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ADAM WHITE is from Youghal in County Cork, where he served his time as a carpenter before travelling to Brittany to work and learn French on the building sites. He later read English and French at NUI Galway and started to write poetry. His debut collection, Accurate Measurements, published in 2013 by Doire Press, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In recent years he returned to live in France and works there at present as a secondary school English teacher.
Shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Poetry
Full of poems that lie true to themselves and true to the worlds of which they sing.
— Mike McCormack
Roofing
Depending on the weather, deal wall plates
slap or clonk into place. They’re butted together,
and what’s sticking out’s trimmed
by the teeth of a savage oil-spitting chain.
A ridge poll is offered up to the empty heavens.
But lean rafters, like joined hands, are
raised in reverence to Pythagoras,
who was one of us.
Now crackling felt is rolled out, bobbling along a lath.
With a pencil poised on one ear, you make your way
to the apex, careful not to puncture this sealed hold
of silence inside: quiescence to be sold, owned and passed
down to the youngest son.
Take your time as you alight from the lashed ladder,
hit the ground before the evening’s first rain;
tomorrow you will do it all again.
Winter Visit
novel, labouring on the yard’s steps
and cramped path bearing bags, nursing
them overhead and down onto their breasts
to feed the bunker half a ton.
But I only see her lugging
buckets, the skin round her thumbs
react to dust, hear on a cold
morning what the doctor said about
porous hip bones and then behold
my mother stoking up a house.
Thoughts on Old Tools
Sunlight, Henry Street
All I want is to wake once more with sunlight
fooling in every corner of this room;
no shutters, no blinds, no curtains
that trick you into thinking it’s still night,
or night already when it isn’t yet, but will be soon.
Then it can go back to the grind,
fell the shadows of fountains
up city streets, lustre low tides,
diamond high mountains.
ISBN: 978-1-907682-47-6 | Pages: 72 | Published: 2016
The poems in What Else is There? are concerned with displacement and the consequences of this. Its immediate, literal manifestation in the book is the type of displacement Michael D. Higgins recently described as “the greatest human rights issue facing the world at this time”, which is to say the appalling plight of migrants and refugees. Elsewhere the notion of displacement is fleshed out, considered from different and much wider angles, appreciated as part of our history and intrinsically human, even imagined in our everyday lives —particularly in the life of a writer — to be something of a necessity. There are elegies here too, and poems on ecology in an elegiac style, but also celebratory poems that were written before and after the birth of the author’s first child. The poems are essentially lyrical, often working from recovered feelings and thoughts. Some of them play with rhyme; in that the rhythm of each poem is carefully considered, all of them are musical.
ISBN: 978-1-907682-22-3 | Pages: 72 | Published: 2013
Accurate Measurements by Adam White is unusual in that it is a poetic celebration of the world of manual labour, of craftsmanship and doing things in the right way. There is something very slow and considered about the pace of the poems; we are right there with the poet as he reaches carefully for the next word or image to describe his work in a specific way, as he might reach hand over hand for the rungs of a ladder (review by Róisín Kelly, Southword Literary Journal).
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Doire is the Irish word for oak grove, translating into English as Derry.