Mary O’Malley on Playing the Octopus: An alien in Eden

I had a childhood free of trees. I liked it that way. I knew three places which had trees, and considered two of them frightening. They were not, for me, natural. When I went to university in Galway, I considered the trees there both pleasant and safe. The same applied to Dublin and the only trees I really took to were the blue flowering jacarandas on Lisbon’s Avenue Dom Carlos.

Of course I liked and even planted the light friendly birch and ash and mountain ash, but trees mostly arrived floating in on the tide as windfall.

After seven collections of poems, a writer tends to know his own obsessions. I had never had any desire to write about trees, nor any poem that seemed to require one in it. Except perhaps one where my son, in a joking reference to my complete lack of interest in what we’ll call the agricultural, told me the first step in building a boat was to “first catch your tree”. The same word crann is used for both tree and mast in Irish.

Then about five years ago we moved to another area, to one of a number of houses built in what had been an old beech plantation. “Like New England in the Fall”, a neighbour said of the lane in autumn. Visitors oohed and ahhed.

Yet the trees made me uneasy, their hulking shapes, their darkening presence. I had never lived close to a wood, much less surrounded on two sides by one. I was on unfamiliar ground, in every sense. I had no idea how big a tree could be. I began to see them as “Na Fathai”, the giants in Sean O’Riordain’s marvellous poem. I couldn’t read them, and couldn’t ignore them either.

In an attempt to make sense of this new element, I went back to the books: Graves’ tree alphabet, the early Irish tree lore, the twisted fantasy of the middle European folk tales and Dürer’s marvellously tortuous illustrations. This is why trees form and inform so much of this collection. They are poems arising out of a beautiful landscape – but I was an alien in Eden.

Not for the first time, Dante came to the rescue, and I became immersed in the convoluted forest in Canto XIII of The Purgatorio and the powerful hell of Dante’s imagination. At a time in Ireland when the mental health services are useless in the face of so much depression and despair, particularly in the case of young men and women, I considered the trees in the light of a hurt mind’s despair. All I could do was listen to their insistent voices, and write the poems that came.

Dante was my guide through a forested underworld. I wouldn’t have had the courage to go in alone. Sometime during that year, we had to fell a dangerous tree. Young men arrived, like acrobat mountaineers. They did their amazing circus act, chopping and cutting, until finally, with an earth-shaking shudder, the great trunk fell. Light flooded the space where the tree had stood. Next day, I realised my fear had gone and a respect for the great beech had replaced it. I asked the contractor to take a slice out of the timber to season for us. I intend to make it into something useful, a table or worktop.

I went to America in 2013 to take up the Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University. That period led directly to several poems considering the newness and wildness of William Penn’s land grant, and the strange grip Philadelphia’s shoreline had on me.

There are poems to honour dead friends – Michael Hartnett and Dermot Healy – and poems to the dead, where the dead stand just the other side of the river, asking only to be remembered. Poems where the young rev up their motorbikes and toss their long hair before riding off to leave us.

Several years ago, I heard the poet Carol Ann Duffy tell the story that is central to Playing The Octopus. I have heard versions of the same story from musicians over the years and it stayed with me as a metaphor for how hard it is to play the uilleann pipes, or bagpipes as in the original version. Some musicians have a slightly more earthy description of what the octopus was trying to do, but I stick to the clean one.

Then one Sunday after lunch the painter Brian Bourke told us the story about a baby crying at a session. Brian is very funny and tells a story with an actor’s gestures, and perhaps because of those and the fleeting effort and agony, accompanied by hilarious grimaces that illustrated the telling, the poem I wrote as a result seemed incompete without an octopus. But this time the metaphor wasn’t about a traditional music lesson, but about life’s many tentacled surprises. If Playing The Octopus is “about” anything, it is how life takes hold of us, about the howls and screeches it squeezes out of us, the sweet or grieving music it plays on us and how much we call the tune or how often it is the tune that calls us. So there are poems that consider tunes, and what is worth keeping and celebrating in this republic of Ireland.

[ Playing the Octopus is published by Carcanet ]