Congratulations to newly-graduated MA student, poet  Úna Ní Cheallaigh whose poem with the intriguing title, “Shooting Ezra Pound, Gresham Hotel, 1956”, has been published in the Irish Times.  The poem concerns Pound’s visit to Dublin, and a moment captured by Úna’s photographer-cousin Eddie Kelly for the Irish Times.  The photograph, featured above,  wasn’t published in the newspaper at the time, but the memory lives on in Úna’s poetic imagination.

The poem was part of Úna’s thesis collection for her MA.

Shooting Ezra Pound, Gresham Hotel, 1956 

(i.m. Eddie Kelly, Irish Times)

Not the photo-shoot you expected

but perfect for you who loved to be still –

Portrait of a poet who refused to speak,

a silent subject, not lying in state

but sitting in a foyer waiting to leave.

No questions to be asked – that was his way and yours –

holding back in stillness with an open Leica lens,

slow catlike, your one eye focused on his face,

listening as he for that crucial line break.

You draw the eye to look,

see in profile a grey-haired man

gazing beyond the frame, shoulders hunched.

You pull me in deeper and deeper still

into the lines of his bearded face,

looking for what’s unsaid.

All the dark weight sinking down

like an old galleon on your shore

waiting for that perfect angle,

that light connecting image;

to capture more than passing ships,

to wait,

yes wait

for Cantos sung in silence.