welcome viewers to focus coming to you from here in the burlington studio burlington vermont studio we are channel seventeen center for media and democracy i am your host margaret harrington of focus and viewer is today we here in the lincoln vermont and this is the latest volume of your poetry call selected to lanty yes and with so it it has poems from the last three years of your of your working life ireland from county cork and you've been here you've been poet in residence at st michael's college for thirty years and could you start off this short time that we have with you with some of the emigrant pa that i arrived in new york and i met a friends of mine all lifeguards was the lifeguard to carry beaches and so he was staying in the bronx where all the irish generally were staying so we did the pubs you know guinness after that country for old men at bandon them like the guy next to abandon its fledgling not all of them make it those that do are more like the rain who flew high off the ego of folklore prevailing in the contentious sky beautiful paints quite a picture of immigrants i mean it we're all trying to get home some are you know in spiritual kind of state so in the end it's there all those set in the particular boat things that we all experience in one way or another that's that's a theme that runs through your poetry to the theme of home where he's yes and yet you know that you know there's no answer really only is sometimes it's with friends who you can be completely comfortable with and say what you want to say other times it's a place i mean vermont is my home no borling to me as i love i love i love having a bit of the house air and so on and so forth and and it's beautiful here bars and restaurants and it's so close and i can walk on and i cycle everywhere no car so i could school as well and we really get to know you through this this these poems and what about your father who p's and q's has as much to do with pints and courts and the printers are known for drink as it has to do with those descenders but i don't say anything about me mystified about the origins of that hit and hope to measure a line gauge and how since he was forced to go he slowly along with out a war torn from himself into every one as we told him to that last zero before finally passing on to the sto if their eyes light upon the white are black spaces a boy who would later still read in small on the top story of the eagle printing company i laboring women and men flick by caught in the lists of axis drowned out by the machines hollow below somehow between floors the elevator diverse questions about the heaven don't you head from to discourse the whole should dying the beginning and end the pretty big bang on time before you forget the political poems and so forth this poem and i had one of the jobs of reading i started you know when you were a kid and you were asked to do certain chores one of my little chores was that i and there you are for the story i tell you after i read this to my mother eileen i'm treading the eye of the need for you again that is my specially appointed task my gift that you gave me watch me slip this yourself in work that's what he'd say ok ok listen i can hear the sticks of our fire spit like corn turning into popcorn with the brown insides of rotten t she she she she i don't know how she saw the poor man maybe she thought published somewhere i can remember but i did appear in the later book called the blind stitch and she said she taught my brother  years ago and she saw i mean she saw me develop into because i thought of it you know and she was pleased at that it's wonderful in this poem how you bring us back to that moment that you're looking in this time back to that  too but i was lucky and i managed to make the best of my luck and on some of the work i did and still a lot of things have to come together being very fortunate and in you you have many translations in here too yeah  brown flower nor the fine white flower though i take them out and measure them on the scales and bake a single loaf it's not any book i was devouring if memory serves me which i put down absent mindedly although i stand at the shadows and scan the book stacks and fall to my knees it's not any missing key i wasn't going out i didn't leave anything on although i'm shuffling from room to room combing the whole house for something and it's nothing between poems also allusions and references and and sometimes playfulness you know as you said you can read the poem by itself without getting all connections  but also reading the whole volume it's a joy to find the connections show out into the themes throughout your your decades of writing here i mean i try to highlight in my writing i've tried to hi perhaps a critiquer not to find in those things you know but there are older meanings in the book that are hidden and that's where i would like them for us to do that in a different way i mean frost he did a lot of this more deeper and st and it came out later on i mean but you know so that's i mean the right place for that a kind of an influence and the thing is that you let the reader and you invite  the so that we can we can join you in the poem so that you don't put up barriers to a or you actually try to break the barrier you know all the time actually seamus used to like me saying that that term that that to discover their prognosis have disappeared passed on unable to make it alone but how good it is to see sox united once more talked into each other occasions such dancing such cavorting such jubilation in the kingdom of socks transitions but they're all myself and we used to joke saw there's a lot of different characters and it's supposed to be in the new phone book of the greek anthology which there are sixteen now but i called this one hundred and i read that actually but he racism but there was a lot of the stuff going on in the south and then of course our present president and so forth and blues there's a brilliant but intangible lies a light blue you must have seen is glistening all fresh snow something akin but not quite the same as you see shine off the back of a bar and swallow the st office i didn't cut non til then why in the irish language a black brother and sister are called blue all my beautiful blue sister and brother indication that guy is in trouble the things are song the rocky mountain top shines like the bald head of a woman after chemo his herself out of your hospital bed to take in the trees the squares the commotion around town sip bear in a dive in the latest war the slaughter of innocents the various wily ways you've grown used to complicity  cord sucking the life out of exhausted terror matter you read about leaders ready to award the future and mammon her body smaller horror in her own i'm going to say thank you and we're going to to end with you're saying chuck it down ok sure and so so thank you so much for being my guest again and and for this beautiful book selected to lanty and this beautiful work prez brother sean he is the light that a lights out of every night he is the radiant forced offspring of the one next let us pray sister moon and all the about their sibling water she is so humble she's hardly noticed we've been nothing without her likewise are our friend fire and load mother earth carrying her basket overflowing with sundry the cures to feed all her offspring the and call rot be vulture boar paradise a rainbow told all our close relatives applaud also those who walk for her sake especially now we need them more than ever