all head

      all light blue eyes

      I’m wearing stardust for my shirt – see?

      if only I could tell you where I’m from

      before I forget...

      If only you could tell us

      The Visitor

      When I was three, the visitor came

      to my house and led me from

      root to trunk, from warm bath

      water to March rain, from my mother’s

      breast, my slatted bed to run to him

      as if an old friend

      And as I ran free as the sunshine on

      green grass, pressed footprints in the earth

      callow and whispering as the wind

      that plays the birch leaves sideways

      in the spring, he smiled at me

      bone–white and merciless

      When I was thirteen, the visitor came again

      holding lanterns of gull–flight and

      nimbus clouds, baskets of honey–bread

      and wild storms and love, love

      and I walked with her a while

      as if a trusted guide

      And she led me to fields of delight

      and fruits of mallow sweetness round

      the curve of her urging I caressed

      the fullness of that promontory

      crashed against the black cliffs

      of my desire with mad fury

      restless as the currents, somber as the grave

      And as I forgot the ocean so too

      I forgot the shore

      for a time

      for a time

      When I was nineteen, I sat apart silent

      a cracked seawall where thousands of

      fireflies had lighted for my delight

      where moonlight had become woman

      and sea tide bliss and there the visitor

      touched the sand before my eyes

      with snow and ice, whipped the waves

      to a dark brooding cascade of hoarfrost

      sweeping that ghastly scene with a ghostly

      arm it whispered ‘I shall return

      to collect my payment’

      Then vanished on the winds

      leaving me frozen and afraid

      When I was thirty–two, the visitor appeared

      again – a giant dark and brooding

      terrible as the gale, empty as a cavern

      reaching a shadow hand inside my chest

      it took the fire there and snuffed it

      ‘Now you are truly dead’

      it said

      And I mourned

      And since the visitor

      hasn’t left me but it sits

      beside me always, touching my cells

      one by one with numbness

      like a game, taking bits of me

      at a time like twine, to make a nest

      my conifer nest

      ‘Will you soon rock me

      in your arms, rock me

      for all eternity and never

      let me go?’ I ask

      And the visitor smiles

      The Dripping Drops of Rain

      ‘The dripping drops

      of

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