The Forward Prizes are the most sought after awards in poetry and it is an honour to have been shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in the UK and Ireland. It feels to me like a confirmation of my poetry’s relevance and worth. The journey to becoming a poet has been a long one, so I really appreciate this acknowledgment. It was the indefatigable Dominic Taylor of Revival Press, the publishing arm of the Limerick Writers’ Centre, who published my collection and it is great to see a small press publisher coming to the fore. Whatever happens, this has given me a confidence in my work and the incentive to keep on writing.
I began to write seriously, I mean to seriously consider my life in terms of poetry, about six years ago when I began an MPhil at the University of South Wales.
As a young man in Limerick, I wrote poetry with a romantic view of the world and with all the intensity of first love. I did initially have some success when I moved to Dublin, with David Marcus and Terence de Vere White publishing my poems, but I didn’t have the skill-set then to move my poetry to the next level. Meanwhile, paying a mortgage and bringing up four children in a series of economic recessions slowly changed my view of the world and of poetry’s place in it. I didn’t give up on poetry entirely, or perhaps poetry didn’t give up on me, and over the years I wrote poems of celebration or of consolation for friends and family at times of birth, marriages and death. Writing these occasional poems, with all the insight and honesty I could manage, became the basis for the way I write today.
Meeting a very young and talented group of poets, at the very first university workshop in Wales, was quite a shock. My first reaction was, “Oh my God! My poetry is nothing like theirs!” It was some time before I realised that this difference – in culture, background and experience – was something to treasure. These workshops and the mentoring by people like the poet, Prof Philip Gross, helped to raise the level of my poetry. I began to enter and do well in competitions but at that point I didn’t know these poems would come to make up Distance, my first collection.
I do use memory in my poetry to build bridges and reconnect to places and individuals. The distance between people in families and communities is a state of mind and therefore subject to change. Good poetry, like good music, gets past the modern defences we have built to keep ourselves safe from being hurt by the outside world. When we read good poetry, the reader and the poet are connected because they identify each other as human. This identification helps bring people closer. I try very hard not to put anything obtuse or complex between myself and the reader.
No one writes a poem with the idea of how it might fit into a collection – at least I don’t. But when I came to see how some poems might make a collection, I noticed how they centred on relationships between people in time and space. In time because we are connected to those who have already gone before us and to those who come after us. And in space because of the changes that physical distance brings about. I called it Distance because I felt it covered both of these themes. The poems that mean the most to me are those that connect me to my family, poems like Upstairs; Fathers and Sons; and My Father Built England. With these poems I try to use detail to, as Patrick Kavanagh said, “recover the time”. The poems that give me the most satisfaction as a poet are the Amelia series of poems in the section New Oceans. This was my attempt to connect to somewhere different, where the culture and the people were exotic and new to me (Belize). But where I was sure I would find the same problems that that we all face.
My boyhood hero was WB Yeats. Yeats was a bridge between the Victorian poets and the first modernists. However, for my MPhil I took Patrick Kavanagh’s continuing influence on Irish poetry, not only because he has been a great influence on my poetry but I felt we have a lot in common and found myself empathising with his situation and attitudes. I love Seamus Heaney’s work – it is both accessible and scholarly. Although Heaney has become the face of modern Irish poetry, I still need the outsider view of poets like Kavanagh.
I am always writing poetry and at the moment I am working towards my next collection. The poems I’m writing now tend to be more lyrical and less confrontational, but that could change at any moment. In any case, I’ll always try to be writing myself into the heart of the subject. Hopefully, I will be in a position to teach creative writing sometime in the future.
The Letter
Like a blind dentist, my mother searches in the red mouth
Of her purse, while our irregular Postman waits at the door.
'That's not necessary, Mrs Carey,' he says, stoically, but
He doesn't move. His hands are blue but not from the cold.
In the sleety rain, the Christmas post is weeping ink.
He places the letter from Hounslow precisely at the centre
Of their transaction; the loose head of the English Queen
Held only by a single artery of gum. My mother ignores
The generous wad of the envelope until she's pinched
Together the correct pennies of gratitude. She is finding it
Hard to concentrate, worrying that the expensive and delicate
Warmth of the house will escape and roll around outside.
She keeps the door pulled against her back with the hook
Of her foot, still sorting halfpennies from thrupenny bits.
'For the season that's in it.' She hands the Postman a shilling.
So that no doubt of her generosity remains in either mind,
She presses the coin in his palm, fixing it home like a tack.
She doesn't open the letter but brings it straight away to
The dining room and places it at the head of the table
Where my father will see it as soon as he comes in.
The Letter was highly commended by Carol Ann Duffy in the Bridport Prize. Distance by Ron Carey is published by Revival Press, part of Limerick Writers Centre. Carey began his career on Shannon Industrial Estate, cutting and drilling steel, ending up as a director of an engineering sales company in Dublin.The Forward Prize winners will be announced at a ceremony in London's Royal Festival Hall on September 20th
