In this episode, poet John McAuliffe talks about the poem that has been a friend to him – 'Mathios Paskalis Among The Roses' by George Seferis.

John McAuliffe was born in 1973 and grew up in Listowel, County Kerry. He has published six collections with The Gallery Press. His first, A Better Life (2002), was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. His fifth collection, The Kabul Olympics, was published in April 2020 and was an Observer Poetry Book of the Month. John McAuliffe’s Selected Poems was published in October 2021.

John McAuliffe is Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and Associate Publisher at Carcanet Press. He co-edits PN Review and The Manchester Review, as well as writing for other publications, and he previously worked as chief poetry critic at the Irish Times and as Deputy Chair of the Irish Arts Council.

You can find “Mathios Paskalis Among the Roses” from GEORGE SEFERIS: Collected Poems 1924-1955. Bilingual edition, translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Copyright © 1967, renewed 1995 by Princeton University Press.

John is in conversation with The Poetry Exchange team members, Fiona Bennett and Al Snell.

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Mathios Paskalis Among The Roses

by George Seferis

I've been smoking steadily all morning

if I stop the roses will embrace me

they'll choke me with thorns and fallen petals

they grow crookedly, each with the same rose colour

they gaze, expecting to see someone go by; no one goes by.

Behind the smoke of my pipe I watch them

scentless on their weary stems.

In the other life a woman said to me: 'You can touch this

hand,

and this rose is yours, it's yours, you can take it

now or later, whenever you like'.

I go down the steps smoking still,

and the roses follow me down excited

and in their manner there's something of that voice

at the root of a cry, there where one starts shouting

'mother' or 'help'

or the small white cries of love.

It's a small white garden full of roses

a few square yards descending with me

as I go down the steps, without the sky;

and her aunt would say to her: 'Antigone, you forgot your

exercises today,

at your age I never wore corsets, not in my time.'

Her aunt was a pitiful creature: veins in relief,

wrinkles all around her ears, a nose ready to die; 

but her words were always full of prudence.

One day I saw her touching Antigone's breast

like a small child stealing an apple.

Is it possible that I'll meet the old woman now as I go down?

She said to me as I left: 'Who knows when we''ll meet

again?'

And then I read of her death in old newspapers

of Antigone's marriage and the marriage of Antigone's

daughter

without the steps coming to an end or my tobacco

which leaves on my lips the taste of a haunted ship

with a mermaid crucified to the wheel while she was still

beautiful.

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