Naming Love makes its first official appearance alongside Ger Reidy’s new collection, Clay, in one of Mayo’s most iconic venues: Matt Molloy’s Yard Bar, Westport.
Both books were launched by leading contemporary Irish visual artist Alice Maher (speech below).
Music was by uilleann piper extraordinaire, Diarmaid Moynihan.
Alice Maher’s launch speech:
So I’ve spent the last two weeks reading poetry, thinking about poetry, dreaming poetry and asking myself all the while…what IS poetry. Like Sean O’Casey asked in Juno and the Paycock…what is the stars, what is the stars? What is poetry and why is it different from writing? It is such a condensed form of communication, the essence of an experience, not a description of an experience…the distillation of what it is to experience, the Pure Drop.
And honestly it is more tied to music for me than to literature because the poet works with sound, the musicality of the sentence, the emotion embedded in a word, the SHADOW of its meaning, and this is often how music works on the nervous system too. Poets don’t waste words like we do in everyday speech, words to them are precious things, pearls or even simple clay beads to be crafted into perfect sounding forms…that is the ancient and sacred art of poetry. The mystery and beauty of our language reflected back to us.
Because it is a mystery how a poem works, or where it comes from even. Seamus Heaney spoke of ‘the inner path’ that a poet takes, that the poet has sensory material stored in the brain and body systems like ‘a culture in the bottom of a jar’ that rises to the surface as words. And Heaney’s own reverence for ordinary things finds an echo in both these poetry collections. A mug, a watering can, the moon, a worm, a rock, a shed, a barking dog, a 5-bar gate, the weather, wind and storm, sun and vastness of sky… we know them but not like a poet knows them. Each poet has a very different approach, a different rhythm to their words, but they are two culture jars with rich sediment resting there from which their language rises into being as poems that help us to become re-enchanted with our world.
Being a poet is about having faith, not faith as in a belief system with rules and definitions, but faith in the process of living and of dying and that we can somehow make sense of everything in between by paying close attention and entering into kinship with that process. “Everything, including the self, is in process” said the philosopher Henri Bergson. It takes a poet to slow down and surrender to that. ‘The long acre’ as we used to call it when I was young (I’m almost sure Ger mentions it in his poetry)…it’s the free grass by the side of the road, it’s not owned or cultivated by anyone…it just grows there. But it takes a poet to notice that, and to value the weeds, the over-looked and the marginal, the ‘free grass’ of our journey through life that we just walk past un-noticing.
And that is another thing that both these poets have in common…their uncommon ability to pick out and give value to the overlooked and the despised. Their care for human suffering underlines every line in a deep seated social conscience and empathy with those who grieve, those who search for home and hearth, those who cry in the wilderness. They have a deep love for this burning world, but both seem to also acknowledge other worlds beyond the veil of the here and now. Ghosts inhabit their works, ancestors, descendants to come, unknowns, beloveds, outsiders. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said; Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations. And those shadows follow us everywhere, even when we don’t see them. They are here now, acknowledged and brought into the light by these two poets. The ordinary, the extraordinary, anger, love, wonder, they are all welcome to the sediment jar of the poet and can rise to the surface as words, like magic. We have two publications here today with the magic of the poets words between their lovely covers. Lisa Molina and Dermot Seymour the artists, both related to the authors through kinship and through friendship. Please take them home and live with them. And many congratulations to both of you for these books of poetry and for your courage in being poets, in naming love and in loving clay.