Counting on words

I'M not sure I believe in the concept of the poet at all. Almost everybody has the same capacity to write poems. A poem is simply an adaptation of experience. That's all it is really. It's just that some people are better at it than others, like Seamus Heaney." And, though you'd never get him to admit it, like Bernard O'Donoghue.

Hot on the heels of a T.S. Eliot Prize nomination, two weeks ago he was awarded the Whitbread Poetry Prize for his second volume of poetry, Gunpowder. Tonight O'Donoghue will meet up with the winners of the other four categories (novel, biography, children's and first novel) at a black tie dinner in London when the Whitbread Book Of The Year, the overall winner, is announced.

With a top prize of £21,000 (individual category prizewinners get £2,000) the Whitbread is the most lucrative literature prize in the UK. Not that O'Donoghue has any hopes of hitting the jackpot himself. Against the heavyweight offerings (literally and metaphorically) of Salman Rushdie and Roy Jenkins, he doesn't feel his featherweight volume stands a chance. "A poetry book," he says, "has got to be very, very good to be in serious competition and I wouldn't, have thought this one was, to be honest. I'm extremely happy to be where I am."

O'Donoghue displays none of the raffish, hair cuts are for lesser mortals, qualities of the stereotypical poet. But then he doesn't think of himself as a poet. He is a teacher, a teacher of medieval English at Oxford University. Imagine then a youthful Mr Chips as played by Robert Donat. Tall (inclined to stoop), just turning 50, clothes the colour of peat, always slightly apologetic, clearly adored by his students. As the part time poet ushers me through the maze of corridors leading to his rooms in Wadham College where he has just been made a Fellow, a colleague stops and congratulates him. O'Donoghue is genuinely moved ("It's extraordinary how kind everyone is") and thanks him in a voice as soft as a sea mist. Because although the Oxford don may have taken the boat for England 34 years ago, one senses that the poet never left his home shores. Certainly he rarely writes about anywhere else.

Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co Cork in 1945. His mother who came from England, was a history teacher. His father was "technically a farmer though he preferred to spend his days touring the backroads of Kerry in his old car selling insurance. O'Donoghue spent his childhood in the farming community of Knockduff, north Cork, a village he now goes back to three times a year with his wife and their three children, for family holidays, to a house from which he can see his childhood home.

"I don't particularly want to write only about the same locale but it just happens. The place seems to be as resonant to me now as when I was young. It's something to do with the language.

There is a deliberate and active interest in language, in what it sounds like as they express things. Perhaps the shadow presence of the Irish language which affects syntax has something to do with it. The overlap, the non fitting that you get between languages, makes people very aware of what language can express and what it can't express.

BERNARD O'Donoghue is a storyteller. His poems are narratives, "narratives with a moral thread".

They seem entirely natural, unconstructed, as if set down fresh told. There is no introspection, no analysis, no sense of hindsight although O'Donoghue believes it is hindsight that provides the counterpoint that brings each poem into existence. "You think yourself back into what you thought then from what you know now and these two perspectives can provide the two poles that the poem operates between. It is very hard to write a poem about a single thing. There has to be some degree of contrast to give it meaning. It doesn't have to be a contradictory idea. It can be verbal, not moral. A linguistic twist maybe that nails it down a bit.

"I think I am deliberately trying, to be outward moving. I prefer poems that are stories about reality. Some stories select themselves: events which are inherently important, such as death. My father died when I was quite young. It was quite traumatic. He dropped dead at a football match when I was 16. Events like that select themselves as being significant. Then you play around with lesser experiences and events and see what kind of significance can be in them.

His poems are not introspective, he says, because the impetus for their writing is less emotional than linguistic. "The occasion of the poem, the thing that starts it going, is usually just a phrase, really, and I'll think, `Oh that's good'. That's got a rhythm or an association beyond itself. You just write a series of words that forms the skeleton of the poem that takes place round them. It's a very objective process really. It isn't to do with state of mind.

For a few months after his father's sudden death, young Bernard continued living in Cork under the care of his two elder sisters who were studying at the university before joining his mother to finish his schooling in Manchester, where she had gone to find work. "One of my sisters did English and one did Irish. It was a tremendous influence on me." It was at this time that O'Donoghue discovered poetry and realised "with a tremendous bang that poetry did give me a kick. I remember reading The Ancient Mariner and things like getting a record of Cyril Cusack reading Yeats when I was 17 and being absolutely riveted by it, and really not knowing what those Yeats poems were about in the very least, but the music of, Cusack's reading of it was hugely influential.

But it was not until he was 35, that Bernard O'Donoghue wrote" his first real poem. At school he was equally split between English and maths. In Ireland, he says, he could have done a joint arts' degree, but not in England. And certainly not at Oxford. So English it was, although he spent the year following his BA as a systems analyst working for IBM in Manchester in the days when computers were the size of rooms. Much as he enjoyed his time there particularly the people his fascination with the medieval world, its language and philosophy, proved too strong a magnet and he returned to Oxford. He has been there ever since. First came two years of further study at his original college, Lincoln, then straight into a teaching job at Magdalem.

HE was soon a member of the active and influential poetry society, run by fellow Magdalen don, the poet and novelist John Fuller, whose enthusiasm and championing of poetry and poets has made Magdalen the crucible of English poetry over the last decade. ("He is an amazing person. James Fenton, Alan Hollinghurst and Mick Imlah were all inspired by him to write.") The incestuous nature of Magdalen supremacy in the poetry publishing world is not without its critics but, says O'Donoghue, he knows he would never have written a word were it not for Fuller. I remember pushing that first poem, Beware of the Crab about cancer under John's door. I was frightened and elated." It was Fuller who first put his poems into print.

However, the main influence on O'Donoghue was not his contemporaries but the poets, for the most part anonymous, he had spent his adult life studying and reading. The medieval poetry of Chaucer and earlier. "The things I really like are the short old English and middle English poems and they're the ones that have influenced me more than anything in the modern period in Ireland or the Irish tradition. Ironically enough, in spite of my application of it all to Ireland, my model of the ideal poem is the old English elegy. I suppose I started writing about bits of experience. And followed the lyric structure."

11 was not only the structure but the voice. There is no sentimentality in O'Donoghue's work, but it is certainly elegiac, tipping his hat to people, places or times whose passing he mourns. But gloom plays no part. (Laughter punctuates his conversation and his eyes glint at the hint of gossip.) "I think of elegy as being an assertion of being alive. You get elegiac as the worst thing that you can imagine is not being alive." Old English elegies, he says are laments for the transience of the world. "Alas The Bright Cup, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament, are archetypal poems that retain their mystery. You're not sure how to read them. But you are sure that they are a glowing lament for transience."

Donoghue is amazed when his poetry is described as loose and unstructured. However easy on the ear it may appear, the opposite is the case, he says, the clue lying in his split English/mathematical personality. "I'm much more numerate than meaning conscious. I see a poem as very much a formal structure. I am much more struck by the form of words as by their meaning. Which is why I like short poems, even though I don't write little rhyming verse or sonnets or whatever. I think of them all as being formed. They're variations on the English line the pentameter too much so perhaps. I think numerately. For instance, if I produce a sentence and get tired, I can tell you at the end of the sentence what proportion of vowels and consonants I have used. It's a freak. Apparently children under the age of six all do it.

To imagine that O'Donoghue's writing is simply a last cry to a lost world, is a mistake. Beneath the soft skin of pastoral memories is an armature of steel. Politics, though rarely obvious, is rarely entirely absent. ("We are all far too ready to assign the blame to somebody else.") The Whitbread Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize nomination, are not the first public acknowledgment of Bernard O'Donoghue's talent. Seamus Heaney's Oxford lectures, published under the title The Redress of Poetry was dedicated to him. ("He is an extremely generous spirited man.") But when I suggest that there are similarities between Heaney's work and his own, he becomes once more the self effacing part time poet. Although prepared to concede that there might be some similarities, they are, he says, superficial.

Heaney is introspective. He's a great deal more serious. I think he's more aware of judgment. And he is there as a presence, a thinking presence. His mind is playing over the poems all the time. But mine isn't."