In a world on fire, poetry, along with much else of value in our society, can seem vulnerable to the flames – and powerless before their might. And yet, more and more, I find myself turning to poets for consolation, provocation, and the hard truths needed to navigate contemporary history. They’ve become my guides, restoring my belief in poetry as a small, often fragile, but still durable counterweight to the inhumanity that so wracks our ailing planet. Even the most abstruse, solitary, or despairing of poems presumes the presence, somewhere, of other people with the capacity for recognition and understanding. It’s possible that our collective future as a species-in-nature will come to depend on the existence of exactly this kind of community. 

It was partly in the hope of testing and exploring such questions that I decided, in early 2018, to set up Island’s Edge Poetry, an online archive of in-depth conversations with Irish poets. Island’s Edge now features over thirty interviews, all conducted in writing, sometimes over a period of several weeks or months – a methodology first employed by the late Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, which I adapted to my own purposes.

When I started the website, the motivating idea was to try to create a collective memoir of Irish poetry now, as narrated by some of its foremost practitioners. In many ways, of course, this was an impossible task: I didn’t have the time or energy to correspond with every poet in Ireland, and even if I had, my own concerns and (occasionally fruitful) biases tended to affect the flow of the exchanges when they happened. As a reader, I’m consistently curious, for example, about the overlap between form and content, aesthetics and politics, in a manner that some people may find tiresome. My own feeling is that poets do not and cannot live only in their poems – that they belong to the world and are enriched by their engagement with it – and this filters my approach as an interviewer. As Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin suggests in our exchange, “poetry both frees us to find words in unexpected places, and imposes a duty of using them in as truthful a way as we can”. There is an ethical dimension to our tenacious search, as readers and writers, for “truthful” utterance, and the “duty” Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin identifies in her own working practice may well be an intrinsic element of the craft in general. 

In any case, five years on from my first interviews (with Jane Clarke and Jessica Traynor, respectively), I’ve now had the pleasure of speaking with a wide range of poets, from relative new-comers – like Molly Twomey and Kevin Graham, who had yet to publish a full collection when we spoke – to acknowledged masters of the craft. Although far from complete, whatever that might look like, the collection also spans Ireland’s ‘spoken word’ and ‘printed page’ poetries, which are often presumed – mistakenly, in my opinion – to be separate spheres, or mutually at odds. In the archive, intrepid investigators of modern life (such as Peter Sirr, Harry Clifton, or the late Maurice Scully) sit alongside proletarian prophets (like Karl Parkinson), as well as queer- and feminist-influenced philosophers-in-verse (from Sarah Clancy to Mary O’Donnell), and others, whose rich back-catalogue of poetic testaments and innovations perhaps eludes any of those specific categories. One of the great delights of compiling Island’s Edge, in fact, has been to encounter this democracy of the voice as it emerges over the interviews in their entirety: to hear wordsmiths of various political and literary dispositions letting rip, contradicting me and one another, with a fierce and sometimes fractious eloquence all their own. 

As such, and in a small way, Island’s Edge offers a series of perspectives on the changes that have been wrought and won in Irish society over the past decade or so, from women’s reproductive rights to marriage equality. So Ailbhe Darcy discusses her efforts, as writer and academic scholar, “to raise awareness in the poetry scene of the continued marginalisation of women’s work.”  Relatedly, the interviews also provide a glimpse into areas of social and cultural life that are still in need of reform or redress, including in the arts sector, which has witnessed a number of campaigns in recent years highlighting imbalances and alleged abuses of power. In the interviews, these issues frequently have a personal weight. Jean O’Brien recalls once being told by a “young man [speaking] with the supreme confidence of young men, ‘Your poems are for women, I write for everyone.’”. Another poet, Annemarie Ní Chuirreáin, relates the generative struggle between speech and silence in her work to “the ways in which women and children have been made vulnerable by institutions of the Irish State” over the past century. Dave Lordan discusses poetry explicitly as a “call-to-battle, which is meant to lift people’s hearts so they can go on living and fighting for a better situation”. 

Environmental anxieties stalk the archive. Why write (and how do we live) in the face of ecological catastrophe and potential extinction? Catherine Phil MacCarthy’s answer is a reflection on the “ginko tree”, which was “the only form of life to survive the [nuclear] bombing” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945. “Having written a series of very gloomy ‘end-of-the-world’ poems”, Geraldine Mitchell remarks, “I am now thinking that a celebration of what we are set to lose might be a more effective way of working.” “Literature”, we’re informed by the inimitable apocalypticist, Patrick Chapman, “needs to be obscene in order to reflect the world with any degree of accuracy.” Hope and horror exist in dialectical tension, in the words and works of many of Ireland’s poetic luminaries.

Even as the website has expanded, I’ve found myself lamenting the gaps and omissions that populate it. Bombarded by a volley of (perhaps too-earnest) questions, not all of the many poets I approached have been available to participate in the interview process, for a range of reasons. And there were others whom I would have loved to speak with, but could not: Dermot Healy, for instance, whose collection The Reed Bed was a formative book in my own poetic education; or Derek Mahon, whose late work, intriguingly, explored a range of anti-capitalist positions and philosophies, in opposition to what he called, in Against the Clock (2018), “the bedlam of acquisitive force / That rules us, and would rule the universe”; or Eavan Boland, who consistently bore witness to the credo, in her words, that there can be “no meaning to an art form with its grand designs unless it allows the humane to shape the invented, the way gravity is said to bend starlight.” These figures have now departed, each of them “no more a person / now” (to quote W. H. Auden) “but a whole climate of opinion // under whom we conduct our different lives.”

Island’s Edge, then, is lit by loss and absence, just as much as it serves as a (partial) repository for the energies and intricacies shaping Irish poetry today. In a certain respect, the archive – forever growing, forever unfinished – exists in a similar state of process and formation to that of the world it comes from. There is, of course, inspiration to be found in this seeming paradox. As another luminous ghost, the late Brendan Kennelly, put it, in his poem ‘Begin’:

Though we live in a world that dreams of ending

that always seems about to give in

something that will not acknowledge conclusion

insists that we forever begin.