Paula Meehan on picking Ten Poems from Ireland

When the poet-editors of Candlestick Press invited me to choose and introduce Ten Poems from Ireland, they made only one stipulation – that I include a work of my own. Otherwise I could chart any course I liked down or up the river of Irish poetry from earliest times to this present moment.

These publications are what are known in the bookselling trade as “point of sale products”. They are sold “instead of a card” and they come with an envelope and a bookmark. You get 10 poems on a given subject and if you know your correspondents’ interests you can surely find a pamphlet to suit. Such a wonderful alternative to mass-market cards with their inane rhymes!

In the near decade of Candlestick Press’s existence they’ve published on a huge array of topics: Ten Poems about Tea, Ten Poems about Knitting, Ten Poems about Bicycles, Ten Poems about Aunts... They also publish every year The Twelve Poems of Christmas – eight volumes so far. They’ve always been hospitable to Irish poets and we feature in many of the selections.

Gillian Clarke has given us Ten Poems from Wales, and Don Paterson has given us Ten Poems from Scotland – I admire both poets greatly. When I was asked to put together Ten Poems from Ireland I felt like Jack Charlton choosing the squad, asking the poets to put on the green jersey.

Patrick Kavanagh estimated that the standing army of Irish poets at any one time is least 10,000 strong; I was aware that while I might make nine friends among the ranks for my inclusion of their poems with my own, I would surely make 9,991 enemies. I took some comfort from the fact that I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from being left out of most anthologies.

That the 10 poems I’ve chosen to present to the world are prefaced by Alice Maher’s exhilarating print on the cover makes me very happy. “Born seeing” in the green, white, and orange of the flag of the Republic is a characteristically visionary image from a radical artist. And just as I was about to press send on the final proof back to Di Slaney and Katharine Towers, the editors at Candlestick Press, Theo Dorgan came into my workroom with the sad news that John Montague had just died. I was pleased to be able to dedicate this publication to his memory.

I chose my 10 poems with an eye to our problematic history and an eye to language itself, these central preoccupations of the living tradition.

I have brought Michael Harnett’s small poem Death of an Irishwoman into prisons, into universities, into psychiatric hospitals, into literacy projects. It opens doors in the imagination, it starts conversations. It is a poem many of us carry as talisman, as medicine bundle, as a reminder that important culture bearers often appear in humble guise. The Irishwoman in question was his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, from whom he got the Irish language.

While Leanne O’Sullivan’s poem Safe House is set during the guerrilla War of Independence in Ireland, 1919-1921, the message is clear as a bell: no house is a safe house during a war.

Eavan Boland’s poem Once, a meditation on legend, love and ageing, takes a couple from contemporary Dublin back to a past when their suburb was forest and they, in one of those marvelous shapeshifts that can happen in a poem, are embodied in a pair of wolves.

Brendan Kennelly’s poem Begin must be one of the most frequently read poems at Irish funerals. I found it once myself tucked into a close family member’s suicide note – a sad message of consolation for those of us left behind to cope with such a legacy. I read it at her funeral.

While the Rising went ahead in Dublin that Easter of 1916, an order cancelling the rebellion had gone out countrywide from the Chief of Staff of the Volunteers. Moya Cannon’s poem The Countermanding Order imagines the relief of her grandmother, a young mother in 1916, when her husband returns from the muster at Dungannon having received that countermanding order.

Nuala Ní Dhomnaill puts Irish myth and folklore to powerful use exploring contemporary psychic states. I include one of the first poems of hers I came across, Fuadach, in a new translation by Theo Dorgan. I remember well the experience of that first encounter – I felt as if my skin had been peeled from my body and something in me had come home.

Tony Curtis is hugely popular for his quirky narratives, his vulnerable creatures, human and animal. He has great courage and has brought poetry into places where many poets would fear to tread. Here, in Civil War, he recounts a story from a school visit.

Belfast poet Gearóid MacLochlainn makes poems in the Irish language out of the explosive stresses all language was put under during what was called the Troubles. The Irish language has entered a new and powerful phase in the North in the hands of the millennials. Here is Teanga Eile in a translation by Gearóid MacLochlainn himself and Séamus Mac Annaidh.

My own contribution, The Two Sides of the Same Coin, remembers a time in Ireland when children were routinely beaten before corporal punishment was thankfully banned in the schools of the Republic in 1982.

And lastly, Thomas McCarthy’s ferociously clear-eyed and tender lyric, Their Going, Their Dying, is as fresh as it was when first published in 1981, a reminder if one was needed of the endurance of song and the continuing comfort of the poet’s art.

I chose these poems knowing that many paths through the thicket are possible and many narratives, including contradictory narratives, can be constructed. Every Irish poet would present a different 10 poems and I sincerely hope there will be more Poems from Ireland down the road.

Visiting my old primary school recently, I met with 11- and 12-year-olds, children of all backgrounds. Such a plenitude of mother tongues I heard there – Yoruba, Mandarin, Russian, Latvian, Romanian, Mandarin, Polish, English and Irish; and soon after I visited another primary school in sprawling Blanchardstown. The children had all prepared pieces for me, poems and songs. I added Farsi, Lithuanian, French, Ibo, and then some, to the tongues already mentioned. I thought then, anything might happen now in Irish poetry, and probably will. Exhilarating to think what Ten Poems From Ireland might look like, 20 years from now!

[ launched tonight, January 26th, at 7pm, at Poetry Ireland,  ]