One Saturday over 30 years ago I opened The Irish Timesand, spying my name below a perfectly executed poem set in Venice, first learned of my namesake, writes Anthony Glavin.
A few months later David Marcus, literary editor of the Irish Press, by way of rejecting a short story of mine, noted how there was already "a young, regularly published poet named Anthony Glavin". However, when David kindly accepted another story for publication later that year, we settled on my middle initial "M" to distinguish one of us from the other.
I returned to Massachusetts the following year, where I received a phone call one evening from a transplanted Dubliner, who asked if we hadn't gone together to UCD, where seemingly I had distinguished myself as a talented thespian and brilliant auditor of the Literary & Historical Society? I modestly demurred, much as I later promptly returned a cheque for £100 from the Sunday Independent, payment for another poem, set this time in Belfast, that once again I hadn't written.
I continued to write fiction, however, and after returning to Donegal in 1979, had a collection of stories accepted by Poolbeg Press, whose then literary editor, the one and only David Marcus, informed me that I was now myself regularly published enough to forgo the middle initial.
When that book came out, I decided it was time to introduce myself to the poet - who, unlike myself, had two more strings to his bow (so to speak), being an acclaimed pianist and a professor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. And so one afternoon in 1980 I sat on a bench outside an RIA practice room, waiting for a student lesson to end. After the student left, I went in and asked the professor, "Are you Anthony Glavin?" When he allowed as much, I admitted: "So's meself!" And with that exchange our friendship began.
Over a pint that afternoon in Tobin's, Anthony the elder (by one year) told how his own mother had recently congratulated him on my book of stories, whereas his father, who kept an eye on such things, had tersely inquired: "What happened to his "M"? Neither of us, however, was bothered by the potential confusions. Indeed I was only delighted to be mistaken down the years for a poet as truly gifted as Anthony - never mind, without a note in my head, being mistaken for an accomplished pianist to boot.
I took pains, though, to make it clear where the talent lay when, in the circularity of things, it became my turn to publish Anthony Glavin's poetry in the Irish Press, where I had succeeded David Marcus in 1987 as editor of the New Irish Writing page.
So I inserted a note over the poems to make it clear that the Dublin-based poet Anthony Glavin was not the Donegal-based editor of the page. The verse in question was a selection of stunning quatrains from an extended series entitled Living in Hiroshima, whose indelible date in history, August 7th, 1945 happened also to be the date of Anthony's (premature) birth:
Even then I must have hated
being confined.
But to push for freedom that
Bank Holiday Weekend!
My father homing from
Youghal in his chrome V8
To hold my mother, then me,
then celebrate.
There was apparently also a touch of the doppelgängerbetwixt our younger, dark-haired, moustachioed selves. Enough so, anyhow, that various neighbours in Glencolmcille congratulated me after a photograph (admittedly somewhat fuzzy) appeared in the newspapers with word that Anthony Glavin had won the 1987 Patrick Kavanagh Award for his first collection, The Wrong Side of the Alps, which was subsequently published by the Gallery Press in 1989.
However, Anthony himself had a far better story of dark-haired and moustachioed mistaken identity: namely, how he had once been lifted by the Guards in my adopted Donegal; they held him for several hours in the firm belief that he was a well-known republican paramilitary on the run, cleverly disguised, I suppose, by a briefcase full of sheet music for piano.
We met up again for coffee after I moved to Dublin in the mid-1990s, and kept all too haphazardly in touch after that by phone, e-mail and Christmas card as his health inexorably declined. News of his death last November did not reach me in time to attend his funeral, but I listened raptly at the celebratory concert and poetry reading in Anthony's honour at the RIAM last December, as friends, former students and fellow musicians saluted an immensely talented - and wickedly funny - teacher, performer and poet.
Earlier, on my way in, I had thought twice about signing the guest book. But sign it I did, albeit moving off quickly so as to allow the gentleman behind to make what he would of the name. Afterwards, in a nearby hostelry, I introduced myself to the pianist John O'Conor, dear friend and colleague of Anthony, who had compered that evening's concert, and who told me with undisguised delight of the considerable consternation backstage, midway through the programme, when another close friend and colleague of Anthony's had spied his, my, our name in the book. I hadn't done it for badness (as they say in Donegal), but John and I agreed it was the kind of last laugh that nobody would enjoy having more than our sorely missed Anthony Glavin.
• For information on contributions to the Anthony Glavin Award, contact the RIAM, Westland Row, Dublin 2 (tel: 01-6325312).