In keeping with posting poems at the turning of the season, below are two poems by Colin Carberry. Born in Toronto, Carberry spent his childhood in Lanesborough, County Longford, Ireland, and is currently living in Linares, Mexico, with his wife and two daughters. Colin is the author of three poetry collections, including Ghost Homeland: Selected Poems (Scotus Press, 2020), and is the translator of Love Poems by Jaime Sabines (Biblioasis, 2011), along with two earlier volumes of Sabines’s verse.
Carberry made three trips to Bosnia between 2008 and 2018. See below for the list of places around the world that he has visited for readings and festivals.
Debut
i.m Kathleen Harold
It must be about thirty years ago now, I was home,
and some of my cousins, aunts and uncles came to see me;
we sat by the old turf stove in her kitchen’s cramped green gloom,
gorging on treacle bread, rhubarb tart, washed down with Barry’s tea.
Then from my jacket I produced my book of poetry,
dedicated “to Nana, with love”. She was placing it
in the dresser with the good delph when a blue bottle fly
she’d been tracking lit for a split second and she pasted
it to the table with The Crossing. Someone coughed. The clock
ticked above us. Without glancing at the grim red-grey stain
on the shiny cover she shot me a wry, impish look,
and said, Now, Colin, your book came in handy for somethin’.
The Bullet
for Goran Simić
Afternoons were reserved for sweaty toil:
bare-chested laborers, with hoe and spade
we dug and hacked the mortar-blasted soil
of Ilidža – thoughts of unexploded
ordnance suppressed in a tacit, sustained
joint effort to snag a real war souvenir.
But all we gleaned from those drills that had lain
undisturbed since the siege were broken beer
bottles, tin cans, and a child’s shoe. We’d meet
again, in Toronto two months later,
at a blues bar on a dark, leaf-strewn street:
rooting through your pockets for a lighter,
you produced a spent, rain-rusted bullet,
the dust of your ghost homeland still in it.
photo: Veronica Garza Flores
- Colin Carberry, “Translating Jaime Sabines,” The High Window.
- Carberry, Two Poems, The Fiddlehead, No. 203 (Spring 2000).
- Carberry’s poetry appeared in The Antigonish Review in issues 120 and 125.
- Translation of Love Poems, Biblioasis, and Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, Biblioasis, 2008.
- Bosnian-Canadian poet Goran Simić,
and at Brick Books.
Colin Carberry’s poems, translations, reviews, essays and articles have appeared in anthologies, newspapers, and print and online journals in Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, India, Ireland, Mexico Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, the U.K., the U.S., United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan (The Irish Times, El Norte, Reforma, El Universal, Cyphers, among many others). His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Korean, Bosnian, Bangla, Chinese, and German. He was Writer in Residence at the Forge Cottage Residency (Easkey, County Sligo) in 2014, and the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island in July 2015. Carberry has participated in numerous poetry festivals throughout the world, including Ottawa Writer’s Festival, Sarajevo Poetry Days International Festival (2010), 44th Bled International Writer’s Gathering (Slovenia), The Embassy of Canada in Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro, The Irish Writers Centre, Feria Universitaria del Libro UANLeer 2024 (Monterrey, Mexico) and the 13th Encuentro Internacional de Escritores “José Revueltas” (Durango City, Durango). In the winter of 2018, he read at a venue called Zvono, in the centre of Sarajevo, where he last saw Goran Simić.
Photos of Bosnia by Veronica Garza Flores.
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