the poet
Paul Connolly has had more than 100 of his poems published in literary journals worldwide. These include Ink, Sweat & Tears, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, Chiron Review, Scintilla, The Manchester Review and The Honest Ulsterman. He's been nominated for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and Best of the Net, and shortlisted once for the Charles Causley Prize and twice for the Bridport Prize for Poetry. He was also a finalist in Walk, Listen, Create's Write About Walking – In the Dark. Paul's debut collection will appear in 2027 from Broken Sleep Books.
the poems
In the Time of the Ice Saints
May morning. Servatius lurks inside
windscreen frost, wiper-slushed.
Between squelches of sun a rose erupts
with luridness. Arterial thoroughfares
hold a breve-to-breve pause at the dominant,
traffic tutti a nearby engine joins with
a permanent now of ticking over. Then
at a when unsensed, above and across the drone
day’s out-of-control firework-spark-
and-blast excreta burst, in clang, exhaust
and words announcing the random diurnal drift.
His kettle chunters at him amid cup chimes
through the arson of lunchtime toast. Quiet.
Then properly theatrical thunder outside, vast
metal sheet flap-unfurled, huge sideboard’s
thud-shatter staircase fall, bomb
report, cardiac sudden grab-and-release.
Dried peas in a rainstick, hailstones helix
in wind-predated shoals. His spirit or something
exults in horrible pleasure, meetings of three.
Then it’s gone, the angry omen spent,
slumbering after swift dissipation. Skies
interchange Ming whites and blue. Someone
laughs gently along to a mellow serenading
pigeon, leaves glow artichoke, chartreuse,
celadon in calm’s renewal of unending
present tense, only their sopping glaze
a vestige of chaos. Haha! grins
pantomime-villain storm in a jump-scare
return, in clatter-silence lurk. Clouds
contract dark, suck light through the windows,
roll it around, fumble it in flashes then hurl it
in slanting cataracts, dinning to exhaustion. Petals
of ice mourn themselves on the ground. He prays
to Sophia for a merciful end, dreams a heart
unfrozen, a-flow like sunbeams, warmest rain.
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Metronome
Vienna, 1822
He sets the mechanism, points at the page,
but the lad is faltering and can’t keep up.
He looks from the rod, its back and forth,
to clumsy hands and a flushed face
and cuffs the lad on the back of the head.
The lad stops. He roars. The lad
fingers the keys in spurts, hesitates,
then pulls away from the keyboard, staggers
upright, upsets the stool, mouths
an unmistakeable oath at him and flees.
He stares at the rod – it sways and sways
and conjures the discarded piece in time –
then turns to the window’s pipe-smoke light,
glowers down and spies the runaway who,
legato now, shambles along the highway
and doesn’t look back. He stumbles
to his desk, sits and winces, grabs
a scrunch of sheets, a quill, and scrawls.
We knock, the device knocks, but the lad
isn’t there and he isn’t there. The door
opens on leftovers and stale coffee,
bedpans and wine dregs. We watch.
He doesn’t look up. We wait. The tocking
slips from sameness to sameness. He scratches
and mutters, ‘cuius regni non erit
finis…non. Non. Non.’
Late Snow
Daffodils are serf-submissive,
dungeoned in February, freed
in a March summer largesse,
they’re bleached and broken now,
long cigarettes stubbed after a savourless drag
in the white-ash gyre of April’s Boreas.
A pink sledge, exultant in crystal January,
sputters alone on the hillside
and is dragged away
cutting brown ruts of failure.
Days stretch. The skies are freight-dark
but sometimes slashed across by a swinging lightbulb,
and the cloud-cover ceiling and antiseptic floors
are glared with the manmade whiteout of places
scrubbed for health and scrubbed for torture,
where drones sicken for the sunshine, and
something, a something common
to cranial drumming and calf ache,
hums from a blueness glimpsed under the darkening,
hums in the dark itself,
flares above and below,
flares behind the eyelids,
and rumbles through our dislocation saying this
is no denaturing, it is
then beats us, serious goddess,
with flowers in freeze and imponderable incense
from unsourced smoke and a refuse gas-stench
off woodlands wet but dying
in abrupt springtime sere,
murderous cutting salt on August gales,
who’s gone, forgotten, then grabs us again,
wrenches us down to our knees
till we abandon categoric fixation,
symmetrical fantasies, and concede
her limitless gravity of whim,
the mystery of blighted harvesting,
a beauty that commands our sacrifice.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb