Posted on Leave a comment

Ráth Éisc / Shoaling Fish – Writing Poetry in Irish

Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin is an Irish-language poet whose Rogha Dánta / Selected Poems entitled Lig don nGiorria Suí / Let the Hare Sit, with English translations by Paddy Bushe, was recently published by Dedalus Press. Here she considers what it means to write in Irish, and to see her poems translated into English (her mother tongue), as well as many other aspects of the fascinating and complex relationship between the two languages.

How is it for you to be writing poetry in Irish, a minority tongue and a language which is not your first language? Conas a théann sé seo i bhfeidhm ar do phroiseas scríbhneoireachta?

I will answer this first question in Irish.

Sea. Gaeilge is ea an chré as a mhúnlaím mo dhánta. Tá sé deacair an chúis do seo a mhíniú ina hiomlán agus mé tógtha le Béarla amháin. Aithním go maith an bhéim atá ar Ghaeilge mar mhionteanga, go háirithe nuair a thagann sé chuig cúrsaí foilseacháin. Ach, chun an fhírinne a rá, fad a bhím i mbun mo chuid chumadóireachta, ní bhím ag cuimhneamh uirthi mar mhionteanga ach go bhfuil sí ina dara teanga agam. Trí Bhéarla amháin a bhí mo shamhlaíocht ag oibriú nó gur bhogas go Corca Dhuibhne im’ dhaichidí. Ansin a chromas chun scríobh as Gaeilge. Thuigeas go maith mar sin, gur i ndara teanga a bhíos ag saothrú ón tús.

Éilíonn an Ghaeilge am sa bhreis orm mar go maireann neamhchinnteacht ionam i gcónaí mar gheall ar mo líofacht sa teanga. Ach ní shamhlaím go mbeinn níos siúrálta ná seo in aon mhórtheanga a bheadh ina dara teanga agam. Fad a bhíonn dán á shaothrú agam, bailím chugam an réimse focal agus foclóra a bhaineann leis an ábhar, chun go mbeinn ábalta iad a láimhseáil le solúbthacht. Bíonn gá agam le foclóirí níos mó sa dara teanga ná sa chéad teanga – chomh maith le téacsanna údarásacha ón litríocht ar amanta, chun brí, úsáid agus litríú na bhfocal a thomhas dom féin agus a chinntiú. Ní bhraithim ar aon mhíbhuntáiste ó thaobh bheith ag scríobh i nGaeilge mar mhionteanga. Tá saibhreas neamhghnáthach i mbéaloideas na Gaeilge atá bailithe agus cláraithe chomh maith le saibhreas i gcanóin litríocht na Gaeilge, idir fhilíocht agus phróis, saibhreas nach mbíonn ar fáil i gach mionteanga. Ní beag an achmhainn iad seo don scríbhneoir. Foilsiúchán is ea scéal eile. Ní féidir braith ar airgead le dealramh, nó d’aon saghas, a thuilleamh as filíocht i mionteanga. Níl na léitheoirí ann.

Fuaireas mé féin báite i nGaolainn na háite tar éis bogadh go dtí Iarthar Chiarraí. Bhí tréimhsí ann tar éis mo theachta anseo ina raibh sraitheanna cheardlanna filíochta ar siúl. Bhí an chéad cheardlann trí Ghaeilge agam le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Thaibhsigh mo chéad dánta chugam ansin trí cheo na neamhchinnteachta, gan líofacht ná siúráltacht sa teanga agam. Stiúraigh Louis de Paor ceardlann eile a fhreastlaíos air agus ina dhiaidh sin bhí sraith de cheardlanna le Bríd Ní Mhóráin ar siúl. Tamaillín ina dhiaidh sin arís, bhí Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill thar n-ais agus í ina stiúrthóir ar shraith cheardlann a lean ar feadh bhliain go leith. Bhíos san áit cheart ag an am ceart chun an Ghaeilge a phósadh isteach lem’ iarrachtaí scríbhneoireachta. Is dóigh liom gurb í an Ghaeilge a bhí dom’ sheoladh thar tairseach an neamh-chomhfheasa agus go raibh buntáiste ann dom bheith ag scríobh i dteanga a bhí úr dom. Bhraitheas leochaileacht sa Ghaeilge féin, a thuigeas a bheith oiriúnach don leachaileacht a bhí ionam ag an am, dea-thréith inti a bhí oiriúnach chun mo mhothúcháin a iompar.

 An cuimhin leat i mbolg na hoíche
 gur thánamar ar phram
bán, díomhaoin, ar thaobh an ché?
Pram ramhar cuartha den seandéanamh
is spócaí fé.

– ‘An Pram’ (An Teorainn Bheo,  Coiscéim 2007)

And with the publishing of your poetry, are there particular considerations when it’s in a minority language? Cad iad na gnéithe le cur san áireamh agus tú ag foilsiú i mionteanga?

When composing a poem in Irish, I don’t think about its publication. I more imagine, if I think about it at all, that I’m communing with somebody who has an understanding of Gaelic, someone who’ll grasp what the poems are about. It’s when I’m editing and preparing for publishing that all my angst relating to who the final reader of these poems might be, flares up.

There are considerations for those of us who publish works in Irish which don’t arise for someone publishing in English or in any other major language. Firstly, when one writes in a minority tongue it means a limited readership. The publishing of poetry as opposed to prose also makes for a restricted readership, making publishing a doubly compromised proposition for the Irish language poet. Monolingual editions of original Irish language poetry find their market. Indeed they sell well among certain interested and supportive communities. Some Irish language poets and publishers are content to work within this sphere. How to augment this readership has nevertheless become an increasingly pressing question for others. Broadening the appeal of minority language poetry by making it available in a second language offers a way forward. The chief question that arises then relates to whether or not Irish language poems should have English translations published with the original poems. There is a growing demand for such translations to be provided alongside Gaelic poetry. It does facilitate a greater audience and readership. I was for a long time without translations and learned that a lack of them limits the range of the poems I could draw on for many publications and reading events. While many appreciate the access that English translations allow them to Gaelic poems, it also raises fears. Will the Gaelic itself fall further into the shadows of the major language when what we need is that light be thrown on the Gaelic and on the way of thinking which it is deeply rooted and inherent in the language itself.

Ráth Éisc / Shoaling Fish. Writing poetry in Irish and being translated into English. Photograph courtesy Pexels / Arthur How Wong.
Ráth Éisc / Shoaling Fish. Writing poetry in Irish and being translated into English. Photograph courtesy Pexels / Arthur How Wong.

I’m not a monoglot. Why can’t I provide translations with each of my poems and be a poet in two languages? I‘ve been asked this particular question more than once. I feel expected to conjure up English translations of my poems without a problem. Gaelic poets each react differently to this pressure. We can have certain insecurities about our work when it’s suggested that it needs the support of another language. It can feel threatening. And providing a translation in another language is a daunting proposition for many poets. Keeping the Irish language fairly and squarely in the picture, by presenting the Gaelic poem alongside its translation on the page, goes someway towards holding the ground for the Irish poem. Line-for-line style translations can be very much appreciated by readers with an interest or a fluency in the minority tongue and can enhance for them the experience of the poem. Some poets work bilingually, they themselves translating between the languages as they go, creating conjoined-twin poems, Irish and English. For others it is how to summon up translations. For my part, I have translated a few of my poems to English. It really does take time. Often longer than the writing of the original poem. And my translations only lead me to feel insecure in two languages instead of one. I worry as to how they sit as poems rather than being able to abandon them as translations made to facilitate the access to poems. Unfortunately, readers often judge a translation for its poetic merit and reflect that onto the original poem. Yet, if we do go for it, I know that translation to English opens up a whole new universe for a poem to live in.

Is it disconcerting for you to find your thoughts brought over to another language? An gcuireann sé isteach ort do smaointe bheith aistrithe go teanga eile?

Tugann an t-aistriúchán spléachadh eile dom ar mo dhánta féin. Cuireann seo sceitimíní orm.

I have found being translated exciting – even though I was wild with doubt and uncertainty about that possibility until recently. I’m now very pleasantly surprised by the translations of my poems by others. They mean that I read my own work afresh. Sometimes I catch a stirring of the Irish poem under an English translation and recognise that the Irish poem is alive in the skin of the English one. This can all be so reaffirming.

The option to work with a person who is both a translator and a poet, with a fluency in both Irish and English, always sounded to me like the ideal thing. I finally did get this option and it has worked out well in my case. I’ve two volumes of poems out there now which are presented bilingually. A good relationship with my translators has allowed for wholesome discussion around the intentions of my original writing and the scope for various interpretations. These discussions have meant that my involvement and consent have been drawn into the translations in a way that doesn’t leave me feeling dispossessed of the poems but rather enriched by the effect of the mirroring of them. The presentation of English translations alongside my Irish poems has meant that each original poem is platformed in a new light. Line for line transpositions are in the main what have been provided. While not always possible, when these work they give a transparency to the relationship of the two versions of the poem. I’ve found new resonances in my own work through these translations.

It’s true that not everything can be carried over to another language. There are losses. But I find that the gains can be more than compensatory. Translation can add a new perspective, even a new layer of meaning, or give an aspect of the poem a shine. If this turns out to be ‘overcolouring’ the original it can be reined in – especially where there’s a cooperative process between translator and poet in progress. And if translation doesn’t provide the very same experience as in Gaelic, it should provide a parallel one. The process of translation can also be a means of investigating a poem’s integrity and credibility. It has the potential to question the original, to identify flaws. It may, on the other hand, fully endorse it. While I can worry that a translation will show up a weakness in the original poem, once a poem is endorsed, it’s really helpful. I feel verified as a poet by the recent translations of my work. I also feel more certain that there’s no betrayal of the Gaelic tongue with these interpretations for a new readership. I see that the English translation can be an invitation to visit the original poem. A call to those apprehensive but curious about Irish. As Meg Bateman has said, “Translation can be a door ajar.”

It was Paddy Bushe, both an Irish language and an English language poet as well as an experienced translator, who made the English translations for ‘Let the Hare Sit / Lig don nGiorria Suí’, Dedalus Press 2022. This comprises a selection of poems drawn from my four original Irish language collections (published by Coiscéim) and is presented as a bilingual edition. Through this translator’s consultations with me I found trust in the process.

Fo-amhrán thíos fúm
sa ghorm dhorcha, faoi ghloine
a leánn. Leá a scuabann uainn
na huile nasc idir chuimnhe is an saol

– ‘Gúna mo Mháthar’

There is an undertone of song
in the deep blue, under glass
that dissolves. Dissolves all
the ties of life and memory.

– ‘My Mother’s Dress’

Another very positive translation experience for me has been with the translator David Knowles, and this has also culminated in a publication, ‘Translating Brandon Mountain / Agallamh leis an gCnoc’. Again, it was the cooperation between translator and poet which yielded a more than satisfying result, this time in a short selection for a limited edition by Ponc Press 2022, printed on a Heidelberg printing press.

Díríonn siad a gclochamharc
i dtreo na gaoithe i gcaitheamh an lae
ag ligean don ngiorria
’s don gcaora stánadh isteach tríothu
go dtí an taobh eile.

– ‘Súile faoin Spéir’

[They]… pan their stony gaze
to the daytime winds
letting the tranced hare
and the statued sheep gaze through
to the fabulous elsewhere.

– ‘Eyes to the Sky’

This has all confirmed for me that a good translator will find and reflect the sound and sense of a poem and create a parallel realm within a translation. I think we must trust translators and allow them to be brilliant, knowing that the translation of any poem to another language anticipates a new, and sometimes eager, audience.

Teanga / Tongue. From Lig don nGiorria Suí / Let the Hare Sit. English translation by Paddy Bushe.
Posted on Leave a comment

Poetry Affair by Polina Cosgrave

Polina Cosgrave

Russian-born Irish-based poet Polina Cosgrave on the poetry affair, or the heady attractions and transformative power of an engagement with poetry

POETRY HAPPENS in isolation. It is taken like a drug, when nobody sees. You meet poetry like a lover. In a hide-out, invisible to the entire world, unreachable for the general public. It could be your first rendezvous, all sorts of magic anticipated. You are craving to find the real meaning behind their words. Is this a game? What are the rules for interacting with this work of art? How do you prepare as a reader to get the most out of it? Decipher the message addressed to you and you only? This ‘date’ will most certainly reveal some truth about you, that one indisputable fact concealed from everyone, yourself included. A poem may take you to a different destination, a place you didn’t know existed in you, or even somewhere you’d rather not go. But can you stop yourself now, after the candles are lit and the curtains are closed? 

There is a secret urgency about this passionate exchange, and, if you do it right, the collision of your mind with the words typed in another time and locality will culminate in the birth of something blazing and unfathomable. A new state of consciousness, perhaps. If both, the poem and the reader are ready for this transformative union. 

Yet, not every lover will stay with us for long. It is your favourite poetry that continues to haunt you through the years. In my second life in Ireland I have encountered masterpieces that enrich me and reconnect me to my acquired individuality, arising from switching my thinking and writing in the English language. You’ll recognise your darlings the second you touch them. Yes, I’m talking about that feeling in your stomach, those omnipresent butterflies of infatuation, the familiar yet never-seen-before allure. You will repeatedly come back to those poems to discover more precious layers. The works capable of evoking this much feeling are often about you and me both, regardless of our identities.

Some of my very first Irish romances are ‘A Man is Only as Good’ by Pat Boran (see graphic) and ‘Endangered Species’ by Eamon Grennan – probably, because children and animals as the central image represent the essence of existence. And when you’re lost in translation and a foreign culture, you need to check your reflection in the mirror continuously: is this still me? Do I exist? Or is this someone else living and breathing instead of me? As a result, you attempt to examine your reactions to the most crucial, the key experience – your relationship with the vulnerable and the vital. Kids and dogs.

These two poems bring back what I struggle to find at times — my humanity, the belonging to my kind, and they do so without ruining the loneliness we often forget to honour. They point to where my heart used to be in the broken system of modernity, and lead me away from its shards to the point zero, the common origin, where our super powers – the warmth and the observance – dwell, where neither social status nor nationality matters.

These poems’ significance, and the reason they take me where I long to be, is that despite their universality they do not make you look away from the abyss between us and the nature; these two texts actualise and own the otherness as opposed to running from it. We are locked in some form of perceptive contact with the core of the poem (a dog, a child), yet we leave them in their special place, and we respect the position we are put in as well. To be there fully, unapologetically, and still admire the distance. It’s a beautiful dance of imagination, this kind of poetry is built with the dark matter of dreams and true love for artistic creativity.

What’s more, I am attracted to them, because I cannot write like that, and I desperately need someone to formulate these realities for me, to invite me in, to open the door into the sanctuary of literature. That one door I will manage to enter through. And via this act of reading synonymous with communion, I can even be an accomplice to the author by sharing their vision, potentially becoming a part of their art for a split second. There are lovers that complete you, the ones that show you what you couldn’t see without their help. Watch out, because they might demand the same back. And if your gratitude is powerful enough, you will respond in kind to keep the balance.

Poetry happens in ringing silence. It is given like a goodbye kiss that will leave the lovers forever hungry for more. You make a decision to encounter another self. You chip away the too familiar bits of your psyche to dig deeper, to reach the flaming centre of your poem and get burned. It doesn’t mean you are ready to embrace that new person you are about to become. But you are already there to set them free. 

Sometimes it is the excess of life that serves as a poetic impulse, sometimes the lack of it forces you to write away. Whether it is to avoid the emotional collapse or to rejoice in its cleansing fires, you do it again. On your own. Well, almost. You, that poem you are about to call to being, and potentially a few other poems you have been carrying within for months. With a reader in mind, you continue. Maybe they haven’t been born yet, but their likely future perspective has already had an influence on you. Or maybe they are long dead; however, you keep talking to them. To that mental structure you regard as your addressee. Fantasies are a necessity for this tricky business.

Yes, this kiss might be a forbidden one, and this affair will ruin the old you and the habitual predictability you hold dear in order for you to meet somebody else already ripening inside your soul. The other you. The one kinder, stronger, more understanding. Yearning to connect. Line by line you keep shocking yourself. You definitely took this too far. But can you stop yourself now, after the wine is drunk and the buttons are loosened?

The walls will be demolished, the worlds will be exchanged and the pain of creation will be faced. How far can you go with it? Is there a limit to this feeling, is it reciprocated at all? Your poem will bring you the answer, if you just shut up and let it undress you and cut you open. Not every lover is your friend. But each of them knows something you don’t. All you have to do is listen.

Poetry, always in solitude. The most intimate, most personal exploration tool. In seclusion. The antidote to mob mentality. In silence. Natural like breathing. What if I told you that one day you will find the lover you will be willing to share your last breath with? To engage with poetry is to keep looking.  

Posted on Leave a comment

Leeanne Quinn’s Some Lives

Circling the Subject: Leeanne Quinn’s second collection of poems, Some Lives, introduced by Aoife Lynch

Leeanne Quinn’s second collection, is a rich and generous exploration of how poetry is made and how it makes meaning. Simultaneously intimate and outward-looking, Some Lives celebrates the collaborative and open-ended nature of art. In this collection, Quinn takes on some of the giants of 20th century Russian poetry: Anna Akhmatova, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva. These writers, whose work has become shorthand for the power and agency of art, prompt Quinn to ask: what about here? And now? In a time of personal crisis or stasis, can poetry still be effective? And what are the implications and limits of connecting these very different lives and circumstances?

Some Lives is characterised by a paradoxical sense of simultaneous stasis and movement. It’s Quinn’s impressive use of repetition that enables her to balance these oppositional states so expertly. The subtle but significant adjustments which occur throughout the collection are brought about by Quinn’s use of repetition as a source of both sameness and difference. The collection is structured around metamorphosing repetitions, with rhyme, alliteration, and recurring phrases enacting subtle transformations.

Several poems circle back on themselves, repeating words and phrases.

The opening poem, “September”, begins in sibilance: “Wasps, then rain. Below, streets clear / to a silent siren. Some citizens scatter, / others stand looking upwards.” This poem’s sibilance, and its heavily accented style, slow the reader’s pace so that the movement of leaves “beginning to fall” at the end of the poem seems particularly significant, despite the slightness of their movement.

Several poems circle back on themselves, repeating words and phrases. “Precedence” does this particularly well. Quinn creates a stasis in constant movement through her insistent repetitions:

in the city where the trams still
run and we greet each other
with smiles and greet each other
with smiles while the trams still

run …

However, “Precedence” ends with the observation that even “where nothing // appears to move it is moving”. Even in a poem where stasis and motion are one and the same, Quinn indicates that change is constant.

Moving towards the later poems in the collection, Quinn creates a sense of physical and emotional stagnation that cannot be alleviated. In “Any Weather”, the movement “from one room / to another” that opens the poem begins a process of compression – what Quinn calls a “reducing / down of myself to negatives”. Poems become letters, which become postcards, and Quinn writes: “I used to have quite a cheerful nature, // would go out in any weather, now / I don’t think to go out at all beyond / necessity, which is now my only state”. Quinn suggests that the transformative repetitions which energised earlier poems are no longer enough to propel some of these later poems into hope.

However, only a couple of pages later, the title poem reinvigorates the processes of repetition and transformation which drive Some Lives. This 19-page poem has three modes which recur in sections, all of which are interested in intertext and influence. It’s set into motion when Quinn writes: “I read a poem. // I read a poem about the end of the world”. This poem is “Weltende”, an early expressionist poem by Jakob van Hoddis. One mode of “Some Lives” consists of translations and re-translations of sections of van Hoddis’s poem. Another mode places fragments of previous poems in the collection alongside one another in new orders, to create new meanings, and another mode consists of documentary-style explorations of moments and observations pertaining to the life of the speaker and the lives of the writers who influence Some Lives.

Each section emphasises the time-disrupting power of poetry to enable dialogues simultaneously across years and decades, and across a single moment. Quinn links the drafty provisionality and elusivity inherent to translation to the creation of her own poetry. Here, a poem written a hundred years earlier transcends time, language, and circumstance to accumulate new relevance and resonance, in its uncannily familiar evocation of an apocalyptic world in which “(t)he tides are rising”. In a poem so interested in writing which could be classified as modernist, Quinn rethinks the modernist call for the new. Instead, “Some Lives”, and the collection as a whole, argue for the importance of precedence, and the open-ended, intertextual, collaborative nature of creation. Here, stasis and movement, tradition and change, exist alongside one another rather than in opposition. This collection is a nuanced, thoughtful meditation on poetry’s possibilities.

Posted on Leave a comment

The Arts as Anchor

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan, one of the contributors to Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets, on home, belonging and the writing life - Writing Home

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan, one of the contributors to Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets, considers home, belonging and the writing life

I had found an aerial shot of Dublin on Google, laid out like an intricate carpet, glowing under the rise of a morning sun; the Liffey a sapphire artery, trees and parks peeking out amongst the low buildings, lush and rain-fresh, and the stretch of sea a long sigh past the Poolbeg Towers, with Howth rising sleepily from the bay in the distance. I remember my chest loosening and the rush of relief that swept across my body. I remember thinking that I could fall in love with this city; it looked like somewhere that could be a home.

I had moved to Dublin in September 2012 after Theresa May’s immigration policies forced me out of the UK, the place I had called home for 7 years. I had to leave my friends, my partner, and the life that I had built; I moved to Dublin to start an MA at UCD where I was lucky enough to be accepted at such short notice. Before arriving, I looked up local events and began booking tickets and making plans so I could dive into a new life as soon as I arrived. I didn’t allow myself to grieve for the life I had lost – Dublin somehow felt right, and to cope, I let myself get swept up in it.

Within a week, I had gotten myself a gig as a contributing writer for LeCool Dublin, after religiously following their London edition for years. Every article of mine that they published helped validate me as someone who belonged here, who knew the scene, the streets, the performers, someone with a finger on the pulse. This was the person I had been before, and this was how I would fast-track a sense of belonging – nobody would guess that I was new here if I already had this under my belt. My knowledge of arts events in the city would be my weapon, my shield, and my armour against being the outsider that I knew I was. Writing about Dublin would make me a Dubliner, I had decided. I would write about the home I didn’t have yet, and pretend it was mine.

‘Home is wherever my underwear drawer is,’ I joked to my friends, knowing that there was no teenage bedroom to return to, or attic full of memories

As the daughter of a diplomat, home has always been a temporary concept for me. ‘Home is wherever my underwear drawer is,’ I joked to my friends, knowing that there was no teenage bedroom to return to, or attic full of memories. With all my childhood belongings in a storage unit in Blanchardstown, I knew home was a state of mind. It had to be, otherwise, people like me would be adrift forever.

So over the years, I used the arts as an anchor. I absorbed Irish history and culture through theatre, poetry, exhibitions, and cabaret. Buoyed by cultural events and supportive artistic communities, I put myself in front of a microphone for the first time in my life. I discovered I had the ability to tell stories off the cuff, and years later, I realised that I could also perform my poetry, as well as write it. I had written for as long as I can remember, but Dublin had lifted my abilities up to a new level. I lovingly mapped out the Northside in poem after poem, raising her up and praising her in all her sticky glory, in all her cigarette butts, and in the sweetest of mountain-glimpses.

I made Ireland permanent on paper, because I couldn’t make her permanent in my passport.

Living in my studio flat, in a building where white mould grew out of the walls and furred into the air, I claimed the city as my own through writing, gripping tightly to her, terrified of everything that could be taken away from me with the flick of an immigration official’s pen. After almost having to leave twice, rejected permits, unhappy jobs, damaging relationships, and all of my non-EU friends leaving one by one, I became severely depressed and suffered from horrific anxiety. And so, I clung onto Dublin as my friend, my family, and the love of my life instead. I wrote poems like ‘You City, You Boyfriend’. I made Ireland permanent on paper, because I couldn’t make her permanent in my passport.

That poem, and others, are now included in Writing Home: ‘The New Irish’ Poets, published by Dedalus Press, where 50 poets who have claimed Ireland as their home, have told their stories through poetry. It’s telling that out of my 5 poems chosen for the collection, one is about Brexit, two are about traveling across the Irish border, one is about the Irish coast, and one is a love letter to Dublin. These poems have grown from Irish soil and salt, from the blood meal of isolation from close friends and family, and a life in constant limbo. They have been honed by workshops, writing programmes, spoken word nights, and evenings shared with other poets and writers in their homes, or on their stages. They’ve been shaped by voices on both sides of the border, by those who have lived here all their lives, and those who like me, are far from the place where they were born.

These poems have grown from Irish soil and salt, from the blood meal of isolation from close friends and family, and a life in constant limbo.

But more than anything, my poems come from a constant urge to define and claim a home. My words strive to describe this life in Ireland in the manner of someone who belongs here, whilst knowing that otherness echoes around me, sits on the surface of my skin, and rings awkwardly through my mongrel accent. However, my intrinsic unbelonging is no longer something to defend myself against: I have instead turned it into a beating pulse; it is now the redness that flows through the veins of this life, and Ireland is the pen that has turned it into ink.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan is a Dublin-based arts manager and writer from India, who has also lived in North America, Sweden, Turkey, and the UK. She has been featured on The Moth and Mortified podcasts, with work aired on NPR and Irish radio, and regularly performs her poetry at literary and cabaret events in Dublin. In 2018 she was a participant in the Irish Writers Centre’s XBorders: Accord programme. She is among the 50 contributors to the Dedalus Press anthology, Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets (2019).

Posted on Leave a comment

Roots, Rhythms & Revelations – Grace Wells on her Writing Practice

Grace Wells - Dedalus Press

Passionate, courageous, incisive, inspiring – poet and fiction writer Grace Wells answers our occasional 7 Questions on Poetry, and gets to the heart of what really matters in the writing life.

1. How/when did you start to write? Did poems precede prose or vice versa?

In my study I have a very endearing black and white photograph of myself aged four, earnestly grasping a pencil as I learn the alphabet. It lets me feel that I’m meant to write and that I have always been doing this, which I haven’t. From the earliest age, I wanted to write. As a child I made up stories for my siblings from playing cards, sending the kings, queens and jacks off on rather mundane adventures. I kept secretive diaries, and in school I wrote and directed plays. At thirteen I conceived a very poor dramatisation of Cluedo, and gave myself the part of Miss Scarlet—an archetypal blonde siren in a red dress, which I wasn’t but wished to be.

Writing was always in me but it wasn’t encouraged; I was supposed to get a proper job. My writer was forced underground until she percolated up again in my early twenties, swelling a murky pool of juvenilia, both poetry and prose. The two forms coexist in me like demanding twins. Both vie for my attention, but for the most part poems come as fleeting apparitions, rather as a badger or fox will suddenly run through your headlights at night, or an owl will miraculously wing overhead. Then the actual crafting of poetry is a bit like bonsai gardening, going in with minute scissors, pruning, shaping, clipping. Prose, in contrast, is gargantuan. It’s like carving the Bamyan buddahs, or a temple in a rock face in Persia. Several times I’ve had the experience of spending years chipping away at a longer work only to stand back and see that rather than temple pillars, I’ve carved a mill-stone around my neck.

So poems with their light touch and their sense of apparition, are always blessings for me—fleeting and enlivening love affairs, while prose is the hard work of a marriage full of irritations that must be continuously transmuted into love.

Several times I’ve had the experience of spending years chipping away at a longer work only to stand back and see that rather than temple pillars, I’ve carved a mill-stone around my neck.

2. What’s your process of writing? Do you have a favourite time/place/practice?

I write by hand which fewer people do now. When we tell one another we write, our hands usually make a gesture. Most people air-type at an invisible keyboard which has me frowning. The rhythms of the keyboard are the zippy connections of the mind’s fastest neurons. They tend to show-off, to shriek, Look at me! But the rhythm of hand-writing flows through wrist, arm, chest, heart, breath. I find it more authentic, organic, ancient.

I have iron habits and quirks. Spiral-bound notebook, thick-enough paper, biro devoid of branding or slogan. I turn off the phone, become unreachable. Growl at unexpected visitors. If I’m on a residency I tend to drape scarves over the paintings I don’t like, and heft leaden furniture around until I’m satisfied that everything is just so. I like to position the desk by a window. If the desk-top is glass it becomes a camera obscura, birds drift across its screen. I like to look up, take in the outdoor world like a gulp of air, and then go back down into words.

At home its more haphazard, phrases and ideas come when they will: when I’m stepping out of the shower, or doing something domestic, or when I wake in the night, so I have pens everywhere, and my notebooks rove around like gypsies. But mostly I sit in my study at a rather blocky pitch-pine desk that my writer-friend A.S. King gave me before she left Ireland seventeen years ago. Its wood holds the memory of our young lives, and all of the stories that have happened to us since, so it’s very precious to me. It’s slightly hideous and Germanic, and might have been made by a gentle troll deep in the Black Forrest. I’ve written at it in many houses and under all kinds of duress, and its wide, solid top has been both a high-sea of adventure and a very safe space, a real shelter. At the moment it looks out into silvery-green willow trees. I watch their first buds open, their last leaves fall. I like that slow clock. And in contrast, there’s a fast-flowing stream behind my house, so I work within the sound and auspice of running water. 

I hole up in my study for hours, and then escape outside. I’ll walk off with my notebook and write from the real world. It’s much easier to work with genius loci when you can actually see the features of a place, and watch how the light moves over each small detail. The actual is more intricate than the imagined and remembered. I like that accuracy. And I simply love being in the wild. Writing from within nature resources me, I’m befriended by root and tendril, nourished by the jerky little flutters of songbirds, soothed by the uncurling spirals of ferns in spring, and chilled by winter’s dark lattice of bare branches. It’s easier to chronicle the colour and behaviours of ocean waves when they are in front of you, affecting you, and it’s easier to write about your emotions by letting them speak through seen images and metaphor.

When you bring a nature-slowed eye back into the urban world, the built environment teems, you see the antediluvian lintels and paving-stones, the Bangor blue slates quarried in Wales, the green post-box bearing the initials of a long-dead queen, the dark crow that lands on it and caws alerting you to starlings chattering within a small forest of metal spikes designed to prevent birds from roosting. Brick and plaster and the way nature co-exist with us, offer up a ripe harvest. So I note things down and bring my bag of swag back to my troll-built desk, and tip everything out, and shape something.

I believe in the innate rhythms of voice. We don’t really have a word for that besides voice, but its our jazz, our soul-sound, our gift, our pace.

3. How important is the sound/music of what you’re writing? How much, if at all, are you guided by ‘received forms’?

The musicality within a poem is vital to me, but not in the conventional sense. I know my limitations. I can change a tyre, unblock a U-bend, sew curtains, but I can’t tile a bathroom any more than I can successfully work with metre. I just don’t have the ears for it. But I believe in the innate rhythms of voice. We don’t really have a word for that besides voice, but its our jazz, our soul-sound, our gift, our pace.

So I read my lyrics aloud, listen to how they sound on my tongue, sense how they feel in my body. After recording the Jeeves books, Simon Callow said that Wodehouse’s prose ‘is like singing Mozart: the perfection of his phrasing is a physical pleasure’. Wodehouse wasn’t working within a ‘received form’, he was simply putting words to his own syncopation. Reading those phrases conducted Callow into an embodied experience of Wodehouse’s innate pulse. That’s the rhythm that interests me. One of the great joys of being a poet, is that you get to spend time with a broad range of differing syncopations, from spoken-word ebullients, to restrained academics, and voice-breaking novices just finding their tempo. Helping people to find their voice has been a large part of my life.

But for my own practice, the root of poetic rhythm rises out of stillness: the white spaces between stanzas. The in-breath where we absorb and process what we’ve just read. So much of a poem’s power stems from its pauses, the timing and reveals that tug us on towards a certain visceral response. Poetry is like masterful puppetry. And much of what animates its effect, is breath and pause.

Our current lives are so fast and stressful, if we’re not alert to that, we breathe in a shallow way and operate from a sympathetic-nervous-system in over-drive—completely disconnected from our powerful natural rhythms. But when poetry is read aloud, it can soothe our nerves, lengthen our breath, lower our blood-presssure, calm our heart-rate, and bring us back into the rejuvenating territory of our own stillness. Metre achieves that, but paced breath does too, so that’s what I’m exploring on one level.

But as someone who predominantly writes and thinks about nature and our environmental crisis, there is a further layer to this for me. When we speak or recite, we speak on the out-breath having first drawn in the fine threads of this earth—our planet’s embroidered atmosphere. As writers it’s time to be very conscious of that, to be aware of how our every spoken word is dependent on our living planet. I’ve had the luck to live close to nature and to see the myriad intricate behaviours of fur and feather, bud and blossom. In her health, nature creates the most exquisite patterns and form, music and cycles, and my work is often a dim tribute to that, an attempt to stand within her rhythms and see how they resonate within my writing.

I’d like to think that the more we reconnect to earth-culture, the more likely we are to re-sacralise nature, and truly address the calamity of losing her myriad manifestations and intelligences. So my quest is to write from within that extraordinary matrix. To offer up something that is both full of grief and celebratory wonder, because that is the rhythm of now, the waltz of sorrow and praise that we are all caught up in.

Ted Hughes once said that as an imaginative writer his only capitol was his own life. Forty years on, in a fragmenting world, where all nature’s small threads are unraveling, my only capitol is my creative response to the disintegrating rhythms of the natural world. And I have to trust that staying true to that, will in turn offer something to my reader, their breath, their stillness, their somatic pleasure.

4. At what point do you start thinking in terms of writing a book rather than just writing individual poems?

There are so many ways to write a book of poems. I tend to collect up a body of about sixty poems and see what narratives and themes have constellated, and weigh up what’s good enough to go in. It’s kind of like that old children’s riddle: which is heavier, a tonne of lead or a tonne of feathers? A mathematical mind sees they weigh the same. A poet will experience the feathers as lighter. But when it comes to putting our collections together, we have to be mathematical and know the scruples of each lyric. If a poem is too light, it’s forgettable. It can’t stand up to multiple readings.

Poems can only go into a collection if they weigh enough. Unfortunately for me only three or four really good poems come along each year. So I’m very slow to think about forming a collection. But I’m okay with that. I’d rather wait. I don’t want to publish goose down. I’m looking for swan feather and peacock plume.

5. Who are a couple of your favourite poets (in terms of inspiration) and why?

I love Paula Meehan for her candour and poise, her combination of raw honesty and beguiling expression. And Pattianne Rogers for her capacity to write about nature in a way that even nature would stand in awe of. She weaves thick, intricate poems, dense with flora and fauna. And in contrast I love Mark Roper for his capacity to do the opposite, to simply open one natural detail and marry it to an unforgettable idea. I treasure Michael Coady of Carrick-on-Suir, and Thomas Lynch of Moveen for how they’ve taught me to look at place. I love the cool Northern poets, Olav Hauge and Tomas Tranströmer, for their snow light and fjord thinking. I’m indebted to Rumi and Hafiz for their poetry of devotion, and to James Harpur for keeping a spiritual flame alive within the modern word. I value Thomas McCarthy for his incredible mind, his passion for encouraging young writers, and his capacity to utilize social media as a space for fascinating contributions. I could go on. Rachel Hegarty, Sinead Morrissey, Eileen Sheehan. So many poets to praise and be grateful for.

6. How important are journals and magazines in getting a sense of how new poems are working or failing to work?

It’s live audiences who are my most useful gauge as to whether a poem is working or not. When people are moved by work they queue to tell you. If someone comes up to me with tears in their eyes, I know I’ve achieved something. If I’m really on form at a reading there’s a perceptible silence in the room, there isn’t a chair creak, or shuffle. To create that for even a moment is a privilege.

And radio is really important for me too. The postman sometimes brings me these notes from people I’ve never met, who’ve reached out to me through RTÉ or my publisher, thanking me for a poem or piece of prose they’ve heard on the radio. I’m touched that I’ve compelled someone to sit down, and write their thoughts on a card, and spend good money on a stamp, and walk to a postbox. That spidery, handwritten praise is treasure to me.

The truth is, the way I measure the ‘success’ of a poem has changed. For years I promoted the journals and maintained subscriptions to a good number of them, even through the leanest of times. I used to love ‘The Shop’, which was full of fine poems. It was a real loss when it ended. And I’ve always scolded students and mentees if they weren’t subscribing to poetry magazines. How dare they not! Journals are the life-blood of this art-form. But for too many years I had to work all the hours God sent, I was raising my kids, putting them through college, teaching and mentoring at the coal-face of the poetry world, getting swamped by other people’s output, and having less and less oxygen for my own work. I didn’t have time to even glimpse at the journals. They stacked up by my bed unread.

And then when I did have the luxury of time for a bath, and remembered to take a journal with me, I often didn’t like the poems I was reading. Either I wasn’t grabbed emotionally, or the poems weren’t reflecting the state of our world and the depth of our environmental crisis. My taste just isn’t congruous with most of the editors of the day. There have been some really good environmental journals like The Curlew, Earthlines and Dark Mountain, which I’ve been proud to be in, but I resent how for the last thirty years, the mainstream journals have ignored the earth’s crisis, and not found it necessary to place themselves in the centre of a creative response to our precarious situation.

I’ve always scolded students and mentees if they weren’t subscribing to poetry magazines. How dare they not! Journals are the life-blood of this art-form.

Poets and poetry could have been the fulcrum of all the social and environmental changes that needed to happen. But we haven’t been. We took the wrong fork in the woods and followed the commercial-travellers down a well-trodden path, only for our art-form to get lost in the glitz of festivals, and lost in the house of mirrors that is social media and self-promotion. At the first whiff of hubris, I keel over like a canary in a cage down a mine and lose all interest. I fear that in the cacophony of our own trumpet-blowing, we are making ourselves ludicrously irrelevant, and are doing a massive disservice to poetry.

So I’m very wary about what I read. It’s important that I read for pleasure and nurture. My poetic muse is delicate; I’m careful to only feed it work that enlivens me, so I take word-of-mouth recommendations from Lani O’Hanlon, Fergus Hogan and Keith Payne, poet-friends that I trust, and I dive into their suggestions happily, hungrily. I’ll review work if I’m invited, and if I find it stimulating. But I rarely risk the journals now. In these challenging days we all need to know our places of sanctuary. If I’m happier with a seed catalogue than a poetry magazine, well that’s my sorry truth. Adrienne Rich said ‘there are times when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die’. It’s important I protect my poetic impulse, don’t numb it with deadening work, and continue to seek out poetry that enlivens and restores.

7. If you had one piece of advice to give to young or beginning poets, what would it be?

Coincidentally both the youngest writer I know, Molly Twomey, and the oldest writer I know, Dervla Murphy, come from Lismore, Co Waterford. Murphy is now eighty-seven. She began writing at thirty when she cycled to India. She has the most amazing courage, tenacity, force of will, and resilience of any person I have ever met. These are the qualities that every writer needs. Murphy appears to have them innately, but the rest of us have to grow these qualities and teach ourselves endurance.

For all the previous years of my life I would have answered this question very differently. For decades I poured absolute enthusiasm over every young, or emerging writer, that I met, urging them on into this profession. But I can’t do that anymore. Asked to offer one piece of advice to Molly Twomey, and I feel frozen, tight-lipped. I still sincerely believe that every writer must write. It is necessity. Being a writer is like having a mental illness, if we’re writing, we’re ok. If we haven’t time for our work, we’ll be somewhere on a spectrum between catatonia and mania. So we have to write. But would I send another beautiful, young person into this circus? No. I have seen too many writers crash and burn, their bright trajectories shot down by the unkindness of publishing and the generally inclement conditions of the writing world. It is too harsh out there for me to actively encourage anyone into this realm.

And as right-wing and neo-liberal politics gain more ground, it is going to be harder than ever to be poor— and most artists are poor, we scrabble around like elegant, cathedral mice seeking crumbs beneath the altar-cloth of capitalism.

And things are going to get harsher. These are serious times, we are in an environmental tailspin that may not be reversed. And as right-wing and neo-liberal politics gain more ground, it is going to be harder than ever to be poor— and most artists are poor, we scrabble around like elegant, cathedral mice seeking crumbs beneath the altar-cloth of capitalism.

Oscar Wilde said that when bankers get together they talk about art, and when artists get together they talk about money. We do; the lack of it, and the myriad problematical ways that lack manifests. And if we do have money, then we are likely to be time-poor without the quiet to work. All writers bear the wounds of that time-versus-money war. And though there are publishing contracts, competition wins, arts grants, and funding opportunities out there, they are usually chimeric what-ifs dangled in front of our eyes like carrots we rarely ever reach. If we do suddenly find ourselves with one of these lucky-tickets in our hand, it is likely to only avert yet another financial-crisis, and go towards paying bills that have amassed like sand-dunes around our small cove.

To write with any comfort, a young writer is going to need a trust-fund, or a patron, or a partner with a proper job, or a parent with some cash, but even with those supports, they will still be in and out of the dole-office cap in hand. And all of this will be just a little shaming, so it will be hard for them to hold their head high. All my advice now is going to sound like a dire warning: there probably won’t be holidays, or health-insurance, or a pension, and you are likely to have holes in your clothes, your shoes, your teeth and your roof, and this lack will drone on like the sound of a poignant violin, or a dirge that you won’t be able to block your ears against. Struggle and bitterness and your own sense of failure, will clack at your heels like shadows to be eternally fought against, knight-like as St George with his dragon, sword-arm perpetually raised.

And the worst part of all this is, that these material and psychological challenges will co-exist while you are grappling with the unconscious, the half-hatched, the just out of reach phrases and ideas that you are desperately trying to make concrete. Your writing will be impacted by your circumstances, and you will not quite create what you meant to, not quite fulfill your potential. But nonetheless you will offer what you can, bringing your finished poems and stories to the table like someone arriving at a pot-luck dinner with a pie whose pastry is just a little undercooked. You will offer it anyway and everyone will be very nice about it, but you’ll know in your heart your work could have been so much better.

And all of this will have ramifications and consequences for the people close to you. Your partner. Your children. And your parents—who will always be worrying for you and trying to rescue you from what they consider your folly, so you will need to be very determined, and ruthless as a card-shark, in order to bring all of these other people along with you on this uncomfortable ride. You will paradoxically need to have skin thick as elephant hide to ignore the impacts on your loved ones, and to withstand the constant arrows of rejection, and the barbs of bad reviews that keep coming, while you’ll simultaneously need to keep your pores open and gossamer-sensitive enough to write anything worthwhile.

And all of this will impact your mental health. So what one thing might I say to a bright, hopeful new writer of any age daring to enter this melodrama? For your mental health, you must write, and for your sanity you must defend yourself against the worst failings of this industry so you are not defeated by the obsessive competition and clamour for success that fuels this industry and divides writers from one another. Instead you must strengthen your writing-friendships, build peer-support, and only engage with structures that deepen your feelings of mutuality with other writers.

But having given that warning, I still have to say, write. Though your glass is always going to be half-full of money-worries, professional jealousy, insecurity and self-doubt, it will also be half-full of creativity, contemplation, observation, mystery and meaning. The prevailing wind of lack is also your updraft of freedom. However austere things become, you have to keep viewing your days as the most marvelous adventure. And your words will bring you to wonderful places and incredible people. So make it easy for yourself, buy nice notebooks, good pens, lure yourself on with enticing sugar-lumps of one sort or another. Catch your brain the minute it starts moaning and whimpering about how hard this all is, stop those thoughts, pick up your pen and push on as if you were Dervla Murphy cycling to India.

Remind yourself daily that the reason you write is not because you want success or fame, or even to earn a living from this patchwork profession, but because this is who and what you are, a writer prepared to face into the cycling alphabet of storms that are going to keep blasting our shores, while you courageously write into their gale, a silver river of words brooking your lips, and flowing on, moon-bathed through the dark.

Grace Wells has published two collections of poetry with The Dedalus Press, When God Has Been Called Away to Greater Things and Fur.

Posted on Leave a comment

My Daughter in Winter Costume by Mary O’Donoghue

Mary O'Donoghue. Dedalus Press, poetry from Ireland and the world

US-based Irish poet Mary O’Donoghue on the background to her villanelle, My Daughter in Winter Costume, included in the 2017 Dedalus Press anthology The Deep Heart’s Core (eds. Pat Boran & Eugene O’Connell)

 

I saw the sculpture ‘My Daughter in Winter Costume’ (1922) at the Boston Athenaeum Library in 2010, in the exhibition John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist. This daughter had a stoutness that delightedly flouted modernism’s lean, rawboned lines. This daughter was robust, and in that she seemed safe, even though she stood quite alone on a plinth in the centre of a large room.

Her endearing rotundity — the confusion of where she began and ended — led me to the villanelle. I admire this form because though it mandates nineteen lines the return of those repeated lines means you might, if so moved, outrun the nineteen lines and never come back. It makes sense that the form has its possible origins in dance: the virelai, a category of French chanson depending, like the rondeau, on the tight whirl of rhyme and reprise. (I might also suggest the villanelle’s relationship to ‘Lanigan’s Ball’, where line steps out and line steps in again.)

The poem was written before I met my stepdaughter, Niamh. But a poem can, I suppose, lie in wait for its return. I caught up with it, and it with me, one morning when zipping Niamh into a sleeveless quilted jacket. This jacket, deeply red and flocked with pink flowers, belonged to another child. Her name is written in forbidding felt tip pen inside the collar: Lily. That the jacket was so fat, and that it had looked after the child of a dear friend, seemed as heartening as that chubby sculptural form on the plinth in Boston.
That jacket was much-loved and is now outgrown. The villanelle form is perhaps a net: all those lines shuttling back and forth in repetition, still trying for the same thing as the poem — which is to say, safety.


My Daughter in Winter Costume

after John Storr’s sculpture (1922)

She is sealed like a bomb in her anorak.
Her face is flushed fruit under the hood.
She’s already moving away. I want to call her back.

At nine in the morning the sky is blue-black.
I think of hard falls, split lips, her blood.
But she’s sealed like a bomb in her anorak,

and shouting to friends on the tarmac,
a yardful of children, a tide, a flood
already moving away. I want to call her back,

I’m faint, suddenly starved with the lack
of her, and determined that she should
know, all sealed like a bomb in her anorak.

Grip the wheel. Radio on. The yakety-yak
of today’s talking heads on How to Be Good.
The morning is moving away. I want to call her back.

This is what it’s like to be left slack,
the cord frayed like I knew it would.
She is sealed like a bomb in her anorak,
already moved away, and I can’t call her back.

Posted on Leave a comment

Metathesis by Enda Coyle-Greene

Enda Coyle-Greene. Dedalus Press, poetry from Ireland and the world

Enda Coyle-Greene sketches the background to her poem ‘Metathesis’, included in the anthology The Deep Heart’s Core: Irish Poets Revisit a Touchstone Poem (Dedalus Press, 2017)


‘Metathesis’ began with a word I either didn’t know or had forgotten. Words are air to writers and it’s possible I’d absorbed this word in much the same way one breathes through someone else’s perfume in a crowd, or inhales a fug of over-roasted coffee beans while walking past a café. I may have parked it somewhere.

Poems are given to their makers in many ways, and, like most poets, I find it difficult to write ‘about’ a subject when challenged to do so. A poem has to offer me a way in and early drafts usually involve me looking for a door or even a window I can prise open. Poems are never given a pre-composition intellectual work-over.

All I had was a word, ‘metathesis’, and a feeling that keeping that word as a working title would affect the making or not making of the poem. I didn’t look the word up in my dictionary, at least not until I had a grip on what I was trying to do. Images began to surface — vivid, cinematic, and so ephemeral that I was almost afraid to reach out for them. Looking back now at the first of many early drafts, I’m surprised at how many elements from those first scribbled pages in a notebook — the rushing river, the trees, the weather — have survived into the final version.

As a rule, I try to keep myself out of the act of composition as much as possible; any poem I’ve ever over-thought at the outset has ended up filed away in a drawer with a stake driven through its lifeless heart. I had no intentions for ‘Metathesis’ except to try and grab some of those images and take them to the page.

Stephen Spender wrote: “Poetry is a balancing of unconscious and conscious forces in the mind of the poet, the source of the poetry being the unconscious, the control being provided by the conscious.” Examining those drafts now, I notice that I have numbered each hand-written line down to fourteen. This then is the point at which I must have started that balancing.

Catching a poem while it’s still out of reach is always the most terrifying part of the process. Too light a touch and it’s liable to get bogged down in abstraction, too heavy and it can be smothered. Once I move everything to the white screen, away from my handwriting, from my physical presence on the page and my imposition on the words, I pick up a trail and my instinct kicks in. That trail could be determined by the line breaks, the physical shape on the page, or by a single, ‘concrete’ image. It could be what I call the ‘axle’ word, the one around which the poem turns. It could be the rhyme, if there is one, or the form, again if there is one.

The British poet, Paul Farley has said that, ‘Engaging with form — any form — means there’s at least a chance that you’ll say something you weren’t going to say. Too much freedom gives you that rabbit-in-the-headlights thing.’ This is something with which I concur (and repeat so often that I am in danger of having it inscribed on my headstone). Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich have made similar comments. I’ve found that concentrating on the mechanics, so to speak, helps to take my mind away from any intentions I might have for long enough to allow the poem to come through. But I would write in form only if the poem demanded it.

As ‘Metathesis’ developed, I put the initial draft to one side. A second part was written; this rhymed, but with the end words set far apart, and an ‘eye rhyme’ towards the start, not loudly. What became the opening section of the triptych, unrhymed apart from the final couplet, came next. The initial draft I’d put aside ended up being the final part. I decided to experiment with rhyme patterns here to see what would happen. It surprised me by confirming ‘Metathesis’ as being the correct title for a poem concerned with the randomness of life — how a decision as seemingly quick and unfreighted with intent as simply moving one letter about in a word, for instance, can dictate the way in which a life is played out.

As for knowing when a poem is finished— well, I’m with Mr Yeats when he said that, “The correction of prose, because it has no fixed laws, is endless, a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.” I tend to keep going until I hear (or at least think I can hear) that ‘click.’

Even as part of a longer sequence, every poem has its own separate life while I’m working on it. Later, if it were to be placed between covers, I would hope that it should not only ‘click’ but talk to its neighbours. Like one of those vinyl records which, in pre-download days, we listened to all the way through from first track to last — albums written to be heard that way — a poem should be able to stand alone while keeping its place in the overall flow demanded by a book. The older I get, though, and the longer I’m writing, I’m finding that poems often arrive with their own unconsciously chosen place in that narrative already waiting.

But that’s another discussion altogether.


Metathesis

i

While she’s waiting for the lights to change
at City Hall, the storm begins; the wind
speeds the river, lifts dust, yet traffic holds
her captive on the pavement. Pulsating
at the red-to-green, the seconds counted-
out, her body’s dream-stuck lag behind her
ticking heels, the rush her heart’s dictating
to the slow, too slow of other people,
she at last steps off the street. Descended
to the car park’s underworld, on her knees
she tips her bag, finds keys, her ticket,
and becomes Persephone, reversing
fast into the dark — spinning on to where
she shouldn’t go, but has to, doesn’t care.

ii

She knows the story of Iris, rainbow
sent to a goddess with a god’s request —
an order really, it occurs to her
on the platform, the station almost empty,
a gape in the bird-flecked, seascape roof now
holding those seven curved colours, the rest
of the sky pale beyond the glass. Easter
Monday passes, cold as Persephone
who craved the warmth of red, orange, yellow —
the green, blue, indigo, violet, fast-
dyed by the tears of her goddess-mother;
the ground beneath her quaking, she can’t see
the train, still miles away, the ferrous dance
as track locks into track at its advance.

iii

Beyond the window’s skin, a scattered white,
the many weathers March defines as light,
all that’s left of the storm now its surface
of flotsam on the river she can’t hear.
Up-tumbled desperately from mud, it’s dragged
back to an underworld that’s mapped and snagged
in the hollow of her cup. Silted there,
are tea-leaf letters that she tilts, re-shapes
to other orders, different words, the three
attempts to change what she, Persephone,
can only know — bare trees that never felt
the rip and snap until it was too late,
that never had the chance to turn about
in seasons she has made, can’t live without.

Posted on Leave a comment

The Shipping Forecast

blurred harbour photo by Pat Boran - Dedalus Press, poetry from Ireland and the world

In this short essay, reproduced from The Deep Heart’s Core, poet JOHN O’DONNELL revisits his poem ‘The Shipping Forecast’, among those included in Sunlight: New and Selected Poems (May 2018).


LIKE PROSPECTORS, poets are always anxious to know if what they’ve unearthed this time is the real thing. We make our marks and see how they compare; and there are so many other marks already, from others who for centuries have been panning for gold in the same seam.

Some poems, we know, are no more than fool’s gold, their brassy yellow quickly losing its glister, though sadly not always before they’ve made their way into print; it’s often difficult at the time of writing to tell.

It was Touchstone himself who said “the truest poetry is the most feigning”, in As You Like It, and, as a clown, he should know, planted as he is by Shakespeare to call things as they are rather than as we might like them to be. He would make a useful editor, standing at our shoulders as we write; mostly shaking his head sadly, but occasionally — very occasionally — crying “Yes!”

I’ve chosen ‘The Shipping Forecast’ from my first collection Some Other Country as my touchstone poem because, although it was written nearly twenty years ago, it’s a poem that still makes me say “Yes”. It combines, in the sonnet form I love, many of the themes I’ve returned to often, the struggle to grow up, the father-son relationship, and the sea.

John F. Kennedy suggested we all have in our veins “the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears”. I’m sure there are scientists who disagree. But like a lot of what Kennedy said, it feels right, as I hope this poem does; and if someone years from now sifting through my poems stop at this one, I hope they’ll agree.


The Shipping Forecast

for my father

Tied up at the pier in darkened harbour
the two of us below, in cabin’s amber
light; me surly in a sleeping-bag, fifteen,
and you, past midnight, calmly tuning in
to the Shipping Forecast, Long Wave’s
crackle, hiss, until you find the voice.
What’s next for us: rain or fair? There are
warnings of gales in Rockall and Finisterre.
So near now, just this teak bulkhead
between us, and yet so apart, battened
hatches as another low approaches, the high
over Azores as distant as a man is from a boy.
I think of my own boat one day, the deep.
Beside me the sea snores, turns over in its sleep.

 


Photo © Pat Boran

Posted on Leave a comment

Monsoon Diary: The Cover Story

Mosoon Diary - Dedalus Press, poetry from Ireland and the world

JOSEPH WOODS on the story behind the cover of his new book of poems, Monsoon Diary

For me, there’s a certain serendipity to the book cover of Monsoon Diary.

Last December Pat Boran was in touch about the book and ideas for the cover, as a precursor to knuckling down to the text and its arrangement. I was clear about one thing; given the book’s context, I wanted a contemporary photo, something urban, downtown Yangon and rain-drenched as befits the testing monsoon.

I was convinced I had taken the right image, but a search through my own photos didn’t quite reveal what I wanted and so we played around with a few images including one, sourced by Pat, of a rain-splattered windscreen with people obscured and crossing a road. We were getting close and agreed we wanted to avoid touristic golden temples and pagodas. But given that Myanmar, or Burma, in literature is known as ‘The Golden Land’, I did want yellow in the cover or a ‘Yellow Book’ of sorts? It’s also, simply, my favourite colour. I approached a few photographers with a request, ‘urban and in the rain’, but got no real takers, until I contacted a pal in Yangon, Shane Brady, an Irish Yangonophile who often accompanied me on bookshop searches in the city and was already a dedicatee of one of the poems, ‘Sundays in Rangoon’, in the book.

I was clear about one thing; given the book’s context, I wanted a contemporary photo, something urban, downtown Yangon and rain-drenched as befits the testing monsoon.

He bounced back immediately with an iPhone picture he’d taken of the Chin Tsong Palace with monsoon clouds heaving and swirling above it. I knew we had the image and atmosphere, especially since the building had intrigued me for virtually all my time in Yangon.

For our first year in Yangon, my family lived in a neighbourhood more densely populated than Dacca which was not ideal for rearing a toddler, but a half-crown of sonnets, Let us fly away to the famed cities of Asia, arose from that experience. In our second year, we moved to Golden Valley, a neighbourhood behind the Chin Tsong Palace, and from the back of our house we could see its tiered tower. Golden Valley was the traditional neighbourhood for colonials, and during Myanmar’s long stagnation and isolation, for retired military colonels – and now, expatriates with families.

 I tried getting into the grounds of the palace on a few occasions but was politely turned away at the entrance by a guard, until one day I brought my daughter in her stroller and no one seemed to mind. After numerous visits to the grounds, one afternoon, knowing that in Burma it’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, I left the stroller outside the palace and we walked in. I had my camera and we explored the elaborately carved teak stairs and I photographed the once fabled, now empty and sadly dilapidated interior. There were murals of Chinese scenes that are incongruously the work of imported English artists, Ernest and Dod Procter who went on to better things.

After numerous visits to the grounds, one afternoon, knowing that in Burma it’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, I left the stroller outside the palace and we walked in.

The palace was the project of its eponymous owner Lim Chin Tsong, a fabulously wealthy Chinese merchant who intended it as a lavish residence. Work began in 1917 and was only completed in 1920, so we are in the midst of its centenary. Within a year of its completion, Lim Chin Tsong’s fortune had folded and he was broke for the few years before his death in 1923. The building has had many different fortunes since, as a hotel, a broadcasting house for the occupying Japanese forces, and now houses, rather half-heartedly, a school for the Fine Arts.

And there’s a further serendipity, the great Irish chronicler of Burma, Maurice Collis (whose life I’ve been pursuing and writing), once stayed here on his return to Burma in 1937, to write a travel book, Lords of the Sunset. He recounts reaching ‘The House on the Island’ by sampan or boat and is even photographed in the ‘Island Garden’ grounds in the book. This suggests that either the nearby (to the right of the photo) Kandawgyi Lake must have once extended around the palace, or, more likely, the grounds of the palace once extended to the lake shore.

Occasionally, while living in Golden Valley, I took a 6 a.m. constitutional by that lake, and walking behind the palace I’d sometimes see the rising sun spilling through the top storey, which, while empty, must remain one of the most coveted 360-degree views over Yangon.

I was delighted, too, that Shane in his picture had captured in the foreground a game of chinlon, a kind of kickboxing version of volleyball played with bare feet and a hard rattan ball. That game and the curious colour tints added to what Pat rightly pointed out was a Hieronymus Bosch effect. As for that yellow cover? Well, the book’s title is in imperial yellow.


MONSOON DIARY by Joseph Woods is published by Dedalus Press in April 2018