Interview by Zoë Brigley
“It is in the editing-amending-polishing phases of the original thought-story-memory that I listen to the rhythms of the language, to the unfolding of the scenes, if more than one, and sense when there is what I think of as a key change, almost as though it is music“
A Lost Voice
The screen slowly scrolling the old Census froze when my eye caught her sudden name, then a young Tipperary woman of eighteen, a stranger unknowingly fated to become my mother’s mother, recorded in the old document as versed in the use of the Irish language, as was her daughter, schooled in West Cork, both in time to be taken over to England, where her early passing meant Mam spoke to me only in the language of exile, the language of survival, and though I am Home my words fall now from an exile’s mouth but deep in my heart and being rests still the love conveyed in the lost voices of two mothers who spoke too briefly to me in the old language, a sound still achingly familiar but whose meaning I no longer hear.
Ancestry is a strong interest for many people and it can be fascinating to find traces of family members in the records. Was this based on a true happening?
This was indeed based on a true happening. My mother died when I was twenty-four and her mother, who lived in London with us, had died when I was four, the age when my parents separated and I had no contact with or knowledge of my father again. My step-grandpa returned to Ireland when I was sixteen and contact with him was lost. Consequently, there was no-one I could ask about the history of those two generations. It was when I had settled back in Ireland that I became friends with a local historian with a professional interest in genealogy and he showed me how to explore older records and it was in the 1911 Census that I found my grandma back before she became my Mam’s mother. And so the poem awoke.
Language is an important theme in Welsh writing and in Irish literature. Do you see parallels there?
I do see clear parallels there. I formerly had a long and close friendship with a native-Welsh speaker and conversations with him reflected the same understanding that I perceive in my friends who are native Irish speakers, that all know their mother tongue to be an inherent part of their identity, and, in a sense, makes them ‘more’ Irish or Welsh, or ‘better’ or ‘truer’ Irish or Welsh. So the reading of their respective literatures in their own language is seen as deepening or better grounding who they are, and allies them with others of their own language-speaking ‘tribe’. This is heightened perhaps by the historical fact of long subjugation and the imposition of another, a ‘foreign’ language.
From what I understand from them this sense of belonging is an important theme in both Irish and Welsh writing and literature and attaches them to their history, to an ancient line of ancestors who spoke the same language, and also to a ‘place’ that they never leave, even when they migrate, that it is a metaphysical and mystical connection both to time and location.
This makes perfect sense to me having first been introduced to Irish as my language and then having to switch to English as a young child, leaving a distinct sense of loss.
You chose to use a cinquain here to slowly unfold the story, passing from a glimpse in the records to two real people with real histories and lives. How do you decide what form works best when writing a poem?
Each of my poems is first recorded in pencil in whichever notebook comes to hand as freely as I can think it, almost stream of consciousness writing. I then transcribe it into the word processor with virtually no change apart from adding a title for archiving, which generally changes as the poem takes on its final form. It is in the editing-amending-polishing phases of the original thought-story-memory that I listen to the rhythms of the language, to the unfolding of the scenes, if more than one, and sense when there is what I think of as a key change, almost as though it is music. And so the lines themselves choose for when a stanza should end, and that gives the number of lines in that stanza.
With this poem it was the first ‘scene-setting’ stanza that naturally asked for a cinquain and that set the template. I like the discipline of stanzas of the same number of lines and where the stanzas naturally fall into differing line numbers it forces me to look more critically at the poem, and that can lead to shortening one ‘errant’ stanza or, as has just happened with a poem I am currently working on, of adding lines to increase the shorter stanzas. Should both those fail I try dispensing with stanzas, and as I generally write single sentence poems that can also work well. With this poem it fell very naturally into different moments, discrete ‘scenes’, each requiring, I felt, five-lines and it was then the rhythm of each line that set its length. This was a poem that easily ‘wrote’ itself.
