Randolph Healy

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Biographical note:  Randolph Healy was born in Irvine, Scotland and moved to Dublin as a child. After leaving school at 14, he worked as a salesman, Hoffmann presser, telex-typist, and security man before returning to Ballymun Community School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied mathematical sciences. He is the editor of Wild Honey Press. Working as a maths and science teacher, he lives on the borders of Dublin and Wicklow with his wife Louise and their five children.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857448
ISBN-10:  1876857447
ISBN-13:  9781876857448
Author:  Randolph Healy
Title:  Green 532
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  04-Jul-02
Extent:  140pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  210 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 10.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  

Table of contents:
Mutability Checkers
Vision
World War II
Russian Tabernacle
Storms
Poem in Spring
Arbor Vitae
The Rodin Sculpture Garden
Voyage
Puppets
Colonies of Belief
Solas na gréine
Processions
Breviary
(The) Republic of Ireland
Anthem
Flight
Aisling
Change & Response
Three Transcriptions
Envelopes
The Size of this Universe
Primula veris
Foliage
FlipperSat News
Frogs
Jim
Heresiarch
Spirals Dance
Flame
BOIDS
Victoria amazonica
Vertices
Daylight Saving Sex
Sempervivum
Arena / Breaking
scales

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Excerpt from book:  

Frogs

On a grassy hill, in a luxury seminary in Glenart,
I found, screened by trees,
a large stone pond.
The waters of solitude.
Friends.

Patriarchs,
ten thousand times older than humanity,
the galaxy has rotated almost twice
since they first appeared.

They get two grudging notices in the Bible:
Tsephardea in Exodus,
Batrachos in the Apocalypse.
I will smite all thy borders with frogs.
I saw three unclean spirits, like frogs.

Their numbers have been hugely depleted,
principally by students.

Sever its brain.
The frog continues to live.
It ceases to breathe, swallow or sit up
and lies quietly if thrown on its back.
Locomotion and voice are absent.
Suspend it by the nose,
irritate the breast, elbow and knee with acid.
Sever the foot that wipes the acid away.

It will grasp and hang from your finger.

There is evidence that they navigate
by the sun and the stars.

This year, thirty-two, I said
“I’ll be damned if Maureen has frogs”
and dug a pond.
Over eighty hatched, propped up with cat food.
Until the cats ate them.
It was only weeks later we discovered
six shy survivors.

The hieroglyph
for the number one hundred thousand
is a tadpole.

Light ripples down a smooth back.
La grenouille.
Gone.

Review quote:  When I encountered Randolph Healy’s poetry twenty years ago, I was struck by the way his syntax was evidently a way of exploring and controlling the world. The same qualities of intellectual elegance and inventiveness drive a range of surprising forms in his subsequent writing, where they mingle a wide range of commitments evoking compassion and protest with delicate humour. Healy’s first ambition is always to write a constructed poem, instruction and delight being the natural consequence. I read everything he writes with pleasure and excitement.

Jim Mays

Review quote:  If poetry can sometimes be the right thing for the right reason, then Randolph Healy’s Green 532 has all les mots justes – just notes – to shake the tale loose from the tribe and dance with it. Lurking, like a lark, somewhere between “reflection and shadow”, these poems are cosmological forays into the “fragile, transitory, precarious” uncertainty that underlies our ability to respond.

Charles Bernstein

Review quote:  One of the things I like about Randolph Healy’s writing is language’s freedom to remain in its own country, to be all the things it has been wherever it is found. He makes wild and tender constructs of language instances, he shapes and scatters them, he grabs them from far fields and under his nose, but whatever their distances he presses them home, he brings them to the real, and it feels that each moment of this poetical process is arrived at by nothing less than careful thought. So he assembles all his fond language children into a perfect team, the orderliness without which there is no possibility of beauty.

Peter Riley

Review quote:  Healy’s is a richly social and humorous poetry. A science teacher by profession, he rifles mathematics, biology, neuroscience and linguistics for his themes, and fills his poems with anagrams and acrostics in a spirit of Oulipian joy in the structural possibilities of language.

David Wheatley
The Times Literary Supplement