Dear Galway Review Editors,
3 Márta 2024
Please find five sonnets below. It always is a privilege to be in communication. I included within this MS Word attachment a new biography that is up-to-date, as well as a photo, attached as a jpg. An early Happy St. Patrick’s Day and very early Happy Easter! I hardly can believe we are in 2024. I have been reading with delight the writings published by The Galway Review. May God bless you for amazing work.
Following Seamus Heaney’s advice, I labour to blaze new trails. He once counseled and advised: “Don’t write Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Miltonian, or Heaneyan sonnets. Write Blackmanian sonnets.” So, I have done so. What I bring to poetry’s table in sonnet-writing is a partial defiance of tradition and a reliance upon everyday vernacular, combining free verse and rhyme to create a new style. It is my hope that all five sonnets can be published, as there are threads that tie them together.
The poems are personal and hibernophilic. John Matthias, Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of Notre Dame, was friends with Seamus Heaney and is a poet I have found to be fascinating. Though I aim to be original, I do not defy the past completely. In fact, I embrace John Matthias’s style and weave into the sonnets the names of family members, which some poetry teachers might resist, unnecessarily. The names of my father John and my brother Rodney show up in two of the poems. In our youth, my brother’s nickname was R.J., because his middle name is James.
I remember seeing Seamus Heaney’s massive, multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary and Seamus suggesting that I write a poem about Irish dictionaries and lexicons, since such a poem had not yet been written. The sonnet also was written to honour my great-grandmother, Mary, who spoke and read Irish and who emigrated from Ireland to the United States. I have poignant recollections of her speaking Irish. I’ve held an ever-present fascination with the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language and the Foclóir Stairiúil na Nua-Ghaeilge. More could be said about the sonnets, but I will leave it there and let the poems speak for themselves.
I send warmest greetings to The Galway Review. I hope you all are doing well.
Very sincerely,
Shane Blackman
305 South Val Vista Drive, Lot 332
Mesa, AZ 85204 (USA)
Phone: (602) 647-3666
E-mail: shaneblackman1971@yahoo.com
Shane Blackman is an Irish-American poet and historian whose poems have been published in The Galway Review, The Mythic Circle, and the Latin American Literary Review. When the Irish Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, Shane was a Visiting Scholar at Oxford, where Seamus tutored Shane on how to craft sonnets. Shane’s father John is an Irish citizen who has taken the family to Ireland often, and Shane’s brother Rodney has served as a Visiting Scholar at University College Dublin. Under the tutelage of University of Notre Dame professor and poet John Matthias, Shane learned unique and introspective ways to weave family into poetry.
Branigan’s Voice
The fine art ran in her ancestry all
The way back to Ireland and opera
Houses & halls there, where story-tellers
And musicians made their voices well-known.
The Branigans moved to New York City,
A new home for theatre and chances
To sing and act and give it your best shot:
The wise lady prayed in St. Patrick’s Church.
Laura shot to the top of the charts with
The song “Gloria”, with its disco ball
Flashing silver and light on the TV.
Magazines observe she owned the decades.
What awed listeners was her five-octave
Range, a pure sound and tone, unparalleled.
Trinity Irish Dictionary
The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit,
They protected lives on emerald isles;
Words for phrases, phrases for a country
Enshrined by Saint Brigid, Saint Peter, and
Jesus of Heaven, who walked on water.
If Oxford University has its
Dictionary, then Irish colleges
Have their lexicons – rich, profound sources
For those pleasant words & their history.
Irish academies wrote metaphors,
Definitions, and meanings – with nuance.
Gaeilge has its own language and linguists
And dialects, which go from shore to shore.
God’s divine plan wrought rhythm and beauty.
An Elegy for Mossbawn’s Writer
I go back to the farm-lands of my youth
To recall what it was like to live off
The soil, where a word-smith explained my life:
Seamus Heaney is the name I think of.
I return to the academic halls
Of the place where I read literature
Of all types, to fathom the depths he must
Have fathomed at Saint Columb’s in Derry.
Our paths crossed at Oxford & Notre Dame,
Where he read verses and lyrics aloud.
These were the days when the music happened.
In Sweden, he credited poetry.
Tríocha Lúnasa Dhá Mhíle a Trí Déag
Was the night a bard’s soul entered Heaven.
Los Angeles Muse
I looked for aide-mémoires of the times my
Good parents lived in Toledo’s suburbs,
The quaint houses & wide streets, the structures
For a devout family who loved God.
Full of wonder, I saw a TV show
About The Byrds, whose sanguine songs caused the
Rock bands to play on. Teens broke from customs,
Traditions and turned James Dean into a
Rebel with – and without – a cause. That’s what
My brother Rodney James and I had done
In school gyms, pool halls, and basketball courts.
It took a trek to the Fifties to get
To the Eighties, which made the venture chic.
I thank the L.A. band for those billboards.
The Genius of John Blackman
I sorted through boxes of albums and
Scrapbooks & found time-stamped documents of
Achievement in maths and engineering.
This good man is a natural genius.
He is my kindly father and dear friend.
His particular knack-set with numbers
Is unmatched and exceptional, in sum.
One time, I introduced John to a math
Professor and pal named David Wilson.
Once the two were talking, I watched them speak
The same language: it was supernature!
Humble to the core, these gentlemen solved
Problems in mathematics, as they spoke.
Calculus was equal to poetry.
The Galway Review 