V.P. LOGGINS, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

At Aillroe Beg

for Kitty Higgins

That morning I thought it best
to get a paper towel and pick
the dead sparrow off the walk,
sad traveler looking for a way

around the River Shannon that
by chance took the wrong turn
into the plate glass window,
thinking, perhaps, that light

emanated from the setting sun
and here was the sure way home;
not knowing that transparancies
like the divine invisible can kill

as surely as what we see. Little
hacky sack of senselessness, I
took you in the paper shroud
to the bin and laid you there.

I began thinking about writing this poem when Becky my wife and I visited our dear friend at her home on Ireland’s River Shannon. One morning, as the estuary spread before us, I found a fallen bird on the walk beneath the window. As the poem indicates, it became clear to me that the bird had taken “the wrong turn.” And as I stood there, I began to consider what I thought of as the world of seen and known things and the world of unseen and imagined things. This tension became central to the poem. Aillroe Beg is in County Clare.

V. P. Loggins is the author of The Wild Severance (2021), winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition, The Green Cup (2017), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Book Prize, The Fourth Paradise (Main Street Rag 2010) and Heaven Changes (Pudding House Chapbook Series 2007). His critical work includes one book on Shakespeare, The Life of Our Design. He is co-author of another, Shakespeare’s Deliberate Art. His poems have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Bryant Literary Review, The Cape Rock, Crannog (Ireland), The Healing Muse, Memoir, Modern Age, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Poetry Ireland Review, The Southern Review and Tampa Review, among others. He has been a finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Word Works Washington Prize, and the May Swenson Award.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Illinois, he holds a doctorate in English Renaissance literature and has taught at several institutions, including Purdue University and, most recently, the United States Naval Academy. Talking Drums, an art exhibition and installation by sculptor and ceramicist Andrew Cooke with music by Paddy Craig, based on his poems in The Fourth Paradise, appeared in Portaferry, Northern Ireland. His work has been featured in A Universe of Dreams, poetry and music performed nationally by Neal Conan of National Public Radio and Ensemble Galilei.