Winter Harbour Drawing

                                               Winter Harbour         C. 2005 
                                                  Pastel on paper,
                                                     12 x 12 ins

Christmas Mummers

Christmas Mummers
Charcoal on paper
16.5 x 23 ins

Snow drift remnants

Snow drift remnants Dec '10

Lost where they fell, the boy's blue, a girlish pink,
footsteps grey on white, the hushed quiet
after our voices had echo fallen
in the garden ringed with innocence
in the last days of a snowbound season.

Lost sole / soul survivor

Sole survivor Achill Island 2010

Years trodding the boards
out of Murmansk and the North Sea,
dipping a Toe in the ice fraught oceans
I even got to kick against the emerald chill
of iceberg slopes
now my after life, is here in Achill sound. beached, dryblown
with whale husk and filligrees of netting,

a few baldy dayglow bouys that bobbed out of Liverpool or Swansea,

out there it's seagull screech and a thrum of wave on keel,

my best years had me worn out, shuffling redlight streets in New Amsterdam,

or Hong Kong, I was made for those loafing harbours,

their fish and chips fumes, tar and oil murk,
oh the ardent cigarette buts I scuffed!

Here its wind keening in the shells and sheep skulls 
rain blown famine villages,
ghostly stepping stones for a pier. 

City under Snow, 2004 (From the Archive)

                                               City under Snow  2004
                                                Acrylic on paper
                                                 16.5 x 23 ins

                                    It snowed in the city that year for the first winter in decades, 
                                   near where we lived. The lanes and spaces became clean and white, 
                                 a stark geometry of urban fields, rooftops and roads.  

From the Archive, Winter Interior, 2003

Winter Interior, 2003
Oil on board
24 x 20 ins.
(OPW Collection)

Blackbirds in the snow, 2010

Blackbirds in the snow
Pastel on paper
8 x 11 ins