1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I have been writing since my teens, changing, developing, and hopefully getting better all the time. My writing life has been 'off-grid', as it were: I have published very little, and I have no literary friends. As a young writer, after a brief contact with the poetry world in my native city of Cork, I felt, unconsciously at first, that I was better suited to the fringes of literary life. And of life in general. I have lived and worked all my adult life in provincial Spanish cities, writing all the time and hoping my isolation would give my work an individual perspective until I felt I had reached a stage when my poetry could go out into the wider world.
As a result, the poems in my chapbook are a selection from the many poems I have written over the years. They were chosen in an attempt to mark out an area I could call my own, to lay the foundations for future books. The poems are meant to be solid structures, the lines often heavily worked on.
Now that it has been published, I feel free to move up into the air, to use lighter materials, to have openings that would allow for more space and let oxygen in.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Two reasons.
My area of rural Ireland still cherished, as I was growing up, the rags and tatters of an ancient poetic tradition. My mother recited poems on impulse as she went about the house. Her favourites have stayed with me.
On the other hand, Ireland in the 1970s was still a closed patriarchal society dominated by rigid Catholicism, and poetry dovetailed easily with an impulse towards inner freedom and became its expression.
For fiction I would have to have lived in a different type of society or at least seen my relation to that society in a different light.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write a lot, but none of my first drafts is anywhere near finished. I need to find connections with other texts I have written, perhaps years before, and work on them over an extended period before I feel a poem has enough shape to deserve that name, and longer still before it has autonomy or independence.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of
short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on
a "book" from the very beginning?
Poems begin with attention, to an experience in life, to an echo I hear in a word or phrase. It continues through a process of enquiry that includes the origin, development or consequences of that experience, and the more ground that process covers, the more intensely I work on a project. Fortunately, I don't have to meet deadlines.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
When I hear poets read, the voice adds another dimension. The poem ceases to be just a text and comes alive.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Given Ireland's uneasy relationship as a colonised country with its neighbours in western Europe, and my own origins in an underdeveloped rural area, I am conscious of my condition of outlier to the central trunk of the poetic tradition in English.
Equally, I am aware that the echoes of my own experience and the history of my area in the impoverished and neglected parts of Spain, particularly Galicia in the north-west, and elsewhere in the world, place an onus on me to give expression to those who have in a sense been sidelined by history.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I have just finished an extraordinary book Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean and the Climate Crisis. The author, Tao Leigh Goffe, concludes that 'we desperately need more poets influencing policymakers. With poets at the international table to develop climate policy, what new horizons are possible? They invent and distill the language needed for an optimistic future.' It would be nice to think that she is correct.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor
difficult or essential (or both)?
The final shape of my chapbook owes a lot to the poet Patrick Cotter, my editor at the Munster Literature Centre. He stressed that the book should act as a calling card, as an introduction to future work, and together we sifted my poems with this in mind. He was easy to work with, patient, kind and understanding.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I read a lot of Rilke as a young writer, and practical lessons taken from his work have been essential to my own writing, especially the advice he received from Rodin, that artistic activity was work to be carried out like any other work, on a daily basis.
Or that beautiful text where he suggests that one should wait, and gather meaning a whole life long, and if possible at the very end, one might be able to write a few good lines.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
My creative writing happens at night, in silence and semi-darkness, when the secretive workings of the unconscious mind dominate the process of putting pen to paper. Always pen on paper, with pages that are often unreadable, frequently very bad, and always in need of revision.
In the morning, the computer and the keyboard take over. I analyse, alter, cut and delete, and occasionally find something worth pursuing.
I think of my night work as a trip to a quarry, from which I return with a block of uncut stone. By day in my workshop, I follow the veins and fissures of the stone and try to find the shape that is hidden inside, waiting for the tap of the chisel to make its revelations.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The act of giving attention, of focussing on experience always leads to some inspiration. If I am physically or mentally tired, or unwell, I accept that I will be unable to work, and engage in some other activity, cooking, walking, listening to music, that makes me feel better.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The damp that rises from the boggy soil of Atlantic Ireland, and the heady aromas of wild flowers, like cow parsley or honeysuckle, or the sweetness of burning gorse.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I feel that poetry has most in common with photography, in which an opportune moment gracefully shoulders a wealth of experience. I find inspiration in many great photographers, from André Kertész to Willy Ronis, Saul Leiter or Rinko Kawauchi.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work,
or simply your life outside of your work?
When I was a teenager, the best poetry in English came from New York and Northern Ireland, and Heaney and Ashbery were and remain hugely important for me.
Milosz and Tranströmer, Lorca and Machado. Aurelio Arturo, the Columbian poet. The Galician poet Uxio Novoneyra, available in English translation by Erin Moure. Diane Seuss and Daisy Fried, Kathleen Jamie, Alice Oswald and Pascale Petit, Alison Brackenbury and Gillian Allnutt, Eilean Ni Chuilleanáin and Martina Evans, John Burnside and Mark Doty.
I also see my own development as a consequence of the discovery of a short book by V. S. Naipaul, who I had never heard of when I picked it up by chance. He is justly criticised today, but Finding the Centre was a revelation for me. This account of how he came to write his first book, Miguel Street, which I immediately got hold of, consciously focused on the process of leaving a non-literary background and turning that background into writing material. I saw the characters he created from the streets of Trinidad in people I knew in rural Ireland. He was also the first writer who got me thinking about the continuing role of the British Empire and colonial experience in the place I grew up, despite independence. I think he also helped me find my own way in a literary tradition I loved, but found at times overwhelming, the tradition of Joyce and Frank O'Connor, Yeats, Kavanagh and Heaney.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I want to write more about being a young adult in Spain in the late eighties and nineties as the fervour of the transition to democracy vanished and the tentacles of the old regime made their presence felt again through the first right-wing government, an early taste of the fascist inheritance experienced more widely today.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I am not a writer. I couldn't have made a living from poetry, and never really thought I could, but writing is a safety net that has prevented me from ending up as something much worse than I am.
I teach English as a foreign language, but I sometimes fantasize that I wouldn't have made a bad tradesman, a carpenter or a stonecutter.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I drifted naturally towards writing as a teenager. I was bookish, and poetry was 'in the air' in the place I grew up.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
My enthusiasm is often for books I have been reading most recently. These include the afore-mentioned Dark Laboratory, essential reading alongside Michael C. Mann's 1493 and Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse to explain how we have ended up where we are today.
I have learnt a lot from Eula Biss's Having and Being Had, a look at the economics of writing, and from Christiana Spens' The Fear, a philosophical study of anxiety.
In Spanish, I have loved Martin Prieto's Un poema pegado en la heladera, portraits and analysis of Argentinian poets to add to the more familiar work of Borges, Pizarnik and Olga Orozco.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I am working towards a full collection.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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