The Poetry

I began to write poetry out of my reading of ballads and folk-tales, mythology and fantasy. I liked the intrinsic connection between word and music, the bare, stripped-down style, the brisk pace, and the patterns of repetition and refrain. Far from being transported into a different and magical world, I discovered new attitudes and ways of connecting with the one I lived in. I understood that ballads were a way for people to preserve memories and insights that were being left behind by industrial and market-led culture, or to honour things that weren't valued in classrooms and employment. It was a very sensual experience, full of pictures and music and those things are still important to my work now.Then, in studying Old English and Old Norse, medieval literature and the metaphysical poets at university, I found forms and patterns, structures and the enormous riches of the English vocabulary. I also realised that poetry could be a way of making connections across many disciplines and modes of thought, and could give you a way of getting into the lived experience of intellectual ideas.

My brain seems to be wired for short bursts of intense attention, so the aesthetics of Imagism seem very sympathetic – precise word choice, compression, musical phrases rather than strict metre, and so on. I like economy and shapeliness in my poems, and I like them to read well aloud. I am very strongly influenced by Seamus Heaney, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T S Eliot, the geo-poetics movement founded by Kenneth White, and by the Chinese Rivers-and-Mountains school.

I'm most interested in the processes of creativity and craftsmanship, the different ways that people build a living on the earth, the sense of home, and how we create it, the links between language, place and community, connections and traditions. I have a particular interest in Celtic mythology, and the connections between the Ireland of my heritage and Scotland where I live now. Much of my work is grounded in close observation of the place I live – the weather, landscape, wild-life and history – and the places I visit.

Wherever We Live Now includes poems about archaeology, about the creation of a sense of belonging and of national identity, and about how the way we see and relate to the natural world shapes how we see and feel about ourselves and the communities we live in. More recent work will hopefully go deeper, exploring the practices of re-inhabiting and re-wilding, and looking again at some of the underlying assumptions of eco-feminism.

August Herb Garden

August Herb Garden Bees tumble, carousing to summer's end
in the flowers of borage and thyme
a shimmer of brown and gold
over pink and purple cushions
and blue fallen stars in the grass.

Glendalough

Bury me at Glendalough,
where the water falls like a white knife
between the black rocks,
and the huddled grey tombstones sleep
at the foot of Kevin's tower.

I want to be by the lough's wide blue sheet,
where kneeling Kevin
heard blackbirds and red squirrels
sing lauds and vespers
from his lonely stony bed.

I want to hear children come
to the new centre of pale wood and glass
to learn how books were cherished,
and monks sang in praise of a God in whom
their parents say they have no faith.

I'll rest within the sound
from the bright red van selling hot dogs,
and the hawkers making money
from shamrock, and green stone rosaries
and whiskey-flavoured toffee.

Bury me at Glendalough
because my people know themselves there.
There, not at Tara, nor O'Connell Street
is where they know their origin,
and where they want to end.

Walking on Water


face forward, never look down.
The jelly swell beneath your feet
melts under your gaze, and small fish,
silver against the glittering sand,
flit from your sudden gravity.

The trick is not to look inwards;
Don’t watch yourself doing it.
It’s important to look away
to where stone houses on the cliff
draw closer, and the white waves
play chap and run on the sand’s door.

The trick is to put your faith
in willing hands stretched out to you,
in those others who take for granted
the paradox and adventure
of walking unsupported
solid on the crest of the sea.

I sometimes post poems on the blog, and you can also see them at Peony Moon, Well-Versed, and at Catapult to Mars here and here