Featured Poem

Tom Duddy

The Years

I am shameless in my need
to know how he has fared
since we last spoke together
outside an exam hall,

one June. But I am soon
deterred by jokey evasion
and stock response—What
woman would have me?

He, the most bashful one
among us, the one I remember
reciting ‘Sea Fever’
in fits and starts as he stood

awkwardly bent-legged,
half-trapped behind a desk
that was too small for him
stands before me now, bashful still,

but darkly-sunned, grey-templed,
wholly himself, wholly
entitled to fend off
all enquiry. After we part

(much sooner than I’d hoped)
I find myself at a loss, alone
in the street, unfit
for anything but marvelling.

 

 

First published in The Dark Horse 28, Winter / Spring 2012.

Auden said all genuine poems are rooted in imaginative awe. A special area of interest in Tom Duddy’s poetry seems to be the mystery of time passing and the differences it embodies. On occasion, as here, he examines this through memories from his Irish childhood, the whole bound together by his accomplished but unobtrusive verse-craft; for example, in ‘The Years’ one notes his deft, accentuating use of line ends: ‘wholly’, ‘alone’, ‘unfit’, and the mixed registers, from the almost offhand ‘jokey’ to the sonorous ‘darkly-sunned, grey-templed’, with their ghosts of puns, and that closing elevated verb, ‘marvelling’, which leaves the speaker poised, marvellously too, in the astonishment of the present.

—Gerry Cambridge