'I dwell in Possibility -/A fairer House than Prose-/ More numerous of Windows-/ Superior - for Doors -". So wrote 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson from her sequestered Amherst home. It's a telling commentary on her reclusive writing life and it seems apt too that her poetry provided the initial spark that led 27-year-old Wicklow poet Caitr∅ona O'Reilly toward her Forward prize-nominated first collection The Nowhere Birds, recently published by Bloodaxe Books.
O'Reilly, now living temporarily in Hull where her boyfriend and fellow poet David Wheatley teaches at the university, says that reading Dickinson as an undergraduate at Trinity was the "event" that turned her toward the poetic form. Particularly attractive to O'Reilly is "the precision of Dickinson's writing and her descriptions of states of consciousness which not many other writers have written about".
Far from seeing Dickinson as a poet who led a limited life, O'Reilly says: "Her withdrawal can be seen in many different ways but one of the ways is that it made it easier for her to write and not take on the 19th-century responsibilities of motherhood and being a wife. It just gave her freedom and she explores that freedom in her poetry. I find it exhilarating to read."
Reviewed in this newspaper, O'Reilly's Nowhere Birds was said to be "the most startlingly accomplished debut collection by any Irish poet since Paul Muldoon's New Weather in 1973". If one stops to ponder all the debuts over the almost 30-year period in between, this is the highest possible praise and the shortlisting of The Nowhere Birds for the £5,000 Forward first collection prize tends to confirm the assessment.
The other poets on the shortlist are Andrew McNeillie, Catherine Smith, John Stammers and Greta Stoddart.
In that same Irish Times review by Patrick Crotty, O'Reilly was cited as being a far less social poet than either of her seniors considered in the same review - Greg Delanty and Rita Ann Higgins: "Ireland exists as a backdrop to many of her poems, but their focus is private and philosophical rather than public". O'Reilly agrees.
"Most of my concerns are private. It's a first book so a lot of the book is concerned with the experience of childhood and the landscape of Wicklow where I grew up. All my poems come out of immediate psychic or emotional experiences." But, she stresses, "There are certainly fictional moments in most of the poems. They are not direct autobiography in any kind of way."
She was surprised, then, when a friend told her the collection was very revealing about her. "I don't tend to think of the poems as direct and revealing because I'm aware of the artifice that went into writing them and the formal considerations which make them less direct and more mediated."
O'Reilly's poetic voice is assured and immaculately controlled, the language as spare or effusive as the need demands; line after line, it has a felicitous rightness to it. She uses the sonnet or sestina, liking its formalism because, as against free or blank verse, "it acts as a stimulus to the poem. It's a test of how you can think within boundaries".
The Nowhere Birds of the title was inspired by the idea that centuries ago people believed migrating birds wintered on the moon and for O'Reilly, a keen birdwatcher, this fits perfectly with themes of departure (from childhood, from Ireland) explored later in the book. There are glimpses of all kinds of avian life in the poems "small birds shriek and toss/ their bodies to the wind like empty gloves"; "Birds in a hedge confer in boiling voices"; or a meditation on Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock's The Birds "She is driven indoors by the birds/ who will eat the palms of her hands./ They leave an awful silence when they go,/ a landscape of recumbent, bitten blondes."
O'Reilly hopes to return to tutoring at Trinity College in September but is spending the summer months in Hull working toward the completion of her 100,000-word doctoral thesis on Consciousness and Modernism from Dickinson to Plath by way of Hilda Doolittle. She quotes American poet Michael Donaghy, who said of the process of writing a Ph.D whilst simultaneously being a lover of words: "It's like studying vivisection if you like dogs."
The Forward Prize for Best First Collection is sponsored by Waterstones Booksellers and will be announced on October 3rd. For further information see: www. booktrust.org.uk/prizes/forward.hit
