“Ceasefire”: ‘Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears / Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king / Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and / Wept with him until their sadness filled the building. II: Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles / Made sure it was washed and, for the old King’s sake, / Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry / Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak. III: When they had eaten together, it pleased them both / To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might, / Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still / And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed: IV: ‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’ (From Ghost Orchid, 1995, p.38; based on Iliad XXIV.)

“Bloody heroes”: ‘When shiny Hector reached out for his son, the wean / Squirmed and buried his head between his nurse’s breasts / And howled, terrorised by his father, by flashing bronze / And the nightmarish nodding of the horse-hair crest. // his daddy laughed, his mammy laughed, and his daddy / Took off the helmet and laid it on the ground to gleam, / Then kissed the babbie and dandled him in his arms and / Prayed that his son might grow up bloodier than him.’ (Quoed in part in Maurice Harmon, ‘The Centre Holds’, ABEI Newsletter, No.10, Jan. 1996, p.14.)

“Wounds : ‘[…] Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of / Bullets and Irish Beer, their flies undone. / A packet of Woodbines I throw in, / A Lucifer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus / Paralysed as heavy guns put out / The lights in the nursery for ever. // … He collapsed beside his carpet-slippers / Without a murmur, shot through the head / By a shivering boy who wandered in / Before they could turn the television down / Or tidy away the supper dishes. / To the children, to a bewildered wife / I think “sorry missus" was what he said.’ (Selected Poems, p.36; quoted in part in Tim Kendall, review of Selected Poems, Cape 1998, in TLS, 8 January 1999.)

“Anticleia”: ‘And if, having given her blood to drink and talked about home, / You lunge forward three times to hug her and three times / Like a shadow or idea she vanishes through your arms / And you ask her why she keeps avoiding your touch and weep / Because here is your mother and even here in Hades / You could comfort each other in a shuddering embrace, / Will she explain that the sinews no longer bind her flesh / And bones, that the irresistible fire has demolished these, / That the soul takes flight like a dream and flutters in the sky, / That this is what happens to human beings when they die?’ (quoted in Tim Kendall, review of Selected Poems, Cape 1998, in Times Literary Supplement, 8 January 1999, [q.p.])

“The Horses” [poem], in Times Literary Supplement (21 Jan. 2000): ‘For all of the horses butchered on the battlefield,/Shell-shocked, tripping over their own intestines’ / Drowning in the mud, the best war memorial / Is in Homer: two horses that refuse to budge / Despite threats and sweet-talk and the whistling whip, / Immovable as a tombstone, their heads drooping / In front of the streamlined motionless chariot, / Hot tears spilling from their eyelids onto the ground / Because they are in mourning for Patroclus / Their carioteer, their shiny manes bedraggled / Under the yoke pads on either side of the yoke.’ ( p.20.)

“The Rabbit”: ‘I closed my eyes on a white horse pulling a plough / in Poland, on a haystack built around a pole, / And opened them when the young girl and her lover / Took out of a perforated cardboard shoe-box / A grey rabbit, an agreeable shitty smell, / Turds like a broken rosary, the slow train / Rocking this dainty manger scene, so that I / With a priestly forefinger tried to tickle / The narrow brain-space behind dewdrop eyes / And it bounced from her lap and from her shoulder / Kept mouthing “prunes and prisms" as if to warn / That even with so little to say for itself / A silly rabbit could pick up like s scent trail / My gynaecological concept of the warrn / With its entrances and innermost chamber, / Or the heroic survival in Warsaw’s sewers / Of just one bunny saved as a pet or meal, / Or its afterlife as Hasenpfeffer with cloves / And bay leaves, onions - enough! - and so / It would make its getaway when next I dozed / Crossing the Oder, somewhere here in Silesia (Silesian lettuce, h’m), never to meet again, / Or so I thought, until in Lodz in the small hours / A fat hilarious prostitute let that rabbit bop / Across her shoulders without tousling her hair-do / And burrow under her chin and nuzzle her ear / As though it were crooning “The Groves of Blarney" Or “She Walked Unawar” then in her cleavage / It crouched as in a ploughed furrow, ears laid flat, /pretending to be a stone, safe from stoat or fox.’ (in The Irish Times, 26 Feb. 2000)