Barbara's bleeuugh!

New year, new...

2012-02-01T18:25:00.004Z

Here we are on St. Brigid's day already, and not a peep on the blog in an age. Things are moving again on the poetry front. All being well, I hope to back with my fellow peers in Ballinasloe, this weekend, and there's talk of a new collection coming out this year, with Doghouse.

That said, I need to see if I've actually got the good makings of a book: the real test is the editing day, or days, I'll be spending down in Tralee. Not too long to go now: I'm hoping to get down over the half-term coming up shortly.

The title seems to have settled on the one thing. I won't say just yet, but I'm quietly pleased with it and hope it reflects the collection as a whole.

In the meantime, I've been getting used to me new iPad. I think I can safely say it's one of the most useful presents I've ever had. The kids have been teasing me about how I never put the damn thing down.

I've all sorts of wee games and functions on it now, and a whole lifetime's worth of music is now on tap whenever I'm up for it. I can even listen to the radio, read and sometimes type at the same time. I even read poems from it at a reading the other night!

If you've got one, do look out for a wee game app, Machinarium: it has great appeal if you're into solving puzzles and lateral thinking at the same time. Reminds me of all the Discworld games I used to play - not that long ago!

Better start thinking about doing some readings and promotion then, hadn't I?

Digital Archives at SHC Queen's, Belfast

2011-11-09T14:49:00.008Z

I was reading an interview with Miriam Gamble, over on Emerging Writer's blog, and Miriam mentioned that a good deal of her work is available to listen to at the The Seamus Heaney Centre Digital Archive at QUB. I know the person behind the establishment of this digital sound archive, Paul Maddern (from my time at QUB doing my Masters), as this mammoth project was his PhD.

Anyway, I had a good old browse and a listen to some of Miriam's work, which is really interesting and has earned her a good reputation.

I then wondered if there was any of my work on there, as I and Enda Coyle Greene had launched books in No Alibis bookshop (a great place to browse and buy books, as well as music and other events) back in March 2008. Well, I found a few (use the search facility and enter author's name) - a bit cringeworthy for me to listen to - but there they are in all their glory.

If you get a chance to browse this amazing digital archive, you won't be disappointed. In there you will find poets as diverse as Sinead Morrissey, Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney (of course!) and many, many more. I was really tickled to see and hear Billy Collins' work on the website, as I actually attended this reading in Armagh in July 2008 (and wrote about it here), so it's nice to re-hear the work again.

There's a lot to be said for 'hearing' poetry - after all, it is an oral/aural art.

Poems and Mushrooms

2011-10-17T18:19:00.004+01:00

I picked this up from Rob McKenzie's blog, who in turn is talking about Don Share's take on a poem by Katherine Kilalea which is called 'Henneker's Ditch.

Share quotes the poem - if it is not the whole, I'd be dying to get the collection it's in, New Poetries V - and then goes on a really interesting meander, showing us not only a good appreciation, but a good insight into his own thought processes when he comes across a poem that needs unlocking.

I last felt this interested in a poem when reading T.S. Eliot's Prufrock, or Ginsberg's Howl. This is a poem that's got me thinking about hybridity, dream sequences, and - of all things - some of the things I used to do, twenty or so years ago before I got sense.

They would be drugs - well, mushrooms in particular (that's about as hard as it got around here - they were free!) - which I'm not advocating in any shape or form - but these were the first thing I thought of when I read Kate Kilalea's poem... I've put this here more as a note or reminder to myself, more than anything - but the poem is exciting, and has me thinking hard.

Poetry Abounding

2011-10-05T18:44:00.003+01:00

Apologies for disappearing again - holidays came and went, back to school came and went and so did back to work - yes the hamster mill keeps on spinning round!

Just back from Dromineer Literary Festival this weekend, where I was lucky to be part of the Poetry Divas big gig in the Whiskey Still. We were treated like the Divas we are, and the feedback afterwards was tremendous. Fair play to those who came along to support us, in spite of the awful weather and after the readings/Q&A sessions with writers Jennifer Johnstone and John McKenna.

Our set worked out at around the hour mark and included the by-now-infamous 'boobs' poem, complete with accompanying visuals (think Bob Dylan's song). We were well-received and mightuly looked after by Declan & Fiona in Lough Derg House as well as Rita in the Whiskey Still. The weather wasn't good enough to allow anyone a decent view about the lake, but it looked as though it would be really beautiful on a sunny day.

Tomorrow is All Ireland Poetry Day, as well as being National Poetry Day across the water in the UK. There's plenty happening up and down the country for those who want to join in.

Here in sunny Dundalk, there's a lunch time broadcast on Dundalk FM at 1pm featuring people from public life (including me!) discussing favourite and non-favourite poems from Soundings. You can listen online by clicking here but be aware that you may need to download a plugin in order to stream it.

There's also a lunchtime reading taking place in DkIT Library featuring John O'Rourke in the Slieve Foye Room.

Back on the horse - picking poems!

2011-07-02T12:40:00.006+01:00

It's been a while since I posted here, so long in fact that the echoes are rather loud!

As usual, I've been busy with things work-ish; finishing off courses for the summer, taking on short courses and up to my eyeballs in paperwork and marking. The marking will continue for another week longer, but it is sheer bliss knowing that I don't have to be hurtling up and down the M1 or across to Kells for a few weeks.

In the meantime, I was asked to judge a poetry competition for Eyewear - the theme was using the number six, as it is Eyewear's sixth birthday. I chose the winning poem blind from all the poems sent - so it was amazing to later find out that the winner, Janet Vickers, was Canadian, and it was Canada day yesterday - serendipity on many levels.

Check it out and look out for the picture of me with cakes... in the background. Oh yes.

Divas at the Festival of the Fires

2011-04-29T22:53:00.004+01:00

The Poetry Divas ride out again into the Festival of the Fires tomorrow at the Hill of Uisneach. This is located in the very centre of Ireland, quite near Mullingar, where traditionally the five provinces of Ireland met (yes, five, you read right!). I'm thinking I'll be airing some of my 'Celtic' poems, and perhaps any to do with fires. Incidentally, I'm a fire sign, so perhaps that's a Good Thing.

Take a look at their website; there are some stunning photographs from last year's festival. If you're in the area, come along and take a look-see at the Spoken Word stage around about 3pm tomorrow and say hello to the Divas.

Spring into Poetry, London

2011-03-31T19:18:00.017+01:00

Don Share signing a book

Me and Malika Booker

Our genial host talking to Emma Jones - & his wife

Malika Booker and Amy

Amy & Anne Stevenson

I'm just back from the reading at Oxfam Marylebone, last night. Phew what a sweat to get there in time: flight delayed into Gatwick, train to Victoria, tube to Russell Square, and up the stairs to the Penn Club, flung on my reading outfit and lippy, and into a cab to arrive, just before the main guests arrived. Talk about seat of the pants!

The readers were terrific: I really enjoyed the variety of voices. After I went first - which allowed me to chill out and relax (and stop sweating - sheesh, beginning to think there's something awry there!) - there was the gorgeous voice of Malika Booker. Her work is steeped in her Grenadian background, with a Caribbean lilt and she read very well. I bought her Breadfruit pamphlet later on, which I've already peeked into. Malika also made off with a copy of my 'Cattle Crush' poem, about cattle being castrated, which she is going to use to teach poetry to Year 8s - yay.

Closing the first half of the readers was Anne Stevenson: I watched this diminutive figure command the entire room with her wonderful reading. She gives each word its total and correct weight, without it seeming ponderous. I have her voice now in my head and am looking forward to re-reading her mammoth Collected Poems 1955 - 1995, which I brought over and asked her to sign for me. She said something very nice about my reading afterwards which I shall treasure: that she could 'hear where my lines ended.'

After a quick sup and a chat - hi to Chris Bazalgette, so nice to meet you after all the years corresponding on the Open University message boards - the second half kicked off with another prize-winning poet: Emma Jones, Dr Jones to me and you. An Australian by birth and accent, she read from her collection The Striped World, from Faber, which was a Forward Prize winner for Best First Collection in 2009. Very imaginative and surprising work, I shall be searching out her work.

Then came Jacquelyn Pope, from the US, whose work has a lovely measured pace and is quite beautiful in a really understated way. Her collection Watermark literally walked out the door afterwards - before I managed to get my hands on it - boo hoo. I was too busy talking to poets and audience members!

Lastly, came Don Share, also from Chicago in the US, whose warm, witty but poignant poems were a thoughtful point to end the evening on. I also got his collection Squandermania from Salt - and weirdly, when I got back to the hotel, the current book I'm reading, a history of the Irish state during the second world war, That Neutral Island, by Clair Wills had that very word on the following page I was reading, where Fine Gael were giving out about the 'political codology' the 'squandermania' of the idea of Ireland being able to defend itself during the war (p.90). Wow, I thought: isn't that cool!

Todd Swift could give a masterclass in the art of hosting and introducing poets: his tone is so relaxed it sounds conversational - very intimate and draws in the audience.

What a great evening - it seemed to be over far too soon, but I heard so much and came home with some lovely lines in my head.

Spring, Sprong, Sprung

2011-03-26T16:13:00.003Z

The clocks go forward tonight, giving that extra hour of daylight and making everyone all summery again. It's about time, I've been waking up so early in the mornings, because of the angle of the sun being that little bit higher, and I've been paying close attention to the daffodils that I planted in the garden last autumn - I hadn't any bulbs planted in the garden, and it's nice to watch them growing, from the green budding tips to the blowsy yellow trumpets that sway in the wind, announcing that SPRING IS HERE!

I'm back from France, which was a really interesting trip away. While the ceremony and burial were poignant, the French way of carrying out these rituals was very interesting to observe - so dignified and respectful, and yes even elegant - so French! I've also met a whole load of new relations, cousins two and three times removed, and there are some interesting times ahead as we will all forge new connections through the children in families on both sides. I reckon that my lot now have a very valid reason to pay more attention in their French classes at school, and hopefully we will see some exchanges happen between the families, over the coming years. It's all about family in the long run :¬)

So, it's back to normal, until Wednesday when I fly to London to take part in that exciting poetry reading in the wonderful bookshop at Oxfam Marylebone. Anne Stevenson has an extra long slot, so I can't wait to hear her wonderful poetry in person, as well as the others which include Malika Booker, Emma Jones, Jacquelyn Pope, and Don Share. Busy, busy, busy! Now, back to the garden to make the most of this fine spell we're having.

That London Reading

2011-03-18T19:19:00.003Z

I was supposed to be going to Prague next week, wiv' the hub, but family commitments mean going to France to a funeral instead. I'll be helping to lay to rest the last direct French connection we have: a Gran-aunt, who was just six months shy of her 100th birthday. She slipped away quietly ... always a very modest and unassuming, but hugely supportive person.

But I'm still up for the end of month reading in London, at the Oxfam Bookshop, Marylebone. Details as follows:

Wednesday 30th March

OXFAM SPRING CARNIVAL
POETRY NIGHT
FEATURING

Anne Stevenson
Barbara Smith
Don Share
Emma Jones
Jacquelyn Pope
and
Malika Booker

7.30 pm
OXFAM BOOKS AND MUSIC
91 Marylebone High Street
London W1
Nearest tube Baker Street

Admision: £5; concession £3.

Hosted by Todd Swift

ALL PROFITS TO OXFAM - Make sure to book the tickets if you're coming!

International Wimmin's Day

2011-03-09T09:36:00.005Z

We have a whole day to ourselves - and where does it start? On the first day of lent, Ash Wednesday!

In our house there's lots of talk of giving things up - but funnily enough it's things that people don't like anyway. One of the nearly-wimmin of the house said 'I'm giving up smoking and drinking for lent.' I replied that she didn't smoke or drink anyway, and she said that made it all the easier.

One of the mini-wimmin here said she was giving up broccoli, to which I said that she didn't like it anyway, so not much hardship there either. You have to hand it to them for thinking outside the box - whose children are they anyway..?

It's not like years ago, when you gave up your sweeties and saved them in a tin until Easter Sunday - with a quick detour on St. Patrick's Day, yum yum.

Anyway, later on I am teaching a Leaving Cert class the finer points of creating a character, so I'm having fun in my own writerly way on IWD. How about you, anything exciting? Drop a note in the comments and let us know!

Prufrocks in Dublin

2011-03-02T09:42:00.003Z

The Prufrocks read again, this time in Dublin on Saturday 5th at 8pm in La Catedral Studios. The last time some of us read together, was at Flatlake, back in August 2009. We had a bigger reading crew that time, and a very full tent (Cillian Murphy was there - swoon). This time we are three: Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Mary Mullen and my good self.

Mary is from Alaska, originally and her poems are often set there, which makes them interesting and haunting in their own right. Mary has a book out from Salmon, Zephyr, which I can't wait to hear poems from. Mary is also a successful memoirist, and takes classes teaching people how to write memoir.

Nuala, from Dublin originally, now living in Galway county, is an award-winning writer of many years standing. A fiction writer, as well as poet, her debut novel You, launched last year and is still getting good notices. She has a collection, The Juno Charm, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry later this year.

So, if you're round and about in Dublin at the Book Festival, do drop over to La Catedral Studios 7/11 Saint Augustine Street Dublin 8 on Saturday at 8pm. We promise not to disappoint!

Election Day

2011-02-25T18:22:00.004Z

Never has an election been more anticipated that the current one here in Ireland, and thanks be to Jaysus the run-up to it wasn't any longer than it has been.

I swear the election posters here in Dundalk were multiplying over night. There's a roundabout near us that, four weeks ago had just four or five posters attached to the iron railings that protect pedestrians from the traffic.

Going through it today, I counted (periphally, of course, I was driving) about twenty. I have to laugh at Fine Gael's 'Five Point Plan - go to wubblywubblywubbly to read all about it'. As if!

Last week, I was up in Donegal for the weekend, a trip which necessitated travelling through Norn Iron twice - it was nice not to be visually assailed by election images for the time it took to go through the north. A visual break, I guess.

Anyhoo, at this stage of the day the deed is done. I have exercised my right to vote, placing preferences all the way down from 1 -16 (I'm old-fashioned and feel the need to vote from last to first - just to make sure I express myself most emphatically!). I feel sorry for anyone in a constituency that has more candidates than that - I hear one of Galway's constituencies has 35 candidates!

One thing for sure: the intricacies of the Proportional Representation Single Transferable Vote make the day after, Saturday, the most interesting day, when we see what it is the Irish people may have actually said. I'll be tuning in around lunchtime, when hopefully all the ballot boxes will have been opened.

March Date for the Diary

2011-02-06T11:48:00.004Z

More about that reading in London: *edited in: Weds, 30th March*

OXFAM SPRING CARNIVAL
POETRY NIGHT
FEATURING

Anne Stevenson
Barbara Smith
Don Share
Emma Jones
Jacquelyn Pope
and
Malika Booker

7.30 pm
OXFAM BOOKS AND MUSIC
91 Marylebone High Street
London W1
Nearest tube Baker Street

Admision: £5; concession £3.

Hosted by Todd Swift

ALL PROFITS TO OXFAM.

I can't believe the line-up! Anne Stevenson! Almost this time last year, I was holed up in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, where they have a terrific library of books. There, I found her collected, which I devoured. Poems which I still remember: Granny Scarecrow and Poem for a Daughter. Guess what I've just pulled off my bookshelf to read?

Nothing to Say - So Don't Say Nothing

2011-02-04T13:56:00.002Z

Sorry, I've been absent for a while, whilst life got on with itself. January was a tough month for many, not just getting over the expenses of Christmas, but the cold weather we experienced really seems to have impacted on people very hard, between burst pipes and trying to stay warm.

Now, it's February, spring feels like it's coming, the days are just starting to push out a little, and I hear myself going around saying, 'It's like November, only backwards.' If it were only that simple.

Still, some things to look forward to: a trip to visit Prague; a reading in London at the close of March - to make up for the one I didn't get to read at ... and Easter is later this year - maybe the weather will be kinder?

So, it's all to look forward to. Wonder what great poetry this year has in store for us then...?

What are you looking forward to? - go on, tell us!

Shh, don't mention the C word

2010-12-22T18:58:00.002Z

My word, is it that time of year already?

Well, here's wishing you a very warm and happy time with your families and friends, and may 2011 be not only the first year of a brand new decade, but the start of many great things.

I will be glad to see the back of 2010, having spent a good deal of it in me bed.

Normal-ish service has since resumed, in the last three months - sure I'm even writing again! Shhh - lets not jinx it :)

In the meantime, I leave with a little something about critic/poet Randall Jarrell's book of reviews/critiques/ essays: Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews, 1935-1964. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

Jarrell (hadn't he a fab name? He gave good photos too - every ounce old-school beard going on there!), had a great facility in writing about the poets he wished were better than they were, and praising (without sycophancy) the poets whose work he admired(Bishop, Stevens, Auden, Yeats and of course, Frost). There's a really brilliant essay on what made Yeats write the way he did, in the book, which I am looking forward to re-reading. I think he's right on the money, with his approach on Yeats. I want more of his work!

Reading with the benefit of fifty-sixty + years later, you recognise the writers whose work has endured, and the writers whose work was not as good - well, guess what? You've never heard them... or you may have but in a very slight sense (ooh, he was harsh on Stephen Spender). Makes you think about today's writers quite carefully, as well as what went into Jarrell's close reading of poetry.

Poets do say it better

2010-12-19T13:38:00.003Z

Colm Keegan features nicely in the end of an article in this week's Sunday Times Culture magazine (no url, I'm afraid, they've gone subscription). The commentary, written by Harry Browne, offers a broad survey of how Irish culture has responded to the economic times we live in.

Theatre, says Browne, a more immediate medium, seems to have turned to re-interpretations of old classics to try and help re-define ourselves, with plays such as Phaedra, or Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman. Cultural commentators, in the form of writers, haven't had the same impact - perhaps not having the economic nous to deliver pronouncements - I love the line about 'Irish intellectuals mak[ing] a good case for being the world's leading blatherers'!

So, Browne turns to the spoken word piece by Clondalkin poet Colm (and his cohorts of the Unruly Trinity) for some lovely quotes: 'Ireland is a Glock pointed at someone's son. Or a Christian Brother. Or it's own mother because she won't move into a nursing home.'

Nearly - Never Made It..

2010-12-01T17:43:00.003Z

Just home after trying to get to London today, to do the Oxfam reading.

Guess where I was trying to fly to? London Gatwick.

Guess where is closed until who knows when? London Gatwick.

There are some things you just have to console yourself with: that your home is still warm, and you have a nice warm curry waiting for you and that in the grand scheme of things, you're actually quite lucky, compared to some poor buggers caught out in the snow.

And there's always next year :)

Reading Reminder

2010-11-28T15:51:00.004Z

Brr, it's cold here this afternoon. To add to the state of our nation, in these hangdog days, it's snowing quite hard outside - and it's sticking. The papers are full of 'nuclear winter' analogies about the way things are going in Ireland, while everyone is pretty sick of the misery, doom and gloom on all media outlets. 50, 000 protested in Dublin yesterday to show their annoyance. I'm trying to tell myself that the wintry scenes outside look pretty, but you know how it is.

Anyhoo, a little reminder of Wednesday's impending reading. If you're thinking of going, be sure and book a place, so you can be sure of a seat!

Oxfam Christmas Poetry Night
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
7.30 pm

Oxfam Books and Music Shop
91 Marylebone High Street, London W1
near Baker Street tube.

The Oxfam Poetry Reading in Marylebone series ends its 7th year of events on
a high note with six guest poets - including two coming especially from
Scotland for the occasion - TS Eliot Prize winning Bloodaxe poet Jen
Hadfield and Picador poet John Glenday whose recent collection Grain has
been shortlisted for the 2010 Ted Hughes Award for New Work In Poetry.

This internationally-minded series will also be featuring a poet from
Ireland (Barbara Smith), reading on her birthday, two prize-winning American
poets, Dante Micheaux and Michelle Boisseau and England's own Sheila
Hillier, whose recent collection was shortlisted for this year's Aldeburgh
Prize.

The host for the evening will be Todd Swift.

The event is supported by Kingston University. Tickets are £5 / £3
concession (students) in advance or at the door (if seats remain). Do call
or email the shop to buy or book tickets:

Telephone : 020 7487 3570.

Email: oxfammarylebone@hotmail.com

Now, all I have to worry about is whether the weather be cold or not, making sure I get there!

Reading for Oxfam, London

2010-11-11T18:58:00.003Z

Readings don't get any better than this one coming up in London, in support of Oxfam on the 1st of December (my birthday!) - just under three weeks away:

Oxfam Christmas Poetry Reading hosted by Todd Swift.
Oxfam is very pleased to be featuring six fine poets, from America, England, Ireland, and Scotland, with special guests Bloodaxe poet Jen Hadfield (TS Eliot Prize winner) and Picador poet John Glenday (Grain) headlining. Other poets reading are: Barbara Smith (Ireland); Sheila Hillier (England) and two visiting Americans, Dante Micheaux and Michelle Boisseau. This event will be ticketed. Tickets £5, concessions £3. Tickets available in advance from the shop or by phone: 020 7487 3570.

The observant among you might have noticed something a wee bit 'odd' about the line-up... :)

All Ireland Poetry Day...countdown

2010-10-06T13:30:00.003+01:00

On LMFM tomorrow at 12.15pm talking about the events lined up for Louth county this year. I'll also be talking a little about myself, The Poetry Divas, and other diverse poetry related things.

You can listen on the web live at the time - if you're local, LMFM broadcast on 95.8FM.

Hey ho, the addy oh!

Now, where did I leave that feather boa... The Divas fly again tomorrow e'en in McGeough's Bar, Roden Place, Dundalk as part of the Open Mic night - woohoo!

All Ireland Poetry Day

2010-09-28T21:18:00.005+01:00

I'm really excited this year by All Ireland Poetry Day, which this year falls on Thursday 7th October - the same day as in the UK, so ye'll be having it every which way this year.

I've been busy putting together the programme for Louth county, on behalf of the Louth Arts Services (and Poetry Ireland, too) since the mid-summer and it's a real cracker this year.

At Lunchtime, there are two readings in Louth - Drogheda Library host Marie McSweeney at 1.30pm, where Marie will be reading from her recent work. Marie has won many prizes for her short stories and poetry, including the Francis MacManus award. DkIT Library host a reading in the library's rooftop atrium garden, where people can come and listen to poets, past and present.

Later that evening in Drogheda, the Viaduct Bards host a poetry session in Drogheda Library from 6.30 - 7.30pm, whilst in Carlingford, Jaki McCarrick reads at 7.30pm in the Holy Trinity Heritage Centre. Jaki was a featured poet at the Poetry Ireland Introduction series last year, and her plays and short stories have been winning prizes galore lately.

Finally, and I'm really excited by this one, Meitheal, is a new open mic session launching in McGeough's Bar in Roden Place, Dundalk from 8pm onwards. Featured readers on the night are The Poetry Divas collective. Run what ya brung!

New Review

2010-09-13T08:54:00.002+01:00

My review of An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, edited by Wes Davis, from Harvard University Press is now online at Eyewear!

Another Year On

2010-08-31T14:41:00.004+01:00

Back to school time... and back to college for one as well! Trying to overcome the tiredness is proving a challenge, as I try to meter out the jobs that need to be done: the uniforms, the tracksuits, the contents of pencil cases, the trousers that need hemming, the books that need ticking off. This year, I won't moan about the price of all that stuff that has to be got - for me, it's worth spending on!

But I do it all with a slight of glee - there's no escaping that feeling that mammies up and down the country must be feeling: the feckers are going to be back at school and my house will be my own - to bathe in the peaceful silence (well as silent as a housing estate will get with all known children between the ages of 4 and 17 away being edumucated) of my CLEAN house.

What will I do with all that silence - hopefully a bit of what Nuala Ni is doing - some writing! Now, if I can only manage two hours, I'll be doing well :)

Poems in Southword

2010-08-16T19:18:00.003+01:00

We interrupt this illness to bring you some poems in the latest, brand-spanking new Southword 18.

You will find me just underneath Matthew Sweeney - not figuratively (helas!) - with five poems that belong to a much longer sonnet sequence about George Mallory, the British mountaineer who died attempting Everest in 1924, with his co-climber, Andrew Irvine.

James Harpur retires as Poetry Editor at Southword, to be replaced by Leanne O'Sullivan, and Tania Hershman is taking up Fiction Editor-ship there too. All good stuff. Check out the other poems, stories and reviews, it's a meaty issue.

Waiting results from tests...

Back after this short break - I hope!

2010-08-07T19:22:00.002+01:00

It's been quiet here for a good reason. Apart from three days in Donegal, during which the rain rained like a rainy thing (did-ya-know it's been the wettest July since, er, last year?), I've been trying to get over various chest-related things which have been leaving me drained and... er... well... still unwell.

Some of you might remember me moaning (Feb) about general unwellness long before the pneumonia (Apr) episode. If not, a quick recap: pain in abdomen, pain in chest, general fatigue etc. etc. hospital, home, bed, hospital, home, more bed, back to work ya-di-da-da.

I returned recently to the doctor after diagnosed pleurisy seemed to be refusing to go away. Conversation went like something this:

Me: The pain is still there.
Doc: Well, your chest is clear.
But, the pain is still there - it's tender to touch under my tight armpit; exactly where I had the pneumonia. In fact I've had this pain there since before I had the pneumonia. Me and this pain know each other so well, we could be bosom buddies.
Is that so?
Yes.
Maybe it's not pleurisy.
Then what is it?
It might be costochondroitis.
Huh?
Could be caused by pneumonia. Here's a prescription for some heavy-duty painkillers and some prednisone. Go home and go to bed.

Again? Sheesh...

Gawn Fishin

2010-07-27T19:18:00.002+01:00

Back when I get some well-needed chest rest!

Salt, Neruda and Ten more years

2010-07-17T15:00:00.001+01:00

To help keep Salt Publishing's head above water there's the Just One (more)Book campaign, which is simple enough: browse and buy one book. Recessionary times have been incredibly tough on publishing: more so on poetry! There are some great books there, and if you've been promising yourself a book from Salt, now's the time.

But there's also a 'flashmob' gathering in London today - er, just now - at the Southbank Centre, at 3pm London time, to celebrate ten years of Salt Publishing with a mass public recital of Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Salt."

To get you in the mood:

Ode to Salt

This salt
in the salt cellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won't
believe me
but
it sings
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.

by Pablo Neruda

Much more here at this link

Younger Poetry Magazine

2010-07-13T10:41:00.003+01:00

There's an online magazine, YM, available for the younger reader who's dipping their toe into poetry: Ben Wilkinson calls attention to it over on his blog, for a short article he has written on Louis MacNeice's last collection The Burning Perch, which if I didn't already know, I'd definitely be more curious about.

It reminds me of the book on my shelf by Ted Hughes: Poetry in the Making, a Handbook for Writing and Teaching. These were a series of lectures for younger people on poetry that were once broadcast by the BBC, collected into book form. I read these again and again for inspiration and angles: it's available second hand, on certain websites, but I think it really could bear being re-issued.

You - Nuala Ní Chonchúir

2010-07-07T08:00:00.001+01:00

You was a complete delight to read and is the latest offering from Irish writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir. Nuala is an Irish short fiction writer and poet, born in Dublin in 1970. Her short fiction includes Nude (2009), To the World of Men, Welcome (2005) and The Wind Across the Grass (2004). She has won many literary prizes, including RTÉ Radio’s Francis MacManus Award and the Cecil Day-Lewis Award.

In 2009, her pamphlet, Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car was one of the four finalists in the prestigious UK Templar Poetry Pamphlet competition. To say that Nuala is a writer who is going places, in a literary sense, is something of a understatement: her short story collection, Nude (2009), is currently shortlisted for the 2010 Edge Hill Short Story Prize - results due this week - so fingers crossed for Nuala!

I'm delighted to have you on the blog again for some scones and morning tea - milk or lemon? - and the scones are, of course, freshly baked - there's some freshly potted strawberry jam too. Congratulations on the publication of your first novel, 'You'. It's a riveting read!

Oh milk for me, Barbara, and a brown scone, thanks; with dollops of jam, mmmm. Thanks for having me over to Dundalk.

I’m glad you were riveted to You; it’s amazingly nice when someone says they like something you’ve written.

Firstly, I'd like to ask you how you came to the decision to use the second person. In reading the book, I found that voice deeply compelling; it seems to speak to an inner child in me in a way, as well as getting across the girl's angle, so was this a deeply concious decision or one that you came to more quickly/intuitively?

I have an unnatural grá for the second person voice, really. When I start to write a story, it often emerges in the second person (it’s like my head thinks it’s the first person). I find it a very comfortable voice to work in and I’ve written several short stories in it. So doing the novel in the second person was a very instinctive thing for me. It’s not a conscious act at all – I just love it, as both writer and reader. I like its peculiarity, its distance and, paradoxically, its intimacy.

This sort of leads me into the next question: telling the story from the point of view of the child allows for a slower reveal than if we'd seen it from an omniscient narrator's point of view; we've got to work a little harder as readers to put together the pieces (which is appreciated from this reader's pov). How much thought do you put into how the reader will perceive the story?

You know, I never think about the reader per se. When I edit, I obviously aim for clarity for the reader’s sake but she is not in my head as I write. So how the story is perceived doesn’t come into my writing equation. I don’t workshop my fiction so usually the first inkling I get of whether something has worked or not is from an editor’s perspective. And I prefer it that way.

The child’s voice is a device, like any other literary device, and I like its limitations. There’s only so much a child will understand and as the writer you have to be aware of that. And tread carefully.

There's something about the fact that the girl's name is avoided, which reminded me of the narrator of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca (although your narrator is much more feisty!), who is never named, but takes other people's names (i.e her husband's name but not her own - Mrs de Winter). How important are names in your creation's worlds?

Names are huge for me and not openly naming the novel’s narrator was deliberate – she has nicknames instead e.g. Little Miss Prim. (I know her real name, though!)

I find naming one of the most joyous aspects of creating characters and often their entire personality will hinge on their name. I am like a blackbird, foraging for names all the time: in newspapers, in TV credits, in spam etc. My husband brought home a new cookbook the other night and the author’s name was so quirky and cute, I’ve stolen it for my list of character names. I like odd and memorable names. I love the way Dickens used names in his fiction, and Annie Proulx is a consummate namer.

Barbara, thanks a million for hosting me today and for the delicious home-baking; it’s been lovely chatting to you. Next week my virtual tour brings me to England to the home of short story writer and novelist Elizabeth Baines. I'd love if some of your readers would join me there.

It's been a real pleasure, Nuala. To readers out there who haven't managed to get/read You just yet, it is stocked in all good bookshops in Ireland, or can be ordered directly from New Island - postage is included if you live in Ireland!

Guess who's coming tomorrow?

2010-07-06T14:52:00.003+01:00

Nuala Ni Chonchuir and her debut novel You will virtually drop by for a quick cup of tea and jammy scones tomorrow.

She's busy in West Cork this week, tutoring a creative fiction workshop, but she'll find time in her day tomorrow to answer some intriguing questions on voice.

Liffey Sound

2010-06-27T19:44:00.003+01:00

I had a great time yakking my head off to Niamh - fair play to her and Liffey Sound for inviting me round to tea and allowing me to bring some poetry to air there.

The theme of the show was A Woman's View and it is now available to DL, thanks to the wonder of Niamh. Fastest hour I've ever had, even as we were keeping half eye on the England v Germany match.

Take a look on the side bar too, there are so many different writers to choose from to listen to, such as David Mohan, Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Maeve O'Sullivan and Kate Dempsey - even the bould Peter Goulding (who is busy writing World Cup poems - as you read!) to pick just a few. The shows last an hour long, but be warned, it's a quick hour!

Is that the time already?

2010-06-26T21:02:00.003+01:00

In response to a previous commenter (yes, you Dick! :) )Body and Soul was fabulous - the weather and the craic there too. I met a good few musicians, and not a few poets either. We Divas rocked the kasbah of course, even managing to sell copies of Poetry Divas 2 (or Divas in Blue, as it may well become known), the new pamphlet released by the Divas Collective. We're planning an even bigger version for the Electric Picnic, but more of that later.

Tomorrow I'm on Sunday Scrapbook, Liffey Sound 96.4FM with Niamh Bagnell from 4pm to 5pm. It is possible to listen live on the web - I hope. If you get lost, try the ordinary website: Liffey Sound . I will be reading the, by now, infamous 'boob' poem on the programme, so there's an excuse to escape the droning vuvuzela on the footy for a wee while! Ahem.

I have so much teaching work on at the moment it's really not funny, but I am looking forward to July immensely - I have a nice, chunky review to write on Wes Davis' Anthology of Irish Poetry, which had an 'interesting' review in the Irish Times today. I must save my own myriad thoughts for the review, which will appear on Eyewear in July... but the IT review has already been garnering attention on FB today, and not just because of the feckin'size of it. God help the students it may be aimed at (take that one whatever way you want), is all I can say. It is massive. And has shamrocks all over it. Hmm.

The only worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Think Wilde might've said that. Right?

Shh, Don't Tell Anyone

2010-06-15T20:41:00.003+01:00

But the Poetry Divas are all set to ride again. . . there is a really special boutique festival this weekend at Ballinlough Castle, Co. Westmeath.

Those lovely people from Body & Soul at Electric Picnic have organised a discrete summer solstice celebration - and the weather forecast is set to be an absolute cracker! In case you don't know what I'm on about, Body & Soul at EP was the really chilled out area with small tents and teepees and lots of like-minded relaxed dudes 'n dudettes with great attitudes, lovely mugs of tea and the occasional freebird hairstyles.

But don't let on - right..? We wouldn't want too many people there...

Now, I am off to think about my outfit, nails and other sundry things that Divas must do - oh yes, and some poems too... think I'll bring me boob poem to this one for an outing... always goes down well... :)

Books beget more books

2010-06-13T15:51:00.005+01:00

At least books always seem to do so in my case. There I am, on Friday, in Dublin's Chapter's bookshop on Parnell Street, as part of the audience, to help welcome Salmon Poetry's Prophesying the Past by Noel King into the world, and I just can't help myself: arriving early, picking and sifting from the poetry bookshelves.

What do I find? Michael Donaghy's Collected, as well as The Shape of the Dance. Oh joy! I spent all yesterday (Saturday) and today devouring them. God Donaghy was so good (!) - in prose as well as poetry - and I did like him before in poetry, but now I am totally besotted (!) and I have a much better understanding of all the varying schools of poetry (and what nonsense it all is) as well a good overview of why form is a good tool to have in the poetry kitbag. Lucky those who attended his classes in London back in the day. . .

I also found Material by Ros Barber on the bookshelves (alas the last copy), and have been dipping in and out of this extraordinary book. The title poem is practically faultless and there are so many gems in it that it will take some unpacking. Somehow I also came home with Peter Porter's Afterburner as well...

Back to Prophesying the Past, though. I confess to having more than a passing interest in this one: I've proofed it and read the poems many times, and Noel King is also editor of Doghouse who published me back in 2007. It was a real delight to hear the poems given voice and for us to finally see this long-awaited book delivered. Noel reads in the Poetry Cafe in London with Eileen Sheehan on Wednesday 16th June at 7.30pm.

The Magpie Has Landed...

2010-06-09T08:24:00.001+01:00

... in Dundalk. It's a great pleasure today, to welcome Elizabeth Baines' Flying With Magpies tour to sunny Dundalk on the east coast of Ireland, with her new novel, Too Many Magpies.

I devoured this book in one sitting: I am a quick reader, but when a book grabs one's attention the way that Too Many Magpies does, I find it extremely hard to put it down.This book was amazing for its exploration of that disturbing sense of guilt that women experience as parents and the build-up of worry and tension in the novel just kept on ratchetting up. I thought TMM was very well written and I loved the opacity of the language; everything adding to that sense of heightened awareness. Anyhow, on we go with Elizabeth's visit.

Elizabeth Baines was born in South Wales and lives in Manchester. She is a prizewinning author of prose fiction and plays for radio and stage. Too Many Magpies was published by Salt in 2009. Previously Salt published her collection of short stories, (2007) which was pronounced ‘a stunning debut collection’ (The Short Review). In October 2010 Salt will reissue her first, acclaimed novel Balancing on the Edge of the WorldThe Birth Machine. She is also a performer and has been a teacher.

About the book: How do we safeguard our children in a changing and dangerous world? And what if the greatest danger is from ourselves? A young mother fearful for her children’s safety falls under the spell of a charismatic but sinister stranger. A novel about our hidden desires and the scientific and magical modes of thinking which have got us to where we are now.

Elizabeth, you write your main characters very strongly, and the issues and themes that are raised are those that affect women in particular. I enjoyed particularly the voice, that to me was the main strength of the novel; the voice of this woman. How hard is it to articulate a character like the narrator in Too Many Magpies?

Well, to me voice is all-important - to my mind, it's HOW a novel or story is told that is its real essence, and which carries its real meaning. I really can't begin writing until I hear the narrative voice. Sometimes that happens quickly and sometimes it doesn't, I find: you can have the theme and the story and even the characters, but you still can't hear the voice in which the story will be told - whether it's the voice of one of the characters, or of a separate narrator etc, and how precisely that voice sounds. I don't really find that I can do much actively to make this happen: basically I find it's a question of waiting to hear it, and if it doesn't come quickly, you just need to let the novel/story grow in your head. In fact, the voice of Too Many Magpies came to me very quickly right from the start (along with the first sentence that just dropped into my head): that of the main character, a woman trapped in a crisis and fearful for her children. Once the voice comes, I find, you're away, and it feels more like listening than thinking or working anything out. So all in all I found the voice of this particular novel very easy to achieve and as a result I wrote it very quickly. As I say, though, it's not always like that!

Although the woman is having an affair, I still found I had good sympathy with her. Again this is a real strength of the character’s complexity – how much thought do you give to the development of a character: their flaws, their foibles, their strengths?

Again, once I heard this woman's voice, I had her whole person, so I didn't put a lot of conscious thought into developing a profile of her. I know some writers draw up character profiles with backstories etc but I think I'd find that process distracting and defocussing from the bit of a character's story I'm writing and indeed distancing from characters themselves. As with acting (which I also do sometimes) I need to inhabit the story and the characters rather than stand back from them in the way that I think (though I may be wrong) 'profiling' or 'developing' them would require. You know the actor's saying that if you get the right shoes on you know exactly how your character will behave? Well, that's how I feel about voice: once I've got the right voice I feel I know as much as I need to about the character(s) for the story I'm telling, and with a first-person voice like this one I'm right inside the character's head. I know that in reality it's the converse of this last that's true: the characters are actually inside my head, they are constructs of my imagination, and merely aspects of the story I've made up! But for me it's more a question of daydreaming them than thinking them out. And once you're in that state of 'being inside a character's head' (and as long as there's no overall authorial irony, which there isn't in this novel) you're no longer judging him or her, and so the reader, one hopes, is less likely to judge him/her and more likely to identify. I suppose I must say that I did identify with this particular character in some of the more objective, non-writerly ways - which must have helped! - as naturally I drew on some of my own experience of having children, and, more specifically, the thing that happens to her elder child also happened to mine.

I found a magical realism element to the novel: sometimes I felt that the setting was real, sometimes I felt that there was a slippage between a created reality and a second created universe (that may be because I was ill whilst reading, admittedly). This added a real sense of urgency to the novel's progress; I wondered how this atmosphere came about?

I'd say this comes from the narrator's psychology and situation. Her problem is precisely how to view the world and how to work out which is the reality, the empirical world of facts her husband works in, or a world of charms and spells and luck and intuition represented by her lover. And she is indeed slipping from one to the other world as she turns emotionally from one to the other of the two men. And there's another level she slips towards, away from them both: the uncertainty which neither world view properly acknowledges.

Thank you Elizabeth for such an interesting insight into this intriguing novel. For those who want to follow this interview up, you can read about Too Many Magpies on the Salt website; you can watch Elizabeth talking about her novel; and you can hear Elizabeth's podcasts too.

Next week, the Flying With Magpies tour lands at Vanessa Gebbie's Blog, and the last date of the tour is at Eco Libris. All thanks to Elizabeth and the Salt publishing crew.

A Poem, A Plaque

2010-05-27T14:46:00.004+01:00

A few weeks ago, Dundalk Town Council's Arts Office invited me to come over and launch the poem they commissioned me to write, celebrating 15 years of the Arts Office existing in Dundalk, at their annual music bursary awards. They had the poem cast in bronze, which is wonderful although a tad daunting, because it's permanent - so I just hope I got it right.

The poem grew from a recording I was invited to be part of back in August 2009. Dundalk Arts Office was leaving its then premises and moving back into the Town Hall, in the Basement Gallery. Many prominent figures in Dundalk's arts life were asked to come and talk to Harry Lee, of Dundalk FM about how the arts had developed over the past fifteen years.

There were musicians, artists, writers and people involved in drama who spoke of the importance of the arts office and how it enabled people to become more involved in the artistic development of different areas in Dundalk. I enjoyed being a part of that programme, as well as listening to all the figures talking about their experiences. Whether politicians or people on the ground, each person's perspective was interesting and I tried to encapsulate that into the poem.

I know it has especial resonance for those in Dundalk, but perhaps it may not make sense to those outside the town - but that's okay. That's the thing about a commission - you can't please (fool) all the people, all of the time.

Feel free to click on the picture - you should be able to read the poem :)

Being Silent is Good for you

2010-05-24T14:27:00.005+01:00

Photo credit: The Sunday Tribune - the name of the photographer isn't given, alas.

On Saturday I took part in 'Chris Doris: 10 Poets Observe in Silence,' in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. There was a piece about it in the Sunday Tribune yesterday and a photo of us all in the round. This is the most challenging, and yet most rewarding, piece of art I have contributed to in a long time.

What we were asked to do was simply to remain in the present, be silent and observe across the day, for just under six hours. We took breaks every hour and had a lunch break. And so the hours passed, with each of us trying to remain in the now, not wander off in our own thoughts, but let the day pass. And it did pass, serenely, quietly - the Hugh Lane has the sort of acoustics you get in a church or cathedral, which I thought lent a sort of 'holy' quality to the day.

You can call me barmy, if you wish, but I got a lot from it. Maybe you had to be there :)

Drivin' in a straight line...

2010-05-17T09:26:00.011+01:00

Picture thanks to Ireland Genealogy Projects and Roots Web Ancestry

... in a poem is not as easy as it looks on TFE's 'oul bus. I think it might be one of them 'oul-fashioned wans dat dey used ta droive in da 70s & 80s (okay, meybe da 60s) in Dublin - see above.

I gave you all this line: 'I got down on my knees and smelled the brand new linoleum,' from a story by Edna O'Brien (another class act) in her short story collection The Pagan Place.

What you did with it was another matter entirely. Well fair play to you all, you got into it. I'm very impressed with the response - you all engaged with the line and took it your own varied and many ways - and the round up begins here:

Niamh has her Ear To The Ground

Rachel Fox is Flat Down

Emerging Writer is on the bus too

NanU's The Ineffable Scent of Linoleum

JoAnne's in The Kitchen

Don't Feed the Pixies has a quirky take in Out of Gas

TFE's has a Pilgrims Progress sort of moment amongst others

Peter Goulding's pulled out all the rhyming stops for ium

Bill gets technical Close to the Ground

DanaBug dishes the dirt on Willow ware and linoleum

Jeanne Iris is a Mom Interrupted

Poetikat uses her olfactory muscles

Enchanted Oak has a strongly coloured lino: The Red Floor

Pure Fiction breaks Virgin Territory

Padhraig lays it on us in Trackstopper

Colin looks at the roots of it all in Flax

and Watercats with a right kitchen sink drama,

Jessica Maybury talks straight about what you find on the lino

and Linoleum's Fresh Dreams from Chiccoreal

Swiss is better late than never with the process and scents of a Lino cut

I hope that's everyone now! As for the driver well...

The Mechanics of Movement

I got down on my knees and smelled the new linoleum,
adopted the cat stance, then threaded the needle
hand under each arm, slowly in turn, shoulder to floor.
Back to the cat stance, spine arched up and back to rest
and folded my legs with my bum in the bow crook
of my calves. All the while breathin, deeper and deeper.

Drivin' The Poetry Bus

2010-05-11T19:21:00.003+01:00

Next Monday, the 17th of May, I get to grip the wheel of TFE's poetry bus for the day. So I thought I'd better leave what I'm thinking of, out for ye to think of.

"I got down on my knees and smelled the new linoleum..."

Start with that line and see where you go with a poem - this line should give you somewhere to go using longer lines, and that's what I'm interested in seeing you develop, nice long lines: think Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Sinead Morrissey... the Bible

Simples. (I can't make that sucky/squeaky sound those meerkats make...)

You know the drill - leave a comment below if you're contributing and I'll come and look and post your link in my post next Monday - ding, ding, ding!

Krapp's Last Tape

2010-05-08T19:23:00.004+01:00

Last night, I went to see Krapp's Last Tape in the Gate Theatre, Dublin, with Michael Gambon in the title role. Woah.

From the opening, when Krapp's hand comes slowly up from underneath the desk to rub his head and scratch his hair (and I was sitting there thinking about how to convey the 'handness of hands' as he did so well), to the closing scene with Krapp sitting there, aghast, resigned, displaying all the gamut of emotion and none, simultaneously - I was truly spellbound in the second row. The one hour one-hander felt like fifteen minutes in the presence of someone very, very good at what they do.

Fintan O'Toole of the Irish Times must have been at it last night too - his review is far more eloquent than I ever could be, describing Gambon as 'an alchemist of the soul'. I know one thing he doesn't though: last night was really, really special - I saw tears in Michael Gambon's eyes as he took three curtain calls. That's what you get for sitting in the second row..

Irish Pages Annual Lecture

2010-05-05T15:31:00.005+01:00

If you're in Belfast this Friday, here's a thing you might be interested in:

The Fifth Annual Irish Pages Lecture
Friday, 7 May 2010 at 7.30pm
Belfast Exposed, 23 Donegall Street, Belfast

Free Entry & Refreshments

To Scullabogue Backwards from Belfast
Against Sectarian Preconceptions
by Patricia Craig
Introduced by Glenn Patterson

A critic, essayist and anthologist, Patricia Craig was born and grew up in Belfast and
lived for many years in London before returning to Northern Ireland in 1999. She
has written biographies of Elizabeth Bowen and Brian Moore, and edited many
anthologies, including The Oxford Books of Ireland, English Detective Stories and Modern
Women’s Stories, The Belfast Anthology and The Ulster Anthology. Her memoir Asking for
Trouble was published in 2007. She is a regular contributor to The Irish Times, The
Independent and the Times Literary Supplement.

****

In case anyone's wondering, Scullabogue is the name of a townland in County Wexford (VInegar Hill and all that), at which a certain barn was used as a staging post for the rebels in the Irish 1798 Rebellion. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it (the end part rhymes with vogue, if you're not sure how we pronounce it here)?

Solving Sylvia?

2010-05-02T14:39:00.004+01:00

I almost regret getting stuck into Ariel's Gift last week, as it ended up with me re-reading Birthday Letters, Ariel (the facsimile of her original ms), reading Her Husband, by Diane Middlebrook, and then turning to the internet to order Plath's Collected Poems (I did have this, but don't know where it's gone), as well as her Journals, Letters Home (you need these both, apparently, to balance each other out), and Johnny Panic & her collected Prose. I stopped myself just as the bill came to the 100 mark, at the children's stories - but only just.

I've also ordered some Anne Sexton, and Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, oh and AS's Collected too, I read her work at AMK and decided I really should have my own copy. But that's by the by.

Anyhoo, what do I think of the whole thing? I find S&T's whole story appallingly fascinating. Their sad story reminds me of my own parents: miserable together, miserable without each other. My mother felt trapped by the whole marriage versus a creative life. Like SP, my mother had an American upbringing and education (her parents fled France when WWII broke out). In Dublin at the end of the 60s, at the age of twenty-one, she met my dad, at uni, and got pregnant, married and ended up living in the back-of-beyond in a border-town-land just as the Troubles were starting away from the city lights, trying to raise children and have a creative life. The strain of trying, coupled with the loss of a baby, I think, caused her mental unravelling, and contributed to the subsequent demise of the marriage. He too had his own mental and personal issues - there are always two sides, and then ten more, to any story.

Weirdly (or perhaps not, if you're a psychologist), I've found myself in slightly similar circumstances to my mother: six children and all the concomitant responsibilities that go with those different personalities; as well as my own wants, wishes and desires for a working creative life. I guess you could say that I'm looking at my options; weighing my life and wondering, Have I got the balance right? Am I doing what I want to be doing? I'm beginning to think that the answer may not be what I want it to be; so I'm going to have to think strongly about what's important to me: the writing I should be doing, instead of the energy I give to others in the teaching process (Plath & Hughes taught in the US for a year; they didn't do much writing).

But back to the original spark of this journal-post: Ariel's Gift is designed as a sort of primer; like a literary York notes to Hughes' Birthday Letters. Erica Wagner takes each part of the couple's life together and matches the poems of that period. It begins with the infamous meeting of Plath & Hughes (she reciting his recently published poem back to him; he being snarling and manly - and all the rest) and goes on from there.

After a certain point, I couldn't escape feeling that Birthday Letters is more than an apologia gleaned from a lifetime of mourning and regret. Hughes would always write from the vantage point of selectively looking in his rear-view mirror; how he sees things and how he has to re-read her work in cataloguing it for posterity (and sale to Smith College) -memory being a trickster too. BL is in some aspects a synthesis of both of their work; the working relationship they had once shared was almost symbiotic: they re-used each other's mss to write on, they seized on each other's images and metaphors from poem to poem. In Hughes re-reading of her work, re-working of this material personal to them both, perhaps he came more to terms with the psychic rift that occured between them - but this is to trivialise the whole matter, and to re-hash what a whole pile of other people have written as well; I do realise.

Our fascination as a reader is with the what-ifs: what if she had lived and gone on to develop her writing talent; what could her riposte have been. That is why their story is enduringly fascinating to me - almost fifty years later; that and the personal similarities that I identify with.

Mad Yaks & Everyman & Ariel's Gift

2010-04-23T12:01:00.007+01:00

This week's been great - all these books started arriving in the post and then yesterday my youngest son brought up an envelope that my husband had missed: a book that arrived while I was away, before I got sick - The Floorshow at the Mad Yak Cafe! I'd been looking forward to buying this and reading it, but it was a real unexpected surprise to find it already here :)

I ripped open the envelope and was delighted to read Colin Will's work inside - intially impressed by the closing Far Eastern sequence, which includes the title poem; avoids being 'tourist poetry' by the fact of being calm and examining, without trying to judge by Western standards. Others that jump out at me are 'Mr Self-Destruct does not want to workshop today' (great title, huh?); 'Old campaigner,' 'Exiles,' and these are just for starters. I recommend this book, just for the whispering subtlety that is shown in poems like 'The Jewel in the Gym.' Imagined or real emotion-scapes, I think its hard to tell the difference between them; here's a writer who's invested a great deal in the act of imagining and making art from that act. Something about it, which reminded me strongly of the work I'd been reading earlier in the week, Michael Donaghy's Safest.

Other books received: from Michael Farry, (thank-you - so much) a whole block of Roths (could that be a new turn of phrase). I started with American Pastoral, which I found heavy-going, but brilliant at turns. I read the shorter Everyman yesterday and I actually loved it: the grim, gutsy Jewish humour behind every twist and turn of the protaganist's fate. It starts in a graveyard at a funeral, and tells the story of how the bloke in the coffin came to end up there; supplying all his faults and failings in between. As an examination of the life of a man and an exposition on the theme of regret, I thought it was pretty masterful. I did wonder though, if it was a healthy thing to be reading about someone with dodgy health, when my own health is dodgy! I have The Plot Against America to go, but I might wait for a few days; Roths are rich and need digesting.

Currently reading Ariel's Gift, which TFE had a spare copy of, and am reading it in tandem with Birthday Letters and Ariel, which are staring at me from the bookcases in my bedroom. A'sG is meaty and interesting; how we are all obsessed with Hughes and Plath and what happened to them both. Underneath, they were people -deeply flawed, deeply talented, but people. Erica Wagner seems to want to show how Hughes paid for his repression of his part of the experience, but tried to make up for it with Birthday Letters. More on this when I've read it, if I haven't got fed up with it...

Withdrawal

2010-04-20T18:17:00.003+01:00

It's nice to be mollycoddled like I have been in the last four days. Breakfast in bed; lunch and dinner made for me. All I have to do is eat and not complain. He is becoming a very good cook - I trained him well ;)

I don't have to worry about shopping, laundry, what the kids are up to - nothing. It's a bit weird and takes a lot of getting used to, as I normally hold the reins of control quite tightly. Too tightly, he says. It's a bit like being a kid, not having these responsibilities. All I have to worry about is eating, sleeping and the mere body basics.

So, I'm reading: Elizabeth Baines new book, Too Many Magpies arrived yesterday. I read that to the strains of a programme on Madwomen in the Attic. How appropriate; the undercurrent of paranoia is so well maintained in EB's tightly woven book. I also have some Philip Roths coming in the post - and I'm getting a chance to look around the web and catch up on people's blogs.

Everything has slowed down to the pace of the Radio 4 programmes I listen to. There is nowhere I have to be or do. I just have to learn to be better and not push it at all - I paid for that yesterday and ended up sleeping in this morning. Softly, softly.

Readings and settings

2010-04-17T16:27:00.003+01:00

Before I headed off to hospital Friday a week ago, I had the rare pleasure of hearing Martin Dyar, winner of the 2009 Patrick Kavanagh Award for an unpublished ms, reading to a select group of about 40 - 50 people.

The setting was magical: the drawing room of an old country house, Annaverna House, in the middle of a forest, on the slopes of Cuchulainn country - Ravensdale and the Cooley Peninsula. First, some readings by local writers; some who are getting started in the trade and some more established (yeah, I read too).

After drinkies and chat, Martin Dyar totally wooed the audience with his tales of characters from Mayo, his muscular language - I heard comparisons being made with Ted Hughes' work! Long poems, short poems, humorous and restrained, he brought something for everyone and had us all utterly spellbound. He even read the poem he read last year at the Irish Writers' Centre, Dublin for the Stinging Fly launch, which I think is called 'Death and the Post Office.'

That reading has sustained me over what became a very trying week. I ended up in hospital (again) from Sunday, with a partially collapsed lung, as a result of pneumonia - which I think I may have had for some time - fatigue and a persistant pain under my left ribs had been diagnosed as, well, something 'muscular' ... hmm.

It's going to be a long recovery, and you can help me: what I'm looking for are a list of books, easily obtainable, (think Easons for a start - possibly Amazon) that I might enjoy - come on guys, save my poetry & prose soul!

Sore but still here

2010-04-10T17:11:00.004+01:00

I never knew how much pain two tiny wee holes could cause you! Well, it's all over bar the shouting, but it went well yesterday, despite me blubbering like a baby in the ante-room before I went in - last November I hadn't a good experience with the medication I was given before the colonoscopy; I was lucid for some of that experience and it gave me nightmares for weeks afterwards. Put it this way, yesterday I was scared witless.

Needless to say, the anaesthesia staff were really kind to me, and I was away with the fairies before you could say 'general anaesthetic.' I came round after a forty min op which sorted me all out for now. Into the wee holes they made, one under the belly-button, one above the bikini line, they inserted cameras and instruments, as well as Carbon Dioxide which helps to make space so that they can see around the organs a bit easier.

So, today, apart from these weird pains in my diaphragm and shoulders (which is caused by the dispersion of the CO2 and is normal after a laparoscopy) and my stomach feeling like someone peformed Riverdance on it with elephants that were high on red bull (maybe they did, who knows what they get up to in Theatre when you're out for the count!), I'm grand. Nothing that a bit of Difene and some extra strength Nurofen, as well as a good night's sleep won't cure. Aren't we women fierce resilient all the same?

Wish me luck...

2010-04-08T12:08:00.003+01:00

... tomorrow I go under the knife - well, only a tiny hole actually; that's the beauty of a laparoscopy, a teeny, tiny hole, through which they insert a camera, CO2, the kitchen sink and whatever else they can get up the tube that goes into my tummy.

I'm just concerned about whatever it is that may come out... or, there being nothing in there and the pain is just 'in my mind' (thank you Eddie Izzard, for that one).

Either which way, I will be out of my mind for at least one day. No change there, then... :)

See you on the far side!

Snowy start to spring

2010-04-01T16:48:00.005+01:00

Pics of the great house at Annamakerrig, otherwise known as the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for Writers and Artists, and the lake in front of it from the far side - a bit mucky but worth the walk.

So, there we were in March, and we thought spring had finally arrived, but it turned out that winter still had a sting in its tail to deliver.Still, I've had a great time sorting out my poems, writing a few more and letting some air into the cobwebbed spaces that were my mind. I feel refreshed, recharged and ready to face the next few weeks...!

The snow is now melting here and the sun is quite warm - and it's April.

Annamakerrig Awaits

2010-03-26T18:23:00.005Z

I'll be off writing for a whole week, undisturbed (sans hub, sans kids, sans everything - bar the sense), at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for Artists and Writers.

Tyrone Guthrie, playwright, was a rare spirit. He gifted his estate, deep in the drumlins of Co. Monaghan, to the Irish state upon his death in 1971, as a place to be developed for giving artists a space to work in.

I've already received a couple of bursary residencies to this magical place, last year (one lot from Dundalk Town Council, another from the centre itself), and by the Goddess did I make the most of those three weeks.

This coming week is my last gifted week there, making the most of Tyrone Guthrie's far-sighted hospitality, which is continued through the friendly staff who mind the place on his behalf, for us writers and artists: Guests of the Nation, indeed!

Thanks TG.

The Chimaera

2010-03-23T14:41:00.005Z

The new issue of The Chimaera is online, and there's a review of Nigel McLoughlin's Chora, a new and selected from Templar Poetry.

There are also other reviews from Angela France on Alison Brackenbury & Paul Stevens on Jee Leong Koh's book, Equal to the Earth (lovely title, don't you think?), and poems galore, themed and unthemed, from all sorts of poets (Alison Brackenbury & Anna Evans to name but a few).

Check out this lovely online poetry ezine, it's presented well and easy to navigate and some of the poems can also be heard as well as read.

Oh yeah, I wrote the NMcL review... nearly forgot!

"With a shillelagh under me arm...

2010-03-16T14:04:00.004Z

Photo courtesy of St. Patrick's Shamrock Company at http://www.realshamrock.com - a website where you can buy shamrock - jaypers I'll be getting mine out in the field, as usual!

...and a twinkle in me eye,
I'm off to Tipperary in the morning!"

I wish - but, it is good that St. Patrick's Day falls on a Wednesday this year, as it gives me a chance to mitch off from teaching - no I mean take a well-earned rest and have a bit of family time.

I'm just surfacing from what has to have been my own worst winter of discontent: illness after illness, pain after pain, strange swellings and shrinkings, ultra-mood swings - it could be viewed as being funny, in that understated way that Irish women have, except that all the way along since last September I've remained undiagnosed - but I'm finally getting closer to a diagnosis! Progress indeed. I've had a colonoscopy (basically, a camera up me bum -unneeded, but apparently an elimination that was needed), and an OGD, both of which thankfully I was knocked out for (camera lowered into the tummy and small intestine). Nice, I suppose, to know that at least that part of me is okay and has been passed as fit. Wish the rest of me was :/

But it seems that the pains and the mood-swings and the awful, awful mind-numbing tiredness is down to wandering bits of endometrium; the lining of the womb.

You'd think that this stuff would stay put, where it belongs - but no, in some women it likes to go off and have an ould grow on other organs, causing 'adhesions' which are when one bit sticks to another - say your ovary to your womb, or your ovary to every other organ around it.

What happens every month as you go through the cycle is that these extraneous bits grow and shed, just like your womb would, except that there's nowhere for the shedding to go... which is why you get strange, regular pains (that were frankly the most excruciating thing I've ever been through - I'd much rather have had a baby, without any anaesthesia any day!). I'm far from having the whole thing sorted out, but it's nice to have a name for the symptoms - endometriosis - and not feel like I'm simply going doolally.

So, wherever you are, have a Happy St. Patrick's Day : enjoy the wearing of the green and have an ould pint of shtout for me!

Lovely things to read

2010-03-12T14:40:00.006Z

This week, into my mailbox arrived Paul Maddern's Kelpdings (great title); The Stinging Fly (so many good stories/poems in there - and congrats to Kit Fryatt on winning piece of the year), The Dark Horse from Scotland/US (really enjoyed this last subscription and now they've gone 'buy online' so there's no excuse!). Last but not least is the Poetry Divas 1(still a few copies left- go there to buy!) pamphlet with those brazen poetry huss... lovely ladies! The Divas work hard and play hard as is evidenced by the poems in this first edition, complete with a cover of pink wellie-booties in a love-heart - oh yah.

Paul Maddern's pamphlet from Templar was one of the winners of their pamphlet competition last year and it's just gorgeous. The poems, the cover (how can you not like a cover that colour), the pamphlet, the words... it's like taking a vacation in your head in much warmer Island waters... how I long for some real heat in the sunshine now.

This year's Templar pamphlet comp. is already open, in fact it closes mid-April, so you'd want to get a move on soon. The judge is Pat Winslow (get her poetry if you can - very, very talented poet) and the comp. closes on the 8th May 2010. Get cracking now (that last bit was to myself ) B)

International Women's Day

2010-03-08T10:57:00.003Z

So, what are you doing to celebrate International Women's Day?

I remember when I was expecting the twins being asked to read at a poetry event in Drogheda to celebrate, with Susan Connolly - that's eleven years ago now, in 1999! Frightening.

Today, I'll content myself with hugging some quiet poetry news to myself and thinking about the achievements of some great women in writing: Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Molloy, Adrienne Rich - and some more contemporary ones: Emerging Writer, Nuala, Apprentice, Peony Moon, Jane Holland, Pascale Petit, Kay MacKenzie Cooke... and that's just a quick glance around the blogospere - here's to us grils (yes, that is deliberate!).

A Christening Through Binoculars

2010-02-28T14:27:00.003Z

‘I can see God through my nocliers,’ you said
and we indulged your three-year-old self
with shushing smiles as the priest intoned the rites
that would make you one of theirs.

I held your baby sister in my arms as we waited
our turn for water droplets, for you and her.
You scrutinised the ceiling, hunted for loose angels,
asked ‘ If heaven was inside the chapel walls?'

I thought not, but didn’t say, as you were bundled
up by a burly Godfather, to receive your blessing,
and I offered the crowns of both your downy heads
in return for confirmation that binoculars allowed.

This is pure rough, I'll take it down later for work!

Bookshops going Bust

2010-02-27T22:22:00.003Z

I heard this morning in class, and it was later confirmed, that the newish kids on the block, Hughes and Hughes, the Irish booksellers have gone into receivership. Odd, I thought to myself, didn't they post a profit last year?

We're gutted here in Dundalk, as it was a great bookshop with a coffee-shop area, and a lovely children's section, and they were the sort of bookshop that would order it in for you, if they didn't have it. Hell, they'd even ring you to tell you it had arrived. They didn't mind you looking around and the sort of stock they held was definitely a cut above the Easons that we have here - you could buy decent poetry books in it for a start, or more obscure books that you mightn't find. Jeepers, I even found Claire Keegan's last book in it, Walk the Blue Fields.

It means now that for book-purchasing and browsing, I'm constrained to having to go to Dublin, or to rely more heavily on that internet book crowd, than I was before. I'll admit that doesn't help matters, as far as H&H were concerned - I had a tendency to go to the internet quicker than ask a bookshop to order; but that was down to the constraints in the past of juggling kids as well as the sort of books I wanted to get my hands on.

Here, on the outer rim of Europe, sometimes you have to try that little bit harder if you're looking for books that are better known in the UK, or US or beyond: last year I remember going to Waterstones in Dublin and asking for Mick Imlah's The Lost Leader, and them not knowing what I was on about.

So what's a girl to do? Books are moving in a similar direction that music moved in; online access, downloading onto these new fangled reader devices. But does that mean the death of books? And does that mean the death of bookshops? And where does the library fit in to all this, with their (surely by now) reduced budgets in the recession? Am I to become a weird oddity with all those feicin bookshelves I bought to hold all the card-bound paper sheets (that I bought) - with black typing on those sheets!

News reports are saying that high rents were partly to blame for H&H's sudden demise, and that landlords might need to get a little more real with their expectations in the CEC (current economic climate). But the fact that a big bookstore like Waterstones could say that their business was down by 10-15% over the Christmas period tells us a lot (as if we needed to be told) about what people are cutting back on. It can't be good in the long run for writers.

New Shoes

2010-02-19T18:22:00.003Z

Get Your Love Groove On,

2010-02-14T14:48:00.002Z

Okay, get your Barry White out, your half dozen oysters, your peppercorn steaks and chocolate puds and in your bestest, deepest chocolate voice get it on, on the Lurve Bus...

The Garden of Earthly Delights

In the kitchen, Valentine,
it will begin with the green
curlicues of garlic shoots hid
in the cold shelf of the fridge.

The prying, bulging eyes of spuds
will wink in the clammy closeness
of their plastic bag. All being pulled
spring-tight tonight, through the tilting

built into their bolting seed husks.
And you too will respond with the flick
in your loins, the click in your head
as my hands riot in the radishes,

tease out the aubergine chunks,
toss together pillows of cherry tomatoes
and delight in these firm ruins
of last year's seedpods. There,

Valentine, is where you will begin.

Crossroads

2010-02-12T19:02:00.006Z

I received, this day last week, an anthology of creative writing from the Deansgrange Writer's Group, based in Dublin, called Crossroads. It's edited by Katie Donovan, a poet whose work I've admired in the library up at the TGC at Annaghmakerrig. Katie has a new & selected due in 2010 from Bloodaxe, entitled Rootling.

Katie modestly describes her input as that of a selector, and her choice of work throws up some interesting poems, stories and memoir - and when you look at the bios in the back you realise that many of these names are people you've seen namechecked before in journals and mags around the country.

11 contributors, too many to mention, all interesting work, with a good opener (William and Eileen - Catherine Paradise) and a great close (The Coat - John Piggott). I'm still dipping into it, alongside the great tome from RTE's Sunday Miscellany programme, and they're a good complement to each other for bedside reading.

It's a great credit to the group to organise the anthology - I know exactly how much hard work goes into them, from my own foray into anthologies last year (Drogheda Writes 2, anyone?) and I know DWG would appreciate the support. The group are donating proceeds to the National Rehabilitation Hospital, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin; a worthy cause from a worthy group of writers. Copies are available at their website for only €10.00.

Oh and did I mention how lovely the cover is...? ;)

A Weary Spring-start

2010-02-07T15:28:00.004Z

Sorry that there hasn't been much going on in here for a while, but I've been under the weather. The weather as in cold - it plays havoc with my shoulders, and a long standing stiffness that I have (no sniggering at the back there). Basically the colder it gets, the stiffer I get and it got to the stage that I couldn't move out of my bed for a couple of days.

But on the bright side, I got to read at the new Brat Bride Dundalk festival last Sunday, which featured, weirdly, another Bee Smyth, and the Poetry Chicks. I'm already a big fan of these girls (and Conor the pianist), as I've seen them and met them at Flatlake and Electric Picnic last year, where I read too (part of the ever-changing Poetry Divas, don't ya know). They moved the audience with their rousing aural-work and got genuine gasps and wows - what more could you ask for.

Now, in an aside, I've heard tell that Flatlake is moving its dates to June - anyone know anything about this?

In other news, it's competition time again - Strokestown has passed, but there's still time to enter Wigtown in Scotland, they don't close until Friday 12th, and there's word from Cavan, about the Cavan Crystal Poetry Competition which opens its doors to Adults this year. €10 for three poems and it closes March 31st. Bridport is of course open once again, plenty of time to think about your entries of either short stories or poems - but I'd given up on them because it is such a big/high-class field. Still, time to think outside the box, eh?

What else do you be doing when spring is a-coming in, but clear the decks of that stuff you've been a-writing ;)

Mainstream Love Hotel & Other Books

2010-01-22T11:50:00.003Z

This week sees a lot of books flying in my letterbox. I've been reading Mainstream Love Hotel, Todd Swift's latest offering, and bought copies of Elizabeth Bishop's Collected, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, Wallace Steven's Collected - and The New York Poets anthology from Carcanet, while I was at it, because I wanted Frank O'Hara's work all in the one place - in fact that was why I bought the others, so that I can more easily refer to them as I want, instead of rooting about at the various Nortons stashed away (besides, I had a book clear-out, enabling me to buy some... oh, you know how it is with a book-sickness!).

Anyhow, back to MLH from tall-lighthouse - all week I've been reading this, as well as catching up on new episodes of Mad Men (we're a few weeks ahead of the UK - bless RTE). One seems to compliment the other in a weird connected way: smart, sophisticated, sexy, psyco-analytical, egotistical, and old-school with a new-twist this book plays with you, toys with you, right from the opener, 'Mirror', with its cryptic ending, 'The sister of knowing is making.'

In fact, there's a wonderful playfulness about the whole book, a lightness that carries each poem's deeper layered sense, as in 'The talking cure,' which is also one of my favourite poems in the collection: yes, 'Bold. / Bad Baby' indeed. There's also a wonderful facility with language, again playful and fizzing, as in 'French poem,' where the sonics gleefully bounce down the lines from 'Elle' to 'Eiffel' and on to 'Zola' and then 'novel.' Stylish, sexy and smart? Yes. But there's great grist in there too, and a wonderful joie-de-vivre, no doubt because of Swift's Canadian background, and varied European living experiences.

And there's a waryness too in his work: 'These days,' again another well-wrought sonic and rhythmically cadenced poem balances each of its phrases carefully carrying the poem's motion softly down the page:

These are the days
not other days
these are the days I was
working towards
as other further weeks,
working for days
that now I see have come in,
fish from the street

sold fresh, the man
in his whites, ringing to bring
fish just off the boats,
days that were in the sea

...

I'd thought to have my work
done by now, to have reached

the goals set out long ago,
I won't get there now

But you must read the book to reach the poem's shimmering conclusion!

Known as a tireless promoter of poetry wherever he has travelled in the past, Swift now lives in London where he continues finding and pushing new (and established) poetic talent in his Oxfam Marylebone reading series. I think Mainstream Love Hotel sees a sure move forward from the previous Seaway: New & Selected from Salmon Poetry, which spanned a twenty year writing career. It's great to see his work becoming available to a broader audience and it will be interesting to watch the trajectory of his next twenty poetic years.

A Meme about Books

2010-01-18T10:52:00.005Z

I haven't indulged in these for a while, but this one intrigued me. I nicked it from Sheenagh Pugh's blog which is well worth reading in any case.

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?

Lord of the Rings – sorry!

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you'll read next?

Currently reading Mainstream Love Hotel. Just finished The Lost Symbol, because I like reading pulp and giving out about it just as much as anyone else!

3. What book did everyone like and you hated?

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. I really wanted to like it, but I got a bit annoyed with the heroine in the end. Probably just me being curmudgeonly, because I know the book went on to win great honours for its author, so it must be good.

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you'll read, but you probably won't?

Ulysses by you-know-who. I know the plot, the characters and the story: I just need to read the damn thing.

5. Which book are you saving for "retirement?"

Isn’t that a bit ahead – who knows what I’ll be doing then!

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?

If I get annoyed with the book I will do this, but I’ll still read the rest of it. Mainly I wouldn’t do this on myself, as I enjoy holding back too much.

7. Acknowledgments: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?

I can see both sides to that argument. A publisher I know said it was better to try and be concise, rather than thanking everyone, including the cat. Funnily enough, established writers don’t have long Ack. lists, if at all.

8. Which book character would you switch places with?

Watson, from Sherlock Holmes. I’d love to see Holmes in action, see the way his mind worked. I reckon I might have a bit of trouble in the trouser department, though.

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?

I have a book that I bought second-hand: Richard Scarry’s Big Book of Words. I bought it because it was the first book my parents bought me after a trip they had away and I loved it the way some kids love a teddy bear, or doll. I did let the kids read it – I’m not that precious – but I have reclaimed it, to ‘pass on.’

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.

The Crowning Privilege, a book of Oxford lectures by Robert Graves. It was the first, and probably the last, book I bought on eBay. It was brilliant – Graves had a strange mind when it came to poetry and how it worked – if you’re in any doubt about that, try reading The White Goddess.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

I find it extremely hard to part with books, but I have given them away - I gave a signed copy of a Billy Collins poetry collection to a dear friend of mine. I regretted it instantly, but she adored it.

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?

Probably that copy of The Lord of the Rings. It has moved house with me countless times.

13. Any "required reading" you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?

Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. I hated it in secondary school, but loved it later as one of twelve 19^th c novels I had to read for a literature course.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

Dried flowers. And a shopping list. Not in the same book, obviously. Although who knows..?

15. Used or brand new?

I like both. I love the smell that second-hand books have, slightly musty and, well, bookish, but I love the feel of a book that hasn’t been opened yet, cracking the spine of it – that sort of thing.

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?

I’ve read him, but I don’t like categorising. Pass.

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

I had reservations about Peter Jackson tackling LOTR. But I thought he did very well in the end. Can’t think of any movies that are better than the book, because I do like both mediums and also I like the world I create in my own head when I read a book.

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?

Uh, can't think.

19. Have you ever read a book that's made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

Paradise by Abdul Razzak Gurnah. It was aching. It made me hungry to experience eastern Africa. But that part of Africa probably doesn’t exist any more. All the more reason why the book worked for me.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you'll always take?

I used to have a great friend who was always dropping in really interesting books and CDs. Alas we don’t live in the same town anymore, but I always read those books – many of which I still have.

Now, if you feel like having a go at this yourself - nominate yourself. Go on, you know you want to!

Spring Sap - Already?

2010-01-15T13:23:00.003Z

So, only a few days since this area shook off its white winter coat and assumed its green one and what a relief to see green again. I think that you can feel a little ill if you don't get to see the colours you're used to seeing out in the garden. It's so warm today I've even turned off the heating, which is a bit mad. I even saw a few buds on my clematis outside, which is great because I was worried it had been killed by the cold.

I think they used to call these days Halcyon days; country people that is. I remember that great Weather Eye columnist Brendan McWilliams writing about them in the back pages of the Irish Times. He talked about those rare days you get in winter when the sun actually shines and people and the country take a wee breather.

It's nice, I can tell you, not to be feeling my feet going numb or my fingers going stiff over the keyboard. I know, you think I'm probably some old crock, the way I'm going on. Thing is, as I get older I'm getting a lot stiffer, a lot earlier than I'd like. So days like today are a blessing, halcyon or not. It makes me think forward to the summer.

And someone outside is running a machine that sounds like a lawn-mower. Incroyable! Brid's Day isn't even here yet...

Changing the Numbers

2010-01-03T14:58:00.003Z

Isn't it great to be able to say twenty-ten, instead of the mouthful of two-thousand-and-nine, and all the previous year incarnations up 'til the end of the decade?

I remember when I was a little girl watching some programme on the TV, in the seventies, about what life might be like post-millenia, and seeing a picture of the then-BBC-newsreader Richard Baker put through special ageing makeup in order to see what he'd look like thirty or forty something years from then. Basically it was just a grey wig they used, plus some crow's feet around the eyes. I remember thinking that it was a long time away to me, a little girl - but look how the years have just plinkity-plinked past. Jeepers, I didn't even feel that last decade at all, at all.

All this is by way of remarking on how quickly forty-two years have snuck past when I wasn't looking; somehow I don't think I'll feel the next forty-odd either. This time thing: you can waste it and spend it, some say you can even save it (but I've never seen a time bank, have you?) - but you can't keep it from flowing through your fingers - each day, each hour, each second - all those labels to help us move along our seven days, our months, our years... and time only ever moves one way. Time's slow arrow moves into a future that we cannot see - a little like shooting over your shoulder without taking aim. Hmm.

Asking a Shadow to Dance

2009-12-31T21:06:00.006Z

I rather wish that I had had this sooner so I could recommend it as something to be added to a Christmas wish-list, but still - this DVD from Oxfam Marylebone is a real treasure trove.

What is it? A DVD featuring 35 (yes, that many!) young British poets: some filmed on the occasion of the The Manhattan Review launch (remember, I madly flew off to be at that?) back in March 5th; others were filmed in interesting locations such as the Poetry Library, Southbank and Norwich. The poets were selected by Todd Swift, he of Eyewear (and lately of Mainstream Love Hotel fame too!).

It's good value, it's a worthy cause and if you want to pop an oul thermometer under the tongue of British poetry and wallop its knees for a reflex check, this is where you should start. I don't profess to like everything on this - but nor should I. It is as diverse and wide-ranging as the sheer breadth of voices (and faces) that feature.

My own favourites? Emily Berry (yes, that rather brilliant corset poem), Ben Wilkinson, Joe Dunthorne, Colette Sensier, Agnes Lehoczky, Kavita Joshi... actually, on reflection I am wondering what's not to like...?

It's available online, for the meagre sum of £12.99, and could be looked at as a good glimpse of what's happened in British poetry since the millenium - go on, you know its worth it :)

Ooh - another nearly made it

2009-12-23T14:16:00.004Z

I just found out today (thanks Michael Farry!) that I got shortlisted for the Basil Bunting Award, the new poetry competition that was launched this year.

I was delighted for a number of reasons: well, validation being one of them, but Achieving the Lotus Gait, is part of a longer sequence of poems I've been writing on and off during the year on the grisly subject of torture.

I think it may be some sort of sublimated desire to deal with yucky things from the past. Anyway, I'm delighted to see my name on that short list, along with names I recognise, like Dawn Wood from Scotland. I think I'm the only Irish name in there... that's twice that's happened now :))))

Congratulations to the worthy winners, of course. I think the judges' report shows just how tough their criteria were.

Meeting Roddy Doyle

2009-12-09T18:35:00.003Z

It's always nice when you can get work and your own interests together in the same room, and it didn't come any better than this afternoon, when the long-awaited 'One Author, One Community' initiative finally came to fruition in Navan, and Roddy Doyle sailed into our midst for a totally spellbound two-hour visit.

We had chosen to read and work on one of his lesser known novels, 'Mad Weekend,' written in 2006, the year after Liverpool had won the European silverware (after a dramatic match: first half - no score, second half, score 3 - 0... remember...?). Anyhoo, the plot of this novella, saw three 20 something Dub male mates organise to go to a match in Liverpool on the night they are watching the European final. When they eventually get to Liverpool, they spend a great deal of time in The Beehive pub chatting up girls and losing one of their number - as well as seeing a Chelsea v Liverpool match... and the rest - well, you'd have to read it :)

Featuring Roddy's trademark snappy Dub (and Liverpudlian) dialogue, all the groups of learners involved really got into appreciating Roddy's work in the lead-up to today: some wrote him letters, some wrote him reviews, and some thought up some fiendishly difficult questions, which Roddy answered with generosity and aplomb - heck, even panache.

Well, he won a definite fan in me - not that that was ever in doubt. I still fondly remember going to see The Committments in Camden Town in London, back in 1991 with my mates and feeling very proud of being Irish afterwards, even we were all eejits. I was so proud today to see how well everyone acquitted themselves - and I think I won a few fans over to the cause of reading and writing - not bad for a few weeks work :)

Word up: Roddy's own favourite book is actually The Snapper; he told us a great story about how he was in the Rotunda, waiting for his own wife to give birth, and while there the camera crew turned up to film the pregnant girl arriving to the hospital - talk about life imitating art.

Excellent day - deadly buzz man!

More Lovely Poetry Books...

2009-12-06T17:15:00.003Z

... being launched in Dublin on Tuesday 8th December @ 6.30pm at the Unitarian Church, St. Stephens Green, by Director of Poetry Ireland, Joseph Woods. This is a lovely venue for a launch, as you get to read your work from a pulpit and the acoustics are very good in poetry terms. Plus, there are interesting stain-glass windows to gaze at as you hear the words.

The books in question? Well, Arlen Houseare are launching five books; Red Riding Hood's Dilemma, by Orfhlaith Foyle, Shedding Skin, by James Martyn, imram/odyssey by Celia De Freine, An Urgency of Stars, by Geraldine Mills and The Truth in Mustard, by Terry McDonagh.

All interesting titles, I think you'd agree. I can't go myself, because I must teach... but I shall be looking forward to ogling the books and getting inside the covers before too long :)

Good luck to them all on the night - maybe you might fit this line-up in :)

Michelle's Peony Favourite Poetry Books 2009

2009-12-01T14:24:00.002Z

Michelle of Peony Moon has a great series running just now: writers with their favourite books of 2009.

Part 5 includes my choices, but not my whys... more on this rumination later. As you can guess, I was hard pushed to actually nail three, never mind six - there are so many great poetry books out there.

If you were stuck for a Christmas present for someone who likes poetry, and wanted to get them something out of the usual for Christmas, you could do a lot worse than browse these lists and google the results. It just shows you there's some mighty fine poetry out there...

Nude Launch Afters

2009-11-27T20:25:00.004Z

Sorry I wasn't back here sooner, I was a little, um, busy this last two days.

Anyhow, Nuala's launch for Nude went very well indeed: quite a crowd turned out in the delightful No Grants Gallery for the night and many copies were sold - good job too. What great timing to have a nude exhibition, as a backdrop for the launch.

I collected my bag of copies for my creative writers and they can't wait to receive them tomorrow - they've been made wait a little longer than I first anticipated, so I'm glad to be delivering them.

Afraid I had to swing away early, I had an appointment with a large dose of preparatory lower-tummy medicine, and a toilet (and the least said about that the better - yuk!).

But I did manage to quickly swing by the Irish Writer's Centre to pick up a copy of the Davy Byrnes Six Stories shortlists and winners - and you gotta take your hat off to Claire Keegan - 'Foster', her winning story, is a pure blow-away. Feic me.

If you want to see pics, pop on over to Nuala's blog. My favourite is the one with all the chaps under the nude pictures ... :)

Dublin Nude Launch

2009-11-24T17:55:00.002Z

I hope I have your attention now. I'm in Dublin tomorrow night for the launch of Nude, from Salt Publishing, by Nuala Ni Chonchuir (sorry about your fadas, N, this new version of Windows Internet Explorer won't let me copy and paste your name into Blogger, grrr! - give me Mozilla Firefox anytime!).

Where: No Grants Gallery, Temple Bar, Dublin 2

When: 6pm

Who: Nuala Ni Chonchuir

What: Nude

How: by any means possible!

So, you've been warned :)

PS. Did I mention I'm launching it..? Better go and write me speech now, hadn't I?

List Making

2009-11-20T22:02:00.003Z

We are making lists here in Barbara-land. Ones that decide whether certain people have been naughty or nice, as well as ones that make fine promises about culinary standards that need to be addressed for the Yule season (whether to use Jamie's turkey treatment, or the stuffing as per the recipe on the back of the stuffing bag last year) - as well as outer rings of lists that orbit around the inner lists in a sort of black-hole-singularity kind of way (see, I've been reading the blogs tonight and paying attenshun).

So, I wondered: what goes on your lists for Christmas? Do you make lists of things that have to be done, or is it more a mental checklist (because you now know exactly what those lists should contain (besides socks and jocks))?

Do you worry about your lists; do you make a master-list of lists; and, more to the point, what happens when you start to list under the lists that you've made...?

Here's one thing that's going on my list: wasabi!

StAnza virtual poetry fest

2009-11-13T09:17:00.002Z

Have a look at the post on Colin Will's blog about tomorrow, Saturday 14th's web festival of poetry, brought to you by the folks at StAnza.

They're beaming in live poetry from all over the world, from Mumbai, India to Sacramento, USA and everywhere in between, by satellite to St Andrews and then it's simultaneouly being webcast - so you can enjoy the action from the comfort of your own laptop.

StAnza website is here The festival kicks off at 1pm and finishes at around 10pm with live music etc to close. Remember this is a live stream; there won't be any catching up if you've missed anything, but you can tune in at any stage during the day.

Colin has the full line up in his post, mentioned above, along with poems, pics and translations. Do check out this exciting virtual poetry festival if you can, Saturday!

Ouroboros Review

2009-11-12T19:51:00.002Z

Another fine issue is just out, with poems by Susan Millar DuMars, John Walsh, Michelle McGrane, Arlene Ang and so many, many more.

Why not spread it around - it looks and reads really well, even on screen and you can embiggen it too - it's practically a magazine on your desktop. All you're missing is the licking of your finger to flick the pages - and lets face it, in these swiney-fluey days, that's probably not a bad thing ;)

On the Subject of Forty-Two

2009-11-08T18:24:00.003Z

There is a machine in Douglas Adam's trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (okay, I know it outgrew being a trilogy), that is set up to calculate the exact meaning of life, the universe and everything. Deep Thought is its name and the answer it comes up with is the number of 42.

42 is quickly becoming an important number for me. It has some resonance in my husband's family: his mother and father both lived in houses that held that number. For me, it is the number of years I will have on my next birthday - a number of years that is beginning to sound far older than I thought it would.

A few days ago, at the doctors I was asked if I smoked and for how long. I horrified myself by answering that I had been smoking for about twenty years. Where in the name of holy jeans did those years sneak off to? And that got me thinking again about how quickly a year seems to pass these days.

Years, when you are small, seem to pass very, very slowly indeed. I spent a great deal of time wishing them away: wishing I was wiser, cooler, popular and a lot of other various attributes that I associated with being older. Now I wonder how much of my life I've spent wishing, wishing.

As the years have gone by, I have found that each year doesn't last as long as the previous. I wonder is that because certain things have an inevitability about them, once you have learned how to get the hang of them: like Christmas, or Easter, or poxy Valentine's Day, or the start of school holidays, or the new school year. All these events stack up to make a year, and they just flash past - like swallows flitting in for spring and away again for autumn.

I suppose I'm supposed to feel contented with where I am now. After all, if the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything is 42, then it stands to reason that perhaps I know it all now, doesn't it? If only that were true. Someone once told me that by the time you reach 40, you have crystallised; you have somehow hardened into the person you will be for much of the rest of your life.

Trouble is, it's very hard to appreciate whether this is true or not, when the view you have is always a close up, and only a frontal one at that (the back of you being very difficult to see in the mirror). I used to think I had done well to reach the age that Christ was allegedly crucified at. Now, looking back, I think that I was really only getting the hang of life at that stage, and it was only a very tenuous hang, I might add.

I wonder what I'll think in ten years time? I wonder what I'll feel about having been 42 in retrospect? I wonder if I'll even make it to 52. Time was (especially in my twenties) when you didn't worry about things like that. Old was something that happened to your aged grandparents - or their contemporaries. It was never going to happen to you.

Ah, how youth is wasted on the young- isn't that what they say?

The Latest Stinging Fly has ...

2009-11-02T20:00:00.005Z

... loads of poems, dark stories and some reviews too.

Liz Gallagher's The Wrong Miracle gets a good look-see by Grace Wells - her 'linguistic dexterity' and the 'sheer verve of her style' is mentioned; this comes alongside five other worthy first collections.

Highlights for me: 'Road Trip,' well-written non-fiction (although it had me completely absorbed in the way that fiction usually does) by Robert Hopkins; an interview with Deirdre Madden and two fine poems that sat well together - 'A Little Knowledge' by Val Nolan and 'Grapefruit' by Alan Garvey.

But hey, don't take my word for it: go get your own copy of the Stinging Fly, why don't you.

And the cover - so, so sumptuous - and red! I like.

Falling Back

2009-10-23T14:31:00.003+01:00

Autumn Herself

She leaves notes on the brambles:
glistening blackberry globes for stewed
desserts and jam, or damsons ready
for eager childrens' hands to scrump.

She flirts with a passer-by in the quickened
blaze she leaves on a ten year old beech,
fire licks going quickly over to bronzed yellow.
They cling until the first hard storm
spins their dry crunches into a limp mess
down the muddy street drains.

She's the crush of burnt sienna velvet
in a dress fondled in a department store.
She's low angled sunshine across a field
of beige barley-stubble. Her scent
is the must of late saucer mushrooms;
her jewellery scarlet berries hiding
in the dark, green prickles of paired Holly trees.

A Gallery of Poets

2009-10-16T18:22:00.004+01:00

Last night, like I hadn't enough to be doing, I headed to Dublin's Waterstones to a Gallery launch of five poets' latest poetry collections. The poets didn't disppoint. I ended up going home with an armful of books, and really enjoyed hearing them sound their poems out. I met the lovely Hugh O'Donnell hob-nobbing with Denis O'Driscoll and chatted to quite a few poetry g-literati (hi Teresa!).

In order of appearance: Tom French, with The Fire Step (his first collection, Touching the Bones won the Forward Prize in 2001); Vona Groarke with the very accomplished Spindrift (I've seen quite a few of her poems from the collection in various journals and papers over the last while); Kerry Hardie, with Only This Room; Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, with The Sun-Fish (a PBS recommendation this quarter); and Peter Sirr, with The Thing Is.

I like all of them very much and am having a good read of them all, being suitably impressed by their writing, skill and techique. Peter Sirr's remarks about the complexities and wrestling with the minutiae of editing, and how it is always taxing raised a few chuckles in the room, as did editor, Peter Fallon's ripostulary remarks about how we all submit to the editor - hmm.

On a more serious note, Peter Fallon referred to the dangerous currents of uncertainty in the arts world and how none of us know how these will play out, especially now that the Celtic Tiger has well and truly scampered off over the horizon - eastwards. Tough times are coming. Small comfort I know, but in the end, it was still a good turn-out last night, all things considered.

Work on Horizon and more...

2009-10-14T17:35:00.003+01:00

I received word the other day that Horizon Review 3 has gone live this week. Yet another feast of poetry, short stories, reviews, criticism and so much more. I'm really lucky to have 3 poems on there, as well as a separate collaborative piece I wrote with poet Tony Williams during the summer. That's towards the bottom of the side-links. It's quite different to what I normally do, but I really enjoyed doing it with Tony (hmm, perhaps I should rephrase that... ;) ).

If you haven't done already, you should take a look at this fast-growing e-journal. Edited by Jane Holland, it also has Nuala Ni Chonchuir as fiction editor and George Ttouli as reviews editor. HR just grows on you!

In other news, I have work in the latest edition of Mimesis, which just arrived on Monday. There's me in the same journal as Paul Muldoon... and Rob MacKenzie, not to mention a lot of other names I recognise. Imagine!

And I've a brace of work forthcoming in the new edition of The Yellow Nib, the journal of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Writing at Queen's University Belfast. They're sonnets about Mallory. I won't say any more until it comes out, but I am very excited by it :)

Teaching and Writing - do they mix?

2009-10-08T20:51:00.002+01:00

I've been super-duper busy since the beginning of September - the observant among you can't have failed to notice the dearth of posts here. Why? Well, I got hours teaching for Navan VEC, as well as getting my own Saturday Creative Writing classes back up and running again (in a lovely new venue, DKIT).

So something had to give; the writing. And there's the rub. If I don't write, I don't have material to work on or send out. If I don't write, I don't develop all the ideas I have percolating away. If I don't write, I start to feel a little bit nuts.

I have just been coming back to the idea of writing this last few days - that must mean that I'm getting used to the teaching - thank goodness. And I still have one unused week from my residential bursary coming up: on the mid-term break. I should feel a little guilty about going off to write for a week at Annaghmakerrig and abandoning my husband to the six mini-monsters (okay, kids), but the truth is, I don't have time to feel guilty about it.

In that magical place I'll have the space to think, walk, eat, write and fool around with words, but more importantly I'll have the space to get three mini-projects nailed that have been rocketing around my brain for the last three weeks. The best thing about having to drive to Navan from Dundalk is the head space it allows for me to think. No time wasted, eh?

I can't bloody wait!

All Ireland Poetry Day in Louth

2009-10-04T16:11:00.003+01:00

So how did it go in Louth on Thursday, 1st of October 2009, All Ireland National Poetry Day? It went very, very well indeed, thanks for asking :)

First off, our radio interview on Harry Lee's Dundalk Daily turned out to be one small part in a huge poetry-packed programme. I was lucky enough to arrive just as Pat McKenna of the youth theatre programme was finishing reading a poem, and Damien Kelly gave a recital of beautiful classical guitar music. He was followed by Nessa O'Mahony who read a poem from her latest verse novel, In Sight of Home, published by Salmon Poetry, who had been workshopping in Dundalk Library with children from Realt naMara National School - and that's all I got to see of an action packed programme that celebrated poetry local and national, rhymed and unrhymed!

I, and three members of Dundalk Writing Group then read from our work, and then I had to scoot and get ready for the lunchtime reading being held at Dundalk Institute of Technology, with Susan Connolly. Our reading ended up being over-subscribed. We had just started, with about eight or ten people sitting in the room, when the door opened and about twenty more people, students and lecturers crowded into the room. We were stunned by the turn-out and delighted, naturally. I am of course, very grateful to head-librarians Concepta and Lorna who gave us a big build-up via posters and the DKIT website, and of course hosted us there.

The evening reading in Carlingford featured Catherine Ann Cullen, who read work from A Bone in My Throat, as well as new work that has been featured on Sunday Miscellany, RTE radio's early morning programme that features writing and poetry. Her work was received very well by the local audience, which included members from the Dundalk Writing Group - way to support NPD, guys! Carlingford Heritage Centre is located at the Holy Trinity Church, and is run by a very enthusiastic and friendly committee - the venue really suited the poetry reading very well indeed.

Drogheda's Poetry Slam, held in Boyne Books, Narrow West Street, Drogheda turned out to be a huge success: over 60 people turned up; 22 people took part in the slam; and the grand winner was Noel Sweeney from Dublin, with Paul Timoney from Dundalk a close runner up. Fair play to the organisers, Roger Hudson and Mark Kearns for a successful first Slam.

Now, about next year ...

Nude Makes Landfall in Dundalk

2009-09-29T08:35:00.000+01:00

Got your attention, haven't I?

Today, I am delighted to welcome Nuala Ní Chonchúir and her wonderful new collection of short stories, 'Nude' from Salt Publishing to my humble blog. I have to say, I've read them very quickly, because I was pulled into them very easily. Always a good sign, when you can't tear yourself away from a book.

Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in County Galway. Her third short fiction collection Nude was published by Salt in September 2009. She is one of four winners of the 2009 Templar Poetry Pamphlet and Collection competition. Her pamphlet Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car will be published in November. Nuala's website is: www.nualanichonchuir.com

Pull up a comfy armchair there Nuala, here's a very large mug of strong writer's tea and some homemade scones & blackberry jam (freshly picked from the Cooley Peninsula on Sunday!). Tuck in!

Hi Barbara and big thanks for having me here at your blog. I know and admire your own work, so I’m honoured to be here.

Thank you Nuala, now down to questions: firstly, how and where do characters come from, for you? Do you find characters re-visiting you or is it the other way around, do you like to tease out other nuances of them in related stories?

Gosh, that’s hard to answer because, in a sense, there’s no one way that characters ‘arrive’ to me. Sometimes I have a sense of someone or a relationship between two people and I want to write about them. Take Magda and Jackson in the story ‘Jackson & Jerusalem’. She’s an older woman artist and he’s a teenager who models for her; I liked the idea of that dynamic – a friendship across generations/sexes. I based the physical descriptions on my own son when he was a bit younger. Magda isn’t based on anyone but she’s very real to me. She’s also featured in the story ‘Madonna Irlanda’ as a younger woman; if I like a character, it’s irresistible to write more about them.

Other times characters arrive like a voice in my ear – I hear their voices and I work from there.

How do you delineate so well between older and younger characters, such as Jackson and Magda in 'Jackson and Jerusalem'? Do you find it hard to switch between the headspace needed to make each character live and breathe in the rounded manner that they do?

I’m glad you think I do it well...I was one of those children who preferred the company of adults; I loved listening to their conversation. I had my poor neighbours plagued as a child, always in their houses talking to them. I find younger people harder to relate to but having kids myself has given me some understanding of what makes them tick. All of that knowledge gets ploughed into fiction, I guess – into my characters.

My stories are generally from one POV so there isn’t really a problem switching headspace. I’m not sure that I find it problematic anyway. It’s fun to get inside the heads of people who are nothing like you; I enjoy that escape thoroughly.

Have you ever experienced great difficulty with a story - say for example, getting the ending right, or losing your way through the story? I ask this, because I find your stories are so absorbingly complete and well-imagined, that I can't imagine difficulties!

Yes, lots of difficulties! I don’t plot so I never have a clue what’s going to happen next. I used to almost fear endings but I’m more relaxed about them now.

And I suppose only the stories that work get into the book. I start, and then abandon, lots of stories – some just don’t lift off the page. I’ve written plenty of what Richard Ford calls ‘minor aesthetic nullities’. I’m rarely happy with anything. There are a handful of stories in Nude that I really love – the rest I just like, in whole or in part. But it doesn’t matter what I think – it’s impossible to be objective about your own work – I just hope that readers enjoy them.

Are you compelled to write or can you save ideas for work, for later on when you get the chance? Which method works better for you?

Writing is a compulsion for some people and I’m one of them; I’m always in writing mode. Henry James said, ‘Be one of those people on whom nothing is lost’. I think I am one of them – I seem to notice a lot and, as I notice things, I’m writing a narrative in my head. I presume all writers are the same.

Lately though, with my new baby and with promoting Nude, I’m too tired and busy to write anything more than the bones of a few poems. I want to be writing above all else, but the headspace is just not there. So, instead, I take notes!

Thanks so much for having me here, Barbara, and for your great questions. Next week my virtual tour takes me to Petina Gappah’s blog in Geneva, via Zimbabwe, which is where Petina is from. Do join us!

Thank you for coming by, Nuala, it's been a pleasure and I hope that Nude garners the attention it deserves.

The Sparks on Arthur's Day

2009-09-24T19:22:00.005+01:00

I’m very pleased to welcome Ben Wilkinson to my humble blog today, on what turns out to be Arthur’s Day. We’ve just missed the 17:59 time slot, but still, raise yourself a nice, slowly-poured creamy-headed pint of porter with me, pull up a stool and we’ll get down to some poetry appreciation.

Ben Wilkinson was born in Stafford in 1985 and studied English and Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He is currently completing an MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

His poems have appeared in a wide variety of publications including Poetry Review, Poetry London, Magma, and the TLS. He has also reviewed poetry for Poetry Review, Stand and the TLS, and writes critical perspectives of contemporary poets for the British Council’s Contemporary Writers website.

His first pamphlet of poems, The Sparks, was published in 2008 as part of Tall-Lighthouse’s Pilot scheme, showcasing the best British poets under 30.

Wilkinson: to an outlier, it’s a name that whispers steel and Sheffield, and makes you think of a certain set of double crossed swords. But, before you wince, Ben Wilkinson crosses pens, not swords (perhaps there’s a new coat of arms) and makes Sparks with his pen. Hmm, does that remind you of anyone else in the poetry world? Digging..?

I really liked a great deal about The Sparks when it arrived in the post, so much so that I felt a little discontented that there wasn’t more to read, to contextualise the poems as part of a larger body of work. That is sometimes the shortfall of the pamphlet; a delicious taste that leaves you wanting (a little like fine-dining).

Still, there’s more than enough to show Wilkinson’s dexterity with words. My favourite is ‘Byroads’, a poem I can actually see in my head. I see it as a filmic slow-run film, intriguing in the way that Derry based artist Willie Doherty's work is. Doherty's art explores the complexities of living in a divided society, and I think this poem gets under that skin in a similar way.

In ‘Byroads', there are moments capturing a state of mind, or just a state. Or is it? I see the colours, borders and 'unapproved roads' (yeah, yer man is definitely to the forefront of my mind now) in the poem, and my mind fills in the rest: the north of Ireland and that not-so-simple-situation once you’ve looked.

Hanging baskets frosted white
in the orange blur of a maple wood dusk,
ice stalactite rigid towards the pavements.

The firing of some gun from the wood's
clearing. A bus rumbles on, coughing,
and a local makes his turn at the pub's carpark.

Living goes on despite the divides, but surface stillness betrays its depths. Like Doherty, there is a juxtaposition of image and language, through which a careful reader can extract a deeper meaning. This is but one example of Ben’s restraint, all the more remarkable given that sometimes our younger selves can tend towards a brashness that some might construe as vivid talent, and others showiness.

Anyway, intrigued by Ben’s pamphlet, I sent him some questions by email, to give us all a wee insight into what makes him tick poetry-wise.

When did you realise that poetry was going to be such a major part of your life? Was it in school or university?

Hi Barbara – thanks for featuring The Sparks on your blog. I suppose I first ‘found’ poetry in school, around my late teens. Something clicked while reading the stuff I was studying back then (Larkin, Hughes, Duffy, Armitage – the usual poetry taught in English comprehensives). And I guess at first, that ‘something’ was nothing more than a feeling that “this is doing things which, in my experience, prose isn’t capable of”. But over time, my interest in poetry grew into a sort of secret obsession, and I started privately reading as much poetry as I could, particularly twentieth century and contemporary stuff. I was also tentatively writing stuff at the same time – mainly while I was studying for my A-levels.

Things changed when I went to university. I joined the poetry society there and found likeminded people to share my interests with. A bunch of us would meet once a week for a couple of hours – sharing work by poets we’d recently discovered, playing writing games, reading our poems to each other and occasionally swapping drafts. I carried on attending these meetings until the end of my time at uni. How useful the group was to my actual writing, I don’t know, but it was good fun and I met some interesting people, and it introduced me to some great poetry. By my second year, I was pretty much convinced that poetry wasn’t going to leave me alone, even if I wanted it to.

What’s the best buzz you ever got from a poem - one you’ve written and one you’ve read.

Though I compulsively edit poems and am rarely satisfied with them (beyond the initial, distorted euphoria experienced after naively thinking I’ve just finished one), I have written a few things which buck this trend. ‘Filter’, a poem in The Sparks and my first to appear in Poetry Review (so something of a confidence-boosting milestone), was written in the summer after my second year at university. It emerged over the course of about an hour, almost fully formed – so much so that, unlike most other poems in the pamphlet, it is still pretty much identical to when I first saved it onto the computer, aside a few alterations. That was a really satisfying poem to write – the lines almost just seemed to appear, as if I’d been subconsciously preparing to write the thing for ages. If you’ve ever written a poem in that way – and I reckon most poets have at some time – you’ll know what I mean. For me at least, it doesn’t happen very often.

The best buzz I ever got from a poem… that’s a difficult one. I enjoy many poems for the unique experience they offer, so it’s hard to narrow it down beyond a handful. But I have to pick Philip Larkin’s ‘Here’, simply because when I first read his collection The Whitsun Weddings, and particularly that poem, it made me realise that in the right hands, poetry could encompass, reconcile, and attempt to make sense out of anything and everything. It could switch seemingly effortlessly between the totally insignificant and trivial and the utterly profound and existential (and often pull apart the false boundaries between these). Of course, I now realise the limits to Larkin’s style, but as a young lad I found poems such as ‘Here’ made me see poetry in a completely new way, and helped to validate my own first attempts at writing.

But I might also be tempted to choose Mick Imlah’s ‘Tusking’, simply because, despite having had little influence on my own work that I’m aware of, it is such a haunting and beautiful and absorbing poem it refuses to leave me alone. Memorability is an important factor. I want the initial buzz of the first reading, but I also want that feeling to carry on and make me return to the poem later; for it to persist and stick in my thoughts, even if it’s just a stanza or a few lines. What I reckon all great poems have in common is that persuasive musicality and distinctiveness, but also an intoxicating emotional and intellectual potency. They also have a (perhaps deceptive) sense of necessity and purpose – as if they almost willed themselves to be written.

Do you play word games, like Scrabble, and if so, what's the highest score you've ever had with one word (can you remember it)?

I used to play Scrabble quite a lot – with my grandparents as a young kid, and occasionally with friends when I was in my teens – but I don’t so much anymore. I guess I like to think I was – and still am – pretty good at it, so I suppose my highest score for one word was halfway decent. I don’t remember it though. Besides, the thing with Scrabble, as I’m sure you know, is that an impressively complex or obscure word doesn’t always equal an impressive score. My highest score probably involved placing something really boring, but creating new words from existing words in the process, while landing on a triple word square or whatever. It wasn’t “quixotry” though, I’m afraid.

Who have been the most important poets you have come across?

It depends what we mean by ‘important’. If we’re talking about which poets I think have had the most noticeable influence and effect on my work, I’d say Eliot, Auden, Larkin and Gunn have all been very important. More contemporary poets would include Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Michael Hofmann, Glyn Maxwell, Roddy Lumsden, Carol Ann Duffy and Paul Farley – essentially, those poets which I feel are most interestingly engaged with the British lyric tradition. In my own work, I’ve always been interested in attempting to combine a colloquial, everyday register with an inventive use of poetic diction, syntax, rhythm and form – particularly segueing from one to the other (and sometimes back again) in a single poem.

But I read much more widely than that list perhaps suggests, and poets whose work currently interests me include Christopher Middleton, James Lasdun, Frederick Seidel and Todd Boss. I’m not one for factions or ideas about ‘where poetry is headed’. Michael Donaghy – who is so eminently quotable that anyone even remotely interested in poetry should read his recently published collected prose – once pointed out that “art has no direction”. That makes sense to me. All poets are plodding along together, trying to write the best poetry they can, with only instinct to guide them. I think Donaghy also rightly said that you can always tell bad poetry because it’s always bad in the same ways, whereas a good poem surprises and delights in unexpected, inventive and often artful ways. For that reason, I’m always interested to read widely, and uncover new and different approaches to writing.

All Ireland National Poetry Day, Oct 1st

2009-09-16T17:50:00.008+01:00

Last year saw the inauguration of a National Poetry Day in Ireland, by Poetry Ireland, in celebration of 30 years of that organisation serving the Irish poetry reading public. Every county in Ireland held at least one poetry event, be it reading or workshop and it proved to be a great success.

You may remember me blogging about it last year, as I was invited to be one of three poets representing Louth, along with Patrick Chapman and Patrick Dillon. We first did an outside broadcast at Dundalk Arts Office in the morning with Harry Lee of Dundalk Daily on Dundalk FM 100, and then gave a lunchtime reading at Dundalk Town Hall.

This year, I was (honoured and privileged to be) asked by Louth County Arts Office to curate the events for Louth, so this year, we've got all sorts of events in Dundalk, Drogheda and Carlingford, happening on the one day, Thursday October 1st 2009. If you're round and about, come one, come all!

Dundalk: Lunchtime reading, at 1pm in the library, Dundalk Institute of Technology, with Susan Connolly and Barbara Smith, Dublin Road, Dundalk. T. 042 9392950

Drogheda: Evening Poetry Slam, at 8pm in Boyne Books, Narrow West St. Drogheda with special guest, Dixie Nugent. T. 041 9875140

Carlingford: Evening reading, at 8pm, with Catherine Ann Cullen, The Trinity Church Heritage Centre; a beautifully restored medieval church in the picturesque setting of Carlingford, County Louth. T. 042 9392950

Other events:
Dundalk F.M Radio and Harry Lee of Dundalk Daily will celebrate National Poetry Day from 10.00. am to 12.00. pm, including live readings by Dundalk Writers Group with Barbara Smith at 11.00. am.

Sandy Sneddon will read from his collection of children's poem's in Drogheda Library, Stockwell Street, for selected schools at 11am.

So, it's all happening here, isn't it? If you know of a poetry event in Ireland happening near you on NPD, October 1st, why not tell us all about it in the comments box?

Ask not what your county can do for you, and all that jazz... or poetry... :)

Gimme Some Extra Energy...

2009-09-14T16:37:00.002+01:00

There are times lately when I find myself looking back fondly to the days of study at home, slow-cooked casseroles and a slightly guilty feeling at being able to spend some time online catching up with what writing friends and colleagues are up to.

This is because my life seems to have seriously stepped up a gear! I'm doing hours teaching for Meath VEC delivering classes to adults. This is all on the back of the creative writing classes that I began with, oh two years ago..?(!)

So now my days are full of me bashing the keyboard on my computer, form filling, and making session plans and schemes of work... Oh, don't you just love the chalk face - it's no wonder that teachers look forward to their summer holidays; I'm seriously knackered and we're only two weeks into courses.

In other news, I've received a commission to write a poem. Just one poem - imagine! Much more about this closer to the time when it comes to fruition... exciting stuff, eh?

I survived Electric Picnic...

2009-09-08T09:00:00.005+01:00

and lived to tell the tale.

My tale involved wellies, lots of mud and an inordinate amount of walking. I think I may have shed a few pounds this weekend too. And my blisters have blisters..!

It was brilliant. I arrived (after three hours walking around outside) on Saturday afternoon to support writer Kate Dempsey's children's writing workshop in the Kids area, where we and Niamh B helped some very imaginative retellings of fairytales come to life on the page.

I caught a quick blast of Rita Ann Higgins on the Literary State in the Mindfield area, followed by Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan reading from William Burroughs' iconic classic, Naked Lunch.

The rain managed to hold off and later on I caught the last ten minutes of Billy Bragg's set in the Crawdaddy big-top tent. Billy hasn't changed a bit, still angry and still giving out about politics and capitalism, but still giving us a fresh take on it all, aided by his lonesome electric guitar.

Later after a quick chill-session watching a bit of Heath Ledger in Dark Knight, I watched Imelda May, with mi amigas from the Divas (and hubs!), and we enjoyed the tight band, complete with slicked hair, and rockabilly shirts - ooh and a strummed double bass.

Highlight of Saturday: Madness. Even better second time around, their saxophonist is bonkers and Suggs, well, is Suggs. We had prime positions for this hour-long gig, and the band actually started early - and encored late! Yay, "Madness, Madness, they call it Madness..."

Sunday was a much wetter affair, alas, with our own Poetry Divas collective kicking off the day's lineup on the Literary Stage. Photos here, courtesy of EW - thanks! Can you see the state of my wellies?

Some of us Divas went off to the Body and Soul area, to hit the Bog Cottage with more poetry, and that random hit seemed to go down very well, after some session muscians kindly allowed to us to read.

Later I enjoyed the Poetry Chicks' set on the Spoken Word stage, being ably managed by Marty Mulligan - also saw Raven, Miceal Kearney, Billy Ramsell and Maighread Medbh in the crowd relaxing on cushions and taking in the show.

Long story short: the mud was really sucky and mucky. It took me an hour to find my car afterwards, and I had to get a very nice gentleman on a tractor to drag me out of the field - backwards - adding a new twist to that expression, 'looking like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards...

I'd do it again though!

Electric Picnic - here I come!

2009-09-04T21:42:00.002+01:00

I confess: I am an EP virgin, as in, I've never been. This weekend, I not only get to go there, I get to perform there too, as part of the Poetry Divas collective.

Things to expect: me airing my boobs again..! Great poetry, and from the website: 'sequins, sparkles, tiaras and willies plentifully mixed among metaphors, similes and sonnets." I kid you not about the 'willies'!

When: Sunday September 6th at 12 midday.

Where: Art Council Literary Stage, Electric Picnic, Stradbally Co. Laois.

So nice to be sharing the bill with wondrous writers as well as ... ooh, Billy Bragg, Brian Wilson, Bat for Lashes, Lamb... oh my - who let me out for the weekend...

See ye on the far side! Pictures to follow :)

How Tara's Halls resounded...

2009-08-30T18:19:00.006+01:00

You know, you can't beat the sound of a well-tuned harp on a wet day at Tara. That and the sound of specially picked words.

The recital went very well, considering the rain did its best to mar proceedings. Paul Muldoon acted as master of ceremonies and did an able and relaxed job of shepherding proceedings along. Unfortunately, the event had to repair to the disused church from the planned outdoor, that has been plainly restored, but the acoustics suited the gig very well.

I came a little late, just as Susan McKeown was giving a beautiful rendition of a song in Irish and English (for us heathens with little Gaeilge), accompanied by Aidan Brennan on a beautiful acoustic guitar. Paul Muldoon then quickly gave us a few poems; one about Beagles hunting the great Hare seemed to set a thread running for the next few turns at the mic, and the great Michael Longley gave us some beautiful poems that come from his time spent at Carrigskeewaun, over in County Mayo. He commented in his introduction that fifteen years before, he and a good few other poets and musicians had taken another 'turn' at Tara, to try and invoke peace. It seemed to have worked, he said and the audience loved this wry comment.

One of his set, about his first grandaughter, who came after four grandsons, was really touching. I think it is called 'The Foaled'? But I'll need to check that in my Longley Selected later on. Michael Longley was then followed by Laoise Kelly, an amazing harpist, who actually comes from Mayo.

Laoise has been involved with the protests against the motorway development for a long time, and told us of how she had met Paul Muldoon in, of all places, New Zealand, at an event. Her harping was a great addition to the programme, as she played 'tunes' that were collected over hundreds of years by people like Petrie and harp gatherings in Belfast - never mind the usual Carolan tunes that people expect from a harpist. I enjoyed her sets very much, as it reminded me of my own days spent on the harp from age fourteen to sixteen. Harping ruined my fingers for guitar playing, as I found out later on: I pluck instead of strumming - something which drove my later guitar teacher mad.

Just before I left, Paul Muldoon read from a sequence he has called 'The Old Country' - not a mocking poem about Ireland, but one that celebrates the localisms and colloquilisms of Irish cliches. I liked this very much, as did the audience.

Anyway, there was an email sheet sent around to collect addresses, and it is hoped that they will repeat this gathering next year to celebrate Tara's heritage and keep its plight in the public eye. So, I'll keep ye posted!

A Turn at Tara

2009-08-30T10:01:00.005+01:00

I'm going to this reading today at Tara Hill, which is organised as part of Ireland's National Heritage Week. Paul Muldoon and Michael Longley are reading there, with music from Susan McKeown with Laoise Kelly, Steve Cooney, Aidan Brennan, with perhaps more performers on the day.

I've loved Tara Hill a long time. When I lived in Drogheda, it was in easy reach and often on a Sunday we'd go there as a family and wander over the hill, past the Mound of Hostages, and the Rath of Cormac , the Lia Fail - the stone of destiny, and we'd always finish with a digression over to the lonely Rath of Diarmaid and Grainne; me imagining the two fugitive lovers of Irish legend spending some time there, and finally go back round and cut through the Banqueting Hall to the exit gate.

Of course it sounds like there are buildings on Tara, but there aren't. What there are instead, are shapes in the ground, which have acquired names through folklore and legend glosses. There are mounds, and circles of ridges - to keep someone or something in, or possibly out. And usually on Tara there are sheep grazing. Lucky sheep to be wandering around on the hill where it is thought High Kings and courtiers might have gazed out over the plains of Meath at the distant blue and purple mountains to the North and West and South.

Today, we're going back there after an absence of about two or three years. I'm wondering what it will look like, since the-powers-that-be decided that it was a good idea to build a motorway just below it. And I know my kids will enjoy going to the place with the sheep - perhaps they might enjoy the poetry and music too. After all, "The harp that once through Tara's halls /The soul of music shed / Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls / As if that soul were fled ..."

Not today though. Not today.

Back to School - with a bang

2009-08-24T19:20:00.003+01:00

This back-to-school malarkey doesn't get any easier each year. I'm just in the last throes of it today and tomorrow: hemming trousers for the boys in extra strong stitching, so they don't pull down their hems through repeated putting in of their legs; extra sewing on the box pleats of the skirts, so that they don't end up ripping up to the waistband. Ironing on about 30 labels with names on, not so much for the benefit of the schools, but to save kids here rowing in the mornings about whose tracksuit bottoms belong to whom.

I still have a list of things to get as long as my arm. It's not that I'm a last minute lassie, it's just that it really does take the whole summer to organise things. Things like a pack of twistables x 3, or rubbers x 20, or even copies (exercise books to forn readers) x 100. And that's not a joke.

I buy pencils by the box load, pens by the bucket. And don't talk to me about pencil parers (I actually invested in an industrial strength one of those a few years ago - best €15 I ever spent). But somehow when we get to Christmas they're all gone - poof - vanished into thin air. I reckon there must be a hole in each classroom where stationary fairies live with a huge hoard of the little buggers. Maybe they re-sell them on fairy-eBay...

Ah well. The upside of all this expense is that next week I get my house back to myself between the hours of 8.30am and 2.45pm, Monday to Friday. I think that's something to look forward to: the sweet smelling sound of silence. Oh yeah.

And in between all that I've been writing poems, and getting ready for my own new term of writing classes to begin. You know what they say: ask a busy woman ...

Flatlake - bloody brilliant!

2009-08-17T09:00:00.009+01:00

I'm just about revived from the Flatlake Festival in Monaghan. Pat and Kevin and their very able crew ran a very tight ship and I got to see quite a few other acts as well as reading with the Prufrocks, and the Diva Collective.

I saw a brilliant one-act solo show about the wife of Dylan Thomas, Cait McNamara. The actress doing this ran the whole gamut of emotions and really got across what it might have been like living with someone like Thomas, being tied down with babies and wanting to have a life of their own too.

Our act, The Prufrocks, was sandwiched between this show and a Harold Pinter tribute (which included the lovely Keith Allen, nowadays better known as Lily's dad).

Liz Gallagher led us off down the path reading from her brand new, hot-off-the-press collection from Salt books, The Wrong Miracle. She was followed by Jaki McCarrick, who not only writes poems and prose, but writes plays (award winning ones too!). Mary Mullen, originally from Alaska but who now lives in Galway gave us some poems that evoked living in Alaska in the 60s, and then Nuala Ni Chonchuir took the stage to read some poems that will feature in her new pamphlet forthcoming from Templar, Portrait of the Artist in a Red Car. I finished up the set, and I got a bit of a fright when I stood up to read. I had been sitting in the front seat, focussed on the readers, so I hadn't been aware of the crowds pouring into the tent. It was by now packed to the rafters!

*** Late edit: Nuala Ni Chonchuir has posted her report, complete with pictures of all the Prufrocks who read - do pop over and take a look! ***

Some pics:
If you embiggen this one, you'll see Cillian Murphy, star of Breakfast on Pluto, gazing enraptured at, well aparently it was me! EW took the picture.

And this is meself in my reading garb, complete with de-rigeur wellies! Despite the shadows, we had a lot of sunshine on the day - some weather gods smiled on us!

Later on I read with the Diva collective, at Radio Butty/Mondo Rancho, compered by Pat McCabe himself. We were on after The Poetry Chicks, who did a specially commissioned piece by Dermot Healy for the occasion as well as some of their own inspired performance pieces. If you get a chance to see them anywhere, you should go along for a look, they are brilliant.

As for ourselves, the Divas, we also amazed with our own work, and that poem about boobs I may have mentioned a good while back finally got a good airing in public. Seemed to go down pretty well, judging by the laughter it got...

Unexpected highlight of the day: Jinx Lennon's act in the Butty Barn. I'm willing to bet you've never heard such a great song title as 'Gobshite in the House,' or 'Everyone's got a mental home inside their head.' Jinx is described as a "a proper seanchaí, a punk, a poet, a troubadour and fuckin nutjob to boot," in a review over on his website - and I'm not joking, I was mesmerised by the whole act that I saw. Words just don't do him justice - go and see him if you can. He's got my respect and he lives here in Dundalk, right under my nose and I never knew what he was up to!

Now, I must get on with this back-to-school malarkey and do me other job: being mum-of-six ...

Flatlake - Stop Press!

2009-08-11T22:13:00.004+01:00

A quickie from holiday land in Ciarrai to let you know about - Flatlake Literary and Arts Festival on this weekend, 14th, 15th & 16th August at Hilton Park, Co. Monaghan.

I'm in two acts: The Poetry Divas, and separately with the Prufrocks, which also features, Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Liz Gallagher, Mary Mullen and Jaki McCarrick. Saturday for Prufrocks and I think the same for the Divas ... my (limited) internet connection here in the wilds of Kerry is a bit intermittent.

Links later dudes - in the meantime, think Butty Barns, madcap antics, possible mud and definite enjoyment - then you have the essence of Flatlake!

Bring your stylish wellies and your feather boas... :)

The Great Outdoors

2009-08-02T22:14:00.001+01:00

I have a story in Indieoma's latest feature: The Great Outdoors.

It's called Jacob's Ladder. Have a look see and discover why rock-climbing is something of a passion of mine.

Deep Cleanse and Escape

2009-07-30T21:37:00.003+01:00

Well, I've been back almost a week from the wonderous getaway writer's hotel (okay you get artists there too and dancers and musicians) that is the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig. It was brilliant, I wrote loads and met loads of new and interesting people and talked the face of myself. About writing, art, that I like.

And I feel like it was a month ago. I was whisked off to Cabra Castle, home of the romantic getaway, by mon cheri, for our fifth wedding anniversary. Imagine: five years. People in prison get parole ... only joking!

From Our wedding + Kerry

Back in 2004... ah, God be with the days. Feel free to embiggen. And laugh!

So of course once I got back, there was the state of the house to be contended with. I've just got over the brow of the washing, cleaning and scrubbing mountain today. Even the goldfish were washed.

And very soon I am off to the Kingdom, Ciarrai, for my annual dose of mountains, sea and obligatory Irish-style picnics: sandwiches complete with sand and 'hang' (ham to those not Irish).

From Kerry pictures 03

The western view from our (rented) holiday house in Ciarrai. From the sitting room window.

When I get back, there's Flatlake Literary & Arts Festival, where I'm reading in not one, but two acts, with some really top notch poets and writers! This summer gets more active by the day. Keep an eye on WRW's blog and Musings for more info, as well as Emerging Writer's

See y'all on the far side :)

The Cabbage Cometh Forth

2009-07-27T17:15:00.004+01:00

So, who is Rob Mackenzie? Well, Rob was born in Glasgow, and currently lives in Edinburgh. He originally studied law and then turned to theology. He has spent periods of time in Seoul, Lanarkshire and Turin and is involved in organising Edinburgh’s ‘Poetry at the…’ monthly reading series.

Rob’s pamphlet, The Clown of Natural Sorrow (Happenstance, 2005), was what brought him to people’s attention first, and a debut full-length poetry collection was published by Salt books this year, The Opposite of Cabbage, and is already receiving a great deal of critical attention, not only in Scotland but further afield. Current reviews (and they are very encouraging) include Magma 44 and the latest edition of Poetry London.
Failte Rob go blóg Barbara.

Today we celebrate your arrival at this stop in the Cyclone Blog Tour and offer a little Irish sustenance to keep you going on your travels. Our meal will be simple fare: cabbage, bacon and spuds, with homemade parsley sauce (none of that packet stuff, here), which goes well with your collection The Opposite of Cabbage. And of course a creamy pint of plain black porter. Complete with shamrock … or should that be a harp? Anyway, let’s get started on the questions.

In your interview on Nic Sebastian's Very like a whale, you mention when you began to work for real on your poems towards a first collection. Did you find it easy to tell the difference between good poems and better ones? Were there any you wanted to put in but were dissuaded from doing so?

Sometimes I know when I’ve written a good poem; sometimes it’s really difficult to know. It’s easier when the poems are many months or even years old. I often feel my most recent poem is my best one and only realise that it’s crap months later.

Two types of poem particularly resist self-assessment. Firstly, those which seem weird or adventurous, in which I’ve entered territory I’m unsure about, which I’m not sure the reader is going to ‘get’ in any meaningful way, especially those poems when I’m pleased with my own writing.

Writers can bewitch themselves by their own writing. Sometimes that’s because it’s good. Sometimes it’s because writing poetry is partly about casting spells, spells which should act on the reader. However, the writer has to examine his/her material more clinically. Self-deception is a common ingredient in many spells and can involve the writer returning to a poem months or years later and realising, with a high degree of self loathing, that the spell has worn off and the poem is awful.

In contrast, the second kind of poem I find hard to assess is the one that seems quite normal, fairly mainstream. I don’t want to write boring poems that mirror hundreds of others. The question is – does this one stand out from the pack? Is there something about it that’s distinctive? These questions are very hard to answer, although surprisingly easy to answer when it comes to assessing other people’s poems!

I was dissuaded (by a few writers who read my manuscript) from including certain poems. I took some out, revised some, and stubbornly held onto others. I always asked the question as to how important the inclusion of a poem was to me. If it wasn’t really important, it was easy enough to ditch. That’s all a writer can do, I think. You can’t ever guess which poems will go down well with readers. In two reviews I’ve had recently, a poem one critic pointed out as among his favourites was labelled a dud by another (in an otherwise very positive review).

In your other life, would you say that your pastoral work informs your poetry? I detected that behind the poem 'White Noise,' and wondered how faith (and in turn poetry) can be a consolation when we flawed humans feel most frail.

Yes, my work as a Church of Scotland minister does inform certain poems. I have to be careful with issues of confidentiality, so I never write about any individual directly or in a way in which a person could be identified, but many images and ideas come from my experience of working alongside people, often in difficult circumstances. ‘White Noise’ (scroll down the webpage) is a direct example of this – the character ‘Frank’ is entirely fictional, although informed by the death of a baby after a few days in a real family. The trumpet notes and cherry blossom were factual, and come from a house I pass daily on my walk down to my parish, although I’ve manipulated them for poetic purposes. That poem is one of those I wondered whether people would engage with or not, one I found particularly difficult to assess, but I’ve had as much positive reaction to it as to any poem in the collection.

I think poetry (and faith) can act as a consolation for people, but I tend not to write with that in mind. I try not to force poems to fulfil a role. I begin a poem with whatever has sparked it off and go with the flow until it’s done, whether that takes a few minutes or a few years. I then revise sections that seem dull or predictable. The poem may console, celebrate, challenge, illuminate, or discomfort. I don’t go out of my way to do any of these things (I go wherever a poem appears to lead me), but I hope each individual poem generates a reaction of one kind or another in individual readers.

The Opposite of Cabbage uses the device of a narrator that seems unable to help themselves but look, say for example in 'Girl Playing Sudoku on the Seven-Fifteen. They ‘bear witness’ but cannot do anything about it. I think that this points to the way that society tends to avoid having to get involved, and wondered if that was a valid reading?

I hadn’t considered that as a reading of that poem, but it’s a fair way to read it. At least, I think what you’re reading into it is mirrored in several other poems and in society. Paralysis is the dominant political reality of the day, I’d say. Governments do things, often against the will of the majority, and no one can work out what the hell to do about it. It’s no good to vote the party-in-power out because the opposition is just as bad and probably worse. Protest falls on deaf ears.

What’s odd is that mass demonstrations (against the war in Iraq, for example) are ignored and problems concerning young people, education, poverty and the health service are talked away, but when a newspaper reveals financial irregularities at the heart of Government, a whole load of MPs are forced to resign. I find that really disturbing. Scandal always seems to have more effect in the UK than political necessity. Why no resignations over Iraq and Afghanistan, over the dire state of many areas of our cities etc? A financial scandal is shameful, of course, but the resignations won’t change anything in our society. We are paralysed as far as that goes. Some poems in the collection reflect that, bear witness to it, reveal it. Sadly, they don’t, in themselves, have power to ensure change, but I do believe that poetry – and literature as a whole – is important for any society and the very fact that people often turn to it in times of tragedy and turmoil is compelling evidence of its continuing importance.

And finally, Some of your poems are self-referential (and humorous) in that they invoke the poet in the poem as well as the poet looking on from outside the poem. I'm thinking of 'Advice from the Lion Tamer to the Poetry Critic,' and 'A Creative Writing Tutor Addresses his Star Pupil.' Using the sestina form in particular in 'A Creative Writing ...' seems to undercut both content and the form. How did you get the idea to take this approach?

I’ve read quite a number of modern sestinas which undercut their own form. I know some people who would argue that such ‘anti-sestinas’ represent the only way to make the form work these days. I wouldn’t go that far (although good sestinas of any kind are few and far between), but there is something ridiculous about the form. It’s so difficult to write one without becoming repetitious and tedious that the challenge is irresistible for someone like me. I wrote numerous sestinas but only one made the book.

I use ‘John Ashbery’ as an end-word, which is a daft idea in itself. It references the fact that Ashbery has written at least one celebrated (typically oddball) sestina, ‘Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape’. I wrote an earlier draft of the poem in response to a sestina by Stephen Burt called ‘Six Kinds of Noodles’, which employed ‘Ashbery’ as an end word. I was then directed to another example, by Kent Johnson, ‘Avantforte’,in which the increasing length of the lines only adds to the farce.

I wrote my sestina in iambic pentameter while the tutor in the poem pontificates about how form and metre are effectively outmoded concepts, which I thought had humorous potential. Also, ‘John Ashbery’ was a helpfully iambic name! The poem is a satire on the creative writing industry. Not that the industry is all bad, of course. There are many excellent teachers I’d be delighted to receive a few lessons from myself, and many CW students go on to produce excellent work. The poem is a satire and I do think the sestina has real potential as a vehicle for satire.

Thank you Rob, for these full and informative answers, which I think add greatly to reading your collection. Please scoot along to Rob’s Salt Page, where you can read samples from the collection – it might persuade you to make a purchase, which you won’t regret. I hope you enjoyed the quick meal, Rob, and a pint of plain. Rob’s next Cyclone stop is at poet Michelle McGrane’s blog, Peony Moon.

Where I am this week

2009-07-20T17:56:00.003+01:00

Cabbage comes to Dinner

2009-07-17T20:52:00.006+01:00

... and will be served with bacon and spuds - yes, we are going to toast it in Irish-style!

Yes, Rob Mackenzie is swinging by this blog on Monday 27th of July, as part of his Decabbage Yourself Cyclone Tour, which recently stopped by the blog of Bernardine Evaristo (author of the excellent Blonde Roots).

We will dine in simple Irish style, and raise a pint of the black stuff while we're at it. And of course, we will investigate aspects of Rob's book from Salt, The Opposite of Cabbage, reviewed recently here, as well as other pressing questions on writing.

In the meantime, you can see what Rob has to say at the photographer and poet Apprentice at My (Elastic) Gap Year, when he chats about his book and other musings.

A tiny bit of good news

2009-07-10T19:24:00.005+01:00

Those energetic guys who organised the UK Latitude Festival linkup with Pen Pusher magazine had a competiton running for poems about one's postcode.

Today they announced the winner from a shortlist of ten poems that they liked, and the winner is Inua Ellams with 'Lovers, Liars, Conjurors and Thieves'. Inua's poem is an 'ode to Southwark', London, and his poem will be published in issue 13 of Pen Pusher due on July 23rd. He will read on the New Voices stage on Sunday 19th July at 11.40am at the Latitude Festival and will also receive a cool T-shirt with the winning postcode on it, provided by I love my postcode. Well done to him!

Why am I telling you this? Because this poem, about dear old Dundalk, 'Because I Heard About the Harp', made it into the final ten! Oh my :) I knew there was something good about having a beer factory in the town - hai (as we say here!).

Two Irish Winners at the Templar Pamphlet Comp

2009-07-10T08:14:00.004+01:00

Congratulations are due to Paul Maddern and Nuala Ni Chonchuir. Strictly speaking Paul is from Bermuda, but we've adopted him in Belfast, and what's theirs is ours and vice versa. I know Paul from my days in Queen's last year and where he is just finishing off a doctorate on sound and poetry.

In Templar's words:

Templar Poetry is delighted to announce the winners of the 2009 Templar Poetry Pamphlet Prizes. The full results, including the anthology poets, and other new titles will be placed on the Templar Poetry Website on Sunday 12th July. The publication of all new pamphlets and collection will be celebrated at the Derwent Poetry Festival in late autumn.

Nuala Ni Chonchuir: 'Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car'

Paul Maddern: Kelpdings

David Morley: The Rose of the Moon

Dawn Wood: Connoiseur

A huge congrats to all the winners -and a special shout out for Nuala - yay!

Work from Kairos

2009-07-10T07:54:00.003+01:00

is featured on Peony Moon, Michelle McGrane's blog. She is very kind to host Roosters, which is one of those poems that keeps getting comments, whether by mail, email or at readings. If only we knew what we were doing when we wrote them!

Michelle has work featured on the latest issue of ouroboros which you really should check out - it's packed to the rafters with work, including John Walsh from Galway; not just in print but in sound and vision too.

More on The Wounded Deer & Frida Kahlo's Art

2009-07-07T14:30:00.000+01:00

I pulled down a book I had forgotten I had at the weekend, it's a bio-art book on Frida Kahlo's work, and I read it very quickly, and had a good stare at all the pictures in it and a read of the details of her life. Dear me, but she had a tough life, physically-wise, but she never let it get her down, and in her 47 years on earth managed to produce some amazing art.

Then I read 'The Wounded Deer' again, and I really feel that Petit has gotten Kahlo's voice, or as close as you could dare without the services of a medium. My absolute favourite poem in this pamphlet is based on, and is also titled, 'My Birth,' which you can view here . Don't let the picture put you off in any way, the poem is the most positive thing I've ever read, a real making of good, life-affirming art from -well, good life-affirming art. Art was what kept Kahlo sane and allowed her a true expression of her soul.

Another favourite line comes from 'The Wounded Deer,' also available to view here. 'And once, when I opened my eyes / too quickly after the graft, / I could see right through / all the glass ceilings...' Love that glass ceiling - class.

Pascale has two poems up on her blog today to celebrate Frida's birthday, one just happening to be, yes you've guessed it - 'The Wounded Deer'. She's also reading down in Bantry (thanks Liz) at the West Cork Literary Festival, Ireland on Thursday morning at 11am in Bantry Bookshop. I can't go (sob, sob), so I shall just have to make do with me imagination... ah well!