Micheal O'Siadhail's latest collection of poetry, about love, honours his wife of 35 years, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease eight years ago, he tells Rosita Boland
Micheal O'Siadhail is in need of water. It's a clear blue September morning, and it is remarkably hot. The member of this standing army of Irish poets, as once memorably described by Patrick Kavanagh, has not been standing; he has been cycling. His bicycle is locked to a lamp post down the street from the hotel where we're meeting, and thirst is making him feel the miles he has just cycled.
Love Life is the title of O'Siadhail's latest collection of poems. It's a title that would work equally well transposed, as Life Love. The poems in the collection are all about his wife, Bríd, to whom the book is dedicated: his life's love.
"I consider myself one of the lucky ones," he says straight away, a reviving glass of water in front of him. "After 35 years I am still in love with the same woman." O'Siadhail is sitting on the sofa opposite. He has already changed his mind once about where he'll sit, having got up from the armchair beside me. Where do I want him to sit, he asks. I don't mind where he sits at all, I tell him. Anywhere he feels comfortable. He stays on the sofa but perches on the edge of it, as if he's going to move again at any moment.
Everything about him seems restless, like a bird about to take off at any moment. He talks rapidly throughout the interview, but I get the impression that this is more because it's the way he always talks than because he is nervous.
O'Siadhail has published 11 collections of poetry. He has been a lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin and a professor at Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; he now writes full time. He is also a founder member of Aosdána and the founding chairman of the Ireland Literature Exchange. He also, unusually for an Irish poet, has a website, www.osiadhail.com. It even has a helpful phonetic spelling of his name, which he gives as "Mee-hawl O'Sheel".
O'Siadhail's previous book, in 2002, was called The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust. To follow a book about extremes of human suffering with such a contrasting subject as requited love might seem an entirely new direction. Or not. "Love triumphed in The Gossamer Wall," says O'Siadhail. "Extraordinary acts of love under extreme suffering. Suffering doesn't have to be the last word in love; for me it's the bridge. I always had the feeling that you get extraordinary poems about people falling in love, but I wanted to capture the journey between the falling and the being. To capture something of the negotiations involved."
Open the book anywhere and you will find a love poem, recording the texture of two lives shared over more than three decades. Their first house: "Shells we didn't build, / Houses just loaned to live in, / Hermit crabs squatting. / At last Trimleston." A garden is made. Jobs are done, another world of work occasionally glimpsed by the other: "Even at the door I hear your school voice . . . / I sneak a voyeur's glance before you know."
These poems, which form some two-thirds of the book, take on an extra meaning, like the colours of shot silk, when read in tandem with the last third of the book. Eight years ago Bríd was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. It affects people differently; the highest-profile person with the condition in recent years was the late Pope John Paul II. "It's not as bleak as it was," O'Siadhail says stoutly. "There are good drugs, and we live in hope of better ones. She has retired from her job [she was the principal of a primary school], but Bríd lives at her own rate."
In one poem, with the stark title of Parkinson's, O'Siadhail writes movingly of the news of a diagnosis, heard together and come to terms with together. "Any breeze shivers in your limbs, / My aspen mistress," he writes. "When it's someone you're in love with, the condition is part of them," he says simply.
O'Siadhail had been thinking about the book for some years; recently, it seemed the right time to write and publish it. "It was a joyous book to write, but that doesn't mean it was easy," he says. "The enigma of life, a partnership, is that you are so utterly together and yet so utterly apart. Poetry is an ideal medium to capture that paradox."
Was it hard writing so publicly about something so personal? What does his wife think of the book? For a moment O'Siadhail is still on the edge of the sofa. When a book is published it's out there, no longer private. Your friends and relatives, for instance, might know a lot about the main events in your life, but not the stranger who picks up your book. It's a truism, but this goes through all writers' heads each time their books are published.
"There is always a fine line between exposing enough to tell the tale and breaking privacy. You do risk clumsy intrusion," he says, choosing his words carefully, speaking slowly. Then he says: "Bríd reads my work."
What's left unsaid is that there is a trust between them, space and grace for one to interpret the other. The book is written by O'Siadhail, but it is the result of a partnership. The book wouldn't exist without its subject matter. It is a portrait of a life lived together, through all the joys and challenges, sustained by a lifetime of love.
Love Life, by Micheal O'Siadhail, is published by Bloodaxe, £8.95
PARKINSON'S
By Micheal O'Siadhail
1
Stealthily. One day that quiver in your ring
Finger. Or my impatience at your squiggling
Such illegible notes. Just your astonishment
Noticing the absence of an old lineament.
Once speedy genes, high-geared and fleet;
At twelve the school's swiftest athlete.
The oils of movement slower to lubricate.
Stiffness, a tremor, that off-balance gait.
A specialist confirms Parkinson's disease.
Falling dopamine. The brain's vagaries.
Then moments of denial. Again so strong
And confident: Those doctors got it wrong.
Your fright is pleading with me to agree.
I bat for time: Maybe, we'll have to see.
What can I do? These arms enfold you.
No matter what, I have and hold you.
And so you must travel painful spendthrift
Windings of acceptance. Giving turns gift.
Together. But is there is a closer closeness?
Yet another shift in love's long process.
2
Flustered now by stress,
A need for time,
Days planned, a gentler pace;
Any breeze shivers in your limbs,
My aspen mistress.
Hardy, deep-rooted, light-loving
You learn to endure.
Pioneer tree in fallow or clearing.
A random sigh flutters in your leaves:
O God, I'm tired of shaking
3
Often I wake early to taps on my pillow.
Last evening's tablet at the end of its tether
Your forefinger begins its morning tremolo
As if counting in sleep hours lain together.
I think at first you'd pitied an over eagerness,
My jittery hand that spilled half your coffee;
A headstrong giant-killer wobbly and nervous
That slowly over time you'd steadied in me.
Blurs and transfers between fellow travellers.
I couldn't but see your half flirtatious sidelong
Glance at me that both asks and reassures:
Even if I shake I think my spirit is young?
Our years side by side tongued and grooved.
A face is beautiful once a face is loved.