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the poet
Jane Robinson is an award-winning Irish poet with a doctoral degree in biological science from the California Institute of Technology. Her books are: ‘Journey to the Sleeping Whale’ (2018) and ‘Island and Atoll’ (2023), both published by Salmon Poetry. Jane has taught poetry workshops in libraries and outdoor settings. In recent months she was the invited reader at Green Sod Ireland’s Biodiversity Summer School in Kylemore Abbey, and at the IMMA Earth Rising Festival. Listen here: Music for the Atoll, 2023 (SoundCloud).
the poems
Fairy Castle
Two Rock Mountain, Dublin
After a long, slow climb from the road,
calling out the names of bramble, foxglove,
ling and furze, we left the flies behind
when we turned from the wood’s edge,
bending our bodies to the sandy granite track,
to the bog-water pools and slender rushes.
But a drone hummed over. All of a sudden it
owned the hill, flexing mechanical insect-legs.
Whose gadget filmed us tilt our moon-faces
down to the mica path? A thin, pixilated
sliver of mind let loose on the raised bog
made skylarks crouch from their songs
to cover nests hidden by heather stems.
We threaded our way on up to the cairn.
Coastal Forest Fragment
‘Go with the process,
go with what you’ve got!’
~ Breda Wall Ryan ~
Your feet are unshod, grassy-toed,
horn-hard on wandering paths to
a paradise where humans did not ever
learn to wield a flint or turn a thread.
Imagine the mossy temperate forest
grazed by giant deer, phosphorescence
haloing their upheld heads and antlers.
Hear chuckles from a family of rooks
who gossip on the topmost branches
of oak trees lining a path from strand
to dreaming bed. A pocketful of sand
from Magheramore. Sprigs of water-mint.
Heathland Observation
After a photograph by Tina Claffey
The landscape’s sharp details are sprung up close
by macro lens. On one of the seven heathers
stands a grasshopper who resembles a horse
in medieval armour. The insect’s breastplate,
green. Brighter, the nets of her compound eyes
as she watches from her temporary rest
on St. Daboec’s heath. Hummocked beside
the peaty water, this heather’s named after
a saint who raised both his hands to the sky
as he walked the mountains and scattered
huge clouds of insects with each step taken.
Few grasshoppers still sing in the fragments.
In wilderness we’ve shopped out, car shaken,
light slain. Earth’s future saints will be the ones
who help all forms of life and hold them sacred.
Publishing credits
Fairy Castle: Island and Atoll (Salmon Poetry)
Coastal Forest Fragment: Poetry Ireland Review (No. 144)
Heathland Observation: exclusive first publication by iamb