Photo credit: Louise Monique | Interview by Zoë Brigley
“I will hold onto a poem, working and re-working it, until I get the ending right.”
In the Waiting Room
i.m. Peter, Maura & Tommy Dullaghan
You’re slowing down, Peter says as he passes, and you’ve put on weight. He’s the same as he was – rake thin, watery eyed. I shouldn’t be here, he says, sounding annoyed. I suppose not, I shout after him. I need to get out. His voice comes from the mouth of a corridor. Stay where you are and rest. My father sits beside me, out of breath. You’ve been at it a long time now. Have you come up with any answers? I look at him. Myself, I only ever had the one, he says: God’s will. That’s too easy an answer, I tell him. A cop out. And you know better? He stands Where are you off to? I ask. Looking for answers, he smiles, same as yourself. But don’t sit here too long or they’ll lock you in. I slowly move myself. I have so little energy these days. I take off in the opposite direction to the traffic of the dead. My mother is propped up in a bed by the wall. I push towards her. But she waves me away. Go on, she says, pointing, you have things to do. The door’s that way.
So I like the uncertainty in this poem. We begin with the title wondering if this a realist scenario in a real waiting room, but once it begins, it takes on the quality of a dream and the people who we talk to are probably ghosts. How did the poem come about?
As you identified, it came from a dream. I was lucky enough to jot down much of the dream when I woke up (including the dialogue). I then worked at it over a number of days. It’s not often that I can make a dream poem. But when I do, there’s always an element of the surreal that I enjoy. The main thing, I think, is to trust the reader and not to try and explain everything. Indeed, I like the fact that I don’t always understand everything myself.
The arrival of the father in the tercet half-way through makes that moment feel important. Fathers can be important figures in our lives for better or worse, and here it feels as though the father is elusive offering riddles and clues. Do you write about fathers a lot in your poems?
My first two collections had a lot of poems about my father. In my subsequent collections there are a few poems about him in each. So, I suppose, he’s a recurring obsession. In my most recent collection In the Coming of Winter he appears as a ghost, as he does here, so I guess I’ve moved on from memory.
My father died when I was a young adult, so I never had very many adult conversations with him (I had also moved away from home when I was twenty-one). This poem allows for a conversation of sorts, albeit vailed in its meaning. But, I suppose, that’s how dreams communicate with us.
Great endings of poems are hard to achieve, but this is a good one with the mother intervening and gesturing to the practical world. Do you spend a long time thinking about the endings of poems?
I think poem endings are extremely important. I don’t want them to give a clunking summary or closure. A softer landing is generally better. Mostly, it needs to feel like an ending. The reader should feel satisfied and not left hanging or short-changed. I will hold onto a poem, working and re-working it, until I get the ending right.
