A recipient of Irish Arts Council funding, A.K. Lee was awarded a funded residency to Vermont, made the Biscuit Prize long list, was shortlisted for the Earlyworks prize, received merits from the Nottingham Poetry Prize and The Gerald Many Hopkins Society and won the Impressions prize for Poetry. After an M.A. from Camberwell, 2011, he teaches Book Arts at arts centres in Britain and Ireland. Safari is the flicker of individuation involved in relating text with image, his books are in the collections of The Chicago Museum of Modern Art, NIVAL, the Yale collection and Tate Britain. AKLeeSample.com
After a poetry reading
‘Mother, the lake is cold’ he drones
and a dozen earnest upturned faces
give him the benefit of their doubts.
Nodding agreement though numb to his feelings,
lost in their lulling belonging to share
their scornful faux-weary snob-touchy detachment,
their would-have, if-only delusion’s despair.
Loathe to appear thoughtless or artless or trite
the audience lolls with a louche disengagement.
Fearfully clannish, freethinking yet prim,
broadminded, yet set in the ways of their world
clique-cosy, blasé while fiercely concerned
with envy, to distance themselves from their role
as wary onlookers as timid toe-dippers
as flaccid lotharios chaste by regrets
for their could-have-been should-have-been life left to live
with their needy self-welcome still begged, though a bet.
The works
Chain us break our will
legislate the false divides
curb our futures as unworthy
of our class to shame our pride.
Pass on all your fears
infiltrate our straining brains
sap our passion with a terror
of our daring and it’s gain.
Feed us all the lies
consecrate the perfect crime
lure us smiling to an alter
built in praise of fear of mind.
Keep us on your side
correlate our will to live
with our will to work and please
leave us nothing left to give.
Six
Idle bit a plum
they burst unexpectedly
these longing daydreams
hiding what you mean
already I disguise you
as anyone else
gooseberry nippled
chilly Japanese wearing
only oven gloves
downy thighs brushing
chalet school issue bloomers
in hysteria
draws my hand along
your spreading legs and into
your beautiful face
A stone our seedling
hard as thought of another
plucking at your fruit
In the Garden
What do older people realize but just can’t say?
That doom despite resistance casts a shadow on their lives?
Their years wore down persistence? All their plans proved only lies?
That time denied the hopes they had of rising to the day
and finding that the fears that held them back for far too long
had somehow passed behind them – disappeared behind the light
of dawn this day renewing by its brightness and the song
of birds their own as-natural resplendence and their right
to be as free as birds. To sing, and fly as high as mind
allows imagination soar beyond the fall of fear.
To hope again for better days more fearless and to find
a fierce determination to make real what they can hear.
The beauty of the birdsong which in chorusing dawn
embellishes in sound all-that the light of each day shows:
the ever-variating colours heralding each rose
the sweeping light reaching into every grass of the lawn
spies churning worms for birds to pick and kill without a care
and quells the tread of creeping cats who nearing leap to seize.
Their sudden struggle and the sense that doom is somehow fair
might be how aging to its own despair may come to feel.
Waves
…one off-season sunny
morning for no reason walking
Rosslare Strand with
fears of finding a weariness here
where the sun
imploringly streaming through curling clouds I
stop and am amazed.
The touch-pink of this tiny shell
this pebble grey
this lick of pale green seaweed is
tracing it’s assured pattern
over the sand lulls
and it’s edge complicit nudging
brain from mind still at this time
where land and tide and time and now
plunges pressing holes into the rising by
the listing ship beautiful and wrecked.
To lie along the sandbar
raising from the water when
under you the wave occasional
sand around your fingers stiffen…
…from the wreckage to the raising
I am walking bow to lie. And
when the wave occasional relentlessly precedes
and when the sun across my back
and squinting through the speckles iridiscent
in my eyes slides into the green sea blue
breathing heart beating single
sandgrain’s unknown moment shown
as yielding sandbar loosing prone
and when the wave occasional relentlessly precedes
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