Bell

You are invited to the rehearsed reading of

Ob Gob by Roderick Ford,
Directed by Donal Gallagher
Friday, June 21st 2019, 6pm • Free
Triskel Arts Centre, Cork City.

A fictive Europe. An emerging facist state, where the weak and disabled are killed by mobs.

Yulia and her three daughters - Ob Gob, Caoimhe and Neon, have survived by isolating themselves from society, and are bound by a mutual determination to keep the crippled Ob Gob and Caoimhe hidden at all costs. Their situation is about change when Neon gets a chance to leave for college.

Rich with magic realism, gothic theatricality and dry humour, the play presents the women's progress through necromancy and ventroliquism into a sexual and moral decline.

The Piano Tuner

Echo, song and smoking wax make up the church entire,
as he gives himself to silent hands that take him
trusting to the bread and wine...
He turns over in his bed intrigued
at how his dying mind in its own way
gives him what his spirit needs.

He has a songbird in a cage,
blinded to improve her song,
who like the soul imprisoned in his skin,
made herself forget the skies
and the flowered forests of her home,
though underneath the sweetness of her song,
he hears her pine for some long lost love.

He likes to try to guess the world of sight:
the soil opening wide its many mouths
to receive the swaddled dead,
or the way the wings of his guardian angel
surely fill this room, as she sits beside his bed
watching him with eyes of stars.

In the end no angel came for him,
but a faun gripped him like a lover
and drew him out as joy leaping
self-forgotten through fields that blazed
like windows in the church of summer,
till he whirled to one who cried his name
and flew like a bird through his heart of flowers.

List of poems – click / tap to toggle
  • A Plate of Holes
  • Amber
  • An Old Woman Weeds a Grave
  • Auntie
  • Bees
  • Birds of Paradise
  • Bon Voyage
  • Cairo
  • Curve and Swoop
  • Duskfall
  • Fiddler's Croft
  • First Love
  • Ghostwood
  • Giuseppe
  • Grandpa's House
  • Jessica
  • Lay my Corpse
  • Milf
  • Miss Johnson
  • On Hearing that the Bees are Dying Out
  • Room of Red
  • Rosa
  • The 16A
  • The Body
  • The Carpenter’s House
  • The Child
  • The Creature by the Sea
  • The Dinner Guest
  • The Fish
  • The Ghisi Miniatures
  • The Gorgon’s Palace
  • The Iron House
  • The Nails
  • The Old Mirror
  • The Old Train
  • The Other Side
  • The Piano Tuner
  • The Shadow Garden
  • The Spinner
  • The Thorn Tree
  • The Uncles