'A two-year's gestation of 67 poems (one for every year in my life) is frantic by this plodder’s standards...' Acclaimed writer Aidan Matthews introduces his latest volume of poetry, entitled Pure Filth - read an extract from Pure Filth below.

Pure Filth, a very Irish contradiction, is called an oxymoron by the, well, purists, and that term entered my infancy at school when a very dashing priest introduced us to the notion of a paradox. (His own first example, by the way, was blind faith.) I've liked it ever since.

The book itself came quickly over the two years of the Covid curfew when, same as everybody else, I was air-kissing my grand-daughters through sealed windows as their masked mothers held them high out the front. That was the time of the drones over Deansgrange cemetery and the demise of the sign of peace, hug or handshake, at Sunday mass.

A two-year’s gestation of 67 poems (one for every year in my life) is frantic by this plodder’s standards. I store poems like wine from a wild-geese vineyard for the most part, albeit my bottom-drawer Beaujolais is often more vinegar than vintage. Premature print can be galling too, of course. At fifteen, I confused remembrance with respect by sending the Irish Times an elegy for my father instead of a eulogy of him, and the man didn’t die for another quarter-century of parental banter about the oedipal inclinations of his seventh child.

There’d even been a two-year section of my early adulthood, a novitiate of sorts, in which I wrote nothing except for my signature on consent forms and my initials on the bark of a paper-birch tree in a walled field in Stillorgan, a place-name an American correspondent loved to write as two words, not one. Now a similar time-frame in a different millennium seemed to offer a kind of symmetry, if not a tither of sense.

During Covid that second lockdown gave me licence, and the surprise gift of my wife’s pristine kidney put fresh pepper under my ponytail. I could step in and out of my own dehydrated riverbed with the holy spirit of gallows humour, like the 1960s schoolboy who could cross into many countries – West Germany, France, Nigeria, Switzerland, the Soviet Union itself - by standing inside the gates of their embassies and scrunching their gravel as he walked up the road from his home to the Church of the Sacred Heart on the site of Donnybrook Fair.

So analysis and dialysis bookend the work, and in-between lies (most convincingly) the mucous membrane and the muck of our beautiful ordeal in this world. As the woman who raised me said in her last text message from Rialto (one closer the Coombe and not the Venetian variety), It is Heaven here at the bus-stop, love. She mightn’t have known she was writing a line of perfect pentameter that I would plagiarize.

For that very reason, Pure Filth isn’t so much by as via Aidan Mathews. Poets set tables. They set them as prettily as they’re able to, in south-facing light with fine cloth, cutlery and the best beeswax candles. But they don’t provide the food or the refreshments. It is the readers who arrive in turn with their portions of private fare, of lamb dressed as mutton, maybe, or a pinch of salt in the sweat of their brow, the surf and turf of their own genitals, and the body of Christ impaled on the roof of their palate from an early-bird vigil mass.

They sit on carvers and they eat off silver. The poem waits on them.

THE HALLOWEEN PARTY (FROM PURE FILTH)

I hoist a knitted skeleton on a drip-stand in the porch.

The children are coming, a hundred and twenty last year.

Remember the white-face zombie in her communion dress

And the imp with the actual scythe and his separated father

Standing shyly out at the gate as if it were Saturday.

Later, the lights gone out in the scared terraces,

There will be no safe house for the lads in the black bin-liners.

I place a candle on the ledge of the lunette to illumine

A later myth than the carnival of Samhain -

This is no shambles, it tells me, this is Shangri La;

The Fall, the Flood, those are our fathers’ phantoms.

But a bumble-bee with long yellow stockings of pollen

Gorges on a folding passion-flower and cannot help herself

On the eve of November as the month of the dead begins.

Pure Filth is published by Lilliput Press