Pomes and Things

I set the alarm for 7am as I had to be at the Poetry Festival at Snape by 8.30, then I couldn't get to sleep as often happens when I know I have to be up early. I had a dream that it was 8.15 and I'd overslept, and I woke up and it was exactly 8.15 and the alarm had not gone off. Why didn't my anxiety wake me up sooner? So it was a rush to get there and I was cursing the early start until I met the Irish poet Michael McCarthy. A delightful man in his 70s, and a Catholic priest, he was doing a close reading of fellow Irishman Bernard O'Donoghue's poem Ter Conatus. It could have been a William Trevor story, so achingly painful was it to hear. A not untypical Irish story of the aging brother and sister who had never married but lived and worked together on the family farm. She has a very late, too late diagnosis of cancer, and when he hears he tries to help her in her agony, reaches out to touch her, maybe even hug her, but years of custom have made it impossible and they are denied this mutual comfort. But love transcends everything, and so it does here. Oh my God.


We chatted afterwards, and when I identified him as a Corkman he wanted to know how. My brother lives in Schull, I told him, he's built a house outside the town. My mother came from there, he said. Is your brother an artist then? and when I answered yes and told him his name he said he recognised it from the summer's art festival. He'd look out for his work when next he was there. I confess to never having heard of him, and me after spending four years at Trinity College studying Anglo-Irish literature. But it was Heaney and Kavannah and Yeats and Synge and Swift we read; the little living fellows didn't get much of a look in then. I looked him up when I got home and discovered his own poetry, so perceptive, insightful, tender and respectful. A true Christian then, and a real poet. Hardly surprising that I got back into my car and braved the wet and blustery day outside to go and hear him again, this time reading his own work.

It was worth the effort, of course it was, but the real treat came in the form of the poet who went on after him, one Christine Webb (never heard of her either, sorry). She's an academic, a classicist, who wears her learning lightly but uses language so effectively that her careful annunciation as she read allowed you to practically taste every individual, gorgeous, perfect word. Halfway in she talked about being and looking like a feminist - and she described herself as tall and thin with straight hair, a straight figure. And then she said something I didn't completely catch about how unfortunate it is to look like a lesbian and not be one, or to be a lesbian and not look like one. And she began to read a poem about her female lover who died nine years ago, 40 years into their relationship, and as she voiced the tender phrases a middle-aged blond got up from her seat mid row, brushed past people to the aisle and stomped, STOMPED up the wooden stairs to the door. I felt my stomach turn over with dismay and horror, and faces around me registered the same sick feeling. Oh, but the poet didn't turn a hair, reciting on to the heart-rending end where dreams of togetherness are dashed each morning as reality hits home with sudden wakefulness. I bought her books. Her poem called Martha (Mary's sister) and one named The Midwife's Tale really made me laugh, but Metamorphosis, penned on hearing the sad news of Ted Hughes' death, was vehement, each regretful word projected like a pebble, a tiny missile of sorrow. Beautiful, so beautiful.