Elaine Feeney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Red

 

I am growing in this dress.

 

I plunge my wide curves

to the taut edges and

lift my shoulders to the

raspberry red,

 

I almost trust the seams.

 

Soft on my rounded stomach,

my breasts full,

my charcoal deep eyes.

 

I am growing into this dress,

it is wearing me, moving

me along the street,

clutching and gathering,

in around my rib flesh.

 

Soon I will be this dress.

 

Some evening

with laughter lines

with less clutter in my head,

we will melt together.

 

But not this evening,

this evening is only practise,

this evening on

Grafton Street’s cobbles,

this is only dress up.

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Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland. Feeney has published three poetry collections, including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise (Salmon Poetry). Her debut novel, As You Were (Vintage & Biblioasis), won the 2021 Dalkey Book Festival’s Emerging Writer Prize, The Kate O’ Brien Prize, The Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize (UK), and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Rathbones-Folio Prize. Feeney’s work featured widely on Best of 2020 lists, and she was chosen by The Observer as a top debut novelist for 2020. Her short story “Sojourn” was published in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, and she also wrote the multi award-winning drama, WRoNGHEADED, commissioned by the Liz Roche Company. She lectures in poetry at The National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is also a founding member of the Tuam Oral History Project.

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                                            Roderic O'Conor (1860–1940), Seated Woman in a Red Dress, 1929 (oil on canvas).

Comments

[Paddy Meskell]

Elaine Feeney is just brilliant!

[Grace Cavalieri]

How wonderful. The expectation. The playfulness. "Playing dress-ups." The child survives in the artist.

[Anne H Woodworth]

Our dresses do wear us. We do become our dresses. I love seeing this phenomenon in a poem, and a lovely one at that. It is preserving dresses that we no longer wear.

[Don Berger]

What a beautiful song, that moves way beyond simple description into the mythical world of the speaker growing into the dress. And what a great ear for the line, in a genuine language.

[lally]

brilliant

[Eileen]

Wonderful!

[Peter Kearney]

With the help of the dress, the poem seems to be an expression of joy and wonder at the beauty of her body, including even her charcoal eyes, somewhat removed from her dress.

[Clarinda]

Beautiful! So well embodies so much. And it makes me grieve the dress I gave to the goodwill after I had turned into it.

[Clarinda]

We’ll = well

[Susan Francis Campbell]

Startlingly excellent!

[David Lehman]

Lovely poem-- and painting!

[Terence Winch]

David: thanks. I was hoping someone would notice the painting.

[Eamonn Wall]

Wonderful poem.

[Kyril Calsoyas]

The Camouflage Uniform to The Red Dress

Enduring endless savage strikes,
My coat of many colors bleeds,
Stigmata from the cruel spikes,
And so the inevitable proceeds.

Red dress soaked in love benign,
Knows more than you might guess,
Born of nights close to divine,
Second skin for your heart's caress.

The stage of war or love will remain,
An enigma to all who care and give,
A dress, a uniform carry pain's stains,
Lover or foe must live to forgive.