Table of Contents
Introduction Jody Allen Randolph xi
I City of Shadows
'As Dusk Fell on the City' 1
Atlantis - A Lost Sonnet 3
Once in Dublin 5
Unheroic 7
The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City 11
City of Shadows 13
A False Spring 17
Tree of Life 21
Nationhood: Two Failed Sonnets 23
The Dolls Museum in Dublin 25
An Elegy for My Mother in which She Scarcely Appears 29
We were Neutral in the War 31
Heroic 37
Child of Our Time 39
Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland 41
II Gifts of the River
'I Begin with the Liffey …' 45
The Scar 47
Anna Liffey 49
How the Dance Came to the City 61
The Harbour 63
The Long Evenings of their Leave-Takings 67
And Soul 69
The Proof That Plato Was Wrong 71
Escape 75
Cityscape 79
III Under these Hills
'Dundrum is an Anglicisation of a Gaelic Place Name…' 83
The War Horse 85
This Moment 89
Night Feed 91
The Pomegranate 93
The Mother Tongue 97
Witness 101
In Our Own Country 103
Making Money 105
What Love Intended 109
Once 113
A Marriage for the Millennium 115
Re-Reading Oliver Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village' in a Changed Ireland 119
Two Poets and a City: A Conversation, Eavan Boland and Paula Merhan 125
Notes on the Photographs 149
Index 157
