Poems by Kate Newmann 

 
Evening Visit to My Father
 
 
After four hours
Of blood transfusion
My father was raving.
“Are you okay?”
“Well. I am and I’m not.”
 
They had come from the South of France
Or the South of England.
 
“Who?”
‘Well…”
“Have you seen them?”
 
Perhaps some blood donor
Gifted you these inconvenient,
Inconsiderate ghosts
Who came to visit
But by-passed you. Or
 
Four hours of chat with the blood nurse
When I’ve relished an afternoon off.
Were you simply crazy
With a day of kindness
And conversation?
 
 
​ 
Song of Despair
 
 
My skin that sings your touch.
I wade into the shallow water.
I cast my empty net through white heat
to pull you slowly towards me.
 
I am a stranger on a flat island.
You are black mint tea and apple tobacco,
the heady fading spices,
the whiff of charcoal.
 
I am a drowning exile
sinking in a terrible escape
towards the unforgiving shore of you.
My desires are storm-torn butterflies
 
leaving the continent of memory
in a cloud of forbidden colour
to end like sodden confetti
afloat on impossible silence.
 
 
 
 
from ‘Twenty Songs of Despair and a Love Poem’
            after Pablo Neruda’s ‘Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair’

Kate Newmann is an Irish poet, and a 2025 recipient of the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Trust Fellowship. She was an invited reader at the 25th Medellin International Poetry Festival, Colombia, and most recently at the Himalayan Echoes Festival in Nainital, India. She has published the Dictionary of Ulster Biography and Nearness of Ice, as well as five collections of poetry. Her sixth collection is due out in 2025. 
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