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Oh, it's good for us to be here in this convocation.

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A togetherness of voices. And it's good of the Bodleian to have us here.

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So. We're delighted.

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It's also good to celebrate a literary magazine that declares itself without anxiety and a certain defiance to be a literary magazine.

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So from the start, before I read the contents, the omens were good, but actually it was very auspicious just to see the book itself,

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because it reminded me of one of the most important publications in Irish writing in the last century, a book that came out in 1960s, early sixties.

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It's called The Doleman Miscellany of Irish Writing, again published by a small press, The Dolman Press.

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A press kept online and kept working by, again, a visionary editor who was committed to a certain number of writers.

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Again, a press with high standards of production, high artistic standards, and a sense of purpose emanating from that place.

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So I'd say I knew it was going to be all right.

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Like the Dolman press crew, Tiger already has a purchase on his audience and got a kind of passionate focus.

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At the same time, what was struck me also very, very ominous in a good way.

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Auspicious because of the birds, I suppose the auspices were there.

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It was this colour, same colour as the other magazine.

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But it also reminded me of another colourful Irish book, totally irrelevant.

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Not the little red book of Mao Zedong,

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but a religious magazine that used to be in every household in Ireland called The Messenger of the Sacred Heart.

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This kind of same colour was a cross between traffic, light red and beetroot cut crimson and on the surface of it,

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instead of a birds plunging towards earth, it had Christ ascending, we think in the heavens.

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The same phrase from the Oxford Jesuit poet Gerard Gundy.

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Hopkins celebrated as the wind over the dappled dawn drawing Falcon.

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Well, this magazine also has its bird, its Shearwater.

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I take it not as sending it to heaven, but descending necessarily as a celebratory way towards earth.

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An open winged kingdom of sea lights have down diving shearwater.

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And it's hurrying to brood and embrace the planet.

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A planet more in need of embrace than any time before.

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The traffic light read. The Messenger had also a second very important function in rural areas in the 1940 and 1950s.

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You could put it on a flashlight and make a tail light for a bicycle out of it.

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So there was a there is also, I think in this book,

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unnecessary warning us to the planet which is being celebrated or being reminded we must take care of it,

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that there is a military threatening aspect to the life we are in.

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And this this book and the writers and the vision behind the writing and the vision behind the editor,

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as we hear from Andrew early on, is is of that salvific sort.

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So I think that what the magazine contents are saying is what Hopkins was saying.

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There lives the dear is freshness deep down in things.

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And actually everything in the magazine is saying that in one way or another.

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You can hear it from what was said here this afternoon.

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The dearest, deepest freshness is in the old mythological possibilities still being stirred up by the poetry of McKim and Paul Abbott.

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It's they're the deepest freshest in the language itself,

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in the language of Anglo-Saxon the greatest translated in the Russian that Andrew kind of translated it's there in the language is resourced and

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resourced and criticised and refreshed by Mark Williams's criticism is there in the ancient springs quoted by Andrew in his editorial of Ecclesiastes.

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And it's there in the complete freshness with which the usual life is refreshed in Bernard of Donoghue's poetry,

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under the poetry of the poet McNeill McNeely,

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as opposed to the editor, and in the images as yet that yet fresh images beget in the work of Norman Ackroyd,

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Julian Bell, Joan Beattie and Gil McNeely. What strikes you as you read the magazine is that something is coming to a head.

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Something is being harnessed. Everything in the issue manifests the truth of a statement by Czeslaw Milosz.

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Great Lithuanian born Polish language poet who said.

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And in one of his poems. What is articulated strengthens itself.

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What is not articulated tends towards not being.

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What is being articulated here strengthens itself.

51
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So it's an honour to have been asked to say words as well as read these couple of poems which are quite short and it's true.

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You. In order to salute the issue and the editor and the editorial board celebrate them in Andrew's own words.

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While our unnameable archipelago is the subject of the journal, its vision is,

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by implication global, and its concerns with the state of the planet could not be more of the our.

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And so say all of us. As we also say, so be it.

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And amen to that defiant quotation that I alluded to earlier in spirit and in Archipelago and spirit.

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And in letter, Archipelago asserts in an unrepentantly circular sense, secular sense,

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that prayers of praise or celebration are as worthy, perhaps even more worthy than prayers of petition.

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Above all, Archipelago is a literary journal with literary values.

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So we said to the second issue the same ahead on whatever you're having yourselves at the this is a

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this is called fragment when you're stuck there's a high literally a can of progeny for fragments.

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I mean, I got a certain distance with this poems, but about I was a nerd in Scotland standing at the end of the pier,

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and these dolphins began to move out of the edge.

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So it's one of those things you just had to write down where I was writing had done

65
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of David Constantine's dolphins aware of dolphins all over the place in in Dingle.

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There's a dolphin swimming around where the Empress of Japan, after she lost her voice through a certain amount of stress and anxiety,

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it came back to her when suddenly she saw a dolphin on the seas leaving go to the sea and she spoke again.

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So that's far better than this. But here it is. It's called Near in Darkness and in Light.

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Nerd is the birthplace of a writer called David Thompson, who grew up there and is referred to at the end.

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So fragments there in darkness and in light.

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One summer night in there, when the Morty Firth was a gold backed, gold breasted afterglow, we stood on the pier with other watchers,

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sharing their low voiced, self-contained excitement as an intermittent sunshine furled and roiled in the half light.

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Then somebody said, Dolphins. Dolphins.

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For certain, though no. Their could agree which shift or gleam contained them out there of Earth's rim and round your.

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We just kept standing as if in our twos and threes we'd gather providentially.

76
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And they'd appeared. I thought of David Thompson's unfolding damaged eyes.

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That's so waves and waterfalls in young girls.

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Hair of sex and Eden. Sweet flexed given.

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Low voiced. Quickening starry. One summer night in their.

80
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And this is called our mystery. It's a.

81
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Prose piece. Bruce poems are problematic.

82
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I like David Jones because of writings. So it's a bit of writing.

83
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It's called Our Mystery. I see him still a mystery to the islanders.

84
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A go to me in the pub the night before. Why had I caved in?

85
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Was I not ready for the inner journey? No.

86
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I watched him from the open boat that was taking us back to the mainland.

87
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A solitary profile against Hie sky and a hillside of stone walls.

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Among the Guinness bottles under the swag nets and lobster pots.

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He'd spoken like a numb seal with news for me at the whitewash game.

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A story he'd spoken with you not see you with news from me.

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The imperilled one news he was still imparting when we went our separate ways as the white voice gave him I for the family hotel beside the pier.

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He for the two mile walk to his fisherman's hut the settled bed and writing table of planks and tea chests.

93
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As I sat in the thoughts with a change on either knee,

94
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I noticed the man at the tiller would occasionally turn his head as if he too were keeping track.

95
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So I inquired. And what about our friend?

96
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How does he make out? The answer came.

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He spends his days just walking around the island, working the head.