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Crows on the Wire www.crowsonthewire.co
Contents
Gerard Smyth 5 Kelli Allen 8 Kathleen McCracken 9 Damian Smyth 10 Kathleen McCracken 12 Olive Broderick 14 Gerald Dawe 16 Susanna Galbraith 20 Gerard Beirne 21 Simon Jones 22 Moyra Donaldson 24 Mathew Sweeney 25 Howard Wright 28 Nuala Ní Chonchúir 30 Joanna Grant 32 Gerard Beirne 34 Howard Wright 36 Emma Must 38 Gerard Smyth 39 Joe Duggan 42 Stephen Connolly 46 Maria Finch 47 Gerald Dawe 48 All images by Kelly Richardson with kind permission of the artist
‘ Graphic Novel - based on original script ‘ Educational Research Pack - for post-primary pupils ‘ ‘Purposeful Storytelling’ Symposium in May 2014 A discussion on ‘Crows on the Wire’ and related themes
F o r c o n f i r m a t i o n d e t a i l s l o g o n t o w w w. c r o w s o n t h e w i r e . c o
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Coming in 2014:
Abridged 0_10: HAUNTED Editorial
HAUNTED
It’s a hard climb to Shandon, it takes hard strides
Every fragmented voice or movement leaves its mark on our environment and we are never to forget. Something spilled has spread its stain and haunts our vision as a shadow. An old photograph, a signature in dead handwriting, a blanket of dust and skin cells. Departed others and departed selves remain present within our sensible grasp. With all we have been and done we haunt ourselves among the extinguished masses. We have made casts of ourselves in the air just by breathing, and there in the air they remain, our timeclones, our phantom heritage. Circulating motes animate the ghosts. We shed our pasts like translucent skins but they follow us around on strings of dust and memory, our puppet-shadows.
abridged 0__10
to get from bottom to top of the hill,
No part of this publication may
the upper alleyways, back streets
be reproduced without permission. Copyright remains with authors/ artists. abridged is a division of
that its space is haunted, has a spirit
The Chancer Corporation,
for a guest, a soul sequestered
c/o Verbal Arts Centre,
in the country of permanent weather.
This space is haunted by all that has churned and changed it. A footprint in the sand remembers
Bishop Street Within,
the shape of the sole. Nature haunts our cities like a bitter ancestor from a golden age. Out
Derry - Londonderry BT48 6PU.
urban environment. There are the degenerate satellites that haunt our planet, dumb and lifeless ghosts of the
In the green-sward burial ground stiffened by death, the dead are far from the clouds. They are dust of the ages, ghosts of the infirmary,
of place among the linear constructions a dried weed between paving-stones reminds us of our natural humanity. Nature’s old breath, a hot stench, haunts the chemical cleanliness of the
It’s a hard climb towards bell and bell-tower and the room nailed shut because of the legend
Stable Lane and Mall Wall,
a tree, and we are haunted by this image which is ingrained on our subconscious, innate to
that once were a hell of epidemics.
website: www.abridgedonline.com
from the annals of history they come back
facebook:abridged zero-nineteen
out of a time of hunger, atrocities, raids;
twitter: @abridged030
the constantly shifting smoke of a city in flames.
telephone:028 7126 6946 email: abridged@ymail.com
technological era. Containers of dead space and coded memory. And then there are the digital ghosts, virtual profiles and electronic memories cut loose from their human origins and floating aimless in the cyber space. Undeleted husks of the virtual past. And who could deny the haunting? Past lives haunting the domestic, past environments haunting the urban, abandoned fabrications haunting our networks, abandoned selves haunting our consciousness.
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Next: Abridged: 0 _ 36: Dis-Ease
Gerard Smyth
Overleaf: Exiles Of The Shattered Star, 2006, HD video installation, 16′ x 9′ (variable) with audio.
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A Shrine of the Natural Burlesque
Watching straps lick her ankles,
reaching for a dollhouse cave sheltered behind apricot knees, I am suddenly insignificant, wrapped in tiny useless hairs. Crinoline winds her waist as a nest must shelter fine soft birth, wet with new feathers. There are no margins. Lamp-cast awareness is little like waking, rather too much light throws every detail back into dream. My hand curls in the same glove I use to collect bullets and sand for one after another glass jar. She and I are the rings left in the dermis when pressures are too great or forgotten.
A Minor Once in a film a blonde woman caged in frames saying ‘every man has your voice’ and your absence I would hear like the ghost of a crucifixion your gold grain russet tones in the salt inflected invitations of men whose names escaped me until I was not listening to your voice anymore but to its shorn undertones bleached, scaled, bereft of lights and edges yet still alive somehow the imprint of a resurrection there inside this halfhearted conversation I am having with my latest metaphysician when you walk back in from out of snowfields high desert a floodlit landing strip to ask the colour of the word
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its syllables one intimate long-drawn violet drawl across the minor key of A.
Kelli Allen
Kathleen McCracken
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revenant
Silage
It was a bad year, the annals say, if in winter you could see to the back wall of the shed: elemental debris when the cattle feed ran out, cobwebs splayed out like skin off the black beams (those dead wings of the fields disturbed and opening), the black beams visible for the first maybe in decades, the concave ribcage of a willow basket still brooding and down there, in the shadow, what might be a man – fugitive shoulders hunched against unaccustomed light – but is in fact a greatcoat: ghosting, doused in slurry a dozen summers before, the scrim spoiled by oil or an arm caught in a harvester, torn beyond repair, a write-off ripening for this accidental burial. How it recovered. A child wandered among workers leaning like veterans on grapes and pitchforks, caught in a frieze of sour dust, the brittle light. Death hadn’t happened yet though on its way down years towards him: its features, its fusty knap and chill, the sudden drainage of character and love from the build of the familiar; evacuation, remains but pure absence in extremis. Innocence urged to darkness ‘See what he has in his pockets, young fella!’ where the big figure still loomed, blinded, hollowed out, kneeling on what was left of the bales as if tired or wounded. And each good day since, that shy visage rebuilt thread by thread night-patrolling, diesel-fuelled, on-the-run outlaw, haunter of broad daylight entering in by strange gaps, some shell-shocked inmate, an old ally with soldier’s heart but already braved. From the dry cavity of the body, deftly drawn, slivers of blue egg-shell in the boy’s palm, a small bird flown.
Damian Smyth
Opposite: The Erudition, 2010, 3 screen, HD video installation, 48′ x 9′ (variable) with audio
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tilt of a forehead, a lank collar shrouding the outline of a jaw:
Dream in the Key of D
Ronaldo might have gleaned an imprint of the Styx but I knew it for an English river, the Severn or the Wye eskered valleys where you holidayed that summer of the floods, wore day in day out a bomber jacket picked up cheap in Winnipeg. There was the water, grey and rapid and a regiment of sedge before the sweep of tailored lawns and then the hillock where you stood, abstracted, gazing over at a zinc hotel, its balcony decked with lanterns and a telescope I had no need to look through, your features and your smalltown stance defined, despite the reach, in tight closeup. You scanned my outland shore, squinted hard against the shredded light and recognizing nothing turned, Canadian foot soldier striding back up under
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the gilded oaks, the cinereal elms.
Kathleen McCracken
Opposite: The Erudition, 2010, 3 screen, HD video installation, 48′ x 9′ (variable) with audio
Fallow II
A tempest comes at the close of the year. I cannot bear witness to it. Gales are invisible. But not still. Everything outside is protesting at being pushed around by the spectral pressure. Inside, the only sound is a mantle clock whose tick, unlike my pulse, does not keep pace with the hiss and strike of the storm. Behind its face, a man-made mechanism keeps the calendar year on schedule. Sitting this one out already, I am listening to its second-by-second stroking for an echo of ‘this will soon pass’ or a hint of any other presence. Inside, the insulated tick steadily measures out its own distinct message -
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‘This time has no ending’.
Olive Broderick
Opposite: The Erudition, 2010, 3 screen, HD video installation, 48′ x 9′ (variable) with audio
Little Clouds
A boy at his bedroom window,
Beyond the yard on the left is a row of houses,
in the morning, doing breathing exercises,
the backs of which -- kitchens, bathrooms,
the window is open and he is drawing in air,
landing windows and gardens -- run behind an entry
like a swimmer, his hands pressed against
that leads into a derelict site and the backs
his narrow chest, and he inhales deeply
of more houses. Above this network of houses
and slowly, making sure to hold his breath
the streets rise into the chimneys of other houses,
momentarily and then exhaling slowly.
the sloping roofs, the telegraph poles, the bright sky.
The scene before him has not changed
He breathes again deeply and looks out,
since he moved to his grandmother’s house
not really seeing anything beyond the wall
with his mother and sister several years before,
of the landing and the spangled glass
when he was little more than a boy.
of the bathroom window.
Now he is turning into adolescence
The red brick of the house next door
and the doctor has recommended these
glows a little in the morning light.
morning and last thing at night exercises
There is barely a breeze but little clouds
to help him overcome the asthma attacks
carry across the view. He closes the window carefully
which afflict him from time to time.
and turns back into his room.
The yard is long and narrow;
Above his bed are pictures of motorcycles.
at the far end by the back door
The fireplace is empty and the large wardrobe
there is a coal bunker and an outdoor lavatory.
next to it reflects the young man
At the pantry door stands a wire mesh larder
in the shadow of his room. The dressing table
and next to it an old mangle
and the shelves in the nook of the chimney breast
for draining off excess water
are sparse of ornament. His dressing gown hangs
from the washing before it’s hung up
on the back of the closed door.
on the line to dry on Mondays.
He looks absent-mindedly at himself
It’s rarely used. The laundry is collected
in the long mirror of the wardrobe,
on Wednesdays and delivered on Fridays.
pulls on his shoes and leaves the room
The milkman calls every day before the house stirs.
to the sound of a couple of children
The evening paper comes in just before six at night.
running down the back lane, shouting
The piano is tuned by a blind man
and teasing one another. The rooms
who appears each autumn, the hedges cut
at the back of the house are in the shade
by a bald-headed Magwitch in spring;
where the grandfather clock on the landing
the house painted and decorated by Mr. Wright,
strikes twelve. And then again.
At the beginning, a gas lighter popped
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the insurance man collects his premium Saturday nights. the street lamps on the pavement outside.
Overleaf: Twilight Avenger, 2008, HD video installation, 16′ x 9′ (variable) with audio.
Gerald Dawe
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Archetype
Song of the Bean Nighe
It is our quest to be Ghosts as we know them.
Like a plantation black mammy washing the bloodstained clothes
Bodies pursue patterns in the veined stone,
of abandoned children by the banks of ruptured rivers,
universal epics mapping out on a heart-monitor – quiver and blip. Time cycles in cross-section.
I drove hornless red-eared heifers to the water’s dark-skinned edge, moaning songs of the wild ox beneath my labourious breath,
The Time-traveller is here, drained and shattered on his bicycle seat. I am a Ghost among Ghosts, the biscuit-cutter paradox of vacancy, now a sweat stain of evolution suspended on the axis. Cézanne knew them, the geometric Ghosts – three
where I died giving birth to countless children of indecipherable shade, the base mingling of a paler stream next a lightning stricken tree. Dressed forever in river green with my red webbed feet, my protruding tooth,
parts of the whole as we understand wholeness, and
I lay my thread worn grave clothes to rest until bamboozled like a darky
liquid visitants pool about this scaffolding of the
in a shadowy minstrel show parade, black-faced death cowardly
Archetype.
and lasciviously snuck up on me and sucked my sagging breasts,
We are the fugitive waters of Time –
a small pulse
became my foster child by cozenage, a living man come through the ground,
briefly haunting.
with tracker dogs and takes my trail to grab and pull me down. Cursed to toil until my natural death, I exhaust all who bequest my favour, sit by the banks of my bedchamber and rise back up, swell the water thrice-fold. a broad and foaming flood to make trial of the ford, the bearers wading in, shoulder-high and loose of foothold, braced against the surge, while I wet-nurse and unleash the bier, the raw-hide whip of breeding that burst the banks to sweep the dead away, swap wool for woad, and in the morning be cast upon the shore.
The Bean Nighe is the spirit of a woman who died giving birth and is doomed to work, washing the blood
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from the grave-clothes of those about to die.
Susanna Galbraith
Gerard Beirne
21 YORK STREET
I went to York street Saw the house where I was born And watched the river flow Under the bridge where clocks were turning Women talking dogs were barking Watched the faces come and go. And all the words like bubbles rise Advice and orders tender lies the truth Don’t tell me which way I should go. Outside a butchers shop I saw a girl who looked a lot Like someone that I used to know. I recognized expressions Eyes of boys in men forgotten now God knows how many years ago. And as I paused
My voice it roared But wavered only softly down the street that I call home.
Simon Jones
Opposite: from Scene Setters (series) 2008, C-prints, 24″ X 18″.
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Deep breathing air
To the Current Occupants of My Parents’ House
The Sneezer
I need no key, no invitation; whether
A sneeze cut the night in half,
you are in or out, I come and go
as I walked back from the hotel, whistling an old Dylan tune,
as I please and even in the dark
and poking a finger at the stars.
I intimately know my way Then fast footsteps followed me, from room to room, with all
accompanied by loud exhalations
the secret spaces in between,
of breath, till a tall, fat fellow paced alongside me, laughing
every creak of door or stairs, every layer of paint and tears.
at how he’d caught up with me, without my running on ahead.
I look in the bathroom mirror,
He could be a mugger, he hissed,
often lie down on my own bed.
then a big sneeze came again.
Sometimes I simply sit and listen;
He then pronounced my name,
inhabit memories again. It’s not
and proffered his hand. Startled, I shook it. I did not know him, but indeed he seemed familiar –
the dead who haunt, but the living; the presence that you sense is me.
or almost familiar. Another life, maybe. His voice had no accent, or none I could specify. His face was small for his shape and size. The moon was round and afloat, the rain was out on the islands, so I quickened my pace,
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He sneezed once more. The hay, he muttered, laughing, then he grabbed my arm. Would you, he said, accompany me to the sea?
Moyra Donaldson
Overleaf: Howlin’ Wolf, 2008, C-PRINT, 40″ X 30″.
Mathew Sweeney
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which was no problem to him.
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COLLATERAL
So cold, she rattles and roars like a mouse around the house, a big house from before she was born. That old. Used to wars and death’s tricks, cracked parquet, accidents waiting on wonky stairs, in bedrooms and cubby-holes and along rug-slippy corridors, their numbers untold added to for a hundred years. So old, the hall tiles echo through the ivy-wrapped mansion and sloping grounds bordered by purring trees to the green-treated fences of Monopoly estates called Wildwood, Springfields, Clanbrassil: their sorted gardens and blue-webbed trampolines, the Gabriel’s Hounds untethered under pvc windows, and the tough grass stunted between sane paving-stones. Perhaps a washing-line and length of hose. That controlled. So old, she adds dust to the frames, spines and half-moon tables, escritoires and Biedermeier gilt, settles her thoughts on a million other things in an assortment gallery to be passed on to lip-licking, wallet-smacking strangers, the house falling down around her like mould. A dry pea in a tin can, so old she can’t climb or crawl, she lives in the corner of a room. That cold. Like the house, she needs rewired, brain put in gear; so old, all else is young. If she died, clearances would take attic and cellar, the ramparts and towers emptied of DNA and candle wax. But she will never die, the house will see to that. It rattles and roars like a mouse
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in a trap, a dog with a bone, a cat with a tongue. What it has, it holds.
Howard Wright
Opposite: Orion Tide, 2013, HD video installation, 16′ x 9′ (variable) with audio.
An Unlucky Woman
I will pluck charms, dangle them from my neck and the headboard: rose-quartz beads and a silver turtle, a Síle-na-Gig with gaping lips. I will visit the rag tree at Clonfert, pin a baby’s soother to its trunk, carry a discreet pouch of hazelnuts, slip two gilded fish under our bed. I will wear a Saint Gerard scapular, the kind of thing that drips miracles, and just maybe this army of amulets
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will make my body do what it won’t.
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
Opposite: Orion Tide, 2013, HD video installation, 16′ x 9′ (variable) with audio.
Hard to Say Where the Figure Ends and the Background Begins Helmand Province, Afghanistan The earth is the color
In the blackouts
of the sky which
our grey-booted feet
is the color
learn the dark and the rocks.
of the dirt One of my boys brings me an old dead bullet. They tell us we breathe the dirt
I bored a hole through the top, he says,
up here. Moon dust
so you can wear it on a chain. With luck
and dried-up shit.
the only one you ever stop.
With intake of breath
Children, I tell them in my lecture,
the silt. Coats the spongy
many thousands of years ago
pink of the lungs.
the people here believed
On the dustiest days
in a place they called the House of Dust.
we cough up mud. The place where all our souls went down If it ever rains it
to wait for who knows what. Slowly
streaks. Dirty tears.
feeling the change. Some said the waiting ones
Some days there’s a mountain
began to sprout soft doves’ feathers. As if maybe
tipped with wisps of snow
to fly. One day. Wings the pink and gray.
off on the horizon. Some days just a flat grey scrim. Haze
Of the swirling dirt.
over the ghosts of old dead rivers. The dust chokes out the satellites. Unusable, your dish becomes a nest. No internet for days—laptops turn to paperweights.
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We rediscover writing. Tracing the shapes.
Joanna Grant
Opposite: Mariner 9 (detail), 2012, 3-channel HD video installation, 43′ x 9′ (variable) with 5.1 audio.
Vision of the Underworld (Inspired by the works of don Francisco de Quevedo)
Astrologers, alchemists, crack-brained fools. Petty-foggers cutting thongs out of other men’s leather, boring their noses with hot irons, biting their nails to the quick. Gawdy coxcombs and hob-nailed boots, scythes and sheep-hooks. Contented cuckolds with pincers, crane-bills, scissors, saws. Bare-necked women and all sorts of gee-gaws. Jilts, cheats, picklocks, trepanners, tooth-drawers picking a quarrel with their gums. Rooks and jackdaws, sons of whores, crook-fingered and baker-legged, cramp-jawed knaves and fools with their tongues steeped in oil. Catch-poled blockheads.
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The bones I speak of are dead.
Gerard Beirne
Opposite: Mariner 9 (detail), 2012, 3-channel HD video installation, 43′ x 9′ (variable) with 5.1 audio.
THE VIEWING
All we ask for is American ivy, an English garden, and to bask in the Irish weather; a drive and double-glazing, rooms knocked through to other rooms revealing a polished ground floor leading to the very altars of family ritual. We arrive and ask for many more things, leave again and keep on returning and talking, even as the plans move us through to decking, oil tank; the neighbours over a thinning hedge. The mask drops, the décor isn’t there for the choosing. And when we come to the stair, it turns each time under a stained-glass affair to the landing not tasked with light, nothing poured or streamed, no colonnade to put us in another time and place, just here, more or less where the walls end. When we see ourselves at home, children visiting thirty years from now, they are only ghosts, something to haunt us other than debt. They have travelled from all over the world
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to eat us out of house and home.
Howard Wright
Opposite: Mariner 9 (detail), 2012, 3-channel HD video installation, 43′ x 9′ (variable) with 5.1 audio.
Affinage
LATE SHOW
the art of ageing cheese, its science –
At the late show in our tattered
so after months of not being touched
parterre seats, in the back row or close to it
come country lanes in northern France
we kissed, caressed, held hands – whatever
or Belgium, stretching blenched
love-lust demanded by way of words and deeds.
between thin trees towards horizons: crossroads, in particular, like ribs laid flat to point in four
The late show was one with screams,
of all the possible directions –
a script by Edgar Alan Poe .
this way reaching to a chapel,
Once it was The Brides of Dracula,
its nave as cold as a pantry,
their pale complexions paler still in the Gothic dark.
and that way to a farmhouse where a woman might offer you a Camembert so plump and ripe its bloomy rind
The late show was our nocturnal escape
remoulds the moment of being opened.
into occult stories, tales from the crypt, into the long shadow of Christopher Lee
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in his many guises of metamorphosis.
Emma Must
Gerard Smyth
Overleaf: Leviathan, (detail), 2011, 3 screen, HD video installation, 48′ x 9′ (variable) with audio.
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Look Up, East Sheen
To finally make it to the lovely suburb of East Sheen
I have been to Mozambique
Yes please I’d like to live in that one
I have hiked on dry dirt roads
As the temperature fell I began to think Europe is very cold
And now I am falling into London
To be surrounded on all sides by air
With a single British pound coin in my pocket
To be light
To celebrate my twenty-sixth birthday
Tomorrow I will sit in London and drink coffee in Soho and look at Big Ben and The Houses of Parliament
I am learning to fall In South Africa some of the people with money
The runway at Luanda airport is badly lit and badly guarded
Parachute jump on their birthday for charity
At 5.30am I sneak through the fence
I guess this is a little like that
They let me in for a small handshake of notes
The coroner said I have already passed out from hypothermia
Inside the landing gear
The coroner said the injuries were consistent with a fall from a great height
It was a tight squeeze
The airport authorities expressed concerns about security
I knew something wasn’t right Tomorrow I will sit in London and drink coffee in Soho and look at Big Ben and The Houses of Parliament
My name is Youssof Matada And although my body has been buried in Mortlake
And yet I’ve made it here
I still feel surrounded by air
Slightly ahead of scheduled arrival time
I can still see the snake of the Thames below
To this lovely piece of pavement in East Sheen
And the green golf course on the other side
The coroner said I had probably lost consciousness before the fall
Look up fellow citizens of East Sheen and London
To be surrounded on all sides by clouds
I will come in at high speed each year on my birthday
To be embraced on all sides by air
I will come to a suburban garden near you
Zooming in on the google map
With a single English pound in my pocket
Zooming in with no option to zoom out
And a sightseer’s map in my head
I think I can see Big Ben I can suddenly see the snake of the Thames The beautiful gardens of the suburbs The golf course on the other side There were not many ways left to leave Angola With no money or passport or visa They told me to sneak in but didn’t tell me exactly where This doesn’t feel right To be surrounded on all sounds by cloud
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To be surrounded on all sides by sound To be light
Joe Duggan
Overleaf: from Scene Setters (series), 2008, C-prints, 24″ X 18″
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December 1974
Morden via Bank
The loudest winter for years
Inside the corrugated bowel of this iron earthworm
and here’s my father at the wheel
I grow smaller at the hems of ladies’ tweed skirts.
of his first car – a Fiat, or as he has it
The acidic juices of their perfume sluice the carriage.
a Fiat worse than death. Beyond the hill
These half digested people sway in muted abhorrence,
he’s driving towards snow is drifting
Every ankle brush, every finger tip touch bristles
compacting settling & repeating in slow
As they fight for their square foot of peopled linoleum.
certain waves. My father sings to himself & hopes to make it up & to & even over
Inside this rubick’s cube of commuters, there is a warmth
the hill as if he might then make it home
A heat that emanates out of the proximity of strangers.
before my mother. My father has heard tell
You cannot trust this warmth, you cannot be lulled
of what’s been going on since a month before
It is the recycled rotten breath of this chortling tube,
so continues to sing to himself, Dr Hook, or
Shoving slumped commuters along production lines,
T.Rex or John Denver or the Three Degrees.
Delivering them into the cold, wet mouth of London.
He knows that the most seemingly random choice is calculated but my father continues to drive,
The doors snap open and they spill out like rank entrails
& imagines arriving to his street & to his house
Onto the fading yellow line that marks the boundary,
then at the door then through the door.
Between the secret world of the soot covered tracks And their eventual deliverance into clammy daylight. As they are spat onto the banks of Regent’s Canal
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A pace develops and they devour the air like newborns.
Stephen Connolly
Maria Finch
Leave-taking
Norma Fitzgerald Bradshaw 1927-2011
Decades.
We’re ten. Are we young? Old? It’s hard to be sure. In poetry/art publications years we’re probably ancient. Yet this is only our twentieth issue. We’ve always been a little bit wrong,
The last time we were to meet
slightly askew and out of kilter and context. We’ve never been this week’s thing so we can never
I stood at your door,
really be last week’s. We’re certainly not acting our age. We’ve always considered Abridged a
flowers in hand, ordinary flowers.
poetry/art project, a curated space in which poetry, art and design shamelessly intermingle under designated or ‘abridged’ themes. We exist in the adolescent, that permanently contradictory
‘Aren’t these really lovely,
outsider state, our themes both subtle and epic, often over-stated in the extreme. The gloomy
such a surprise. They’ll brighten up
little goth in the corner with ideas well above its station. Anniversaries are double-edged things.
the room. You’re a bit early,
Are we celebrating (with no little relief) the fact that we made it to our first decade or are we
I wasn’t expecting you yet.’
making a statement of intent for the next? In our case, the answer is both. We didn’t expect the Abridged to make quite the impact it has but now we’re here we want to keep going for as long as we can. For this issue we departed from our usual open submission call and took mostly contributors from previous issues. It’s a kind of restatement of our intent. We thought to pair this anniversary issue with an exhibition in Millennium Court Arts Centre Portadown and Void Gallery, Derry. Two very different but in ways quite similar and probably Abridged towns in essence. Kelly Richardson is the artist we chose as her work is excellent and as we felt she articulated the Abridged philosophy perfectly. And it has always been about landscape, about the end of things, about carrying a healthy amount of mistrust for political and cultural philosophies together with a vision of the present and future that is somewhat at odds with the current craze for positive cultural rebranding. Richardson turns the familiar into something eerie and like ourselves has a penchant for the epic, apocalyptic and immersive and importantly, ambiguous. We don’t preach per se. We lead you into a landscape, let you loose and leave you to find your own way home. If your way is the same as ours great, if not, that’s fine also. Thanks to the hundreds of poets and artists that have appeared in Abridged magazines and projects in the last decade. We rely on your good will and we appreciate it always. Thanks to our editorial staff over the years, Maria Finch and currently Susanna Galbraith who did and are doing a sterling job. Thanks to the Verbal Arts Centre and The Golden Thread Gallery in particular as well as the Context Gallery, the CCA, ArtLink and Void Gallery for their support and to our funders especially the Arts Council of Northern Ireland without whom none of this would exist. Thanks to Millennium Court Arts Centre Portadown and to Void for agreeing to be part of our anniversary year. Paraphrasing Florence Foster Jenkins: ‘People may say we can’t sing but
abridged __ p.48
abridged __ p.49
no one can ever say we didn’t sing.’
Gerald Dawe
Contributors
Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and
Moyra Donaldson is a poet and creative writing facilitator who has
Kathleen McCracken is the author of seven collections of poetry
Damian
anthologies in the US and internationally. She is a four-time
published four collections from Lagan Press, Belfast. Her Selected
including Blue Light, Bay and College, A Geography of Souls,
Races (Lagan Press, 2000); The Down Recorder (Lagan Press,
Pushcart Prize nominee and has won awards for her poetry, prose,
poems was published in 2012 by Liberties Press, Dublin and a
Moonclaves and Tattoo Land. Her poems have been published in The
2004); Lamentations (Lagan Press, 2010); Market Street (Lagan
and scholarly work. She served as Managing Editor of Natural
new collection, The Goose Tree is forthcoming in 2014, also from
Malahat Review, Poetry Canada Review, Exile Quarterly, Poetry Ireland,
Press, 2010); and a pamphlet, Apparitions: A Hurricane (Templar,
Bridge and holds an MFA from the University of Missouri St. Louis.
Liberties Press.
New Orleans Review and The Shop, and she has given readings in
2013). A stage play, Soldiers of the Queen, played the Belfast
Canada, Ireland, England, Portugal, Brazil, and the United States.
Festival at Queen’s in 2002 and was published the following year.
She is currently Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing
His fifth full collection, Mesopotamia, appeared from Templar in
at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland.
May 2014.
Prize 2009 and featured in the Forward Book of Poetry 2010. He
Emma Must lives in Belfast where she is studying for a PhD in
Gerard Smyth’s seventh collection is “The Fullness of Time: New
Pulitzer Prize.
was a founder member of the “Bunch of Chancers” Poetry Group
the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University. She has had
and Selected Poems” (Dedalus Press 2010). He is a member of
in Derry, touring throughout Ireland and New York State. His
poems published in Abridged, Poetry and Audience, Butcher’s Dog
Aosdána and a recipient of the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award
Gerard Beirne is an Irish writer now living in Canada where he
work has been published by Brand, Abridged, Fingerpost, Bear in
and The Open Ear. She won second prize in the 2013 Strokestown
from the University of St Thomas in Minnesota. He is co-editor,
teaches at the University of New Brunswick and is a Fiction Editor
Mind (Lagan Press), Cúirt Journal and the Shuffle Anthology. He
International Poetry Awards.
with Pat Boran, of If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and
with The Fiddlehead. His most recent collection of poetry Games of
has also written stories for children, rap lyrics for the Irish band
Chance: A Gambler’s Manual was published by Oberon Press, Fall
Different Drums and two texts for Echo Echo Dance Company. He
2011. He has published two novels including The Eskimo in the
enjoys performing widely on the London poetry scene and has
Net (Marion Boyars) shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction
featured at Latitude Festival and the South Bank Centre. He runs
Award. His new novel Charlie Tallulah has just been published by
poetry nights at the Cafe Thing in Crystal Palace and occasionally
Oberon Press.
performs spoken word with The Fireflies.
US and Nuala’s second novel The Closet of Savage Mementos will be published in spring 2014 by New Island.
Howard Wright lectures at the University of Ulster, York St. Recent
in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Queen’s University, Belfast.
Maria Finch is a former Editor of Abridged, now based in London.
Kelly Richardson is a Canadian artist whose lens-based practice
His last full collection was King of Country from Blackstaff Press
Her debut publication ‘Darkhaired’ was a Templar Pamphlet
She was editor during the formative years of the magazine
centres on digitally manipulated photography and video installation.
in 2010. Templar Press in Derbyshire published Blue Murder, one
Drawing on the imagery of science-fiction cinema, literature, and the
of the first Iota Shots pamphlets in 2011.
Susanna Galbraith is in her second year of English Studies at
history of landscape painting, her work focuses on the use of digital
Trinity College Dublin. Her work has been published this year
technologies to create hyper-real, highly charged landscapes which
in Icarus and The Attic, both Trinity College publications. She will
imagine an array of possible futures for humankind. Richardson’s
be taking over the role of co-editor of Icarus in June. She is the
work has been exhibited extensively across North America, Asia
Abridged Editorial Assistant.
and Europe. Her video installations and photographs have been
and founded the Graduate Writers Reading Series for UMSL. She currently teaches in the MFA program for Lindenwood University. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books in 2012 and was nominated for the
Joe Duggan is a poet, writer and facilitator, originally from Northern Ireland. His first full collection Fizzbombs was published by Tall Lighthouse in 2008. He was highly commended in The Forward
Olive Broderick is a Downpatrick-based writer with an MA
Competition winner in 2010, and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Pamphlet Poetry Award. She is a Hennessy Emerging Poetry Award winner, and acknowledges support from the Arts Council NI. She is pleased to have had poems published previously in Abridged, A Menu of Poems 2013 (Poetry Ireland/HSE), Stinging Fly, The Sunday Tribune. She is a founder member of Write! Down, and has studio space in the Farmyard of the National Trust Castle Ward property as part of the Castle Ward Arts and Crafts Open Studios Initiative. Stephen Connolly is 25 and from Belfast, where he studies and
abridged __ p.50
teaches in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. He co-runs The Lifeboat. Gerald Dawe’s Selected Poems was published by The Gallery Press (2012). The Stoic Man: Poetry Memoirs will be published later this year by Lagan Press. He is Professor of English at Trinity College.
Joanna Grant is a Collegiate Associate Professor with the University of Zmaryland. She teaches writing, speech, and humanities classes to American soldiers. So far, she has taught in Japan, Kuwait, Afghanistan (twice), Djibouti, and South Korea. Simon Huw Jones is a vocalist, lyric writer and photographer. He was born in Birmingham, England in1960 but grew up in rural Worcestershire where, in 1980, he formed the alternative rock band And Also The Trees with his guitarist brother Justin Jones. In the following years the band toured extensively in Europe and the USA. The band’s twelfth studio album, Hunter not the Hunted, was released in March 2012. He now lives in Geneva, Switzerland where he founded, together with Bernard Trontin, a member of the Swiss band The Young Gods the electro/ambient project November. In 2006 they released an album under the same name and plan to release their 2nd album together later this year.
Nuala Ní Chonchúir was born in Dublin in 1970; she lives in East
collections
of
poetry
are Downpatrick
Song, which is Dublin’s One City One Book this year.
Galway. Her fourth short story collection Mother America was
Mathew Sweeney’s most recent collection is Horse Music
published by New Island in 2012. A chapbook of short-short
(Bloodaxe, 2013). A new collection, Inquisition Lane, is forthcoming
stories Of Dublin and Other Fictions is just out from Tower Press in the
from Bloodaxe in 2015.
poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Arete, Magma and Vallum.
selected for the Beijing, Gwangju and Busan Biennales, and shown and acquired by major museums across the UK, USA and Canada, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (USA), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (USA), Towner (UK), National Gallery of
Abridged Personnel
Canada, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada), etc.
Project Coordinator/Editor: Gregory McCartney has a one way
Richardson’s video installations were recently included in the
ticket to the main attraction, cutting a hole between the ground
Toronto International Film Festival (2012), Sundance Film Festival
and sky.
(2011 and 2009) and in 2009 she was honoured for her contribution
Editorial Assistant: Susanna Galbraith.
to the visual arts at the Americans for the Arts National Arts Awards
In the midst of English Studies degree at Trinity College Dublin.
alongside Ed Ruscha, Robert Redford and Salman Rushdie.
Reading, writing, pondering, re-reading.
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She is the director of the River Styx Hungry Young Poets Series
Smyth’s
KELLY RICHARDSON HAUNTED 11th APRIL - 24th MAY 2014
Cover: Kelly Richardson, ORION TIDE, 2013, HD video installation, 16′ x 9′ (variable) with audio.
What is Abridged? Abridged aims to commission and publish contemporary/experimental poetry plus contemporary art freed from exhibition ties and especially commissioned for the magazine. We encourage poets/artists to investigate the articulation of ‘Abridged’ themes. For example our last few issues have been concerned with Time, Absence, Magnolia and Nostalgia. These themes focus on contemporary concerns in a rapidly changing society. We are offering an alternative and complete integration of poetry, art and design. We experiment continually. We also stray into the exhibition format producing contemporary, innovative and challenging work accompanied by a free publication.
Where is Abridged from? We’re based in The People’s Republic of Derry. Or Londonderry. Or Derry-Londonderry. Or Doire. Or anyone one of the myriad possibilities.
Why call it Abridged? Because we are. You are. Everyone is. It also gives us a completeness to aspire to. People were rather dubious in regard to the name when we first unveiled it. However it’s become quite iconic and serves its purpose as we intended.
Who is Abridged? At the moment Abridged is Gregory McCartney and Susanna Galbraith. However the make-up of Abridged is quite fluid and we have worked with various personnel over the years and no doubt will continue to do so. People come and go. The light still flashes.
How many issues of Abridged are there per year? Generally there are three issues per year though this can increase with the addition of our exhibition publications and other project magazines.
Where can we get Abridged? Abridged is generally available at art galleries and arts organisations in Belfast, Dublin, Derry, Galway. Usually for a limited period as they go very quickly. You can also download a free Pdf of each issue on this website.
How and when do I submit material to Abridged? We have a theme for each issue so it’s best to check this website, our facebook page ‘abridged zero-nineteen’ and the usual agencies such as the Poetry Ireland website and the Visual Artists Ireland email-shot and wait for the submission call before sending us material.
Does Abridged pay a fee for sucessful submissions? Sadly we cannot pay fees though all those published receive a copy of the magazine.
Why is Abridged free? We want the maximum number of people to see it, read it and experience it. We believe this is best done using the free-publication methodology.
How long has Abridged been going? Officially since 2004. We like to think there has always been Abridged people though.
Why is Abridged numbered as it is rather than dated with issue number as most other publications are? We want the Abridged to be timeless hence the lack of a date to condemn it to the archives. We ahem borrowed Factory Records system of cataloguing and added a zero to signify abridgment.
Why are there gaps in the list of magazines/projects? Abridged projects are numbered as they are conceived rather than born. Some (for various reasons) don’t make it to existence hence the gaps. We do on occasion revisit projects. For example Abandoned Donegal originated in 2007 but wasn’t born until 2010 therefore it has the 0 – 7 moniker.
Where did Abridged spring from? Once upon a time there was a rather bad tempered little poetry magazine called ‘The Chancer’ organised by a ‘Bunch of Chancers’. It detailed Derry’s nigh-time activities and the nefarious going-ons in car-parks and other glamorous locations. It was ahead of its time and lasted probably far longer than it should. It was cheap, cheerful and we’re still proud of it. Some of the launch performances went down in legend. When it finally went to the place where all good magazines go one of the Chancers decided a new approach was required and the Abridged was born. Different name, much the same spirit.
What are Abridged’s Influences? Many and Varied. From T. S. Elliot via Vermeer to The Sisters of Mercy.
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Abridged 0_10: HAUNTED
Cover: Kelly Richardson, ORION TIDE, 2013, HD video installation, 16′ x 9′ (variable) with audio.