The taxi drops me in an unfamiliar part of the airport, disorienting me for a moment. I didn’t even want to take a taxi – an enterprising driver pulled over at the coach stop and stole my business. “Take you to the airport, love? Same price as the bus, seven euro. Same price, I promise you.” It was four in the morning, my boyfriend had stayed up all night to walk me to the stop, and I figured that if I turned the driver down, the bus would be late, or break down. He already had two girls in the back, and stopped in Drumcondra along the way to pick up a man waiting outside the station. None of us spoke. It seemed rude to put on my headphones, so I listened to talk radio, advertising jingles and “The Whole of the Moon” by the Waterboys, which has always sounded dated to me. It reminds me of pubs where people play darts and eat chicken in a basket.

Artist’s note: I started these pieces some years ago when I was working on a comic called Stickman. The idea was to create a simple character built from three lines (in the good old stickman tradition) and see how much personality and story could be written into these simple forms. Over time, the stickman changed and became integrated with more detailed work, although I tried to retain the simplicity with one-line drawings and no real backgrounds.

If you want to know what the future has in store, only take a walk down to the Prater. There stands an ancient, highly useful machine gigantically, like an orchestra conductor. At any moment, music could begin, which might spin chirping and unwieldy, melancholy and fleeting, into the fresh green crowns of the nearby trees down the avenue, and delicately into the neverending tangle of leaves and branches of the distant Danube woods. Through a round bit of glass, there is a marvel of metal feathers and capsules, spirals and tiny gears, meticulously designed. Our terrible awe robs us of breath. How far our technicians had come already in the year ’90! “Singularly original, authentic fortune-telling machine”: we need only trust the words to step up, lay down a left hand (and this is important, since it is linked straight to the heart, and thus to our reason and longing, which we Viennese go by instead of our heads), while the right hand puts the schilling on the metal tongue, and Zack! Away it goes…

Preface France is going through a vulgar phase. Paris, the heart and power of universal stupidity. In spite of Moliere and Beranger, one would never have thought that France would go so far in the name of Progress. -Questions of art, terrae incognitae. The great man is a fool. My book may have done some good. This doesn’t cause me distress. It may have done harm. This doesn’t make me rejoice. The aim of poetry. This book was not written for my wives, my daughters or my sisters. I have been accused of all the crimes I am telling you about. Amusement of hatred and scorn. The elegiac is sentimental twaddle. Et verbum Caro factum est. – Yet the poet has no part to play in that. Otherwise, he would be a mere mortal. The devil. Original sin. Virtuous man. If desired, you could be the Tyrant’s favourite; it is harder to love God than to believe in him. For the people of this century, however, it is harder to believe in the Devil than to love him. Everyone serves him and no one believes it. The Devil’s sublime subtlety.

Carlo Izzo, in “The Poetry of W.H. Auden,” says that poets of a particular generation possess inevitable similarities. “It has always been like that: poets of a generation have a family air.” Patrick Kavanagh was born three years before Auden, in 1904. Kavanagh can hardly be regarded as a bona fide member of the Auden Group, but he is certainly a satellite member of the modernising generation of English-language poets to which Auden belongs. The ethos of The Bell editors, like Geoffrey Grigson at Faber in the UK, was to encourage work that reflected the true socio-economic picture of a resurgent Ireland: possibly “unpleasant; depressing; suggestive of a phase that other countries are sick of. There it is. We have to accept it.”

Suddenly there was knocking at the front gate and the dogs started barking. Hivrya ran out hastily. She came back looking pale: “Well, Afanasiy Ivanovich, we’ve been caught red-handed, there’s a crowd of people knocking at the gate and I think I heard my brother-in-law’s voice…” The pastry the priest’s son was eating got stuck in his throat. His eyes started to bulge as though he saw some otherworldly creature. “Get up there!” shouted the frightened Hivrya, pointing at the planks of wood that were fixed upon two beams under the ceiling. All the old rubbish was usually kept up there. Danger spurred on our hero. He thought for a minute then stood on the bench and carefully pulled himself up onto the planks; half-mad with fear, Hivrya ran to the gate, as the knocking became louder and more impatient.

Walking to work, forward, looking forward, never backward – I hear the sound of a girl approaching on a bicycle with poorly inflated tyres. It sounds like she is wearing black and has that nice light brown hair so common and yet so frequently dyed a more extraordinary shade. She passes and I realise I am right. She continues (apace). I never see her face. At work, 8:15, an office, I call Marty. “Could I start a religion?” I say. “It’s too early,” he says, and hangs up. I would say Hello? and look at the telephone receiver, but I hear the tone. I do work; work so dull it is perfect. Perfect like a coma, but more useful. Daydreaming is infinitely better than dreaming. Dreams are the floor-sweepings of the brain.