The Place Inside

MATTHEW GEDEN was born in England and in 1990 moved to Kinsale where he runs a bookshop in the town. He co-founded the SoundEye International Poetry Festival which takes place in Cork. His own poems have appeared in several publications in Ireland and abroad, among them the poetry anthology for younger readers Something Beginning with P, Poets of the Millennium, The Backyards of Heaven and Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2009). Matthew Geden’s second collection of poems explores questions of belonging and displacement, travel and the challenges of maintaining meaningful connection in an ever-changing world. In ‘Time Passes’, after Pierre Reverdy, he writes “He never found any shelter other than space,” and many of the poems echo this sense of being “on the edge, halfway out / the door.” The poems are liable to zoom out to a cool objective view, informed by historical insight, but they also chart intimate relationships and love which have the power to alter not just the poet’s view but perhaps even the world itself: “the mountains blush / under the glint / in your eye.” The poem ‘Limbo’ records one of the many hauntings to which the self is vulnerable, the presence and pull of the past, concluding: “I can’t go back, return to the house / where I was born, the spinney / in which I lived. I would see / myself in the hallway, outside / the living-room door, listening for news / of the adult world, my childhood in limbo.”