Oh, it's good for us to be here in this convocation.
A togetherness of voices. And it's good of the Bodleian to have us here.
So. We're delighted.
It's also good to celebrate a literary magazine that declares itself without anxiety and a certain defiance to be a literary magazine.
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,
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.
It's called The Doleman Miscellany of Irish Writing, again published by a small press, The Dolman Press.
A press kept online and kept working by, again, a visionary editor who was committed to a certain number of writers.
Again, a press with high standards of production, high artistic standards, and a sense of purpose emanating from that place.
So I'd say I knew it was going to be all right.
Like the Dolman press crew, Tiger already has a purchase on his audience and got a kind of passionate focus.
At the same time, what was struck me also very, very ominous in a good way.
Auspicious because of the birds, I suppose the auspices were there.
It was this colour, same colour as the other magazine.
But it also reminded me of another colourful Irish book, totally irrelevant.
Not the little red book of Mao Zedong,
but a religious magazine that used to be in every household in Ireland called The Messenger of the Sacred Heart.
This kind of same colour was a cross between traffic, light red and beetroot cut crimson and on the surface of it,
instead of a birds plunging towards earth, it had Christ ascending, we think in the heavens.
The same phrase from the Oxford Jesuit poet Gerard Gundy.
Hopkins celebrated as the wind over the dappled dawn drawing Falcon.
Well, this magazine also has its bird, its Shearwater.
I take it not as sending it to heaven, but descending necessarily as a celebratory way towards earth.
An open winged kingdom of sea lights have down diving shearwater.
And it's hurrying to brood and embrace the planet.
A planet more in need of embrace than any time before.
The traffic light read. The Messenger had also a second very important function in rural areas in the 1940 and 1950s.
You could put it on a flashlight and make a tail light for a bicycle out of it.
So there was a there is also, I think in this book,
unnecessary warning us to the planet which is being celebrated or being reminded we must take care of it,
that there is a military threatening aspect to the life we are in.
And this this book and the writers and the vision behind the writing and the vision behind the editor,
as we hear from Andrew early on, is is of that salvific sort.
So I think that what the magazine contents are saying is what Hopkins was saying.
There lives the dear is freshness deep down in things.
And actually everything in the magazine is saying that in one way or another.
You can hear it from what was said here this afternoon.
The dearest, deepest freshness is in the old mythological possibilities still being stirred up by the poetry of McKim and Paul Abbott.
It's they're the deepest freshest in the language itself,
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
resourced and criticised and refreshed by Mark Williams's criticism is there in the ancient springs quoted by Andrew in his editorial of Ecclesiastes.
And it's there in the complete freshness with which the usual life is refreshed in Bernard of Donoghue's poetry,
under the poetry of the poet McNeill McNeely,
as opposed to the editor, and in the images as yet that yet fresh images beget in the work of Norman Ackroyd,
Julian Bell, Joan Beattie and Gil McNeely. What strikes you as you read the magazine is that something is coming to a head.
Something is being harnessed. Everything in the issue manifests the truth of a statement by Czeslaw Milosz.
Great Lithuanian born Polish language poet who said.
And in one of his poems. What is articulated strengthens itself.
What is not articulated tends towards not being.
What is being articulated here strengthens itself.
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.
You. In order to salute the issue and the editor and the editorial board celebrate them in Andrew's own words.
While our unnameable archipelago is the subject of the journal, its vision is,
by implication global, and its concerns with the state of the planet could not be more of the our.
And so say all of us. As we also say, so be it.
And amen to that defiant quotation that I alluded to earlier in spirit and in Archipelago and spirit.
And in letter, Archipelago asserts in an unrepentantly circular sense, secular sense,
that prayers of praise or celebration are as worthy, perhaps even more worthy than prayers of petition.
Above all, Archipelago is a literary journal with literary values.
So we said to the second issue the same ahead on whatever you're having yourselves at the this is a
this is called fragment when you're stuck there's a high literally a can of progeny for fragments.
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,
and these dolphins began to move out of the edge.
So it's one of those things you just had to write down where I was writing had done
of David Constantine's dolphins aware of dolphins all over the place in in Dingle.
There's a dolphin swimming around where the Empress of Japan, after she lost her voice through a certain amount of stress and anxiety,
it came back to her when suddenly she saw a dolphin on the seas leaving go to the sea and she spoke again.
So that's far better than this. But here it is. It's called Near in Darkness and in Light.
Nerd is the birthplace of a writer called David Thompson, who grew up there and is referred to at the end.
So fragments there in darkness and in light.
One summer night in there, when the Morty Firth was a gold backed, gold breasted afterglow, we stood on the pier with other watchers,
sharing their low voiced, self-contained excitement as an intermittent sunshine furled and roiled in the half light.
Then somebody said, Dolphins. Dolphins.
For certain, though no. Their could agree which shift or gleam contained them out there of Earth's rim and round your.
We just kept standing as if in our twos and threes we'd gather providentially.
And they'd appeared. I thought of David Thompson's unfolding damaged eyes.
That's so waves and waterfalls in young girls.
Hair of sex and Eden. Sweet flexed given.
Low voiced. Quickening starry. One summer night in their.
And this is called our mystery. It's a.
Prose piece. Bruce poems are problematic.
I like David Jones because of writings. So it's a bit of writing.
It's called Our Mystery. I see him still a mystery to the islanders.
A go to me in the pub the night before. Why had I caved in?
Was I not ready for the inner journey? No.
I watched him from the open boat that was taking us back to the mainland.
A solitary profile against Hie sky and a hillside of stone walls.
Among the Guinness bottles under the swag nets and lobster pots.
He'd spoken like a numb seal with news for me at the whitewash game.
A story he'd spoken with you not see you with news from me.
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.
He for the two mile walk to his fisherman's hut the settled bed and writing table of planks and tea chests.
As I sat in the thoughts with a change on either knee,
I noticed the man at the tiller would occasionally turn his head as if he too were keeping track.
So I inquired. And what about our friend?
How does he make out? The answer came.
He spends his days just walking around the island, working the head.