Parlando
JOSEPH O’CONNOR, WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE 2024
Def: ‘Delivered or performed in a style suggestive of speech – used as a direction in music’
QUINTET
For Antonio Lysy
I
Again.
Spirals of clay dust.
Sunflowers and thyme
By the strade bianche.
Sun-warmed wine.
Pizzicato and swallow-song,
Music and word.
Major arpeggio.
Minor third.
The birds whistle harmony
Over the cortile
As a deer in the forest
Stares up from the grass.
The music drifts out where it will.
Through the tunnels under Chiusi.
The spas of Chianciano.
The back lanes of Montepulciano.
The fields of La Foce.
Quavering solo,
Counterpoint and fugue
As Bach brings us homeward
By the zig-zag road.
II
First light on the vast amphitheatre
that is Val d’Orcia.
Silhouette of twin-belled turret
Of the castle so ancient
that no one remembers its purpose
If ever it was known.
The audience of birds start to chirrup and whistle
As the sun comes up like a russet-haired soloist.
A ladle thumps a milk bucket.
Begin.
Belvedere Grande.
Belvedere Piccolo.
The five-bar gate like a sheet of manuscript
waiting to be written.
Strings of moving lilies.
Brass of blowsy heat.
Bells, and a chime tree of tremulous breeze
Moves a cloud whose shade drifts upward, sailing
Out like an aria across the valley.
Woodwind as the heat oboes gently through the forest,
Through the arches of an aqueduct,
Built long ago.
Old ghosts on the battlements
Conducting the wheatfields
For everything longs to be music.
Little wonder
We say ‘air’ as one word for a melody.
Music, our breathing,
Our filling of the immensity.
The language in which God speaks.
III
Even the placenames sing.
Castiglione d’Orcia.
Montalcino.
Pienza.
San Quirico d’Orcia.
Bagno Vignoni.
Radicofani.
Castiglioncello del Trinoro.
Montefollonico.
The roadmap, a score for a string quintet.
The milestones, a procession of solos.
IV
Born ten thousand years ago
And born this living second,
From the clay hills I sprang,
Trickled up from the rocks
Through the silt stones and loam,
My home was the meadows.
Wheatfields my pillow,
My mother, the earth.
I chuckle. I gurgle.
I flirt with the rushes.
Through the groves rich with olives
In the velvet dark,
By the terraced gardens of dappled poplars
I kiss the foot
Of the sleeping volcano.
Under bridges,
By culverts.
Between high, handsome quaysides.
To the sea I run.
From the clay hills I came,
By the slopes
And the curves of Monticchiello,
I rise
To serenade them.
Orcia, my name.
V
No voice as achingly eloquent
As the solo cello.
Molasses and umber.
Burring.
Purring.
Velvet-toned mocha,
The weep of touched strings.
In the smoke from the wick of a blown-out candle,
The musician becomes his own music.
Animato
Con brio
Grandioso
Giojoso
Grazioso
Liberemente
Perdendosi
Doloroso.
Melody is a map
Made by silence and sound,
By the air and the body
In conjunctions of time
But even when the body that housed it is stilled,
Music subsists,
Echoes onward,
Resounds.
Dew in a garden.
The aroma of pine.
Bashful-faced lemons in terracotta pots.
Fireflies flitting.
Sun-warmed wine.
The faces of the musician’s children,
On a stage at La Foce
The world is reborn.
Mountaintops redden
In solos of dawn.
Dust on the roadways.
Miracles of rain.
Absence becomes presence
again.
Joseph O’Connor, 2024
JOSEPH O’CONNOR, writer-IN-RESIDENCE 2024
Joseph O’Connor’s fiction is published in 40 languages. In Italian, his longtime publisher is Ugo Guanda Editore. His novel Star of the Sea has sold more than a million copies, was a Sunday Times number one bestseller for eleven weeks and was the highest selling literary novel of the year in the UK. Shadowplay won the An Post Irish Novel of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Costa Award in the UK.
Other books include Cowboys and Indians (Whitbread Prize shortlist), Desperadoes, The Salesman, Inishowen, Redemption Falls, Ghost Light (Dublin One City One Book 2011), The Thrill of it All, two short story collections, several stage-plays and film scripts and six nonfiction volumes. A CD of his spoken word pieces for Irish radio, The Drivetime Diaries, reached number one in the Irish charts. He has given readings at many international venues including the Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican, London, the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the Lincoln Centre, New York. In 2011, he was elected to Aosdána, the Irish body of artists deemed to have made an exceptional contribution to the arts.
Awards for his work include the Prix Zepter for European Novel of the Year, France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi, an American Library Association Award, the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, the Time Out magazine award, the Irish Post award for fiction, a Sunday Tribune Hennessy Hall of Fame Award, the 2022 American Ireland Funds AWB Vincent Literary Award, the Bram Stoker Gold Medal for Cultural Achievement and an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland.
His novel, My Father’s House, was published in January 2023 by Penguin Random House; its Italian translation La Casa di Mio Padre was published in February 2024 by Guanda. He is Frank McCourt Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. He has performed spoken word pieces with many musicians including The Chieftains, Camille O’Sullivan, Glen Hansard, Hollywood composer Brian Byrne and the orchestra of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He has recently completed The Ghosts of Rome, a sequel to My Father’s House. A third volume of his projected Rome trilogy will follow in 2027.