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    The Boiler Room
    The Boiler Room
    The Boiler Room
    Ebook132 pages31 minutes

    The Boiler Room

    By Frank Farrelly

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    About this ebook

    The Boiler Room’ brims with the perfectly distilled poems of one man’s life. Shining with truth, honesty and wit, their themes are recognisable: delivering real life experience page after page. Martina Evans

    ‘Integrity, restraint and acute attention to detail are the hallmarks of this debut collection from Frank Farrelly, a lyrical poet fully in touch with his craft. These poems will lift your heart.’ Audrey Molloy

    ‘This collection is distinctly satisfying; for the well-chosen word, the apt comparison, for how the tender and at times reluctant voice negotiates its subject matter, for how the reader finds her or himself sharing the poet’s own nuanced and salutary self-reveal. It animates the vagaries of us, for us—the human in the communal. Edward Denniston

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLimerick Writers Centre
    Release dateSep 2, 2020
    ISBN9781005538934
    The Boiler Room
    Author

    Frank Farrelly

    Frank Farrelly was born in Ardmore, and has lived in Waterford City since 1978. He is a retired teacher of English and French, and only started writing ‘seriously’ in 2009. Since then, his poetry has been widely published in magazines and online. His first chapbook, Close To Home, was published with the aid of a Literature Bursary from Waterford ArtLinks in 2017. He won the inaugural Rush Poetry Prize and was runner up in The Fish Poetry Prize, The Doolin Poetry Prize, Poets Meet Politics and North West Words. He was shortlisted for The Writing Spirit Award, The Cuirt New Writing Prize and The Trim Poetry Prize. Recently he was Highly Commended in The Blue Nib Chapbook Contest 6. In 2019, he was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. The Boiler Room is his first full collection.

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      Book preview

      The Boiler Room - Frank Farrelly

      When we visited once a year, he’d put me on his lap

      and read a letter from his missionary son in Africa,

      inventing tiger hunts, growling behind his red moustache,

      one eye kind, one put out by a jutting branch one moonless night.

      When he died, they laid him in the parlour with the polished brass,

      lacquered wood, his Huguenot mother’s photograph,

      plain dress belling to the floor, raven hair in tight chignon,

      and the Papal Blessing above the modest hearth

      -framed after fleeing westward with the farmer’s girl

      whose folk would have no truck with trade

      and blacked them both for years, until by train

      a box arrived; apples, Queens, farmhouse bread.

      Ardmore

      Uprooted once again, this time south, you leave

      your home, your friends, drive for hours through

      lonely hills, darkened towns, your two-week child

      close-swaddled in the maw of winter.

      When you arrive you flop down fully-clothed, sleep

      like astronauts until the planet turns its cheek

      and you awake, draw back the curtain to reveal

      a swatch of sea beneath a periwinkle-sky

      cloud-ribbed, unfolding like a masterpiece,

      a trawler, beleaguered by a fuss of gulls.

      You watch the tide wipe clean the slate of sand,

      all print of passing life, and all you miss seems gathered too

      and washed away. You push the window wide,

      admit the salty air—its heady promise.

      Leaving

      I remember the blue Fiat, the white Datsun,

      the Peugeot black as melting tar.

      You marked each journey with a different craft

      as if we were travelling to another galaxy

      not orbiting the fields of ragwort and stony ditches

      of this island, swopping one small littered town

      for another where they roll their ‘r’s or sing their vowels

      or cut their midland consonants in half.

      Every leaving left a hole I filled with giddy expectation.

      Was there a river I could swim in, fish, wander beside,

      another girl to yearn impossibly after? And school

      — another ladder of necessary friendship.

      When I left to strike out on my own you waved

      like I was off to war on some delirious ship,

      not driving south to fill a temporary teaching post.

      You gripped the gates to catch your breath until

      you shrank to nothing in my rear-view mirror. I remember

      thinking this might be the last time I would see you alive.

      Another Home

      Roslevin: the huge oak,

      sinews tough as rope you’d pull

      to moor a masted ship,

      the walled garden, the portico,

      the wood beside the railway heading west

      to Galway and beyond.

      Our dog was in her element,

      barked with joy until

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