| Last Poems by Roy McFadden |
| Editor's Note What can we say, here, by the hardening fire, As the clock ticks history, and the flowers drip blood? Roy McFadden, 'Poem for Today', 1943 Roy McFadden died on September 15, 1999. I met him four years earlier through my research on John Hewitt. He was a generous and patient mentor who increasingly entrusted me with his manuscripts and papers. During his final illness, he gave me this last ten set of nineteen poems. Overwhemlmingly elegiac in tone, these have been kept as he ordered them. From our conversations, Roy McFadden would have been delighted with this publication. It comprises a moving requiem for a craftsman of elegance and integrity, who was burdened by a duty to 'capture and immobilise / The trasient moments' ('Granny Bell') and small sufferings of his country's congregation of stopped mouths' ('Replaying Old Gramaphone Records'). Remembering this, I commend these poems to those who, in his words, "prefer to read, rather than be read at". Sarah Ferris Autumn 2002 |
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| LAST VISIT 'You have left your mark', I said, Holding his dying hands. Half-sigh, half smile, and then: 'Not very deep', he said, sideways to God. Irrelevant in the end, Targets, achievements, fame, Remembrances even, fade From thoughts intent on clutching fickle breath. Downstairs, directionless Among the furniture, Pushing past vacant chairs The big dogs ponder, probing his not being there. And under indifferent trees Birds have stopped foraging For nuts from his scattering hand, Held in mine now, and faltering towards goodbye. (January 1999) |
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| Roy McFadden was born in Belfast in 1921 and educated at Regent House School and Queen's University. His first significant work, Russian Summer (Gayfield), appeared in 1941. In 1942 he joined Alex Comfort and Ian Serraillier in Three New Poets (Grey Walls Press). In the 1940's Routledge published three collections, Swords and Ploughshares (1943), Flowers for a Lady (1945) and The Heart's Townland (1947). McFadden contributed substantially to local literary life. With Robert Greacen, he co-edited Ulster Voices (later Irish Voices) in 1943; edited Lagan in 1945-46; and founded and co-edited Rann (1948-53), the most influential contemporary northern journal. McFadden broadcast regularly on BBC's Arts in Ulster, presented Poetry Notebooks and, in 1952, produced his verse play for radio, The Angry Hound, and the poem, Elegy for the Dead of The Princess Victoria (Lisnagarvey). Throughout the next twenty years, individual poems were widely anthologised and an extensive range of reviews, short stories and essays appeared in journals, newspapers and magazines. In the 1970s McFadden published three collections, The Garryowen (Chatto & Windus, 1971), Verifications (Blackstaff, 1977), and A Watching Brief (Blackstaff, 1979); in the 1980s, The Selected Roy McFadden (Blackstaff, 1983) and Letters to the Hinterland (Dedalus, 1986): and in the 1990s, After Seymour's Funeral (Blackstaff, 1990) and Collected Poems 1943-1995 (Lagan, 1996). |
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