The Poems of Valentin Iremonger

Format: Hardback
Pages: 170
Publication: June 2014
ISBN: 9780957466944

Valentin Iremonger (1918–1991) is the quiet man of 20th century Irish poetry in English. The poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi wrote of him: ‘Valentin Iremonger, both as a poet and as a human being, radiated integrity.’ Iremonger’s poems are the epitome of ‘feeling thought’ – the rhythm, whether hesitant or driving, carrying them often in unusually long but lucid sentences. This collection includes all of the poems from his published volumes as well as some published only in periodicals, and a few unpublished. It also includes translations and passages of poetry from his radio play Wrap up my Green Jacket.

The Toy Horse

Somebody, when I was young, stole my toy horse,
The charm of my morning’s romps, my man’s delight.
For two days I grieved, holding my sorrow like flowers
Between the bars of my sullen angry mind.

Next day I went out with evil in my heart,
Evil between my eyes and at the tips of my hands,
Looking for my enemy at the armed stations,
Until I found him, playing in his garden

With my toy horse, urgent in the battle
Against the enemies of his Unreason’s land:
He was so happy, I gave him also
My vivid coloured crayons and my big, glass marble.

Valentin Iremonger was born in Dublin on Valentine’s Day, 1918. A career diplomat, he served as Irish Ambassador to Sweden (where he developed a friendship with filmmaker Ingmar Bergman), Norway, Finland, India, Luxembourg and Portugal.

Iremonger was notably independent as a poet. He assisted Robert Graves with some source material for Graves’s influential study of poetic myth, The White Goddess, and his ‘colloquial, breezy idiom’ led Dennis O’Driscoll to regard him as a forerunner of the Movement school of poets that included Philip Larkin.

Introduction to The Poems of Valentin Iremonger