THE SILENCE OF THE DESERT
INTRODUCTION
Alan Patrick Traynor is an Irish poet from Dublin whose work has been described as “the mystical galvanic paint that sets the fields of Provence on fire.” His poems shock the eyes and the soul at once; they are, in the words of one critic, “deep veridicous spears in a rachis sky of black feathers that will unlatch and unhinge you.” Traynor is the author of ‘Seven Days of Ashes’, a collection written on the spirit of the Holocaust and published by Albino Crow Press. He also has two other poetry collections published ‘Edit Not my Soul’ and ‘Until the Broken Clouds Answer’. His poetry has appeared in literary journals around the world, and he is held in high regard by his peers. Two of his own phrases—“Edit not my Soul” and “Edit not Blood”—capture the fierce integrity of his voice.
The Silence of the Desert is Alan Patrick Traynor’s first novella. It is a work of fiction and truth woven from the living fabric of his poems and life. The narrative follows Liam Bird, a solitary Irishman, and Elise Moreau, an Explorer and Swiss rider of motorcycles who loves mountains, as they travel from the light of Florence through the Atlas and the Sahara, across the Serengeti, into the Alps and the quiet of Vevey, through the rain-wet streets of Wicklow and Paris, the orange groves of Seville, the jazz sanctuaries of San Francisco, and finally into the long northern darkness of Norway under the aurora. At every stage the poems travel with them—read aloud under desert stars, mountain wind, and city lamps—while the music moves from Mozart’s elegant yearning to the searching, unfinished prayer of John Coltrane.
Traynor’s art is not confined to the page. He experiments with German Expressionist painting—its raw colour, its fractured vision, its insistence that emotion is a form of truth—and with jazz guitar, an instrument of listening as much as of sound. These dual fascinations shape the novella’s deepest current: the idea that love, like a poem or a Coltrane solo, is less a destination than a continuous act of attention and listening. The silence that follows every note, every line, every shared night under open sky, is itself a kind of music.
Readers familiar with Traynor’s poetry will recognise the landscapes, the birds, the winter roses, the broken branches that speak an Igniparous language, and the starling that sings in the soul.
Those who come to him for the first time will find a journey that is both outward and inward—a road that begins in solitude and ends in a listening so complete that the boundary between one soul and another grows thin. This is a novella for those who still believe that poems can hold a winter at bay, that motorcycles can carry more than just lonely people, and that the sceptriferous wind moving through the trees above a quiet grave is worth hearing with someone, especially in Vevey.
This is a story you will never forget.
This a journey of Love & Verse…
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A Novella by Alan Patrick Traynor
