When I was young I lived with my grandmother.  Many nights I was the only child in the house with this blind woman.  She wasn’t great company for a child of eight or nine.  But she allowed me to play endlessly with her old Pye radio.  It is a miracle that I wasn’t electrocuted, because in those days very few appliances were earthed.  Anyway, I listened to all the stations, Radio Éireann, BBC One and Radio Two Longwave, Radio Moscow and Radio Luxembourg.  My grandmother didn’t seem to mind all the squeaking and squelching of signals.  The world coming to me through the radio seemed crowded and cheerful and welcoming.

I think of books as radios or televisions that have been flattened for storage or convenience.  When the cover of a book is lifted it’s like switching on a radio or television.  Imagine, when you open a book, that the cover is a kind of a power-pack or solar-panel that makes the book receive signals from far away. When I go into a library or a bookshop now I think of all those books as radio programmes, full of voices and opinions.  You know, literature was really the first successful multichannel company, the first broadcasting corporation.  The voices in books are honest, funny sometimes, rich and brilliant.

I am not sure why I first began to write poems.  It had something to do with the rich boredom and loneliness of my childhood.  Yes, that boredom was rich.  With boredom in my pockets,  I travelled to many places, made many friends in my imagination. Poets are born, not made.  But I think that there are many more poets born than ever live to see their talent exposed and matured by practice.  Most people will have the poetry knocked out of them, mainly by being kept physically busy.  For poetry is born in that oasis of lethargy and dreaming.  I’m sure that things do happen in a poet’s life to awaken the dormant poetic instincts.  One thing that I can say for certain is that I love reading poetry by others.  Perhaps it is only through this love that one can understand why a poet writes.  The sort of joy I feel in discovering a really good poem by Yeats, Heaney or Paul Durcan is the same as the joy I feel when I myself have made a really good poem.  Nearly all writers begin as readers, just as great sportswomen and men begin as spectators.  Others inspire us; we want to do something wonderful like them.

I wrote my first poem for a school magazine.  Sister Carmel and Brigid Coughlan, our two English teachers, organised a magazine publishing project with the two third year classes at the Convent of Mercy Co-Ed in Cappoquin.  I was the editor.  As we were short of poems for the Christmas issue I wrote a poem about Vietnam.  A girl I had a crush on in the classroom next to mine said that she loved my poem. I was thrilled.  Suddenly poetry had power, personal power.  Then I began to write love-poems for her.  I haven’t stopped writing poetry since.  In school I wrote poems instead of learning Latin or Irish.  This was an educational tragedy for me.  I had been preparing materials for an electro-statics project for the Young Scientists’ Exhibition.  Science was abandoned and my Science Teacher was disappointed.  My family became worried about me. Was I going to go to the dogs?  I almost did.  But seven years later my first collection The First Convention (Dolmen Press, 1978) won the Patrick Kavanagh Award.  A year later I went to the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa where I met poets from Asia and Africa. I felt completely at home in their company.

Why do I write?  If I could answer that question perhaps I wouldn’t have to write anymore. Poetry is a vocation and a perception of value.  A good reader of poetry will see the value of the experience.  It is a spiritual and personal value in a materialistic world. A poet begins with a private feeling and a private set of words that seem to fit the feeling perfectly.  A good poet will eventually create a whole new set of values, a new way of speaking to us.  Poetry is the true voice of feelings that comes into our lives like voices on a CD-player.  Poetry is as simple as falling in love, and as complex.  But one can be confident about reading a poem, one can hear the feeling as completely as you hear the voice of a beloved.  I don’t write poems to confuse or complicate others. We all live at a slightly different wavelength from one another.  I am sure that poetry is one of the filters by which we can hear clearly the noises broadcast from other lives.  In many ways I am still the child turning knobs of the tuner, my pen is an aerial and the printed page is its speaker.

This is one of the earliest of my poems to be published.  It was written when I was a student at University College Cork and was published in a College magazine, then in The Irish Times and subsequently in my first collection, The First Convention, 1978.

Originally, it was called “Dark Spaces”, then I called it “Grandmother”.  Now I am happy with its published title because it focuses on the one truly important aspect of my grandmother, her blindness.  She had been blinded in an accident on her father’s small farm near Mount Melleray Abbey in Co. Waterford.  She became a very dominant person, controlling her entire family from the wing-backed chair by her fireside.  Nothing was ever done, no door was painted, no pig sold, no hurling-match attended, until it was ‘cleared’ with ‘Nan-Nan’ as we called her. She had become blind at the age of twenty so she knew the world as a sighted person.  Whenever I brought her tea she clasped the warm mug in her hands and turned it round and round. I used to stand beside her for a few minutes in case she spilt the hot liquid onto her lap.  She was always aware of my standing beside her, and sometimes reached out to squeeze my hand as if I was one of her huge collection of geraniums. [END]