Paul Muldoon

10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence. There’s a world of difference between the phrase ‘you’re altogether too thin-skinned’ and ‘you’re too thin-skinned altogether.’ The latter, Dolan notes, is spoken by Seumas in Act 1, line 87 of Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman. ‘The main intention of this dictionary,’ I’m only after reading in the introduction (only after is another Gaelic construction), ‘is to make accessible the common word stock of Hiberno-English in both its present and past forms, oral and literary … Much of the vocabulary of Hiberno-English consists of words in common currency in Standard English, but an appreciable proportion of the word stock of Irish people is not standard and may be misunderstood, or not understood at all, by speakers of standard or near-standard English.’ I’m thinking of how I’m a cute hoor altogether – a phrase that might certainly be misunderstood – for having changed from tonight’s 9:25 Virgin flight with its 9:05 a.m. arrival into Heathrow to this much less damaging daytime jaunt. When I look up cute hoor, I’m directed to hoor and read as follows:

Tom Paulin

Or Charlus as McGahern would call youwhen we stacked up stories with Heaney– all fun a great geg pure pleasureI’d think of this village near Donegal town– Mountcharlus they say in those partsnot Mountcharleswhich was how one editor at Faberused to sign every letter he sent(was it Dunn who wonderedhad you somehow acquired a peerage?)then I’d try hard to...

Book VI Lines 313-381

All the more reason, then, that men and women should go in fear of Leto, their vengeful, vindictive numen, and worship the mother of Apollo and Artemis all the more zealously. This last tale of the demise of Niobe brought others to mind, inspiring no less zeal among the storytellers. ‘On the fertile soil of Lycia,’ one began, ‘the peasants, too, would...

Be that as it may, I’m wakened by the moans not of the wind nor the wood-demons

but Oscar Mac Oscar, as we call the hound who’s wangled himself into our bed; ‘Why?’ ‘Why not?’

He lies between us like an ancient quoof with a snout of perished gutta- percha, and whines at something on the roof....

I was rooting through tea-chest after tea-chest as they drifted in along Key West

when I chanced on ‘Pythagoras in America’; the book had fallen open at a bookmark

of tea; a tassel of black watered silk from a Missal:

a tea-bird’s black tail-feather. All I have in the house is some left-over

squid cooked in its own ink and this unfortunate cup of tea. Take it. Drink.