Banquet in the Hall of Happiness

From the splendours of the Summer Palace and Forbidden City in Beijing to the arid deserts of Australia's Outback, these poems take the reader backpacking across the globe.

Winner of the Munster Literature Centre's international chapbook competition, Banquet in the Hall of Happiness was launched with a reading at the 2016 Cork International Poetry Festival and is published by Southword Editions in Ireland.

A reading of the opening poem 'Kalashnikov', a past winner of the Academy Cardiff International Poetry Prize, featured on Irish radio in The Poetry Programme, RTE Radio 1, and on BBC Radio Essex.

'Kalashnikov' is published on this site in the section 'Prize-winning Poems'.

Banquet in the Hall of Happiness was reviewed on Sabotage by Roisin Kelly. http://sabotagereviews.com/2016/06/16/banquet-in-the-hall-of-happiness-by-victor-tapner/

Copies of the chapbook are available from:
​https://munsterlit.ie/bookshop/banquet-in-the-hall-of-happiness/

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​Four poems

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The grouping of poems below was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize and forms part of a longer sequence in the chapbook

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Pictures from the Forbidden City

Before becoming China’s emperor, Prince Yinzhen (1678-1735) commissioned a series of propaganda paintings portraying himself tilling the fields

Dawn poppies sprout
along the edge
of every irrigation ditch,

waving their flags
like crowds in the streets
on coronation day.

Across the valley, wind, like war,
has stripped the hillside
bare of trees.

An army of rice plants
raises a million spears
above the drowned land.

So often the crop
is flattened by rain.
Villages murmur hunger.

Spade and sword
have shaped these terraces
and pathways, the graded banks,

still pools, where every stem,
each ripening head,
has its place.

I dip the ladle in the wooden pail
and pour the mix
of watery dung.

This is how the people
must know their emperor:
back bent with peasants,

up to his knees
in the flooded fields,
while he alone sees the snakes

that swim among roots,
their dark bodies
twining the stalks.


​Banquet in the Hall of Happiness

When staying at the Summer Palace in Beijing, China’s Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) took her meals in the Hall of Happiness and Longevity attended by teams of eunuchs

They listen to the click
of my silver chopsticks
on the porcelain plate.
No one dares to speak.

Each supper they bring me
the kitchen’s riches.
Tonight I’ve eaten nothing
but hyacinth beans,

these mirrored screens
my only guests. Once
I was the Lady Yehenara,
concubine to a god.

Now, forbidden by rank
to smile: a dowager
with starched face
and waxen hair,

a woman made Buddha,
too precious to touch.
Later, when the maids
change my gown

for my evening walk
in the marigold garden,
I’ll feel each fingertip
of their white lace gloves,

a hundred buttons
being undone, sleeves
slipped from my arms,
silk falling.

On the table before me,
dishes for a dynasty:
sauce of bear’s paw,
hummingbird wings,

cakes of a thousand flowers.
I peel an iced lychee
for its scent, its flesh full,
its skin red as a berry.


​Temple of Heaven

Saturday afternoon, and the amateur opera singers
gather in groups along the painted cloisters.
Beijing’s breezes are out too,

a dry Mongolian wind and sleet of dust
clogging the contact lenses that trouble
the diva as she steps forward to perform.

She brushes her white weekend blouse.
The tenor, straightening the collar
of his scuffed suit, unfolds his songsheet

and glances at the soprano. She nods.
He starts. Accordions, flutes,
harmonicas, hand-drums: all find a way

to enter the stuttered harmony.
A Mozart lilt, Verdi aria, a Cantonese song
from a time before the land was drenched

in revolution, the days before they saw
their teachers sent to pick stones
from furrows, to boil bark.

Sitting on a bench, an old man
peels an apple and wipes his penknife,
ignoring the accordion’s quick, free notes.


The Ambassador and His Wife Take Afternoon Tea
​at the Orient Hotel

He straightens in his rattan chair,
she teases a cigarette
in her lean fingers.

His New York suit is summer beige,
she is Prague chic
in linen grey.

Each Sunday they are seen for tea,
the Siam lounge,
a corner seat.

The glass-topped table reflects a past
preserved on the wall
in photographs.

Hemingway, Coward, Nehru, Mountbatten:
a gallery of lives
their minds inhabit.

Above the stairway, a ceiling-fan stirs
the foyer’s
air-conditioned ferns.

A guest in the salon orders cocktails.
They dip their heads
and smile.

Their smiles are light
as the lemon cake
on the plate.