A poem is not really captured by its name. A blue, bow-backed chair is that. An orange, glass, 1970s coffee cup is just that. When I write “poem” you might get a sense of a rectangular, poem-ish shape. Maybe a theme or a few lines you remember, but the poem operates beyond the limits of its own composition, in time as well as place.
A poem moves as long as the poet does, and continues beyond the poet’s own life. It is not a set, discrete thing. A poem for a father becomes an elegy when he has died. A love poem becomes an elegy if a partner moves on or expires. Even if the life of the poet ends, their poems proceed beyond them like little pebbles in various people’s pockets, which they touch on occasion and bring out and show off and interpret in wildly different ways. I myself have many.
A scholar in 200 hundred years might leaf through a poem about my father, write a brief copy note in the margin of their e-copy, and move on. They mightn’t be particularly perturbed, their notes reading: poem of its time. Pre-occupied with then-prevalent intolerance. He would move to another book, then another.
As Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill concluded her famous lament for murdered husband Art O’Leary (considered one of the most famous Irish poems of the 18th century), I wonder if it crossed her mind that the ferocity of her voice, the thwarted desire she felt for Art O’Leary’s thighs, his exotic, exuberant clothing, would occupy another for many evenings at another desk hundreds of years later. Even a keen, which Ní Chonaill herself did not record, does not conclude when the grieving, or the life of the aggrieved has ended. It lasts as long as imagination does, which is what emblematises my approach to writing Devotion, this first collection of poems published with The Gallery Press.
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The centre of this book is Keen for A–, a retelling of Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Keen for A– figures its keener as a man lamenting his male lover who has been murdered. I wrote quite feverishly, as you do when possessed with the glut of an idea, and then, as though I had blacked out for the half year I wrote it, faced down this monumental 35-page poem that re-oriented a legendary caoineadh into a love poem for the living.
A major aspect to my thinking throughout Devotion was how the past (even an unrecognisable past, for an individual like myself) might possibly scaffold and generate new meanings in the present, when it is given the space to. I am interested in how different ways of living can inform others; how the feral desire of Eibhlín for Art, despite her nobility (and the certain trappings of an 18th-century aristocratic mindset) could speak to a queer man’s desire to let the record show his feeling. She liberated me, and could perhaps never have conceived that someone would yearn as I do.
I was followed by that haunting line from Doireann Ní Ghriofa’s tremendous A Ghost in the Throat (Tramp Press, 2020) – “This is a female text” – and, more, someone’s very real grief. My male partner sleeps a few walls over as I write. In other words, what I faced down by grafting an extant poem on to an unrecognisable context was that to keen is, as the scholar Angela Bourke notes, a uniquely feminist utterance.
Perhaps Keen for A–’s point is that our understandings of things are best when they are intersectional, broad-ranging, rather than limited, single-lane, and impoverished by only drawing on what is at hand.
Was I depriving Ní Chonaill of something by re-telling her legendary poem? I think this depends on your philosophy on literature, and by writing this poem, I outline a philosophy of my own: that fellow feeling can be found in unlikely places, and that we as a species are in hot water if we can only find points of departure in the emotional lives of people who are similar to us. Perhaps Keen for A–’s point, part of it at least, is that our understandings of things are best when they are intersectional, broad-ranging, rather than limited, single-lane and impoverished by only drawing on what is at hand.
Devotion is, most simply, a book of love poems which draw on the wisdoms of the historical past (ninth-century monks to cats to the mother of Christ to a murdered policemen) and transmutes them to cast a very particular light on the present. I love that the monk who owns Ireland’s Most Famous Cat (Pangur Bán) is now made complicit in a gay poet’s ruminating on his own cat, or the dense scriptural terrain of Northern Ireland being punctured by said poet’s exegesis on a gospel story.
The collection ranges in and out of these environs so as to more holistically ask: what does it mean to love someone today? To be a gay person? To be Irish?
These historical sources gather, like wise relatives at a wake, and tell me how things really should be. And also that things, maybe, might be alright. The visual setting of many of the poems are domestic, and render portraits of a queer domestic space (in Ireland) as a space of interest. And one of happiness. Around the margins of these, the non-human perspective (cats) permeate these domestic spaces and broadens the lowly human’s vista, as they did in the illuminations of seventh-century manuscripts. The collection ranges in and out of these environs so as to more holistically ask: what does it mean to love someone today? To be a gay person? To be Irish?
Devotion is a book, I hope, alive to the impossible contradictions in these rhetoricals, but regards them with loving attention. More simply, it is a book alive, as the beautiful cover painting Meeting on the Gallery Stairs by Sarah Beegan attests, (itself a retelling of an Irish classic, Meeting on the Turret Stairs by Frederic William Burton) to the bizarre, moving menagerie of intimacies that occur when you pass someone you love on a stair or in a darkened hall, that you might not catch a mouth but a crook of an elbow.
For that mark on that crook to be recorded (when it very well might not have been) is a gift indeed. I think of that scholar in a few hundred years from now, leafing over the books that they will use to construct a sense of now. Just for a moment what occupied our days will occupy then. And for a few moments, become felt, never really lost.
Devotion is published on May 17th by The Gallery Press
