EUOIA: Robert Sheppard's Lucia Cianglini in Poetry Wales

Cianglini is a fictional poet I am writing on my own (unlike the others, such as Cristofol Subira or the Polish one whose name I've forgotten). That’s because she is one of the 5 fictional poets who actually appear in ATranslated Man. That’s also why she has a page here on the EUOIA website.

Thanks for Nia Davies for this one. Read Cianglini’s Poem Five of & in the latest edition of Poetry Wales (which was on sale at the Bangor gig mentioned in the last post). 

(The ampersand is on the wall over from the Cork Coffee Shop and is still there; I saw it a month ago.)

Here’s poem six – incomplete (and because it is 'incomplete', albeit fictionally, I doubt whether it could stand separate publication, unlike her Poem Five, which is powerfully present, structurally):

& a pale human body crosses the busy street its

            [           ] pockets bursting with potentials

& the poem rolls out like a scroll as I cut it

& the Downs Syndrome kid sets up in Oliver Plunkett Street

            scrapes the scribbles off the strings of his violin [del.] ‘fiddle’

& a man laughs in tears pointing in fathomless cruelty

& the beggar approaches us with a coffee cup of green twists

            says ‘You seem like a nice lady!’ & I hold you closer

& a Korean slurps his way through porridge and Baileys [?]

 & like the buried babies left by the vanished nuns [del.] …

 … back home [del.] the diary next to the phone collects obligations

            to make a poem that refuses to collect on unity

& it’s time to be out of time’s [                 ] for a while

 & the book of poems tosses emotions around the room

with Tesco bags scattered across its floor

& a tangle of new bras twists in its own labels

 & my sister spouts anti [del.]-capitalist slogans so I sprout wings

she smiles that smug little academic one

& she jerks [?] in front of me until absorbed into the flow ‘of history’ [del.{?}]

& everything bleeps as though it is morning again

            there’s a joke here that only a [               ] could collect

& the revolving door is always ajar laughing all the way from the bank

& the rift that opens leaks human juices & [                {?}]

            my freshly tattooed arm is wrapped in polythene like the Sistine Chapel [del.]

(Cork 2010)

(Robert Sheppard and René Van Valckenborch)

 Lucia Ciancaglini was at work on the epic poem & when she died in 2010. She lived in Cork and Pisa (‘both towns with leaning towers’, as she mysteriously put it), and previously had published three books of poems including Pisa in Motion and a documentary poem Cork Gaol, and an autobiography Better a Death in the Family than a Pisan on your Doorstep. At one time, she worked on the Channel Six soap opera Vita et Mori.



She's not to be confused with Sophie Poppmeier, another of the EUOIA poets I am writing myself (on my own, for the same reason that she appeared in A Translated Man). Read about her here  and here and here. And about the project's progress here.

I am pleased to announce that Shearsman Books will be publishing the EUOIA anthology.  It will be called Twitters for a Lark and will appear in June or July 2017, in time for the EUOIA evening at The Other Room, Manchester.