Q: You’ve just published your third collection, Of Ochre and Ash, which has been described as “urgent”, “subtle”, “exquisite and affirming”. Can you give us an insight into how this new book took shape? Taken purely as a kind of colour-code, “Ochre and Ash” make me think of the deep, weathery atmosphere of Lough Derg, which I know you have a special knowledge of. Is this a far-fetched observation? 

 

A: The title of the collection, Of Ochre and Ash, comes from a line in my poem, ‘When you Dream of the Dead’, and no, it’s not at all far-fetched to relate the colour-code to the temperature, temperament and weather of the lake. In winter, the season when I get most writing done, the reeds have an ochre hue and the lake rarely gets above an ash, slate-blue warmth. Within that poem there is actually a sonic reference to Tipperary (“prairies”):

 

My boat runs in on a flood tide,

is beached at the prairie’s edge,

the closest I’ll get to home.

 

When I print out poems that I think may form a collection, trends and themes emerge of which I was previously unaware. I sometimes find recurring phrases in the poems. 

 

I don’t set out to write a mono-thematic, mono-logical collection. Each poem has its own story, with its own voice. The strange thing is, when I lay the poems close to one another I can hear their polyphony, the dialogue that exists between them. I like that, the idea of multiple voices, a sort of dialogism poem to poem, poem to reader, book to book.

 

There are two sequences in this collection, one contemplating the plague and the dark times in which we find ourselves, and the other my own productiveness during the pandemic, with the honeybee as a metaphor.

 

Q: Critics have noted the “mythic” and even “Gothic” dimensions of your poetry. Are these accurate characterisations, in your view? Certainly by my reading, the memories your poems explore and delicately re-imagine often seem shaded by a semi-mystical or supernatural light, and the effect can be both entrancing and unnerving. I’m thinking of a piece like ‘The Present’, for example, in which “I went inside a clock. My dæmon / unlocked the back, told me to take / my time as he laced me into my snow / boots”, or the title poem of your book, The Shadow Owner’s Companion, which reads: 

 

I know she’s there. At night she rocks in the left

corners of our bedroom; her chair held together with my fear

of the dark. She stays there, mostly, in the dark. Sometimes,

she sleeps at the bottom of the lake…

 

A: In as much as there is terror, wonder and the uncanny in my poems, which adopt the tropes and themes of fairytale and folklore, it delights me that critics might read the ‘mythic’ or ‘gothic’ in them.

 

In ‘The Present’, the poem to which you refer, a mammoth nudges slow globes down a frozen gulley. Inside one globe is my old classroom in which my classmates are huddled beneath the floorboards ‘silent and petrified’. This poem is like a Martin and Muñoz snow globe, in which all the figures are trapped and alienated. In the poem, the snow globes and the clock are objects that constrain, bringing neither harmony nor comfort in the familiar. Like most fairytales, the teller in ‘The Present’ is on a quest to resolve a conflict. Her guide is a mixture perhaps of conscience, spirit dæmon and magical creature, whose job it is to help the speaker to land safely, to accept her reality. Most fairytales warn of the consequences of ignoring a guide. This poem doesn’t, it encourages the reader to imagine their own conclusion outside the poem. 

 

In ‘The Shadow Owner’s Companion’ the creature in the poem is part Baba Yaga, part Banshee, and this mixture is evidence of how fairytale and folklore collide in my writing. In ‘The Shadow Owner’s Companion’, the visitor is full of malign, and in another version of her in the poem, ‘Aubade in which Soul becomes Shadow’, (in Of Ochre and Ash), she is benevolent and supportive. It interests me that from my first book to my third, her character has changed. She was a regular visitor in a recurrent nightmare.

 

Q: When I read your work I often come away with a sense of how a poem becomes a common space, where the past in its mystery can be made vivid and gleaming again, restored. What do you make of this idea? 

 

A: I guess for me much of my writing is trying to figure out the world and my place in it. Invention through poetry provides me with a means to create a parallel reality outside the rules and restraints of the real world.  The irony is that language and the poetic form impose a different sort of limit on expression, with the consequence that the poem may fail as a poem.

 

Q: Sometimes in your work, the rhythm and form of the poem seem to register and reflect the seasons of the natural world, and perhaps also of your own life. Is there a relationship between these zones of experience, as you understand them? I have in mind that play of resistance and acquiescence in your poem, “traces”, “as you drag the sea / and drag it back / and drag it back” I could also mention “Well Worn Wings’, which reads: 

 

I catch sight of my well worn wings – 

their hooked vanes patched blue 

and green – old wounds. With effort, 

they wrench me from the water’s pull...

 

A: I wish I could draw. I could show you the locations I imagine for the poem, ‘Hoofprints’, from the ‘traces’ sequence, and ‘Well Worn Wings’, both vivid still in my mind. I wrote ‘Hoofprints’ after I had heard that a dear family member had died from Covid. I went out for a walk through the fields to the lake. A friend’s horse was cantering round one of the fields. We stopped briefly to say hello to one another, she went back to her beautiful canter and I carried on down to the lake. ‘Hoofprints’ is about the relentless cycle of life and time, and the horse came to symbolise both those things in the poem.

 

As a young woman I was told no, my ideas wouldn’t fly, and I didn’t have permissions to imagine. It’s a load of crock really, I don’t need anyone’s permission to write or to imagine myself as a writer. I have only myself to blame for waiting so long. ‘Well Worn Wings’ is about such self-sabotage. So yes, even if skewed a little, my poems do register the seasons of my life against the seasons of the natural world. 

 

Q: Czeslaw Milosz once asked,  “What is poetry which does not save nations or people?” (and one of his answers, interestingly, was that such a poetry would be “[a] connivance with official lies”). Do you share the perspective that informs this question, i.e. that poetry can and should try to “save nations or people”? Part of the reason I ask is that, in addition to being a poet, you’ve worked as a midwife, and indeed are still an active member of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI): saving lives seems to be a consistent preoccupation for you. 

 

A: When I was a student nurse, barely eighteen and up from the country with no notion of how anything worked, one of our tutors assured our class that we would never see a difficult death. I believed that lie until I didn’t. A life can be extinguished in a second, one second. And though it’s a cliché, life is indeed precious; we should take nothing for granted, nor be complacent in the belief that things we need to do can wait. Often they can’t. Throughout my nursing and lifeboating career, I have seen again and again how that truth holds. Life teaches us these lessons. 

 

The beauty of poetry is that the poem you need to find, finds you. Poems I return to all the time remind me that everything is going to be okay. I’ve sent poems by poets I admire to friends in a time of need, when what’s broken with them is beyond my capacity to fix. I can’t say the poem saved their life, but they tell me it has changed them. Save people, perhaps yes, but save nations, I’m not so sure. With that charge I could see poor poetry doubled over with the weight of the world on her back and unable to lift her head above the view of her feet.