Word for Word: My poetry life in reverse

‘Do you remember that night in 1975?” my oldest friend asked. “You were 16 and left a cottage on the North Road in Finglas. You met a drunken student hitch-hiking through the dark to Kilshane Cross. He called Yeats a fascist. You argued until 3am while trucks thundered past.”

I suddenly remembered it vividly, despite 40 years having passed. I remembered a battered car stopping for the student, the old driver’s eyes glazed with whiskey. When it pulled off I had unearthed a 19th-century milestone hidden amid the undergrowth, and discerned the faded carving: “Dublin 3 miles; Slane 27 miles”

I had sat there, deeply moved, realising that this was one of the milestones that the Meath poet Francis Ledwidge had described stopping to rest at when walking home through the dark to Slane when he was also 16. He had abandoned a job in Rathfarnham, excited and confused, after writing his first poem, and walked 40 miles home to his impoverished family with nothing to share with them except those scribbled verses held close to his heart.

I felt as if I were 16 again, sitting on that milestone, as unsure about my future as Ledwidge surely was on that night, about to walk on into the dark, certain only about his determination to be a poet.

“I wrote the first verse of a poem that night sitting on the milestone,” I told my friend. “I typed the ending at dawn on that huge office typewriter my big brother liberated for me when it was being thrown out from a factory. The typewriter is now displayed in the Little Museum of Dublin, but I’ve no idea where the poem is: I discarded it decades ago as juvenilia.”

"It wasn't juvenilia," my friend said. "It was a good poem, like an early manifesto. It should be in your new Selected Poems. You're overlooking all the early poems and could easily cut some 1990s poems to make space."

I was about to call him daft when I recalled visiting the great Anthony Cronin just a few days beforehand and how, when he heard I was editing a new Selected Poems to encompass 40 years of my life, he also urged me not to ignore the early work. It might be naive, but it represented an essential stepping stone on the journey.

“Feck it – I’ll stick it in,” I told my friend, and our conspiratorial smiles made us seem like teenagers again. Then he leaned forward and queried me about the inner workings of the contributory old age pension. It was like the polar opposite of that moment when Rafferty, the wandering poet, reached his beloved Cill Aodáin: the years did not fall from us and we were suddenly young; instead time caught up with us and we were suddenly a decade away from qualifying for free-travel passes.

But this is a disconcerting experience I've been having over the past six months, editing That Which Is Suddenly Precious: New and Selected Poems. A sure way to make a happy man suddenly old is to see your life spool backwards in verse, from who you are now to being a first-time father, a young man at parties in Rathmines bedsits or a teenager walking Finglas streets; to reread your response to the Stardust fire or how heroin invaded Dublin as you become 45, 35, 25 and 15 again.

You ask fellow poets for advice: they all talk excitedly about certain poems you wrote years ago and dismiss others. Every list they provide about what you should keep and throw away is different. Finally you realise that their advice is so contradictory that it cancels itself out. You need to go back to that bedrock, to remembering that uncertain teenager sitting on a Finglas milestone in 1975, and wonder, if he could have looked ahead, which poems would he empathise with? Which poems would he have felt it was worth devoting a lifetime to writing?

That Which Is Suddenly Precious is published by New Island