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Perhaps it began with the trip to Kinsale in January of this year. I had been promising my friend Ulick I would visit him for several months. He was doing a course in permaculture at Kinsale College of Further Education. Permaculture is about practical sustainability, the idea of living a self-sufficient life. Every time I hear this word, self-sufficiency, I am drawn to the image of a dacha in the Russian taiga with the soil as black as crude oil and the crackling of a freshly shovelled wood-chip fire; images drawn from Tarkovsky’s films or perhaps, not so strangely, the paintings of Finnish mythology by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. A Finnish man once asked me about Irish nationalism and art; why, in the nineteenth century, architecture never played the same role here as in other emerging European nations. I suppose my answer was something about colonialism or religion, but I do not remember.
I did not decide to go to Kinsale until just before my journey. It was a week before university was to start. The weather was cold and grey but it was not raining. I got the train to Cork and slept. On arriving at Ceannt Station, I struggled onto the platform and from there to the bus depot. I was weighed down with my top-heavy rucksack. It was mostly full of new books I had received over Christmas.
It would be an hour before the bus to Kinsale was to leave and so, even with my cumbersome luggage, I went to Eason’s in search of poetry, my obsession at the time. I had spent the previous two months reading and writing poetry, rooting it out, looking for “nourishment” as I called it. In one working week in December, I had written four poems I was happy with – a record! Never before had I written with such vigour and, on this creative high, all the things I saw, heard and tasted, were printed in my memory as ideograms, waiting to be placed into poems.
My uncle Barney described great poems as being like sweets you could suck on forever. On Christmas Eve, we sat in O’Flaherty’s pub in Buncrana discussing poetry. The photo of the night, posted on the internet several weeks later, shows him and me sitting close together. My hair is greasy and plantlike: clumps of hair whisp in every direction. My right hand is holding a half-empty pint glass while I gesticulate with my left. Barney’s hands are on his lap, out of sight, and his dark-reddish hair is silvering over the ears.
“I can’t write poetry, Michael,” he said. “But I can appreciate it.” His Donegal accent has an American twang. He has lived in San Francisco since 1979. His favourite poet is Thomas Hardy, but he told me to read Gary Snyder.
