Praise and Poems

My response to this collection cannot help but be personal, for Mairtín was a much loved friend – so reading No Enemy but Time felt at first like stepping right back into an old grief. But the more I read, the more I felt the power of these poems, honest, tender and loving, to journey me through to a celebration of his life and energy – that man who ‘made up his own mind’, his vision, ‘a mountain shaft on fire’. – Moyra Donaldson

If remembrance of love is to be clear-eyed, fearless, self-critical and devoted at once, these finely-crafted and bracing poems are a tribute both to a poet of exceptional persistence in his
own life and work, and to the complexity of friendship, passion and grief. Naomi Foyle’s elegies, songs, narratives, are a withering minstrelsy – a touching, fitting capture of a very
difficult and necessary affection. The image of the linnet remains – that songbird out of time – somehow at one with ‘the boom box of Belfast drums’ . . . – Damian Smyth

Space

You were known for being obsessed
with space:

scored an arts grant to visit NASA,
sat in the cockpits of rockets;

wrote poems about Jupiter
and UFS, Moonmen and Mir;

worried about asteroids
falling on our heads.

I  read your cover story
– ‘Belfast Astronomers on Red Alert’ –

foolishly believed myself
a little safer on the Earth.