Padraig Rooney

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Padraig Rooney was born in Monaghan and educated at Maynooth and at the Sorbonne where he studied English and American literature. His early stories were published in the Irish Press New Irish Writing page, edited by David Marcus, in Best Irish Short Stories 2 & 3 (Paul Elek) and in Phoenix Irish Short Stories (1997). He received two Irish Arts Council bursaries. He has published one novel Oasis (Poolbeg Press) and three collections of poems. In The Bonsai Garden (Raven Arts Press) was winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Escape Artist (Smith/Doorstop, 2006) won the Poetry Business Competition in 2005. The title poem of his most recent collection The Fever Wards (Salt) won the Strokestown International Poetry Award in 2009. He has lived and taught abroad for many years, mostly in Asia, and currently lives in Switzerland.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717279
ISBN:  9781844717279
Author:  Padraig Rooney
Title:  The Fever Wards
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Nov-10
Extent:  80pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The Fever Wards takes us on a trek through the jungle of the world and of the mind. The weather is torrid, like stepping off the high street into the tropical house. The poems are lush, overpowering and smell of mangoes in the rainy season. Eat your fill.

Main description:  The title poem of The Fever Wards, which won the Strokestown International Poetry Prize, straddles the border between memory and dream. It evokes the demolition of an old TB hospital where a patient watches the wrecking ball bring the world down around her, reduces it to dust.

Other poems haunt the edges of the land, where the sea can be regenerative, a mangrove swamp, an ominous tropical beach, or a sand-filled school become dreamscapes where the wind ‘blows our words away and drowns them all’ or where a giant wave might come rolling in. I spent most of the 1980s and 1990s in and out of Thailand as a ‘mendicant professor’ to borrow D. J. Enright’s lovely phrase, and the weather of these poems is torrid, feverish, out of synch, like stepping off the high street into the tropical house in a zoo or botanical garden.

The defining politics of the Noughties are refracted in a poem set in Rome where ‘Caesar’s campaign notes are full of shock and awe’ or where Humpty-Dumpty lives ‘in a tower’. The speakers in my poems are new nomads, only partly at home, ranging from country to country but also making forays into history, ‘wandering through the Munich ruins’ or finding Indian bones on Nantucket.

Table of contents:
Landing Craft
An Ordinary Morning
The King of Jazz
Winkle-Pickers
Sun in an Empty Room
The Sand School
The Dance of Veils
Wire
Doing the Graves
The Struggle
Rome, Night
His Dark Companions
Sunbeam
The Fever Wards
Talking Troubadour Blues
Junks
Aubade
Scenes
Gurdjieff at the Cafe de la Paix
The Ordination Meal
The Valley
Tower, Wall
Boy in a Blue Tarboosh
The Carpet
Truffle
Mirage
Cavafyesque
Gold
The Dayboys
The Good Popes
Remembering the Troubles
Bunker
Blue Clay
Pawnee Hunkered
Bone Bed
The Miacomet Indian Burial Ground, Nantucket
Iroquois
The Snap
The Children of Izieu
Here Come the Warm Earls
Children of September
Mangrove
Monkeys
The Tow Horses
Beginnings
Forgive my heart these flutters

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (131 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

The Fever Wards

I must be half-asleep in the fever hospital
above the town. Cathedral bells and coughs,
and candles lit beside the winched-up beds
beneath the moon, the northern stars and frost.
The roof is gone and in its place a canopy
of cloth of gold and parasols that flutter
along the path towards the sanatorium.
We’re moon bathing and taking in the air
as the fever wards come down around us
in brick dust and granite blocks and spores.
A wrecking ball destroys a stained-glass window
and swings back out as though a pendulum
were marking time across the patchwork fields.
It showers us with glass and shards of lead
and leaves a broken mosaic on the quilt.
We’re outside catching breath and watching
the customs huts asleep in their own silence,
the creamery cans that man the ends of lanes,
the polytunnels’ darkened mushroom beds.
And on the bedside table a Lourdes Messenger,
a thermometer and damson plums from home.
They smell of coal as though they’d taken in
the smoke that used to puff behind the orchard
before the war. The northern trains are gone
and in their place the disused sidings, sleepers
that smell of creosote warming in the sun.
I’d rise and take my folding cot and walk
if only for this fever that shakes me nightly,
all my nerves on stalks like rhubarb leaves
to catch the rain, or gongs announcing dinner
or benediction in the nurses’ home.

Review quote:  Lushly decadent yet simply poetic … it reminds one of a rare orchid – beautiful, unnatural and poisonous.

The Sunday Press