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Return to the Figure
When most of my father’s friends had died, he began to build columns of round flat stones. He stood them by the front door, the windows, as if to harness companions for the thresholds. They watched the sun pass with him from the Limavady mountain, over Mussendun, to the lip of the headlands of Donegal. They were never spoken to or named, but drew the eye like something that doesn’t need, yet composes living form, the way one thing supports another – the head, the neck, the torso – or lets it lie along it, like one rested hand resting on another’s. Dad wouldn’t call himself a sculptor, but this is art, just as the Inuit traveller once built stone men at each new bend of water, upsurge of ground, to extend their home’s periphery, the touch they’d left behind, so forward steps are always manned by glancing back. Later travellers discovering these sentinels felt held in the plural’s heated hands, believed they could cross the void unharmed.
©2010 Cherry Smyth
Author Links
'Back to Back': Smyth poem in Eyewear
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©2009 Southword Editions and Munster Literature Centre |
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Cherry Smyth is a Northern Irish writer, living in London. Her two poetry collections, When the Lights Go Up (2001) and One Wanted Thing (2006), were published by Lagan Press. Cherry’s work was selected for the anthologies Best of Irish Poetry 2008 (Southword Editions) and The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (Salmon Press, 2009); and has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Magma and online in nth position and Eyewear. She was also commended in the 2010 UK National Poetry Competition. She writes for visual art magazines: Modern Painters, Art Monthly, Art Review and Circa. She is Senior Lecturer in Poetry at the University of Greenwich and the poetry editor of Brand Literary Magazine.
