Discipline: Literature – poetry

Laurence O’Dwyer

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: IRELAND
MacDowell Fellowships: 2017
More: www.unf.edu/mudlark/posters/odwyer.html

Bruna boscana, Pararge aegeria (Linnaeus, 1758)

Walking over the hills, a stranger asked if I needed a lift.
A shame to turn him down – but I was travelling slowly
from Alaro to Bunyola where Maria Suau Font
was keeping an eye on things, like independence
on the mainland. When I got there, I found a village
in rigor mortis. Sunspots and Aleppo pines;
a church hewn from blocks of sunlight
with a darkroom and a Jesus bug inside.
Bruna Boscana has red and yellow wings;
eyes as black as olives. Maria Suau Font
was an indeterminate age. Her house was full
of Creole music. There was a parabolic mirror
in the front yard: giant petals interleaved like crystal
wings. It was her solar cooker, though it’s glassy light
made me think of a Campbell-Stokes recorder,
whose job it is to burn a line on paper,
to record the hours of sunlight.
But there was no need for a weather station in Bunyola –
all you had to do was open your eyes. Sorb apples
and blood-red vines, pomegranates and fruits of thirst;
potatoes like crumbling asteroids. Everything grew
on that island. I settled in, got to know the place.
I woke, I ran, I climbed. Days of gravity and sunstones followed.
From Cala Tuent, the rivers were as dry as rattlesnakes.
It took me a finger of sun to get back to the square.
Dark then, when I heard my name called out.
It was Maria’s friends. She was still at work.
They pulled up a chair. A joint was passed around.
The dictionary someone called it – I smoked,
I coughed, I laughed. Linnaeus knew that conspecifics
fight for control of sunspots. But if another species
flies through that light there is no conflict.
I was so tired when I lay down my head that night,
I could see red behind my eyes. It’s rare but sometimes
it happens. It’s the thrum of veins in the retina.
It’s the ripple of a drum; it’s the outer limit of sonar.
Rare but precious. Beyond that retina – I know where I am.
It’s my Turing test. If it’s independence you’re after you’ll find it
in the sunspots and Aleppo pines where every butterfly
is an anarchist, and every drop of sweat is as wild as honey.

Bruna boscana, "Pararge aegeria" (Linnaeus, 1758)
Chanaral
On Chiloé

Laurence O’Dwyer is a graduate of University College Cork and holds a Ph.D. in paradigms of memory formation from Trinity College Dublin. His first collection of poetry, Tractography (Templar, 2018) received the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. In 2019, he was awarded a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation (US) and a writer-in-residence position with RaumArs (Finland). In 2018, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University. His current project, The Lighthouse Journal, is an exploration of an Arctic environment in poetry and prose and stems from time spent working on a lighthouse in northern Norway. Poems from The Lighthouse Journal have received the Yeovil Prize (UK) (2018) and The Listowel Writers’ Week Single Poem Prize (Ireland) (2019). The Lighthouse Journal is supported by grants from the Arts Council of Ireland, the Ireland Chair of Poetry, the Society of Authors (UK) and the Authors’ Foundation (UK).

O’Dwyer edited and extended a poetry manuscript entitled Tractography during his time at MacDowell. Tractography was published in 2018 by Templar Poetry (UK). A selection of poems from this manuscript received the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry in 2016. He also worked on a book of poetry and prose about a journey from Litløy Fyr (Little Island Lighthouse) in Norway to the principality of Andorra in the Pyrenees.

Studios

Veltin

Laurence O’Dwyer worked in the Veltin studio.

Veltin Studio was donated by alumni of the Veltin School, a school for girls in New York with a highly respected visual arts department. As the plaque just outside the entrance attests, this studio was used by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson during most of the 24 summers he spent at MacDowell. Perhaps most famously, Thornton Wilder put the finishing…

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