Conjure
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About this ebook
Conjure is Michael Donaghy’s third collection, and his most accomplished to date, displaying the same trademark elegance, sleight of hand and philosophical wit that have established his reputation as a ‘poet’s poet’.
But while these poems time their feints and punches as well as ever, often the poet’s guard is deliberately kept down: Conjure’s elegies and disappearing acts, love songs and tortuous journeys represent the most challenging, vulnerable and moving work Donaghy has yet written.
‘Among the finest American poets of his generation’ Robert McPhillips
‘The artistry of Donaghy’s work seems to me exemplary’ Sean O’Brien
‘The fine-tuned precision of a twelve-speed bike’ Alfred Corn
Michael Donaghy
Michael Donaghy was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1954. In 1985 he moved to London, where he worked as a teacher and traditional Irish musician. He died in 2004.
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Conjure - Michael Donaghy
Notes
The Excuse
Please hang up. I try again.
‘My father’s sudden death has shocked us all’
Even me, and I’ve just made it up,
Like the puncture, the cheque in the post,
Or my realistic cough. As I’m believed,
I’m off the hook. But something snags and holds.
My people were magicians. Home from school,
I followed a wire beneath the table to
A doorbell. I rang it. My father looked up.
Son, when your uncle gets me on the phone
He won’t let go. I had to rig up something.
Midnight. I pick up and there’s no one there,
No one, invoked, beyond that drone. But if
I had to rig up something, and I do,
Let my excuse be this, and this is true:
I fear for him and grieve him more than any,
This most deceiving and deceived of men . . .
Please hang up and try again.
Not Knowing the Words
Before he wearied of the task, he sang a nightly Mass
for the repose of the souls of the faithful departed
and magicked his blood to bourbon and tears
over the ring, the lock of hair, the dry pink dentures.
Was he talking to her? I never learned.
Walk in, he’d pretend to be humming softly,
like wind through a window frame.
The last I saw of him alive, he pressed me to his coat.
It stinks in a sack in my attic like a drowned Alsatian.
It’s his silence. Am I talking to him now, as I get it out
and pull its damp night down about my shoulders?
Shall I take up the task, and fill its tweedy skin?
Do I stand here not knowing the words
when someone walks in?
Caliban’s Books
Hair oil, boiled sweets, chalk dust, squid’s ink . . .
Bear with me. I’m trying to conjure my father,
age fourteen, as Caliban – picked by Mr Quinn
for the role he was born to play because
‘I was the handsomest boy at school’
he’ll say, straight-faced, at fifty.
This isn’t easy. I’ve only half the spell,
and I won’t be born for twenty years.
I’m trying for rainlight on Belfast Lough
and listening for a small, blunt accent
barking over the hiss of a stove getting louder like surf.