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CUTLERY CULTURE. A LIFE AMONG THE DEAD AND POEMS.
Shane Gallagher grew up on a farm in Lacken, overlooking the Blessington Lakes in County Wicklow. He says, “There was always something broke that had to be made or fixed for machinery, I learnt a lot from my father and mother around the farm. Went then and served my time working on trucks.”
He was, and still is, a mechanic but now he has found his true calling. (Didn’t Francis Bacon mention, “Mechanical arts and merchandise?”)
Shane says “There was always bits of scrap lying around
the farm yard so instead of getting rid of the scrap metals I tried my
hand at welding and forging sculptures out of it , from tin to steel to
copper, then to cutlery, such as flowers, angel's, , birds, candles
holders just to name a few.”
JFK Said, “In free society art is not a weapon.” But you should see the “revolver” that he (Shane not JFK!) has fashioned from a socket, a spoon and a few other bits and pieces from the kitchen drawer.
He didn’t lick it off the ground. It’s in the genes. His grandfather Jack had “the best pair of hands in the parish”
He comes from a long line of people who had an appreciation of the
arts. His sister Leslie Murphy is a well-known and gifted illustrator
and painter who featured at Dunlavin Festival of Arts and his mother “can turn her hand to anything”.
Shane has ideas to make more and more sculptures. He told me, “I enjoy making them; it keeps me from going mad at mechanics.” He sees it as a hobby and discusses it with the utmost modesty. Stephen Spender said that, “Art is born of humiliation”
but it would be more accurate to say that Shane’s art is born of
humility. He doesn’t ever blow his own trumpet, even if he has fashioned
said instrument from the exhaust pipe of a 1959 Austin A 40.
I’m no Nostradamus but I’m predicting that you will hear a
lot more about this man from Lacken who got no formal training and is
now up there with the best in the west Wicklow arts scene . His work
can be seen in the Blessington Tourist Office. And on Sunday 27th
October a large collection of his works was displayed in his old
primary school which is now the Lacken Community Centre. Shane’s
Instagram account is; shane_gallagher_crafts.
* * * * *
A LIFE AMONG THE DEAD
David McGowan is a man of many parts who has had, up to now,
a chequered career. From working with the dead as a teenager when his
father accidentally bought a hearse to witnessing a dead gang leader
being shot in the head in Chicago. His A Life among the Dead is to all intents and purposes an autobiography.
The author is not critical by nature but he wasn’t
impressed by the educational system in operation when he was in Primary
School, “. . . there didn’t seem to be any purpose to some of the
things we laboured over for hours on end. I recall being hit with the
edge of a ruler by my first teacher. If a child didn’t have their
homework done to her satisfaction, she would make them stand at the
blackboard and say, ‘I am a dunce’ to the whole class.”
When a fellow student embalmer in Chicago who didn’t
seem all that anxious about learning anything, told him later that he
had been assigned to the funeral home to gain intelligence about
mobsters, and was wearing a wire at all times, David felt rather naïve.
On another occasion when a vehicle collided with the side of his hearse a
paramedic who arrived promptly on the scene asked if he had anyone else
with him “I innocently replied that I had one person in my
vehicle. She panicked and asked how the other person was. I calmly
replied that she was dead. She asked to see them, I presume in the
hopes of of reviving them. She got very cross with me when she
discovered that my passenger hadn’t died as a result of the accident.”
After one exhumation he discovered that the long held belief that a person’s hair continues to grow after death is not a myth.
This book is not all about embalming and the lingering
smell of formaldehyde. He also gives vivid accounts of other aspects of
his life. “Thousands flocked to Enniscrone for what was a very joyous occasion.”
What were they waiting for? The arrival of a 48 metre long 767. And
it arrived; but not by air. David McGowan brought it from Shannon
Airport on the Atlantic ocean.
If you are sceptical about the existence of a paranormal the chapter headed Unexplained Happenings
may change your mind. There are happenings that he doesn’t make any
great claims about, he just suggests that it’s unlikely that they were
coincidences. I feel that Liz Tuttle’s description of herself would fit
David, “I’m quite a rational person, but I'm drawn to the irrational.
I love coincidences, and I like to question that in fiction: 'is this
random, or is there something working underneath?'
The author doesn’t force anyone to believe in another world
but he had some strange experiences. One day his hearse broke down on a
bridge over the river Moy as a large crowd of mourners walked behind
it. It cut out and wouldn’t re-start. But a ”little push” got it off the bridge and it started.
He took it to the garage next day and , “They had no explanation for what had happened.” But weeks later a son of the deceased told him, “That
his dad had often told him that he loved to look down at the river from
the bridge to his favourite spot, the place where he had loved to go
fishing in the river. He had often fished with his dad there in the
past. “ But he had forgotten about his dead telling him, “that when he died, he wanted the hearse to stop in the middle of the bridge on his final journey.”
An A to Z of funeral undertaking and the director’s life story.
Don't miss it.
* * * * *
Endurable Infinity
Tony Kitt is a poet from Dublin, Ireland. His family
hails from Co. Mayo in the West of Ireland, as well as from Italy and
Greece. He has worked as a researcher, a music critic, a literary
translator, a creative writing tutor, and a magazine editor. His poetry
titles include Endurable Infinity (University of Pittsburgh Press, USA, 2022), Sky Sailing (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2025; forthcoming), and A Quiet Life in Psychopatria (MadHat Press, USA, 2025; forthcoming). His chapbook called Further Through Time
was published by Origami Poems Project (USA, 2022). His poems appear in
multiple magazines, and anthologies, including Oxford Poetry, Poetry
Ireland Review, The North, Cyphers, The Cafe Review, Plume, Matter, The
Fortnightly Review, The Honest Ulsterman, The New Ulster, Under the
Radar, etc. They have also been translated into Italian, Greek,
Romanian, German, Ukrainian, Albanian, and Chinese. He edited the
Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry anthology (SurVision Books,
2023), as well as the anthology entitled Invasion: Ukrainian Poems about the War(SurVision Books, 2022), and was the winner of the Maria Edgeworth Poetry Prize.
His collection of 76 poems, Endurable Infinity published by University of Pittsburgh Press, asks us, in the words of, George Kalamaras, poet laureate emeritus of Indiana to, “ …undo ourselves in the reconstitution of the possible.”
The following is the first stanza of Tony’s poem, Music for the Virus;
Life in a glass box is as lengthy as its utensil.
Drumroll entry. Piano stairs,
The age of John cage. A vaccine
Descending into judicial transparency.
A feast of poetry for Christmas.
* * * * *
And Joe Harrington’s Rambling House is still going strong after more than a quarter century.
Happy Christmas and I’ll see you next year.
Click on the author's byline for bio and list of other works published by Pencil Stubs Online.
This issue appears in the ezine at www.pencilstubs.com and also in the
blog www.pencilstubs.net with the capability of adding comments at the
latter.
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