rr Writers’Residency funded by Offaly Arts Office, I will have the opportunity in October to spend a week at Brendan House in the Centre of Birr, in Ireland. This Georgian Heritage Town has a remarkable history and a community with a thriving arts culture. Applications to the residency were open to professional writers of any genre, fiction, playwrights, journalism, travel writing or, in my case, poetry.
Having concentrated on prose for the last ten years, I am finally returning to my first love, which is poetry and am building a collection with the draft title of ‘People I met along the way’. So far, all the poems relate to, or are inspired by recent trips to Ireland which I have made in an attempt to connect with my birth heritage. My birth parents were both Irish, from Galway, and, surprisingly, both were poets as I found out whenI finally traced them. (I was adopted and grew up in the UK.) The poems explore connection: some recount actual meetings, such as with a drummer on the banks of Lough Corrib; others explore imaginary encounters such as with the last caretaker of the Isle of Inchagoill; I am drawn to the myths and early religious stories, inspired, for example, to write about a lepper arriving at the whispering arch at Clonmacnoise; equally, I allow myself to be guided by my B&B host through small town Ireland to come face to face with a modern reality. As if bent over a jigsaw puzzle, I find myself constructing a genetic blueprint of myself and wondering what it would look like were it ever to be finished.
In terms of genre, I am currently interested in voice and story in poetry. Studying modern Irish poets who experiment with lyricism and the narrative form is proving a rich seam for me, most recently Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger. The extraordinary work MotherBabyHome also resonates, not just personally, but in Campanello’s giving voice to experience and using source combined with poetry to reach truth. I made a poor attempt at this in some of my memoire poems in A Child in the Middle and would like to build on this start.
A week’s retreat at Birr Writers Residence will place me geographically where my poetry at the moment is located. Place is important to me; The Well was written at and about the small rural cottage where I live. I like to immerse myself in my subject. It will enable me to write and work in a place where artistic endeavour has been and is valued and in some strange way, I believe that permeates a setting. It is a chance to become part of a heritage in its own right. I would like to feel that I am slowly becoming part of an Irish literary tradition, as well as an English one, and this is part of a longer process of becoming whole.
I have also no doubt that Birr itself will offer poems. I am looking forward to seeing the facsimile of the Macregol Gospels in the library, the Seffin Stone and St Brendan’s Monastery in terms of the history and to further my study of the poetry and life of the remarkable Susan Langstaff Mitchell. My birth father as a young student was a radical member of the IRA, and the personal stories behind the handover of the Birr Barracks and the execution of three IRA men at Birr Castle interest me. As with all my visits to Ireland, the people I meet along the way, and the stories they have shared, have enriched my creativity and I have no doubt Birr will be no exception.