‘I was thinking about how we say things in poetry, how we depart from our sources’

In late 2018 I moved to Munich after having spent most of my adult life in Dublin. Autumn was beginning. The sky was a vaulting blue. And there were wasps. Wasps everywhere.

They bored their way into the silver spouts of sugar canisters outside cafes. They peppered the bread in the bakery like giant seeds. They hovered at the window looking for a way in. Their life’s work was done, now they were hungry and seeking food. Soon we stopped seeing them, and yet some time would pass before we remarked that they were gone. September, the opening poem of the collection and the first poem I wrote after moving here, recalls this.

That winter in Munich, grey clouds hung like a dead weight outside the kitchen window. Nothing seemed to move, neither the clouds nor the empty trees. The night sky and the daytime sky were hidden, elsewhere for nearly two months. Sunrise and sunset were variations, not distinctions, through which the day passed. At night I couldn’t see the moon or stars, not even the satellites routinely mistaken for stars. I became anxious that they wouldn’t reappear. I missed the red and purple skies of the Irish winter. The air was dry and caught in my throat. That dry air, the Föhn wind, a weather that was new to me, began to make its way into the poems I was writing.

A ringing sound in my ear has troubled me on and off since childhood. I continued to hear it here, and it slowly mingled with the sounds of this new city as Munich became a louder presence in our lives. I began to write about this too. I also wrote about the landscapes of home, about the paintings of the artist Nano Reid whose work depicts the landscape of Louth where I grew up.

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A night-time cough brought on by the dry Munich air kept me awake. The kind of cough that frightens in its persistence. It reminded me of my sister’s cough the winter she died. I had written about my sister’s death in my debut collection Before You, and I tried to write about this again in Some Lives, in a poem called January. I was thinking about how we remember the past, about how our memories can change and deceive us.

Throughout all of this I was reading a lot of poetry in translation. One of the poets I was reading was Osip Mandelstam. Mandelstam’s poems brought me back to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, books I had brought with me from home. These extraordinary memoirs in turn sent me to the poems of Anna Akhmatova, of Marina Tsvetaeva. The poems sent me to the lives, the lives sent me back to the poems, a pattern that repeated throughout these winter months.

The lives of these poets were all marked by harrowing experiences under the Soviet regime. Though they are undoubtedly linked by tragedy, what defines them is the centrality of poetry to each of their lives. They wrote despite, and in spite of, circumstance. For as long as they could they wrote despite hunger, despite poverty, despite fear, despite ostracisation and claims of irrelevancy, despite threats to their lives and the lives of their families. They each wrote in and against the knowledge that what they were writing was unlikely to be published. Their poetry, and Nadezhda’s memoirs, are remarkable testaments to lives centred on writing.

I began to write poems that engaged with and drew on aspects of these lives, both written and lived. As their work was only accessible to me in translation, I knew that the lives and voices I encountered in my reading were chimera of sorts, approximations and inventions. But they were ones I gladly embraced. Without them, without the momentous work of so many translators, I wouldn’t have been able to encounter these lives at all.

It’s common in Germany for people to leave unwanted items in boxes on the street for others to take. My wife had rescued an anthology of German poetry from one such box. It was in this book I encountered the poem Weltende by Jacob van Hoddis. That this short poem from 1911 about apocalyptic fears, climate change, and pandemics could realistically have been written now, and reflect the world of now fascinated me. And this was during the summer of 2019, before Covid-19.

Weltende stayed in my mind until I began to write about it in a long poem that became the title poem of the collection. I began too in this poem to write more about Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, about Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova, about their lives. Some of the preceding poems in the collection drew on their lives in a more lyrical manner, but I felt certain aspects of their lives were too brutal to be lyricised. I began to think of this longer poem as a documentary poem, documenting and responding to my reading of their lives. I placed factual and direct verse in counterpoint with the lyric.

And among all of this I wrote from my own experiences too, here in Munich. When I wrote Some Lives I was thinking about how we say things in poetry, how we find and adapt our subject matter, how we integrate and depart from our sources. I was thinking about writing, about reading, about the ordinary – and extraordinary – material out of which poems are made.

Some Lives by Leeanne Quinn is published by Dedalus Press. Martina Evans reviews it in The Irish Times on October 17th. The Good Going Up to Heaven and the Wicked Going Down to Hell, a poem from the collection, is published in The Irish Times today.