The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet every month throughout 2025. We are delighted to commence this series with two new poems by Eleanor Hooker.

 

Winter Cradle 

 

And so you arrive, trudging

through old snow to find me,

cradling winter – dearest Grandpa,

ghost enough to shadow this page.

 

You carry the pink wooden chair

you made for my eighth Christmas,

restored to me, unbroken, like love.

Yet another elegy, you say over time.

 

My friends, too many, are called away –

Pat, John, Breda, I say, naming them.

You look up at the sea-eagle’s sudden cry,

and from your eyes – a grave translucence.

 

And your mother, my daughter, you sigh.

We’re arriving at her first year gone, I say,

sitting into the pink wooden chair, small

as a dream. I’ve been hiding in my mind

 

but sorrow found me there. I’ve exhausted

silence, I say. But now I am thawed,

I’ll give grief to the rain and the Suir river

that flows the wrong way, uphill.

 

As the sea-eagle angles into winded-snow,

we hear ice shift like smashed glass

against the shore. Our world is broken,

Grandpa, I say. You nod, but pointing

 

at the bird, whisper, Iolar mara iontach.

And when I ask you to spell it, you spell

live and fly. You say, do that for me, Nell.

By way of promise, I breathe and you listen.

 

* Iolar mara iontach  – wonderful sea-eagle

 

 

Monkshood

Aconitum napellus

 

We learn
by hoisting our blank sails
in the bones of the master,
we coast on their articulations,
tack on their wind, let rain.
We weave. Thread eyes
to darn a torn canvas.

Perennial
and like yew,
lethal in every part,
grown from spittle
from Cerberus’ jaws –
that three headed hound
that guards Hades,
to which depths you, Athena,
master weaver,
descend to gather aconite.

A poisoner
in lilac shoots,
you mean to teach
a masterclass –
a few drops suffice
to have us spider.

But you have taught
too well, Athena.
Reckless,
we sail close hauled,
and out of irons
cut strands
that lash us
to your craft,
and when you anoint us
with monkshood,
we daub ourselves
with deadly nightshade
to know two flowers brief allure.

 

Eleanor Hooker’s third poetry collection Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus Press) is the recipient of the 2022 Michael Hartnett Award. A 2021 recipient of the Markievicz Award, her poetry book for that award, Where Memory Lies was published by Bonnefant Press in 2023. 

Her other two collections with the Dedalus Press are A Tug of Blue and her debut The Shadow Owner’s Companion, which was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award for the Best First Irish Collection. Her chapbook Legion (Bonnefant Press, Netherlands) was published in 2021. 

Eleanor’s poetry has been published internationally in Ireland, UK, USA, Holland, Romania, Hungary, India, Australia and Italy. Her work has appeared in literary journals including: The Lonely Crowd; Poetry Ireland Review; POETRY (Chicago); Poetry Review; PN Review; Agenda; The North; The Stinging Fly; Winter Papers; New Hibernia Review; New England Review, Archipelago. Her poetry has been translated into French, Hungarian, Romanian, Italian and Polish. Her work is much anthologised, most recently in the French/English bilingual anthology Impressions Islandaises: 23 Poétesses Racontent Lee Pays, translated by Virginie Trachsler

She was commissioned to wrote a poem to mark the bicentenary of the RNLI, and read her poem at Westminster Abbey in March 2024. 

eleanorhooker.com

Author photo by George Hooker. Main photo by John Lavin.