The Seven Streams: an Irish Cycle

a new book of poetry

After all these years of writing my way into my ancestry and a country, a landscape and a culture which has always dominated my heart and my mind, I am so very happy to have collected all of my Irish themed poems from all of my collections, into one volume, enabling me to arrange the cycles and patterns of understanding and insight that have come to me through all the years: to come to some understanding of my relationship with that impossible-to-describe island and the shape shifting identity of its inhabitants.

From postcards from relatives contemplated as a child in my mother’s kitchen to the rain soaked mountains of Connemara, from sitting by the blessed wells of The Burren; the shelters of Irish Saints or the open coffins of departed friends, it has been a long, almost mythic, at times heartbreaking but always nourishing journey. The West of Ireland holds the culture of conversation where I perhaps feel most at home in the world: it is not only a lively, quicksilver conversation between people on a daily basis, but between the restless sea and the mountains, between the past, the present and the future, and most powerfully given the thread that runs through this book; the conversation between my sense of origin and the place to which I feel am being continually borne by the never ending, cyclical and seasonal tides of a continually surprising life.

Photo: © David Whyte

THE SEVEN STREAMS

Come down drenched, 
at the end of May, 
with the cold rain 
so far into your bones 
that nothing will warm you 
except your own walking
and let the sun come out 
at the day’s end 
near Slievenaglusha 
with the rainbows 
doubling over Mulloch Mor, 
and see your clothes 
steaming in the bright air. 

Be a provenance 
of something gathered, 
a summation of 
previous intuitions, 
let your vulnerabilities 
walking on the cracked, 
sliding limestone, 
be this time, not a weakness, 
but a faculty 
for understanding 
what’s about to happen. 

Stand above the Seven Streams, 
letting the deep down current surface 
around you, then branch and branch 
as they do, back into the mountain, 
and as if you were able for that flow, 
say the few necessary words 
and walk on, broader and cleansed 
for having imagined.


   -from The Seven Streams: an Irish Cycle, now available to order in paperback or a leather-bound and signed special edition