Introducing Issue 1:  The Orphic Review

The prospect of editing the first issue of The Orphic Review, was both exciting and daunting. It had been a long time since I had acted as an editor, and I was conscious of the responsibility that comes with being entrusted with other people’s work.  

As it turned out, it was an amazing experience. The calibre of work submitted was very high. It was difficult to select just 17 pieces out of the pool of work and the poems for this issue were chosen carefully and with a lot of love.

I believe that ekphrastic poetry needs to be able to stand independently from its subject as well as paving ways towards a deeper connection with it. Ciarán O’Rourke does this skilfully with his series of poems based on the work of Pieter Breugel. O’Rourke’s rich language evokes the colour and nuance of the cycle of life and death that Breugel captured in his paintings. The poems reframe the societal frailties that are as relevant today as they were in the 1500’s, with a faint plume of hope hovering above the final reckoning.

Damien Donnelly’s We Never Talk About Vsevolod is a haunting aria of colours and fragments that come together and smash apart, capturing the abstraction of Kandinsky and imbuing it with a personal resonance. Patrick Chapman’s Rainbow Cathedral, shares this thrust towards transcendence, where precision of language deftly disembodies the senses and soars. Distortion of time beyond the limits of the physical is also central to S.C Flynn’s Thirty Years and Fever’s Child. 

A quicksilver sense of fragility is perfectly captured by Patrick Wright in Self Portrait. Wright’s words sing and lacerate in turns and create a series of powerful images that are so cleverly constructed. Local Settings by Mairead O’Sullivan has a similar effortless contrast of wit and poignancy.

Cormac Culkeen’s If Icarus Didn’t Fall is the second poem in the issue to reference the Greek myth and it takes the reader right up there, lifting our sensibilities with its lyricism and movement. While Icarus gives us the sky, Katie Beswick’s amazing How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found brings our focus right back to that small speck of gum on the pavement in a poem that heaves with defiance.

I found a similar defiance in Alina Hanusiak’s three poems, where the colour red flares and glides across acts of subversion that complement Caroline Clark’s Venus Fly Trap where the tension between beauty and danger balances on the edge of a blade.

 Let’s Cut Ivory by Daniel Wade gives us an insight into the complexity of love and those relationships that push us beyond ourselves. This rain-soaked, cigarette-ashed celebration is all the more vital beside the quiet gravity of Peak/Trough with its powerful juxtaposition of peace and violence.

The poems in this issue formed links, converging and diverging in a way that made putting them together a joy. My thanks to the writers for trusting us with their work. I also cannot thank my co-editor Róisín enough. Her talent, energy and dedication are phenomenal, and she was the life-force behind the creation of this issue. We hope you enjoy reading it! 

 Anne Daly

Pedilavium

By Anne Daly

You fill the enamel bowl with hot water

until the edges become the sky.

An egg-shell cracked horizon,

steam-lathered on a salt glaze curve.

You take my foot into your hands to unstem me,

anoint the petioles of my toes until the skin is shriven

into dulse. Your fingers settle on the arch that rises

and falls with the sweep of a sanderling’s wing.

You cup it to your lips under the ritual of cloth,

as the water grows cold, like a sea breeze before it rains.