On Vision An Attempt at Reparative Reading Sasha Dugdale I THINK ALL THE TIME and I always thought that everyone else did, too. I still assume this is true, because otherwise what would that look like: an absence of thought? A nothing in the mind, perhaps a cognitive vacuum? Wouldn’t a vacuum like that crush the skull from inside? Is that why the ears are placed on either side of the head, two small valves to prevent a vacuum in the event of an absence of thought?

I think all the time, and sometimes I have such great thoughts, they are so intricate and magnificent that they resemble Breughel’s Tower of Babel. But I can’t ever get them out of me intact. The act of birthing them on paper or in speech reduces them to vague shadows of their former glory. The birthing canal snaps the rudimentary structural props. Like a ship in a bottle, they cannot be pulled back out of the bottle’s mouth without splintering and splitting. The rings of Breughel’s tower collapse into a nest of sinister sphincters.

If you can’t communicate your thoughts then there is no point in having them. That was said to me at university and it is quite true, I suppose. This was my coming-of-age: I slowly got used to having humbler thoughts that were expressible, the apprentice thoughts of a beginner draughtsman, thoughts that were the same reasonable size on the outside and on the inside. I began to understand that the other grander thoughts were follies: unrealisable mental architectures with proportions that couldn’t sustain them in the cold world. Slow thoughts! Practical thoughts that proceed in logical order! (My logical thinking ... read more

Nina Iskrenko Thirst

Since morning there’s been a shake-up in Ur of Chaldea
They change the sheets  They clean the silver
The camels weren’t given a drink for the second week in a row
In the water-carrying jug a spider reminds you of the map of the Babylon metro

It’s hot   The Matriarch brims with milk and honey on the outpost
Now and then the bride is sent with a milking bucket to the roof
The setting sun seeing her thinks   I’ll beautify the roof too
It’s a lot of work to milk the clouds though

She is white-stone   Multifunctional   Gentle
... read more

Hal Coase John Montague, The Bag Apron (UCD); Paul Durcan, Three European Poets (UCD);
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cead Isteach (UCD); Paula Meehan, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees In Them (UCD)

IN THE HEANEY memorial issue of the Irish Pages, Murdo Macdonald recalls giving a lecture on a landscape by William Johnstone at the 1994 St Magnus Festival in Orkney. Seamus Heaney was in the audience to hear it. Having listened from the back of the room to Macdonald’s description of the painting’s dual concern with the nature of place and the nature of painting itself, Heaney remarked to Macdonald afterwards that he’d liked what he was saying about ‘that artist’s place-paint’. There in one go was what Macdonald had been trying to say: ‘“place-paint” – whether the meaning one takes from this phrase is the painting of place or the placing of ... read more