It’s the late 1940s. My mother is 10-years-old and the nuns in her school have painted a large colander and asked her to stand on it, dressed in white, her elbows bent, hands raised in prayer, a halo of stars over her head. Hers is an angelic face, and they see in it the blessed expression of the Virgin Mary. Click.
As a child, I was fascinated by this photo. I knew all about Mary, attending as I did, a 1970s Catholic primary school. I was the middle child of five noisy children and most mornings our mum would speed us to school in a small Anglia car, a rattling cast-off from our grandad, her father in Cork, where she’d grown up.
In early summer, my two sisters and I would barely make it to the outdoor devotions led by Mother Dorothy at the May grotto, the salty sea air mingling with our high-pitched hymns. May is the month of Mary ...
My mother died in April 2020, just a few weeks short of her own May birthday, in the early stages of the pandemic. We were all shot through with grief. But strangely, an urge came to me not to write poems of dark loss – but rather, new, fresh ones which would somehow celebrate my mother’s life, from her childhood right up to the early days of her marriage.
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Suddenly, I remembered the photo, went in search of it, hoping to find again, in my young mother’s face, the light that had emanated from her.
“Meeting your mother always made me feel happy,” one neighbour kindly messaged me after her tiny funeral in the very village where all those years ago she’d sped my brothers and sisters and me to school.
I can never be sure what any collection I write is about, the act of writing a perpetual discovery
With loss comes the grace of memories and during that spring of 2020 I remembered another time when my mother had still been alive. A group of Irish poets and I had been invited to give a poetry reading at the Irish Arts Center in New York. Many older Irish Americans came to hear us read and afterwards at the reception I found myself conversing with a woman in her seventies. Her lilting accent, her chatty manner, reminded me of my mum. Out of the blue I found myself describing to her the striking photograph back home in our family album.
“Girl, was that Imelda Hickey?” the woman’s face lit up. “I know that photo. Didn’t I go to school in Cork with her? I was her understudy when she got tired.”
Back in Dublin, my mother was delighted with this story. She even remembered her classmate’s name, and we laughed together at the coincidence.
Poetry is not fiction. But these two stories – the old black and white photograph, bumping into my mother’s schoolfriend far away in New York – along with other poignant adventures in her young life, have all found their way into a seven-part series of short poems that are central to my new collection, Sudden Light.
"The power of the short poem should not be underestimated,“ the poet Simon Armitage once wrote, and I hope these “snapshot” poems about my mother will reveal to any reader who encounters them layers of personal and shared history. We all have mothers and if we are lucky, will love them always, wish to pay homage to their lives in our own individual ways.
Many of the other poems in this new collection take their inspiration from a wide range of photographs and paintings by artists such as the 16th-century Luca Signorelli, John Lavery, James Hanley, Janet Mullarney. The writer Mary Lavin’s intense stare captured by Evelyn Hofer, the German American photographer who visited Dublin in the sixties, is integral to a poem called Happiness, that I wrote in praise of Lavin.
Most mornings I love to walk along the canal, my destination this very portrait, hung by IPUT behind the high glass of their offices at Mary Lavin Place, the first public space named after a woman writer in Ireland. Women feature throughout the poems.
The final one, Visiting, is a response to the Irish photographer Amelia Stein’s exquisite photo of a high wooden shutter folded back, offering the glimpse of a green leafy day. This shot serves also as the cover of the book and as such, complements the “light” of the title.
I can never be sure what any collection I write is about, the act of writing a perpetual discovery, even sometimes long after the poems appear on the page. But maybe these new poems consider memory to be a type of picture-taking or making, the poet’s role to remember, offer an urgent connection with life’s gifts when most needed. For, as my title poem concludes, we “live in semidarkness and suddenly there’s light”.
Enda Wyley lives in Dublin and is a member of Aosdána. Sudden Light, her new collection of poetry, is published by Dedalus Press. She is the 2026 recipient of the 30th Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award in Poetry, University of St Thomas, Minnesota
