Holding the moment

In Micheal O'Siadhail's poem, Dream, he paints a picture of himself, a boy cyclist, "hurtling full tilt" until he wakes up and realises he is 50 years old. He finishes with the counter-point image of the boy in a slow bicycle race, squeezing the brakes, trying to slow time down: "Poised on the rim of a stillness." O'Siadhail's new collection, Our Double Time, explores that double pull of life whizzing past, and our straining to slow the rapid pace, to live more fully and intensely each rich moment.

"And do I ripen?" O'Siadhail interrogates himself, wanting the years of multifold experience, the new and more urgent sense of mortality that age brings, to crown him with a mature philosophy of how to live. He finds various solutions such as "a chosen innocence"; the importance of being "at home in my clay"; and, finally, the Yeatsian joy in friendship: "All my tinyness rejoices/ That I'll have been a voice among your voices."

Other comforts include a love of music, particularly jazz: "The book is built up in a musical way, with recurrent motifs and variations. I would like it to have the quality of a quartet in five movements." His New And Selected Poems, published in 1992, was entitled Hail! Madam Jazz, and in this new book, Madam Jazz is invoked once more: a benign yet powerful female influence who personifies the "womb/tomb" double "dark" of life's beginning and end: "I love the presence of good women. I am at home in their company," he says simply. Appropriately enough, the younger Irish poets who most interest him at the moment are all female and include Mary O'Malley, Moya Cannon and Paula Meehan. The poet to whom he returns as his greatest influence, however, is Rilke: "I love the depth and breadth of Rilke. He writes the most exquisite German."

A full-time poet for the last 10 years, O Siadhail was once a research professor in linguistics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and is still at ease in many languages. As well as his interest in language, O'Siadhail has a love of poetic form: "I think the sonnet is the most musical form you can get. But the language must be able to breathe within the discipline of the form. The ecology has to be right between tightness and looseness." The same could be said of his belief that achieving maturity is about holding back and then having the trust to let go: "Much as a woman does when she is giving birth," he observes.

When he started writing poetry full-time, he did not turn his back on "practical involvement" with literature. He has been a member of the Arts Council and of the Cultural Relations Committee, and is currently one of the judges for The Irish Times/ESB 1998 Irish Theatre Awards: "I feel there is a time as an artist to give service to your community." He is also chair of ILE (Ireland Literature Exchange), which he notes proudly has been "a great success" - "last year alone, 60 works of Irish literature were translated into other languages, and there will be more this year."

But he does not want to dwell for long on anything other than poetry. We return to the theme of mortality. Even when O'Siadhail was a young man, mortality was a fact of his life: "My mother was ill for years and died when I was 21." As he gets older, the awareness of life's "precariousness" deepens: "A friend who was at school with me dropped dead two years ago."

A sequence of poems in Our Double Time is dedicated to a friend who died a lingering death from cancer: "I watched the dignity of a woman who had the strength to arrange the chairs around the table for the time when she'd be gone." There is a poem about a victim of Alzheimer's: "A piecemeal progress/ To childishness. This long roundabout way to go" (from But If). He has also had his own "stint in intensive care". He does not advocate trying to avoid "facing the finitude of life": "People want to escape into drugs, sex, or, increasingly, work. But by facing the precariousness of the moment, it magnifies and intensifies in every direction." O'Siadhail is determined to "rejoice" in the face of death: "I go when I go. Let me go a lover."

Our Double Time is published by Bloodaxe Books at £7.95. Micheal O'Siadhail's reading tour continues: tonight, Garter Lane Gallery, Waterford, 8.30 p.m.; tomorrow night, Wexford Arts Centre, 8 p.m.; Thursday, The Crannog Bookshop, Cavan, 6.30 p.m.; Monday, May 4th Tullamore Court Hotel, 8 p.m.; Thursday, May 7th, Backstage Theatre, Longford, 8.30 p.m.; Tuesday, May 26th, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, 8 p.m.