Uncovering a Hidden History 

For much of my life, I had absolutely no idea that my grandfather, Michael McCann, had fought in the First World War. I grew up with the image of him as the archetypal Irish nationalist hero of the first decades of the twentieth century. A brooding photograph of him in Free State Army uniform and flat-topped army cap dominated the dresser in my mother’s kitchen; stories of his escapades in the War of Independence and the Civil War were an integral part of family lore. But there was no mention of the earlier conflict my grandfather was involved in, as a Lance Corporal for the Royal Munster Fusiliers. His experience, like that of so many of the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who fought in World War I, had been quietly obliterated from the official narrative. There was no room in the nationalist mythology for any stories about those who fought for other causes.

When I began to research my grandfather’s life in greater detail, in preparation for a memoir I hoped to write about him, I first turned to the obvious sources to flesh out the information I already had about his campaigns in the War of Independence and the Civil War. The Irish Military Archives were very helpful in finding Witness Statements that mentioned my grandfather, and his role in the various arson attacks in the North East of England that led to his imprisonment in Parkhurst in 1920. Newspaper cuttings testified to his involvement in ambushes during the Irish Civil War. The Garda Archives were able to provide me with an A4 sheet detailing his subsequent career as a Detective Inspector with the newly established Garda Siochána.

It was when I was trawling through genealogy websites to see if I could get more information about my grandfather’s family, who were small farmers in a townland called Derryronane in County Mayo, that the greatest surprise was uncovered. By this stage I knew he’d fought in the Great War – my uncle Liam had given me the one artefact linking my grandfather to the British Army: his soldier’s pay-book and wallet. But it wasn’t until I visited the genealogy website, and came across a posting from a complete stranger who was also seeking information about the Derryronane McCanns, that I got the visual evidence. The stranger turned out to be my second cousin – a direct descendant of my grandfather’s brother, John – and after we had exchanged emails he offered to send me various family photos.

When the email arrived with the PDF attachment, I casually scrolled through the old black and white photos of people who were vaguely familiar and others who were completely new to me. Then I came across one that brought me up short. A young man in British Army uniform poses with ceremonial cane, right-hand resting on the back of a tall, mahogany and leather chair. The pale eyes stare out quizzically with an expression I’ve often seen on the face of my elder brother, Tom. I knew, without having to be told, that this was a photograph of my grandfather, Michael McCann.

My mother, Mai, who is a marvellous raconteur, and who, at the age of 85, has an extraordinary memory for events that happened decades ago, had never seen that photograph, nor had any of her surviving siblings. I can only conclude that he sent it as a postcard to his family back on the farm in Derryronane, and that it was kept in his brother’s family and taken to the UK when a niece emigrated there sometime in the 1940s. I can’t imagine that it was ever displayed proudly on a mantelpiece; in post-independent Ireland, few were prepared to speak openly about family members who had fought for King and Country. So much had happened in the intervening years – a country divided by traumatic Civil War and attempting to come to terms with all the violence and petty hatreds that conflict had unleashed. Small wonder they adopted the classic Irish strategy of ‘whatever you say, say nothing.’

My grandfather must have seen extraordinary things in his early life but remained reticent throughout his later years. The various injuries (shrapnel wounds to the leg and wrist, a toe shot off) were the physical manifestation but there was little evidence of the mental suffering. One can only imagine the sort of post-traumatic stress he would have suffered, and was forced to contain within himself.

That tension between the public and the private expressions of identity captured my imagination; rather than memoir, I began to think about poems that might explore that tension. That was the genesis of this new collection which presents a parallel sequence of poems, one relating to my relationship with my own father, who died from a long illness during the making of the book; the second exploring the life of my grandfather, whose story slowly emerges through my mother's memories, and my own research. I was delighted when my publisher agreed to put Granddad’s World War I photo on the cover.

I’ve no idea what Michael McCann would make of the book: puzzlement, perhaps, or annoyance that anyone was making much of what he himself had discounted or kept to himself. But I do hope that he might understand the motivation of the writer: to tell the story of a heroism typical of his generation, a heroism in danger of being forgotten once this decade of commemoration concludes.

Her Father’s Daughter is published by Salmon Poetry (Co. Clare). Further information is available on http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=344&a=12

Back to school time 2014

It must be the chiller winds and browning leaves, not to mention the crab apples ripening on the tree outside my window, but thoughts turn to the new academic year, and the various courses I'll be teaching.

As I write, there are still some spaces available on the 10-week Finding the Story Course which I facilitate at the Irish Writers Centre in Parnell Square. It's a day-time course, running from 11am to 1pm and starting on Wednesday 24th September. I look at all aspects of narrative - structure, characterisation, use of imagery, setting as well as the various genre and forms available. There'll be a follow on course in the Spring but Finding the Story is also pretty self-contained. You'll get more details, and booking forms etc, on http://www.writerscentre.ie/html/courses/Autumn2014/findingthestory_omahony.html

There's also still time to book a slot in the Open University's Advanced Creative Writing Course A363. This course focusses on dramatic techniques and how they can be adapted to all forms of writing and is a follow on from the OU's Creative Writing A215 course. This is a substantial commitment, as it takes place over a full academic year, from October to May, and it involves a number of assignments that require you to write, adapt, critique, but by the end of the course you are guaranteed to have produced a body of work, and will have got significant one to one feedback from me as course tutor. This course is a mixture of face to face tutorials (2) and online tutorials, as well as ongoing forum discussion via Moodle. More details are to be found on http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/modules/a363

A poem for the first day of Spring????

St Brigid’s Day, Woodside Road

For Fiona Curran

It’s just as well we didn’t bet our souls on it.

This first day of pagan spring dawns white,

the two-day fall blanking out pavements,

children making hay of it with snowballs.

One attempts, Sisyphus-style, to roll a boulder heavier
than his bodyweight up the embankment.

Mothers in tracksuits supervise from front-doors,

fathers, scrapers in hand, track warily round cars.

Sane people stay indoors, waiting for the equinox

and the met office to make it official.

But I brave the frost, looking for some augury or other,

find it in a melted six inch square in Vi’s planter.

I hunker down for a closer look, then bow before
green shoots tangled in a perfect plaited cross.

(from Her Father's Daughter, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, 2014)

He disappeared in the dead of winter

Auden was talking about Yeats here, but it's equally apt in the case of the great Dennis O'Driscoll, who died on 24th December at the unbearably young age of 58. Dennis had an extraordinary talent of making everyone feel like they were his good friend; he embodied courtesy in a world where it was rare and never forgot to acknowledge in that lovely large cursive handwriting of his anything he felt deserved to be acknowledged. I'm incredibly proud that his last signed book for me - his collection Dear Life published by Anvil this Summer - mentioned a 'valued friendship'; I did nothing to deserve it, God knows, but Dennis was generous that way.

I reviewed Dear Life for a UK literary journal; the review, written last July, was sadly confident that Dennis would have many years of productive retirement ahead of him. I reproduce it here as one last, sad, tribute to a very great poet and a very great man.

THE SUPERANNUATED MAN: REVIEW BY NESSA O’MAHONY

Dear Life by Dennis O’Driscoll, 112pp, £9.95, Anvil Press Poetry, Neptune House, 70 Royal Hill, London SE10 8RF. www.anvilpresspoetry.com

I don’t remember many texts I studied at school, but for some reason Charles Lamb’s ‘The Superannuated Man’ has stayed with me; there is something chilling about his description of the impact of working for a living: ‘I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul’. Reading Dennis O’Driscoll’s new collection (his ninth), I wonder whether he might share the sentiment. O’Driscoll recently retired from the Irish civil service so now has the time to ponder on what life offers when one is released from the bondages of employment. He treats this major transition with characteristic causticity:

     I forfeited my rightful place at the tea-break table.
     An I’m Boss mug expectorating on the draining board.
     The Man United one Tipp-Exed with a name.
     A plastic milk container on which Stats is scrawled.

                                                            [‘Retirement’ from ‘Revenue Customs’]

That verb ‘expectorate’ is the key to O’Driscoll’s understated genius; it lifts what might otherwise seem pure documentary onto another level entirely.
 

     O’Driscoll’s mordant wit informs many of these poems, particularly those that dissect the clichés in the popular culture of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. In ‘Fair Game’, the target is ‘The elephant in the room’ – we’ve ignored a lot of those over here. In ‘Compo’, he forensically skewers the cult of anger that is equally prevalent:

     Be absolutely apopletic.
     Fuming mad.
     Lobby. Picket. Hector.
     Threaten to bring your case
     to the highest tribunal in the land.

O’Driscoll’s approach to humour is similar to that of US poet Billy Collins; he pursues an idea far beyond its logical conclusion and forces the reader, in the process, to reconsider everything she has taken as a given.
 

     But beyond the humour is a darker thread, an almost despairing recognition that mankind has what he calls in the poem ‘Spare Us’, an ‘built-in obsolescence’, both on a general level – ‘Consign us to the past / Find solutions to what baffled us. / Put us down to experience’ (from ‘Not The Dead’) – and on a personal one. Some poems relate to illness and to the resulting awareness of transience:

     The tally of years
     added up so rapidly
     it appeared I had
     been short-changed,
     tricked by sleight
     of hand, fallen victim
     to false bookkeeping.

                        [‘Time Enough’]

Yet O’Driscoll is a poet always prepared to see the other side of the argument, as the poem ‘Admissions’ attests:

     Before you do down life again,
     badmouth a world that never lives up
     to its billing, recall how glorious it seemed,
     your unwillingness to let go, that evening
     you were driven to Admissions.

For this poet, each ‘shabby sight’ ‘gleams with some ameliorating / feature’ and this preparedness to accept imperfection is the prevailing tone of the penultimate, title poem.

     [ …….. ] Leaves swirl around my feet now in a crinkled tin-
     foil din. Thousands of leaves. A sybil’s mixed signals, they shift
     positions, shuffle their decks like tarot packs, gyrate sugges-
     tively. I go on my knees in search. Keep on drawing blanks.

                                                            [‘Dear Life’]

This is a thoughtful, funny, sad and ultimately moving book of poems. I recommend it whole-heartedly.

The Nest Big Thing (with thanks to Noel Duffy)

The next big thing

The wonderful poet and fiction-writer Noel Duffy set me a challenge a few weeks back to follow him in this literary chain, where writers talk about forthcoming books. You can read his splendid account at http://noelduffy.blogspot.ie/

1)     What is the working title of your next book?

My next collection of poems is provisionally titled Her Father’s Daughter, which is the way that I’ve been imagining it over the past couple of years. But I wouldn’t rule out that changing before the book actually gets published. Titles are slippery things, intimately connected with both the mood of the poems, but also with the prevailing mood of the writer, which can change like the weather. I remember finding it very difficult to find the title of my last collection, Trapping A Ghost (Bluechrome 2005). There was no individual poem title that seemed to capture its spirit, and I don’t know how many times I read it through before seeing an individual line from a poem that seemed to offer the best potential as a book title. And then it seemed to have been to have always been the title. Strange, but true.

2)     Where did the idea come from for the book?

I’ve been meditating about father –daughter relationships for at least the last seven years, and probably for much longer than that, because family relationships have always been an obsession in my poetry. But the impetus for this exploration was my father’s first serious illness which, oddly, began this day 7 years ago, when he collapsed with a pulmonary embolism and was rushed to hospital, where he wasn’t expected to survive. We spent those anguished and terrified days all through Christmas and the New Year at St. James’s Hospital Intensive Care Unit; that bare little room with the drinks machine that never worked and the flickering cathode lights has stayed with me ever since. He recovered from that, but had suffered so much of what the doctors termed ‘collateral damage’ that his remaining few years were dogged with illness. So I guess I began a prolonged period of grieving him, or preparing to let him go (he died in June 2010) and that’s what generated many of the poems. But gradually I got perspective to see wider patterns; I’d separately been fascinated by my maternal grandfather, many of whose stories I’d heard from my mother, so I began to see a connection between two sets of father-daughter relationships, and that’s how the book was really born.

3)     What genre does your book fall under?

It’s a collection of poems, some lyric, some narrative. I always find myself wanting to tell stories but need the compression that poetry provides at the same time.

4)     What actors would you choose to play the part of the characters in the movie rendition?

These questions are rather geared towards fiction, I suspect, and yet I can imagine a movie treatment of my grandfather’s story, at least. I think Aidan Quinn would render him very well; the same intensity, the same pale blue Irish eyes that can chill and warm at the same time.

5)     What is a one-line synopsis of your book?

I’ve spoken about the lure of compression in poetry so I should find that question easy, shouldn’t I? And yet!!! Well, it’s a book about relationships and the patterns they create and engrain, as well as about the ability to love while knowing one is going to lose somebody.

6)     Will your book be self-published or represented by an agent?

As my good friend Noel Duffy said in his interview, you’d never find an agent with a vocation for representing poets. That reminds me of an agents’ tea party organised by the Creative Writing faculty at the University of East Anglia, where I did my Masters in 2003. There were some very heavy-hitters invited down from London to meet the cream of the writing talent in my year, and there were some amazing novelists then – Tash Aw, Naomi Alderman and our own Aifric Campbell to name just three. But it was made clear to us poets that there wasn’t any point in us attending the Tea Party because the agents had no interest in meeting us. So we were left to gaze in, like the poor children outside the toyshop at Christmas. Very poignant. I’m hoping the collection will be published by Salmon, who published my last book.

7)     How long did it take you to write a first draft of the manuscript?

As I said earlier, I’d been writing many of these poems for several years, but the real work of pulling them together into book form began about three years ago, after I’d published the verse novel. Then it became a process of ordering and re-ordering, which may continue for a wee while yet.

8)     What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Poets are always writing about their parents, aren’t they? One book that certainly influenced me, though I’d never reach its wonderful heights, was Kerry Hardie’s amazing collection The Sky Didn’t Fall, written about her own father’s death. I loved the complete lack of self-pity, the honesty and bravery and utter beauty of that book.

9)     Who or what inspired you to write this book?

As should be evident from previous answers, my wonderful father, Donal J. O’Mahony, and my amazing mother, Mai O’Mahony, who is an extraordinary story-teller and who has a staggering memory for events that took place up to 80 years ago. She has always been my inspiration.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

I always find it hard to answer that question, because why should anyone else care about my own concerns. But we all have people we love and might lose, or might have lost, and many of us in Ireland share a connection with a generation of extraordinary men and women who went about fighting for the ideals they believed in with quietness and integrity. So hopefully my book might resonate in some way with those sorts of readers.

I am now passing the baton in this extended literary relay race to novelist, poet, blogger and performer Kate Dempsey. Here’s her bio:

Kate Dempsey writes fiction and poetry and lives in Ireland. She has been collecting jobs for her author biography since she could read. She has worked as a coffee grinder, a terrible waitress in Woolworths, a Harrods shop assistant, a computer programmer, a technical writer, a writer in schools and a mother. She's lived in England, Scotland, The Netherlands, South West USA and now in Ireland.

These diverse jobs and homes are reflected in her witty, observational writing, which is widely published in Ireland and the UK. Her short stories have been broadcast on RTE Radio and published in the Poolbeg Anthology 'Do The Write Thing.' She was shortlisted for the Hennessey New Irish Writing award three times and her poetry in many magazines and anthologies. She runs the Poetry Divas Collective, a glittering group of women who blur the wobbly boundaries between page and stage at cool events all over Ireland.

Her first novel, The Story of Plan B, was shortlisted for the London Book Fair LitIdol.

Where to find Kate Dempsey online

Website: http://emergingwriter.blogspot.com
Twitter: PoetryDivas

Facebook: Facebook profile
Blog: http://emergingwriter.blogspot.com

Milton Live - Trinity College Dublin 14th December 2012

I'm absolutely delighted to be part of this splendid endeavour - Dr Philip Coleman of Trinity College has put together a live reading of the full version of Milton's epic poem, 'Paradise Lost'. Here's some more information, courtesy of the TCD School of English facebook page:

The School of English invites you to attend the first full public reading of John Milton's Paradise Lost in Ireland in aid of the National Trust for the Blind in Ireland. Readers include Harry Clifton, Gerald Dawe, Seamus Heaney, Dave Lordon, Thomas Luxon, Iggy McGovern, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, David Norris, Michael O'Loughlin, Nessa O'Mahony, Eve Patten, Provost Patrick Prendergast, Gerard Smyth, Joseph Woods, Macdara Woods, members of Trinity Players, students and staff of the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and many more!

All welcome-please come and show your support!

When: Friday, December 14, 2012, 10am-10pm

Where: 10am-2pm Graduate Memorial Building, Trinity College Dublin. 2pm-10pm in the Gallery Chapel, Trinity College Dublin

Who: Our readers, your good selves, and all of your friends!

New departure - the film-poem, or is it a poem-film

I have been working with my husband and occasional conspirator Peter Salisbury on a new development. We're experimenting with combining words and images to produce something that's neither simply a poem or a film, but depends on both the words and the images to create the aesthetic impact.

Our first project came about when we shared an extraordinary moment on the last night of our honeymoon in Rome in October 2012. We'd been advised to go up to the sixth floor roof-top restaurant, where the view of the city was unparalleled. We arrived just as dusk was falling and the rain clouds were gathering.

What we saw up there astonished us, and was the impetus for this film-poem. Here it is - we hope you like it.