A Different Time

It has been a long time since I posted anything on here. Life has been complicated at times over the last couple of years and this summer I finally made the decision to apply for early retirement from the day job. I just knew I could no longer keep going. I felt tired and anxious. I had compassion fatigue My writing had been sporadic at best.
I've been officially retired for one month now and have still to settle into a new rhythm. For all of my writing life I have fitted creativity around everything else that had to be done. Now I have lots more time to myself and my hope is that I will write more - but I'm not sure that it will happen. The expanse of hours that I have now feels a bit scary. Perhaps I won't be able to fill it with words.

I'm hoping to kick start some creativity with a 10 day residency at Cill Rialaig courtesy of the Irish Writers Centre. It will be an opportunity to have a 'retreat' in which to think about themes for work and to go inwards to see if I can find a renewed sense of myself.

Exciting project

I am very pleased to have been invited to be part of this project, and now that I am off work for a few weeks, I will be able to throw myself into it.

Project 366 is a poem-centric collaboration of artists and writers taking place daily throughout 2016. And why? Because poetry is a process, art is a process. Poetry and art happen because we do it, because we make the effort to make it. So the object of this project is not to create finished art objects on a daily basis; it’s to get work on the way every day. Project 366 is to encourage the everyday business of artmaking for those who work – however they work – with word and image. Some people will post only pictures, some people will post only poems or short prose pieces. Some people will alternate among the various forms of their practice. And some may evolve new practices over the course of the year.

There are no set topics or themes for the project but participants add a short draft work daily so that the possibility is always there for response and for a conversation in the work. The project will be blogged daily on the wonderbook and, from there, republished to other social media, for instance facebook.

Project participants have their own keys and make their own posts each day. English is the language-in-common of the project and translation of other-than-English works will likewise happen on a daily basis, so authors working from languages other than English will need to draft rough translations of their work each day too.

http://project365plus.blogspot.co.uk/

 

Time is a strange thing

When the children were young and I was younger than I am now, I was always busy and yet there was always time to write - late at night or in intense bits of 'time out' of the usual run of things. Now that in theory I have a lot more time and I am a lot less busy, it feels as if there is hardly any time to write. Yet I feel the pressure of time getting shorter, of the probability of there not being a lot of time left.
Maybe it is energy I'm missing - or a sense of purpose? Or perhaps I just spend too much of my time on Facebook.
Whatever - I'm looking forward to taking some unpaid leave over the summer and not having the pressures of work. Having more time . Hopefully doing some serious reading and some writing. Alongside having a few more lie-ins, pottering in the garden, doing a bit of travelling and generally enjoying myself of course. Hope there is time for all of it!

Mother's Day

Mother who has been

my broken bowl           my holy grail

my long silence                        my spoken truth

my tiny bound feet      my seven league boots

my never quite             my every first prize

when you come on the forgotten well among the trees

lower the bucket, hand over hand: the rope will hold

as you draw up the cold clear water. Feel how it cools

your blood’s wild fire, scorched earth greens back, seeds burst,

and you can read again the hieroglyphics of branches

budding across the sky. Birds wake to fly and small animals

uncurl among the nascent ferns. Listen –

a child’s untroubled voice rings on the morning air, singing

as you fetch water for your mother from the wood well

and nothing will be lost.

Here is your father, once the youngest boy

neighbours had ever seen between

the handles of a plough, the hardest worker.

He lies under my heart carved in stone,

grown to the man who never wept.

Soft as a breast, your mother

is my children’s remembered dream of milky mouths.

Each thought undone, each memory unpeeled,

each year of you, I fold, hold to my cheek

like the white linen your grandmother sewed

by candlelight. I breathe you in, the living skin of me

knowing it was always too late for us, for everything

happens as it must, in its own moment.

As I become the past on which the future rests,

forgiveness is a final irrelevance.

Years from now, on some perfect summer evening,

I will look and you’ll be in the garden, gathering fruit.

A small dog will follow at your heels

as you pick gooseberries, bursting juice,

strawberries red ripe under leaves.

When you see me, you will beckon me to come,

and I’ll run down the years into your arms.

From Snakeskin Stilettos 1998

from the window

I'm so lucky to have a view of fields and trees from my kitchen window and I love to sit at the table and just observe. Often what I see seeps into my psyche.

Prey

This summer past, day after day, I watched the buzzard

rise from her stand of trees to hunt; watched her describe

her wide effortless circles, as a wheel set in motion, turns.

This autumn night she has gyred silently above my sleep

so that now at four a.m., I lie awake beneath her dream

and the small, secretive animal of self, trembles.

 

For the day that's in it

There was a taste of Spring in the air today and I was thinking about my mother, Nessa and her sister Muriel, now also gone. The daffodils are starting to bloom and it reminded me of these two poems.

The first I wrote when my mother was going through the hell of late dementia and the second is more recent. They are the same daffodils in both poems.

Daffodils

 

The Vertues: The roots stamped with hony, helpeth them that are burned with fire. They have also such wonderful qualities in drying, that they consound and glew together very great wounds.*

Gerard’s Herbal

 

1

I thought it was a fool’s errand, thought

we’d never find the place,

my mother trying to navigate

with only a vague address to go by –

a farm somewhere outside Millisle.

My children bored, fighting in the back seat,

my nerves on edge, my hands too tight

on the steering wheel, stress levels high.

 

But we got there, loaded sackfuls of bulbs

into the car’s boot, and paid the man.

 

For weeks afterwards, I’d look out the window

and see my mother on her knees, digging,

planting daffodils behind hedges, among trees.

 

2

My mother has descended into hell

(these biblical allusions haunt me),

and daffodils are the only colour in this Easter,

yellow incongruities across the dull fields,

painfully there, like the resurrection of love.

 

I cut them against despair, bring

huge bundles of them into the house,

beacons burning in vases, on windowsills.

 

 

 

 

 

Spring

 

It’s trespass time.

I’ll take my scissors

across the fields

to where my mother

planted her daffodils.

 

It’s not really stealing is it?

Anyway I feel no guilt,

there are so many drifts

a few dozen blossoms

won’t be missed.

 

 

Crazy Knot

I'm hoping to write a series of pieces about my identity as a Northern Irish person and poet - this is the first of them, sparked by a recent visit to Dublin.

I was pleased to be invited to read at this year’s Dublin Book Festival and after a lovely event with a warm and receptive audience, I went for some food with my husband and then back to attend the launch of the Windharp, an anthology charting the history of Ireland through poetry since 1916, edited by poetry commentator Niall MacMonagle. It was a great reading, with poets such as Paula Meehan and Moya Cannon reading both some of their own work and the work of others, from Yeats, Easter 1916 to a poem about a post-crash ‘ghost estate’ and Paula’s wonderful The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks. However as the evening went on, I found myself becoming more and more aware that this did not feel like my history or my life. The cultural references were not mine. I was in a foreign country. The next day, as we walked around Dublin, there was a sense of the whole city’s tourist machine gearing up for the centenary next year of the Easter Rising.

I grew up in a Presbyterian family in Northern Ireland through the worst years of the ‘troubles’. It sometimes feels to me as if my history has been made up of nothing but grim news flashes, bombs, shootings, horror and despair. This is what we have inherited, here in the North, and we are still struggling to find a way through to the future. Even now, sectarian gangs hold huge swathes of people here to ransom, fattening on the communities’ fears. In a recent article by Glenn Patterson, he stated that in the twelve months to February 2015, there were 347 incidents where bomb disposal experts were called out. This is our peace. Fear and pain is in the fabric of our society, politicians rely on it. It is difficult for me to regard Pearse without also seeing the shadows he left behind, that we’ve had to sleep with for forty years. I feel very far away from notions of Romantic Ireland and the Celtic Tiger neither boomed nor busted in my neck of the woods.

I have struggled to find a sense of my own identity in Northern Ireland. In the early 90’s, when I helped to found the Creative Writers’ Network, it was at least in part to explore the idea of an alternative ‘Ulster Voice’. At the time another poet was so vehemently opposed to the very idea of that voice, that she said that the word ‘Ulster’ made her feel physically sick.

I have no time for hatred, guns and flags, for narrow-mindedness, or that mind-set that seems so prevalent here and that will always and forever argue the opposite from the ‘other side’. I have grown into a sense of myself as being Northern Irish, not Orange and not Green; not one thing or the other. It continues to feel as if there isn’t a lot of room for people like me in the North; when the chips are down and the votes counted, our society still falls into its tribal lines.

So who am I? Though I’m not defined by the Battle of the Boyne neither am I by the Easter Rising; neither the burning bush or the sacred heart; not the sash, nor the shamrock – or England’s red rose. To quote a great Ulster poet, John Hewitt, ‘Time and this island tied a crazy knot.’

 

Keeping Busy

It has been a busy year for me with readings and workshops. I love having these opportunities to connect through poetry, so I'm looking forward to facilitating a workshop as part of the Irish Writers Centre Masterclass series on 28th October http://irishwriterscentre.ie/products/the-poetry-masterclass-series

Also really delighted to be appearing at Dublin Book Festival in some great company on November 14 in Smock Alley Theatre, so get booking: http://bit.ly/1kmiFod

And I've been speaking to Headstuff about my latest collection of poetry 'The Goose Tree': http://www.libertiespress.com/shop/the-goose-tree
Thanks to Alvy Carragher for the opportunity and the interesting questions.

Elementary

This is the second Beautiful Dragons project with which I've been involved. The first was 'Heavenly Bodies' where 88 poets wrote a poem each to represent each of the 88 constellations. My constellation was Triangulum and the eventual poem was A Dream of Three.
In this new anthology poets were invited to pick an element from the periodic table and I chose Silica.

Dreamt up, organised, edited and masterminded by the wonderful Rebecca Jane Irvine the projects are not only great fun but also a challenge and I love being involved. The launch of the new book will be in Manchester on the 27th November and the book will be available at the link below, where you can also see a picture of the lovely production.



http://www.beautiful-dragons.com/Beautiful_Dragons/My_Dear_Watson.html

Dis-Ease moves to Bangor

As part of Aspects Literary Festival, the Dis-Ease exhibition opens on Wednesday 2nd September in Sync Space, Dufferin Avenue. Opening at 6.00 pm and a short reading at 7.00pm.

Dis-Ease

Very pleased that the exhibition of Dis-Ease is part of the Belfast Book Festival. The result of my collaboration with photographic artist Victoria J Dean, the exhibition consists of a series of images combined with poems or extracts from poems. It opens on Monday 8th June at 7.45 - everyone welcome.

 

 

http://www.belfastbookfestival.com/#!exhibitions/cahm 

 

Absorbed

 

I’d take you back into myself,

every cell, each chromosome.

 

I’d have you back, before birth,

before conception, all

 

your future still ahead. I’d hold

you as an imagined thing, safe.

Solas Nua

A poem of mine - read in Washington for St Patrick's Day


http://www.wjla.com/blogs/lets-talk-live/2015/03/irish-book-day--24770.html

Irrevocable Things

I was fortunate enough to recently have a poem win the North West Words Poetry Competition. Here it is - for anyone who would like to read it.
It is also included in the Spring edition of the North West Words on-line magazine

Irrevocable Things

We lead him to the chosen spot.

A bright day, without clouds,

autumn sun still holding its heat.

He trusts us; we’ve never

given him reason not to trust us.

The sky blue drug goes in,

we see him feel it hit

and then we watch helpless

the violence of his falling and terrible
tumbling over himself, his desperate
lurching refusal to stay down though
unable to stay up; it goes on forever,
until he’s prone at last and Claire
puts her hand over his eye and
he gives in to the shuddering darkness.
A bullet loudly, thankfully, finishes it.

 It has dragged the heart from me;

I want to cry wait horse, wait,
come back,
we’ll do it better, it was a kindness
that we meant.

 All the regret for every hurt I’ve ever caused,

sadness for everything I’ve ever lost,
is pouring through this rent, that wound,
his drawn back lips, his emptied eyes.

When I am Old

A lovely image from Liberties Press to go with my poem - When I am Old


https://www.facebook.com/DublinLibertiesPress/photos/a.225210427514078.50427.117184288316693/784097174958731/?type=1

Time's winged chariot

I first became involved with social media a number of years ago when I received the ACNI Artist Career Enhancement Award. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter were recommended as a way to increase artist profile and keep in touch with what was happening – and it’s true – I have built up a network that allows me to hear about a lot of submission opportunities and competitions. On one level, it’s great; never miss a thing and I do love to hear about other poets’ successes and new books. But on another level it induces great anxiety in me. I write very slowly and sometimes long periods of time go by when I don’t write at all. I simply don’t have enough poems to keep up with the opportunities.

 

Time is a strange thing. In my career as a poet I have always juggled writing with a full time job that pays the bills, with bringing up a family, with other interests and with all the stresses and strains that are part of life. I always seemed to be able to find the time, even if it meant sitting up into the early hours. Even when traumatic things were happening, there always seemed to be time to write. Now time seems to have shrunk – or maybe it’s my energy levels.

 

I had imagined that as I got older, life would become less frantic, less emotionally demanding, less of a roller-coaster ride. Not a bit of it – if anything it’s more intense. I probably have more time to myself than I used to have – in fact I know I do – but it seems to drift past me in ways it never did before.

 

Which brings me back to all those opportunities for publication - I’m frustrated with myself that I can’t be more disciplined with myself, that I can’t focus more on my writing. I’m never going to be prolific, but I should be doing more. Time is running out.

 

So – what can I do? Energy foods? Throw out the TV? Employ a muse that wields a cattle prod?

Signing Syndrome

I’m just wondering if any other authors suffer from this syndrome. It’s the one where someone hands you one of your books to sign after a reading and every single brain cell you have stops working. Brain freeze. The person standing in front of you is someone you have known for at least ten years – but can you remember their name?

Spelling also goes totally out the window; for example last night, I managed to totally mangle the name Nathaniel so that it resembled nothing more than a long line of consonants.

So far I have remembered my own name, but I’m not complacent about that always being the case.

How I envy those authors who can manage to write an erudite but personal message under these circumstances.

 

A great surprise

I didn't know it was happening until I got the link from my publisher. Honoured to have a poem read by the great Garrison Keillor


http://goo.gl/EzuDpB


And then discovered another one!
http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20141114/

Writing about reading

There have been so many poetry readings over the last few months that it would have been just about impossible for one person to get to them all. I managed to get to quite a few over the summer, and they got me thinking about the purpose of a ‘reading’. For me it adds to my understanding of a poet’s work; to hear them read, to hear where they put the inflections, the pauses, the emphasis. I go back to the poems on the page with the poet’s voice still in my head. Hearing Miriam Gamble, Anne-Marie Fyfe and Theo Dorgan read from their new collections has made me feel as if I have been given a key to the books themselves, making entry to the work easier. On another level, it can be the pure pleasure of just listening, letting the words enter through the ears rather than the eyes.

Hearing Myra Vennard read at the On Home Ground Festival in Magherafelt was one of the joys of my summer. The tone of the event was set by Damian Smyth, who seemed to channel the spirit of Heaney into the room, holding the atmosphere despite noise from outside and other distractions. Myra’s poetry flowed into and around the audience like a spiritual balm. I felt as if I was listening, not to a poet read, but to poetry itself. The event finished with the wonderful voice of singer songwriter Ciara O’Neil and I could feel the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. The music and poetry complimented each other perfectly.

Another outstanding reading for me was that of Damian Smyth during Aspects Festival. I have been at readings where, when the poet announces that he/she is reading two more poems, you can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the audience that the end is in sight; but this was the opposite. I was at a table with a number of other poets, Jean Bleakney , Paul Maddern and Jonathan Hicks and we all agreed that we could have listened for hours. For me it was like the pleasure I had as a child listening to my mother read me the next chapter from whatever book we were on.

I always appreciate the opportunity to read my own work to an audience and I hope people enjoy hearing me read my poetry. I’m always inclined to the view that ‘less is more’ when I read at events. I’m terrified of boring everyone! Different readings can have very different feels to them for the poet standing up there. I’m always nervous beforehand. I usually pick a range of poems to read and adjust the list according to the ‘feel’ I’m getting from the audience. It can depend on so many factors, but sometimes I feel as if my words are toppling off a cliff and other times I can feel the warmth, interest and engagement. Like most poets I have poems that I know work at a reading and others that I seldom read in public. It’s not that one is ‘better’ than the other, some poems just work well spoken aloud and some suit the solitude between the reader and the page. It’s always a bit nerve wracking giving a new poem its first spoken outing.

All of this pondering meant I was very interested to be asked to attend a Poetry Slam as a ‘judge’. It was good fun, though I did feel slightly uneasy at the idea of poetry as competition. It allowed me to reflect on the difference between ‘performance poetry’ at a slam, and a more conventional reading. My conclusion was that good poetry shines through in either setting.

The Influence of Absences

I’ve told the story before, of how I went to QUB wanting to be a writer. (Actually I already was a writer, albeit a fledgling one. I had been writing stories and poems for as long as I could remember. When I was in sixth form, I had won the Belfast Telegraph Short Story Competition.) Yet, when I emerged from university in the late 1970’s, I had stopped writing and lost all confidence. I no longer thought that I had anything of value to say; never mind the ability to say it. I was silenced.

 

During my time at university there was no-one to look to. No women poets that I could find as contemporary references in NI. There was no sense from anyone I spoke to that a woman could be a serious poet. I felt it was stupid of me to have thought I could. This was despite me considering myself a feminist. There wasn’t even anything creative about the degree; no ‘creative writing’ option. I moved on to postgraduate study in a completely different area of life.

 I have blamed the university for my silence and I have also blamed myself – for not being braver, cleverer, more tenacious.

 

Well over a decade had passed before I allowed myself to consider re-visiting my ambition to be write poems; though in the meantime I had continued to scribble bits and pieces that didn’t see the light of day. Second time around there were supports in place, put there by women who were more tenacious than me, Joan Newmann, Ruth Carr, people determined to have women’s voices heard. There were writers’ groups that allowed a platform for everyone, with great tutors like Damian Gorman and Martin Mooney. I will always be grateful to those who encouraged and supported me at that stage and to both Lapwing Press and Lagan Press who opened the doors to publication.

 

All this is by way of a preamble to draw attention to a very interesting academic paper from Alex Pryce – Ambiguous Silences? Women in Anthologies of Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry

When I came across it recently, I was able to see myself in the historical context of the NI of my youth. It allowed me to put my experience in context and to understand more fully why I felt the way I did. It saddened me, but in a strange way reassured me that it wasn’t just my own inability that held me back. It validated the sense I had as a twenty year old woman, that I was expected to not expect anything, to just shut up. Almost four decades later, it validates the truth my experience.

 

See what you think.

 

https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association/publications/peer-english/9/6.pdf

Back to work this week

Leave: Paid and Unpaid

 

I have moved through summer

on the dream that summer

will last forever: how good it is

to open the curtains to the sun,

to get onto my knees to scrub

the floor, to stretch my arms up

to pin sheets to the line, to tie

back my hair and get on with

painting the fence; repairing things;

mending winter’s rents and tears.

 

The nasturtiums are covered

in little black upstanding eggs that

as time goes by, turn to caterpillars,

grow and shed their skins five times,

eat leaves to lacy skeletons, then

to stubs of stem, like amputations.

 

Things grow in random places, ferns

climb the wall; mullein spike through

stones; something starred with dark blue

and yolky yellow flowers, creeps through

the hedge and up the bird feeder.

Horse radish in the lawn, trees planted

by birds in the flower beds, buddleia

blown by the wind to stony crevices

to root, blossom; as once they followed

the railway lines, using the pull of air

from trains to escape from the big houses,

make their way across the countryside.

So it is that exotics become weeds; I read

of a couple who become lost amongst

the rhododendrons and have to be rescued

from that foreign forest on home ground.

 

I don’t feel out of place, just a little con-

fused. Time isn’t what it used to and some

times I hear its winged chariot revving up.

Best is when I’m just afloat, drifting with

the hours – I get plenty done, or nothing.