Learning the Hard Way

TY pupils have under a month left to complete their Work Portfolios, and are currently producing various kinds of prose compositions. Here, Lluisa Hebrero Casasayas, who arrived here from Spain at the beginning of the year, writes a powerfully direct and honest piece in English about coming to terms with such a new, different environment, and learning English at the same time.

I don’t know how, but one day I said to myself: if I don’t talk more to people and make things easier, no-one is going to do it for me, and I still have to be here for nine months, so wake up!’ I can’t explain how much did I change, and what a positive mentality I got. I took my cousin’s old translator and I carried it everywhere I went. I was interested in learning English. I was trying to be as nice as I could, smiling when I had to tell people: ‘I’m really sorry. I don’t understand you, could you please repeat it again?’ Being myself.

And here I am. Basically, I’m writing an English essay. I couldn’t have done this a few months ago! People say to me that my English has improved so much, and I’m so happy for that. It’s already April; I’ve been here for seven and a half months, and I actually can understand everything.

Read Lluisa's full piece here.

'Captivation' and 'Serenity'

Amelia Shirley received an award for these poems from her entries to the Junior Poetry Prize:

Captivation

We knew there must be
More to living.
We'd heard of places where
People laughed with genuine joy.

We knew that lying here in
Metal beds watching
The starless sky
Couldn't be forever.

We would be released
From our solitude,
Shown how to embrace
The moon's glinting hollowness
And tell them...
We survived.


Serenity

The pure look of understanding
In his eyes burnt a hole
In my heart.

The simplicity of his smile
And contentment of his soul
Screamed out to me through barriers of wickedness.

He had seen life,
Seen death.
Then,
He had seen me.

Beckett at Montparnasse

Another expedition leaves early tomorrow - this time a French Department TY trip to Paris. To mark their departure, here's another in the series of famous authors' graves we've visited - that of Irish author Samuel Beckett in the cemetery at Montparnasse. Ronan Swift is our representative. Previously we've paid our respects to Keats in Rome, Gerard Manley Hopkins at Glasnevin in Dublin, and, right, Henry Fielding in the lovely English Cemetery in Lisbon.

'Home' and 'Those Sepia Photos'

Here are two more junior poems, from Opeline Kellett (II form) and Kezia Wright (I form - and she also drew the illustration):-


Home, by Kezia Wright

There, the tree tops meet the sky
And the leaves flutter in the autumn wind as
they bid their tree goodbye.
There, purple evenings are home to the giant moon.
There, snow blankets the land
And icicles drip onto the morning frost.
The land is still when the bitterly cold wind marches in.

There, grasses of green arise from the fields
While sounds of the lamb throng the air.
There, the sun will spread its wings and shine brightly once again.
There, a soft breeze blows through the boiling heat
And gentle waves lap against your feet.
There, the sun will never die and light is everlasting.


Those Sepia Photos, by Opeline Kellett

Those sepia photos in the morning light
reflect memories of many times past.
The débutante ball in 1950,
the young gentleman at my hand.

Those sepia photos show happiness,
a world so simple, so young,
a world without fluster or time,
and laughter at a gleeful song sung.

Those sepia photos show memories
I don't want to leave behind.
What use now is colour in a world left so grey?

Those sepia photos,
Those times were the day.

Off to Pompeii

Good luck to the expedition being led by our colleague Ronan Swift, who early tomorrow morning will set off to the Bay of Naples to indulge in all things classical. Four teachers and 18 Junior Certificate III form pupils will be spending time looking at the many riches of the Neapolitan area. To send them off, here's the link to a poem by former pupil Rowland Cooper we posted in October. It was inspired by Robert Harris's novel Pompeii.

They plan to keep us up to date via the Classics 'Clog', which you can see here.

Junior Poetry Prize Winner, 2008

Congratulations to Joanna Tottenham of II form, who has been awarded this year's Junior Poetry Prize for her poem 'Hearts' (which will also be our next Poem of the Week). Mr Canning, the judge, comments on the influence of Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson.

In addition, the English Department awards book tokens to :
III form : Amelia Shirley and Rosanna Young
II form : Opeline Kellett
I form : Kezia Wright.

We will shortly be posting poems from these entrants.

'Hearts', by Joanna Tottenham

Like a time-bomb they tick,
Always running,
Loving, scarlet,

Sweet like syrup.
Tender as an eggshell,
Broken so often yet
Rebuilt

By the antidote of others.
Working alone,
No coffee break.
As precious as gold
Yet

Carelessly cast away
In the depths of darkness,
Ticking on

Precisely.

'Place', 'Beach Ball', 'Solitude'

Here are three more poems to add to yesterday's, from I form.

Place, by Kezia Wright

There the treetops meet the sky
And there the leaves flutter in the autumn wind,
As they bid their tree goodbye.

There grasses of green arise from the fields
While sounds of the lambs
Throng the springy air.

There a soft wind blows amidst the boiling heat
And gentle waves lap against your feet.
Daylight never ends
And flies buzz in the sticky heat.

There snow blankets the land
And icicles drip onto the morning frost.
The land is still,
When the bitterly cold wind marches in.

There the sun will spread its wings
And shine brightly once again.
There purple evenings are home to the giant moon.

Beach Ball in the Summer Sun, by Josh Kenny

A beach ball in the sun,
Its bright colours colliding
With the sun’s warmth,
Rolling in the summer’s breeze,
On the sandy surface of the beach.

Bouncing and rolling along the sand,
As though it has a mind of its own,
Until the breeze weakens,
And the ball comes to a standstill
In the warmth of the summer sun.

Solitude, by Josh Kenny

My place of solitude is a field,
Not far from my home.
The air is fresh, the ground is moist
And I can see the mountains perfectly.

In the middle of the field I sit
On the wet green grass
Listening to birds and relax,
Forgetting the past.

My field is a place of joy, relaxation,
Solitude and freedom.

'Light' and 'Driftwood'

Here are a couple of what Mr Swift calls 'a tiny sprinkling' of poems written in his I form English set. More shortly.

'Driftwood', by Jamie Boyd

I started out in life
As a huge and mighty crate,
Filled to the brim
With ammunition for an army.

Till one day tall and powerful waves
Crashed down on our ship
Making it toss this way and that way,
Men shouting orders
Slipping and sliding.

Suddenly a rogue wave hits
And flings me into the raging sea,
I smash open and all the bullets
Sink to the ocean’s bed.

And I begin to drift.
Drift far and wide,
To the edge of the world.
I may get washed up,
But the ever-moving sea
Will pick me up again,
And drift away I will again.


'Light', by Zachary Stephenson

There is a dim light
Glowing in front of us.
What could it represent?
Maybe it is God’s light
Keeping us safe;
Or a signal fire
Looking for help.

Perhaps it is comfort
For those with grief,
Inspiration for an idea,
Courage for the cowardly
Or soothing for the stressed.

As it illuminates our lives
I am certainly glad
There is light.

Scribbling the Cat

Liam Canning recommends a memoir by Alexandra Fuller :-

I left Zambia in 1982 having lived in Africa for the greater proportion of my life. In 1980 Robert Mugabe had been elected as Prime Minister of the new Republic of Zimbabwe. In the same year in June a car near my house in Ndola had three hundred rounds of ammunition pumped into it by a group of Joshua Nkomo’s returning guerrilla freedom fighters. Three young friends of mine had been ‘scribbled’. I recall the ghastly image vividly and have often thought of the waste and pointlessness of the fact that it was the car behind theirs that was then stolen.

Once you have lived in Africa the place runs in your blood like an itch you cannot scratch. Alexandra Fuller describes it as ‘how to belong to a place that does not belong to you’ I returned to Zambia for the first time when I read her acclaimed memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, a child’s eye view of the continent she grew up in.

I am currently reading Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African soldier. It spans the time when Fuller returns to Zambia from the USA as an adult and embarks on a harrowing but ironically hilarious journey into the past. She takes this moral journey with ‘K’, a white African veteran of the civil war. They travel through Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique reliving this devastating time in conversation with other war veterans.

‘Scribbling’ is the Afrikaans for killing and it is this casualness to violent death and the irrelevance of human life that strikes home. The book is hard and unforgiving, dealing with race, politics, war and self-justification. Fuller’s prose is clear, unsentimentally honest and strikingly idiomatic and atmospheric. Both of these books must be read in tandem and although they hold a poignant and personal significance for me you will certainly get a unique and realistic feel for the idiosyncrasies of Africa, even if you have never been there.

The Baghdad Zoo

Our 25th Poem of the Week is Brian Turner's 'The Baghdad Zoo' (click here for the full text), from his multi award winning collection Here, Bullet, which has just arrived in the Library. It is about the notorious day in 2003 when, following the American invasion of Iraq, the zoo was ransacked and animals ran loose into the city.

Here, Bullet, Turner's outstanding debut collection, is the first strong poetic voice in English to come from the Iraq conflict. He was recently interviewed in a Guardian podcast with Lindesay Irvine here, and on RTE's 'The Arts Show' by Vincent Woods here. Both interviews are well-worth attention. There's a review of the book by H.R.Coursen in the Wolf Moon Press here.

Yesterday Brian Turner took a poetry masterclass at the 23rd Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway.

Letter to a Famous Person

Our Transition Year pupils are currently writing pieces for their Work Portfolio (we'll post plenty in due course), with their course ending in late May. Poppy Vernon has recently written a letter to a famous 'person' in a recent essay :-

I was asked to write a letter to a famous person and as I don’t really have a significant idol who I look up to, I thought I would take this opportunity to write to you. I admit I am going to have some trouble posting this and am proposing just throwing it high into the air and hoping that it will disappear dramatically.

Her full piece is here.

December 26th 2004

In January we posted a piece by Lewis Mathews about the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004; Lewis was in Sri Lanka on holiday when the disaster struck. Now, Ciara O'Driscoll writes about her reaction as she watched the television images helplessly from her home in Singapore :

It didn’t feel like an earthquake which would register 8.9 on the Richter Scale. Tucked up in my bed in my home in Singapore, it felt rather as if an extremely large lorry had rolled past my window.

Read the rest of Ciara's piece here.

William Trevor at 80

There is much on the airwaves and in the press at the moment about our most distinguished Old Columban writer, William Trevor, who will be 80 next month. We are planning our own celebration of this event - more here before long.

On Sunday, John Bowman's RTE Radio 1 Sunday morning programme replayed a clip of Trevor being interviewed by Andy O'Mahony about his book Landscape in Literature (1984).

If you click on the episode from Sunday 13th, you can hear him talk with Mike Murphy about his education, including discussion of St Columba's. He remembers thinking before arriving from Sandford Park that SCC boys would 'speak strangely', but then found that the school was socially 'pleasantly mixed'. He says that, having mocked the school (fairly gently), he now remembers it 'with affection' and thinks 'it was a very good school indeed', largely because during the War 'the staff were interesting men'. He goes on to talk in much detail about the profound influence that the then art teacher, the great Irish sculptor Oisin Kelly, had on his life.

On Thursday at the Mansion House William Trevor will be receive the Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature at the Irish Book Awards. Also, at the weekend the author is the subject of a symposium at the Oscar Wilde Centre in TCD (here).

Willis Shakespeare Prize

This year's annual Willis Prize for Shakespeare exam takes place on Tuesday evening at 6.30pm in Cotton. Further details from teachers ... you'll be asked to write a general essay on Shakespeare's drama (using at least two plays), to analyse one of the sonnets, and to comment on an unseen extract from a play (last year, Coriolanus). All in VI, V and IV who are interested should let their English teachers know.

Of course, Shakespeare's birthday is on Thursday 23rd.

Bernard O'Donoghue

In today's Guardian, Caitriona O'Reilly reviews the newly published Selected Poems by one of the most attractive and accessible, yet least feted, contemporary Irish poets, Bernard O'Donoghue. O'Donoghue has lived in England for most of his life, and for many years has taught at Wadham College, Oxford (a medievalist, his version of the great epic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published by Penguin Classics in 2006).

His own verse is elegant, understated - a slow burn. He can be heard reading his poem 'Tea Dolls' and 'Geese Conversations' on a Bodlean Library 'bodcast' here. O'Reilly says rightly that the poems are 'clever and self-conscious, but blessedly uncontaminated by the abstract language of ideas or by brittle academic rhetoric'.

O'Donoghue was interviewed on this week on Monday's Start the Week (BBC Radio 4) with Andrew Marr (available on Listen Again).

Summer in the Countryside

In his Mock exam at the end of last term, Junior Cert pupil Steffan Davies wrote an evocative prose composition, 'Summer in the Countryside', which starts :

Take a large white canvas. Paint a great blue sea, and dot the waves with white beads. With a flowing motion paint the ripples in the harbour as they lap against the hard grey pier. Scribble in a lighthouse at the end of the quay and children playing around it. Fill the air with the sound of happy voices and the smell of dead fish. Draw the squiggly coastline, snaking its way up north. Dot yellow on the serpent's back, to make the rape seed crops sitting on the side of the hills. Let the smell of freshly cut grass float away on a breeze.

Here is Steffan's full piece.

'Time', by Fiona Boyd

Our 24th Poem of the Week is by the joint winner of this year's Senior Poetry Prize, Fiona Boyd.


'time'

I promise that I can see tomorrows
Yesterdays and Fridays
and I promise to watch out for all the other days
You said would keep coming around.

I promise I won’t forget the months
Even though there are so many
Or how a week can drag on forever
And disappear in the blink of an eye.

I’m keeping track of all these hours
And minutes and seconds
And half moments of hope.

And I’m saving them up
And I’m writing them down
Just so we know
Just so we know.

'What Was Lost', by Catherine O'Flynn

Catherine O'Flynn's brilliant debut novel (winner of the Costa First Novel Prize) What Was Lost, has just arrived in the Library and is strongly recommended.

'Crime was out there. Undetected, unseen. She hoped she wouldn't be too late.' Our detective from Falcon Investigations is Kate, a 10 year-old heading for her daily holiday surveillance shift at the new local Green Oaks Shopping Centre. Together with her assistant Mickey the Monkey (who she made from a Charlie Chimp the Gangster craft kit), she keeps an eye on the centre's customers, staff, shops, banks ... It is 1984. Not so much Big Brother as Little Girl.

The novel then moves to 2004. Kate vanished twenty years ago (and is seen on CCTV in images reminiscent of the James Bulger story). The story moves to security guard Kurt ('he'd been looking at the same monitor screens for the past thirteen years') and music store assistant manager Lisa, stuck between nightmarish senior management and deranged floor assistants. What follows is a kind of mystery story - what happened to Kate all those years ago, and how are the lives of Kurt and Lisa affected by this?

What Was Lost is both very funny and very moving. Catherine O'Flynn captures perfectly the ferocious seriousness of childhood, and the heart-breaking emotional void below this child's detective role-playing. There are many other vivid minor characters -the sad (and sweet) sweet-shop worker Adrian, the appalling ranting manager Dave, the security guard Gavin (who manages to be both boring and sinister). This is partly a story of lives of quiet desperation, taking place against the background of a post-industrial deracinated Britain: thus the ironically named centre. In the end, it also becomes a love story.

Go to the Daily Telegraph here for a reading by the author, and an interview with Katherine O'Shea.

One further mystery : it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Only long-listed?

JMG