Le Cheile 2004

Noel Monahan

Noel Monahan's work has appeared in The Irish Times, The Sunday Tribune, Books Ireland, Poetry Australia, Paterson LIterary Review, USA and many more outlets. His collections of poetry include Opposite Walls (Salmon, 1991) and Snowfire (Salmon, 1995). Noel Monahan is co-editor of Windows Publications and has published five Authors & Artists Introduction Series. Since the beginning of 1997, he has been consultant editor of W.P. Literature & Arts journal. His plays include Half A Vegetable, a dramatic presentation of Patrick Kavanagh's poetry, A Proverbial Wet Summer, and Feathers of Time. His poetry has been translated into Italian, Romanian and French and he has read his work at numerous summer schools and poetry festivals throughout Ireland. His poetry has appeared in many anthologies, most recently Awakenings, a text for New Leaving Certificate English. Noel Monahan was born in Granard, Co. Longford and is now living in Cavan. He is the recent winner of the Poetry Ireland/ Seacat National Poetry Award with a first prize of £5,000.00. Noel's poem 'The Funeral Game' was chosen as the overall winner, out of 2,500 poems, by renowned judges, Michael Longley, Cathal O Searcaigh and Eavan Boland.

His latest collection The Funeral Game travels a pathway between two worlds, holding and reconciling Earth and Heaven - Life and Death as one reality. A soul landscape of changing myths, fugitive idols, where fantasy is at play and collection is coloured by a deep rooted spirituality and a longing for change in an ageing Christianity, much challenged by the secular. The Funeral Game is Monahan's way of reinventing himself and travelling on.

"His poems have such vivacity that they carry us uncomplaining into the serio-comic world of e.e. cummings."
James J. McAuley, The Irish Times

"Monahan's poems take place in a sunlit imagination where the blacker side of life, although not absent, is not allowed to darken the material.... The mythological poems are light and magical: they dazzle the mind and have a comical touch."
Maurice Harmon, Poetry Ireland Review

The Funeral Game

That winter we came to terms with death.
Every shoe-box was a coffin
For anything small and dead
And we wrapped them in calicoes, velvets...
We grabbed hats, coats, umbrellas,
From the hallway to dress as mourners,
Someone struck an iron girder in the hay-shed
To sound the funeral bell,
John Joe beat the dead march on a saucepan.
We held wakes, issued death certificates
To old crows, kittens, chickens ...
Lined the graves with stones,
Erected crosses with ash sticks.
We pretended to cry, struggled with Latin prayers,
Filled the wet graves in the clover field,
Genuflected in the direction of a whin bush,
The rain pelting down,
We left by a side-gap,
Back to the hay-shed for tea, bread, butter ...
For all who travelled long journeys.

 

This event is funded by Meath County Council Arts Office.

Further details and a recording of Noel Monahan's poetry are available from the Salomn Poetry Website

 

Noel Monahan reads from The Funeral Game and other works on Saturday 31st July at 2:00pm in the Gilson School.