FOREWORD
online writing communities formed. It was clear that apart from being a creative outlet, writing and sharing was a crucial antidote to those lonely and troubling times. It would not be an exaggeration to say that our meetings kept us sane and a creative community became a lifeline. SWERVE seeks to maintain that feeling of community. What started as an anthology is evolving into a journal that affirms our vision to give equal weight to the literary and visual arts. SWERVE 2 is packed with wonderful poetry and prose and stunning photographic spreads by international visual artists Krystina Stimakovits and Gérard Rouxel. Belgian artist Willem Boel describes his response to the West Cork landscape from the viewpoint of an Albers Foundation artist-in-residence. Sinéad Fagan, creator of exquisite ceramic art, is interviewed by author Gillian Watt. Kinsale poet, Matthew Geden, is in conversation with artist Jennifer Redmond. We are thrilled to be featuring our inaugural artist/writer collaboration with works by novelist Hannah Hoare and artist Charlotte Malik. Nick and Jonathan Wonham have allowed us to include a series of powerful anti-war poems and images, created in response to the conflict in Ukraine. As part of SWERVE's artist-inresidence project on a West Cork farm, Jonathan Doig (doyen of West Cork growers), Fiona York (actor, writer and grower) and Caroline Boyfield (artist) share their thoughts on organic farming. SWERVE recently moved to an old medical centre in Skibbereen that is familiar to many residents of the town. The old surgery lends itself as an HQ with an office, studio and accommodation for visiting artists and writers. There is a small gallery space to show interesting new work that will also serve to host workshops and readings. This summer we welcomed our first artist-inresidence, Caroline Boyfield, a writer and artist based in Brittany, who is also our EU editor-at-large in France. We hope this will be the first of many such cross-cultural initiatives. To ensure that SWERVE is accessible to our international readers we have created an online magazine, available at www.swervemagazine.org. Print copies can be found at Waterstones bookshop in Cork City and in Skibbereen from the Uillinn Arts Centre and SWERVE HQ. SWERVE would like to thank all the wonderful artists and writers who have contributed to the second edition of the magazine and you, our readers, without whom we would not exist.
Cover image: Krystina Stimakovits
Page Willem Boel
TURNING SAND INTO GOLD AT CARRAIG-NA-GCAT An artist's response to the landscape of West Cork
Mike Guerin
QUARE HAWKS ........................................................................... 14
Mona Lynch
JIMMY ......................................................................................... 18
Catherine Airey
THE PLEASURE CENTRE ............................................................ 20
Lou Hill
THREE POEMS ........................................................................... 28
Jeanna Ní Ríordáin
FIRST TATTOO ............................................................................ 32
Johanna Zomers
TWO POEMS ............................................................................... 34
Maeve Keane
GOOD FRIDAY ............................................................................ 38
Owen O'Sullivan
AN OCTOBER MORNING WALK ................................................ 44
Ivan de Monbrison
THE FIRE THAT FOLLOWS ME ................................................. 46
Marlowe Russell
BANTLING .................................................................................. 48
Gillian Watt
EARTHY ALCHEMY Interview: Ceramic Artist Sinead Fagan ................................... 54
Fiona York Jonathan Doig Caroline Boyfield
A FARMER’S ALMANACK Froe, Rosscarbery, West Cork Artist-in-Residence Project ......................................................... 60
Janet Harper
TWO POEMS ................................................................................ 68
Holly Darragh-Hickey
MOTHER WILD ........................................................................... 72
Paul Temme
TWO POEMS ................................................................................ 74
Paul Temme
BLACK PEACH ............................................................................ 78
Moze Jacobs
LEGACY BURDEN ....................................................................... 82
Sharon Guard
FLIGHT ........................................................................................ 84
Catherine Ronan
TWO POEMS ............................................................................... 90
Fin Keegan
FREELANCING ............................................................................ 92
Hannah Hoare Charlotte Malik
PARAHUMANITY: A Writer/Artist Collaboration...................................................... 96
Mary Mc Carthy
VISION OF THE COSMOS ............................................................104
R J Breathnach
ARDMORE ................................................................................... 106
Image previous page: IRVI
1
Page
ricia Wallace
SYLVIA BIRCH ............................................................................. 108
nifer Redmond
THE CLOUD ARCHITECT Interview: Poet Matthew Geden ................................................ 110
ystina Stimakovits
AGENT CLOUD Photography: A glass and cobweb invitation ............................. 118
nifer Horgan
THREE POEMS ............................................................................ 128
athan Wonham k Wonham
SIX POEMS SIX IMAGES ................................................................................. 132
éad Corcoran
A PLACE IS A RESTLESS THING ................................................. 144
mi George Simpson
SURVIVING THE SOIL ................................................................. 150
uren O'Donovan
INGREDIENTS (FOR A MOTHER) ............................................... 152
eve Keane
THE BOOKSHELF ........................................................................154
nielle McLaughlin
FOUR YOUNG WRITERS ............................................................. 156
rk Jackson
A LOSS OF RESPECT ................................................................... 157
tlin Young
46A .............................................................................................. 163
Egan Reeve
REITRIC ....................................................................................... 169
rcey Dugan
TWO POEMS ................................................................................174
rard Rouxel
TANTRIC SPANDA A Photographic Reverie ..............................................................178
ragh Fleming
AFTER PRAGUE ...........................................................................186
ma Barry
WAITRESS ................................................................................... 190
Frontispiece and End Pages: IRVI Pages:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13
Willem Boel
Pages:
60-67
Caroline Boyfield
Page:
88
Laure Colomer
Pages:
108, 144, 149
Seán Dunne
Pages :
20-21, 26-27, 46-47, 94-95
Lydia Hickey
Page:
150
Jacqueline LeDoux
Pages :
99, 100, 103
Charlotte Malik
Pages:
56, 58, 59
Roland Paschhoff
Pages:
178-185
Gérard Rouxel
Pages:
110-111, 119-127
Krystina Stimakovits
Pages:
48, 53
Unknown Photographer/ Mich Maroney
Page:
7
Alwin Vyvey
Pages:
36-37, 106-107
Nancy Wilde
Pages:
132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142
Nick Wonham
All other images:
Mich Maroney
artist's response to the landscape of West Cork
ILLEM BOEL tist-in-Residence bers Foundation, Carraig-na-gGat, Glandore
IJosef was and invited the house at Reenogreena by the Josef and Anni Albers foundation, and more AnnitoAlbers were absolute giants in the specifically by Matthias Persson, runs the residency program for the foundation. As it can ruin a art world and far beyond. Theirwho designs, ideas film to read the plot and the ending before you and teaching methods are so well known thatsee it, I decided to come here with no expectations whatsoever. also really know was expected from me, and that suited me well. I decided most people(Ido notdon’t recognise themwhat as original not to ask.) ideas anymore. They have become common ground. As a boy, I went to art school at the Of course, I was preparing trip to Ireland many people wanted to know what my plan was, and weekends, as and many of the my exercises we did why I were was invited. What are you going do there, and how will it eventually benefit you or the Albers there direct copies of Josef Alberstoteachings Foundation? What’s the deal here? I didn’t want at Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau (DE) or Blackto call it a vacation because that would sound lazy and ungrateful. And by not defining it beforehand, the idea of my residency incorporated a Mountain College in moreover, North Carolina (US) after the sense of mystery and hoped Nazi regime closed theimportance, Bauhaus. I which realiseI now, bywould match the real experience. And moreover, by about it, gave an importance being mysterious here and reading upI on theitAlbers what thethat I hoped was true. scope of their influence really was, and still is.
UARE HAWKS
place with no lack of bleak, romantic landscapes -if you were partial to that sort of thing. He was in his late forties and lived with his father and mother who were in their early eighties. They had a small farm that his older sister had inherited, she had built a massive house in a good field and rented the rest of the land to a neighbour. He pretended to resent this at times, when speaking to neighbours, because it was the done thing, but he would freely admit to his family that he would not have been happy to have the pressure of running a farm on his shoulders. He was supposed to get the family home when his parents passed, so he’d have a roof over his head anyway. Not much of a roof though because it was a bungalow from the second half of the twentieth century; there was a ruin of an old farmhouse amongst the hodgepodge of sheds in the yard and you’d be warmer in there during the winter. He planned to write an honest account of Irish vernacular architecture at some stage, one that would make a fleeting reference to the thatched cottages that were as rare as hens’ teeth but an open exploration of uninsulated iceboxes built by corner-cutting cowboys who hadn’t a clue what they were doing. Regardless of the house, he liked where he had ended up in the world. He had a National Geographic subscription and experienced schadenfreude when he saw the conditions and climates some people had to put up with. He loved being surrounded by nature. He knew all his local fox paths and badgers’ setts, he’d watched red squirrels and stoats bouncing away down tree lined boreens, hedgehogs bumbling through leafy copse floors, and shrews running circles across his shoes. It was all very idyllic, the nature and the animals; other people were the problem. Meeting people casually was not Joachim’s strong suit, easy casual conversation did not flow forth when it was required. He particularly hated meeting someone in a field, it was an inherently uncomfortable scenario. An ordinary field now, not a hiking trail or someplace touristy – a standard field. There’s an initial moment of, ‘Blast it, I’m caught’, after which you start to walk towards each other; it would be odd not to. On one hand it might not be your field, meaning you’re technically trespassing, not that the landowner, your neighbour we’re saying, will mind – much. On the other hand, it might be your field and the other person is the interloper; they didn’t want to meet you and you didn’t want to meet them. There’s also the issue of going for a walk at all. It was acceptable to take a child or an elderly relative for a walk but the idea of walking for pleasure was still not entirely embraced by locals and if you had no other business in the field other than taking a walk you may be embarrassed, people might talk, even if just to themselves: ‘Quare hawk.’ ‘Short of a job.’ ‘He’s away with the faeries.’ ‘I don’t know what he’d be doing on these walks.’ ‘Walking!’ If you do meet someone though, you have to suck it up, you have to just walk on over to them because if you try to hide, and then get caught - it’s worse. They see you trying to skulk away and then you see them seeing you and then you have to turn around and do the awkward thing anyway because you can’t just walk away out of a field if you’re after seeing someone. The conversation itself will be a seemingly dry affair but it will be riddled with real, and imagined, subtext. On one occasion Joachim had just scrambled over a briary ditch and tripped into the field not far from the wellingtons of his elderly neighbour, O’Rourke, who was about to replace a fencing post, he held a sledgehammer in one of his hulking hands. ‘Grand day for it.’ said O’Rourke. ‘Oh, mighty day entirely, I said I’d go for a walk. I hope you don’t mind?’ said Joachim. ‘Work away, you have every right - many’s the day’s work your people did in this field.’ The first blow was struck, a reference to his ancestors past industriousness, an industriousness that did not carry on down the bloodline to Joachim. ‘Oh yes, the harvest was a different thing entirely back then of course’ - Joachim gamely trying to encourage reminiscence which he genuinely enjoyed hearing.