BOOKS / Contemporary Poets: 15 Tom Paulin
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Your support makes all the difference.Tom Paulin is the most abrasive and intellectually demanding of the generation of poets who emerged in Northern Ireland in the Seventies. Born in Belfast, he was a student at Hull, and is now Reader in Poetry at Nottingham University. A marvellous essayist and polemicist, he edited The Faber Book of Political Verse; his collections include The Strange Museum, The Liberty Tree and, most recently, Fivemiletown.
THE NATURAL ORDER
The paddleshaped leaves on the banana palms
are shaped again in the stone temples
just as the pine forests deep inside Germany
have become Gothic minsters
there's no escape they say
and there's no love
we must bend the knee
in a stone forest or a stone grove
all that wood sap leaf
has crossed into our dreams like an army
everything we do
we do because it says so
the light of the desert though
is abstract and rational
there's nothing natural
you'd need or want to imitate
so the mosque's this beautiful peaked
imaginary bulb
that's no bulb -
it stretches the sky
into itself the moon and stars
and might explain to me
why the writer -
the precious secular
unconstrained deliberate writer
must suffer in a secret place
alone he holds
his good right arm
and the state's liberties
unflinching in the flame
(Photograph omitted)
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