Nathanael O'Reilly

Boulevard Nathanael O'Reilly

Boulevard is a product of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unable to travel to Australia and Ireland (my homelands), and forced to work from home for almost a year, I turned my attention to the hyperlocal. Boulevard is a book-length poem in 76 sections. Or maybe it's a collection of 76 numbered poems that can each be read as stand-alone works. That's not for me to decide. The work belongs to the reader now. Boulevard explores the life of a street and neighbourhood over the course of a year during the pandemic. I forced myself to write about events happening in front of my house, in nearby backyards, a couple of blocks to the east and west along the boulevard. Instead of travelling in search of subject matter, poetry came to me. Surprising, beautiful and sometimes shocking events took place outside my window. I focused on my immediate surroundings, rather than my distant homelands, my past, my loved ones overseas. I took inspiration from Basil Bunting's Briggflatts and Alex Lemon's Another Last Day (written and set just a few blocks to my west), both book-length poems devoted to the local. I found the poetry in the everyday, the seemingly normal and ordinary. I came to know the birds, squirrels, cats, dogs and trees. I learnt the rhythms of the days, detailed the changing of the seasons, experienced the unexpected. And yet I always did so as an immigrant, a foreigner, an exile, bestriding the boundary between insider and outsider.