Her fragile heart,

papery thin

her two month bloom,

My accompaniment – in this, this.

Michael McGrath: ‘Nothing is ever as it seems. We’ve ended up with seven children, but we had loss along the way’

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A week in Center Parcs in Longford: Standing in the forest, you feel the money draining gently out of your bank account

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Paul Howard: I never loved an animal as much as I loved Humphrey. For 13 and a half years, he was my constant companion

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I believed that the my book had been finished after a visit to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co Monaghan. It was called Notes For Building A Ghost Flower, it had a good index and the poems sparked off each other.

My publisher Liz McSkeane and I signed a contract in early January 2022. Within hours I was dying in the back of an ambulance, having endured a heart attack and gone into full cardiac arrest. I had dressed for a run that morning and woke up in the CCU of St James’s Hospital some hours later. The book was shelved for the foreseeable future and 2022 was dedicated to a quite complex recovery.

2023 began in the midst of a recovery which was physical, mental, emotional and cardiological: there is no other description. I was told that I would need another procedure and the domination of the medical was hurting me a lot. My therapist told me that every time I went back to the hospital I was triggering my PTSD, as my memory of what happened there is fragmented and traumatised.

I decided to take up the book and try really hard to do everything I was told and to focus seriously on my health and healing.

The poems of the book, now retitled Her Red Songs, span wellness, illness and the healing process. They also span the pandemic, which in a way saved my life. I had begun to run in the pandemic to deal with the sense of isolation, aloneness and enforced solitude. By the time of my cardiac arrest I was up to 5km a day and that saved my life. I was pretty fit back then.

The poem Morning Star is a pandemic poem.

Morning Star

Day lightens from cold

to blue. A glint of her caught

in crow’s diadem as he wheels

Home. We are bound to hard things,

to wood, steel and wire -

Who would hear heartsongs

in the cacophony of words

tumult-born? Day is carried

in by crow’s harsh heralding.

Through and above

stormy cross-currents.

soaring. His fluid gyration.

Even now, now, his harsh

heralding is the one true thing.

In rewriting sections of the original book, I began to find wellness. In the first year after the cardiac arrest, I could not go out alone. I had severe PTSD and a lot of drug reactions leading to orthostatic hypotension, vertigo-like symptoms and nausea.

I began going off alone on my rambles to check some feature of a poem as I tend toward accuracy of description. These walks became extended and I began to notice that my pace was quicker and getting stronger. Talking again to poets and editors helped an awful lot too. Nessa O’Mahony requested an essay for the Eavan Boland edition of Poetry Ireland Review. I knew and accepted that I could not write an essay and told her so. She kindly wrote back and requested a poem. The first poem in this book, Tree is Real Silver, was written for Eavan Boland, who we sadly lost in 2020. That poem was my first creative act and a first step to recovery. The poem changed the dynamic of the book and necessitated its disassembly.

From Tree is Real Silver

Birds tremble there

alighting – (lighting)

Its stained glass recedes

and within each

bright ening

light ening

shape,

the song of a bird

embeds a garnet -

Disassembly is an interesting process, as writers we assemble the work of some years into a book. In visual arts terms, this is like preparing an exhibition. There needs to be tension and relationship between the poems. The transition from Notes For Building a Ghost Flower to Her Red Songs had to be flawless. I removed the dedication, some longer poems and rewrote some of the poems, tightening them up. I added in new poems also and they blended. This MSS made me happy and so I resent it to Liz and we decided to launch it in the spring of 2024. I wanted a spring launch: it represents hope, new life and makes us forget the darkness of winter.

Thank you to the first responder who saved my life. At St James’s Hospital, the emergency department cardiac ANPs Nicola and Deirdre, the doctors at the Cardiac Cath lab, the medical staff in the CCU, the Robert Adams Ward, the cardiac rehab team, and the heart support unit. Thank you to the Irish Heart Foundation and to Creative Minds Ireland for trauma support. This is my story and the story of my book.

Her Red Songs is published by Turas Press