Our Poem Of The Week, presented in association with Poetry Ireland, is Elegy for a Basset Hound by Michael O'Loughlin.
Michael O’Loughlin has earned an enduring reputation as one of Ireland’s most important poets and writers. His new collection from New Island Books, Poems 1980–2015, brings together and celebrates a poetic career spanning nearly four decades, and includes new, previously unpublished poems. Exploring major themes such as identity, language, exile and return, O’Loughlin’s work has an exceptionally strong international outlook and a fierce dedication to social and historical justice.
Elegy for a Basset Hound
Other dogs feared you, perhaps rightly –
All that weight so close to the ground
The heft of those padded shoulders
The not-so-comical teeth concealed
Beneath your sadman jowls and pouches.
English-bred and born, according
To the Basset experts, my neighbour plucked
You off the autostrada near Lucca
Where you were wandering confidently
Like a nineteenth-century English explorer,
His mind gone in Antarctic snow.
You settled into an Amsterdam bookshop
Your basket firmly placed between
The New York Review of Books
And Literature in Translation
Where you accepted the ministrations
Of single gentlemen, but fell in love
With my wife and daughter,
Running away from home as often as you could
To climb like a legless man onto Judith’s lap
Where you slept for hours with one eye open.
Untrainable, unbiddable, I could barely hold you
Back on the days I took you with me
To collect Saar from her school, and
You made a beeline through the crush
Of mothers and bicycles, to the class where
The children fought to touch your mighty ears
As you gambolled ponderously on giant paws
Like an Ottoman pasha in his harem.
And yet I loved you for something else:
How on a brown December night
When the light had soaked into the wet ground
I saw you through the dusk of Utrechtsestraat
With trams and teatime traffic crashing between us
Out of earshot, almost out of sight,
You turned on the crowded pavement
And, like the old God of the Kabbalah
Lost in the darkness and unknowing before Creation,
You raised your nose and sniffed the fouled air
And I knew that you had found me.
From Poems 1980-2015 (New Island Books, 2017), which was launched at Poetry Ireland, 11 Parnell Square, Dublin 1 on 15 February.
