Poetry, Painting and the President – Sea week 2014

by Deborah Watkins. Posted on November 13, 2014

13 Nov

This piece was written for the current issue of the Connemara Journal, out now.

The 2014 Sea Week Festival celebrated its 30th year this year with a series of events that brought the village of Letterfrack on to the national stage. It began on the 17th October with a visit by President Higgins who opened the Letterfrack Poetry Trail and Small Works Exhibition in the National Park.

President Higgins and his wife Sabina at the launch of the Poetry trail with Leo Hallissey and David Keane, photo by Aoife Herriot.

The Connemara Environmental Education and Cultural Centre commissioned nine poems by nine of Irelands most eminent poets for the occasion. The poems are carved onto plaques made of native larch, designed by Conservation Centre Letterfrack. They are mounted on slate from the old industrial school and strategically placed around the National Park, Connemara West centre and village of Letterfrack. Some of the poems are specific to their site while others are more general in nature. Together they make for a most enjoyable and thought provoking walk for the community and for our visitors. The poets are Theo Dorgan, Paula Meehan, Rita Ann Higgins, Joan McBreen, Moya Cannon, Michael Gorman, Louis de Paor, Mary O’Malley and Eva Bourke. Letterfrack is a thriving centre of education today but it has always acknowledged its troubled history in a spirit of openness that is respectful to those who lived here in less happier times. If you haven’t been on the Poetry Trail yet, go out and enjoy it soon, it is well worth a visit.

President Higgins views the work with David Keane, photo by Aoife Herriot

The Small Works Exhibition is an annual event that is a gem of an idea brought into fruition by Leo Hallissey, the driving force behind this festival. It has become an integral part of Sea Week and it is unusual because the artwork is shown anonymously, allowing the viewer to decide what he or she likes without being influenced by a name. It is also unusual because each painting is made available for sale by the artists at the knock down price of €90.00 or €120.00 for a framed piece. The generosity of spirit at the heart of this collective makes it special and this is shared by the artists and by everyone who purchases an art work.

One of the artworks at the Small Works Exhibition

‘The Move away from the Coast’ – painting at the Small Works Exhibition

David Keane prepared this years brief which was entitled ‘Time and Tide.’ Artists living in the community were asked to reflect on the fragile nature of existence on the edge of the Atlantic, bearing in mind the impact of last Winter’s storms. The show was skillfully curated by visual artist Mary Hession and artist and wood turner Angie Williams – no easy task with literally dozens of artworks encompassing a wide range of styles. President Higgins took time to view each piece before he shared a few words with the assembled crowd. The president and his wife Sabina were presented with a hand bound copy of poems from the trail, transcribed by the poets themselves as well as two beautiful productions from Artisan House and a wooden bowl made by Angie Williams.

President Higgins and his wife Sabina with Mary Ruddy from Artisan House and wood turner and artist Angie Williams, photo by Aoife Herriot

These two events were highlights for me but they were just part of a rich and varied programme that celebrates the sea through music and dance, walks, workshops, a spectacular ‘After the Light’ parade and much more. Congratulations and thanks to all those involved for making this years festival such a great success.

Getting some Perspective

by Deborah Watkins. Posted on March 21, 2014

21 Mar

I’ve been busy for the last few weeks, doing lots of writing and not very much painting. I’ve been involved in a poetry workshop for over a year now and it’s been great. Writing has slipped into my life so quietly and unexpectedly that I find myself wondering what I did with my time before the workshops. Possibly more painting but life is always a juggling act – for me it’s a question of balance and trying to find just enough time for everything to keep some kind of equilibrium.

At the moment I am writing a business plan for our gallery as we are hoping to develop what we are doing in a new direction. It’s a different kind of writing of course but it is also exciting and I hope that I will be able to share more about that in a few months time.

For now I am going to talk about this painting. I came across it recently while sorting through my desk. I remember working on it about six months ago and leaving it aside as I was unsure whether or not it was finished. Clearly some part of me believed it was not, as it lay quietly unnoticed for all this time. When I found it, I wondered why, because it does seem finished to me now! There are blocks of colour on the right – the pink and green that might seem flat and unresolved compared to the more subtly applied colour to the left, but this gives the piece interest and balance which is something easily lost if the whole surface is treated in the same way.
The negatives seem outweighed by the positives – there is atmosphere, something moody around that hazy purple, the way the light diffuses in the distance and those stripes of red, pink and green do work even though they are incongruous with the rest of the piece.

It reminds me how useful and important it is to take some perspective on a painting – a little distance and time have allowed me to see the piece as if for the first time, so it is easier to make a judgement.

I realise how true this is of writing and yes, so many other aspects in life – it has just taken six months and an old painting to help me remember.

Other Landscapes

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on November 22, 2012

22 Nov

I’ve just bought a book by poet Bruce Snider based on a couple of poems by him that I discovered on the Gwarlingo website. The thing that drew me to them straight away were the vivid descriptions of his hometown of Paradise, Indiana. I was struck by the way he uses landscape as a means of expression and also as a powerful kind of grounding force to that expression. The poems are rich with descriptions of the land, it’s trees and highways, ditches and rivers and these are woven with moments from the past so that somehow he makes these intensely personal experiences into something more accessible, something more universal that we can all understand.

The suicide of the writers cousin ‘Nick’ is at the centre of the collection, simply titled ‘Paradise, Indiana’ but the poems are never indulgent or sentimental. He manages to convey the weight of human grief and loss in a few carefully chosen words that create vivid flashes of imagery, his landscape acting as a kind of compass for memory as he seeks to make sense of the inexplicable.

I especially like this one, called ‘Epitaph’. The images are by Connemara based photographer and hill walking guide Inez Streefkerk.

Epitaph

Because I could be written anywhere,

I loved the hard surface of the blade,

my name carved into barn doors, desktops,

the peeled face of a shag-bark hickory.

I pressed my whole weight into it, letters

grooved deep as the empty

field rows along Tri-Lakes* where I’d seen

my cousin Nick buried in ground so hard

they had to heat the dirt with lamps

before they could dig. I gutted squirrels

my grandmother fried, hanging

skins from the window,

and with the same knife gouged a B

at the base of the frozen creek bank,

the season breaking

like the rose our teacher, Miss Jane,

dipped in nitrogen so it would shatter.

There were more atoms, she claimed,

in the letter O, than people in the entire state.

I could feel God inside that letter,

the vast sky configured, buds scrawled

on the black limbs of trees.

Trucks carried spring feed down

Highway 9 as I wove through the headstones,

tracing names in the late frost,

looking for Nick’s plot

with the wax white roses,

his lucky fishing lure. I could sense

him down there, satin-lined,

curled like the six-toed cat

we’d found bloated in the creek, alive

with lice and maggots. Sometimes

I was sure I could hear him, restless,

waiting for me, the Wabash*

pushing its icy waters, my tongue

humming with the fizz. It never ended,

that stretch of road snaking back home

like an artery through my own heart

where an owl gripped a rat in its claw

over I-80*. I’d put my hands in my pockets

and walk, dreaming of the places I’d go,

the things I’d do, the dump rising

to meet me at the edge of town,

chrome bumpers twisted as the owner

himself, withered arm swinging a fist.

I waited for something to escape –

mouse darting from a glove box, oil

from a cracked sump. I could stand

on a crushed Chevy, feeling it all

thaw inside me: asphalt

and barbed wire, cows and steaming

pails of milk, even the graveyard

rising, new stones nursing old griefs,

slow bones and winter’s cherry trees

making their long walk to leaf.

taken from ‘Paradise, Indiana’ by Bruce Snider

‘Twisted Oak’ by Inez Streefkerk

Cover image ‘Birch Bark’ by Inez Streefkerk

*Tri-Lakes

*Wabash

* I-80

Bogland – Seamus Heaney

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 10, 2012

10 Sep

I came across this photograph with Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Bogland’ on the Connemara Heritage and History site. It is such a beautiful image and it mirrors the words of this poem perfectly.

Seamus Heaney is of course our very own Nobel laureate and arguably one of the most celebrated and popular poets in the world today. This poem was written in 1969 and is regarded as a milestone in Heaney’s career because it was here he first realised ‘an image for the unconscious part of Ireland through a natural part of the landscape where history reposed and was revealed’ * I love this idea of the bog as a metaphor for our psyche, our subconscious and our innermost secrets. It also brings to mind a tree with it’s outer crust and hidden rings underneath, circling time and out of sight until the surface is broken.

Heaney alludes to the ancient bog bodies in much of his early poetry, particularly the viking bodies found in Denmark in the 1950’s. One of these is Tollund man, a male body which has been carbon dated to 230 BC. This man received a violent death like many of the other bog bodies and Heaney has used this in his poems as a political analogy to the unravelling violence in Northern Ireland. Grauballe man was found two years after Tollund man, also in Denmark. Heaney wrote a poem in his honour which begins;

As if he had been poured

in tar, he lies

on a pillow of turf

and seems to weep

the black river of himself.

taken from The Grauballe Man

Such beautiful, tragic and human imagery. It is thick with blackness, a darkness and a beauty that feels uniquely Irish.

The poem ‘Bogland’ has a different perspective. It starts with a comparison to the vast prairies of America. Later, there is an image of ourselves ‘striking inwards and downwards’ – self searching rather than the explorative, outward search of the early American pioneers. He concludes that ‘the wet centre is bottomless’. Here too an image of blackness, like space, a romantic void of disappearing sludge that is rooted in earth and has the preservative qualities of the womb but which falls away to some vast infinite place.

Bogland

We have no prairies

To slice a big sun at evening –

Everywhere the eye concedes to

Encroaching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye

Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

Is bog that keeps crusting

Between the sights of the sun.

They’ve taken the skeleton

Of the Great Irish Elk

Out of the peat, set it up

An astounding crate of air.

Better sunk under

More than a hundred years

Was recovered salty and white.

The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,

Missing its last definition

By millions of years,

They’ll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks

Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Our pioneers keep striking

Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip

Seems camped on before.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

The wet centre is bottomless.

Seamus Heaney

* taken from Landscape or Mindscape? Seamus Heaney’s Bogs by Diane Meredith, The University of California, Davis.

Cover image taken from Connemara Heritage and History

Apple-Ripe September

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 5, 2012

05 Sep

Ripe apples, back to school, my birthday, blackberries, evening classes, woolen scarves, crispy air and pink skies. These are just some of the things I like about September.

We’ve been collecting apples from our trees for the last few days. We have just two – a crab and an apple blossom. The crab is still young so not enough fruits yet for jelly, but their colour brightens up the garden (below), a last hurrah before the Autumn settles in.

G likes to stew the apple right down to a pulp, then he adds molasses and pours it over yogurt. I like it barely cooked with porridge, a set-me-up for the day, delicious and all the sweeter because it’s our own. It was warm and bright this morning so I took some photos to capture them before they disappear into the kitchen.

All this talk of September and apples brought the much loved Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh to mind. His poem ‘On An Apple-Ripe September Morning’ with its imagery of early Autumn and the threshing recalls another time. Men folk gathered together to get the crops in, neighbours and friends lending a hand or paying their dues and all the loose chatter and gossip in between. Nature soaks through the lines – mist-chill fields, wet leaves of the cocksfoot and glistening bog-holes. The last verse ends on a note of awe and admiration towards all this beauty ‘I knew as I had entered that I had come through fields that were part of no earthly estate.’

On An Apple-Ripe September Morning

On an apple-ripe September morning

Through the mist-chill fields I went

With a pitch-fork on my shoulder

Less for use than for devilment.

The threshing mill was set-up, I knew,

In Cassidy’s haggard last night,

And we owed them a day at the threshing

Since last year. O it was delight

To be paying bills of laughter

And chaffy gossip in kind

With work thrown in to ballast

The fantasy-soaring mind.

As I crossed the wooden bridge I wondered

As I looked into the drain

If ever a summer morning should find me

Shovelling up eels again.

And I thought of the wasp’s nest in the bank

And how I got chased one day

Leaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind,

How I covered my face with hay.

The wet leaves of the cocksfoot

Polished my boots as I

Went round by the glistening bog-holes

Lost in unthinking joy.

I’ll be carrying bags to-day, I mused,

The best job at the mill

With plenty of time to talk of our loves

As we wait for the bags to fill.

Maybe Mary might call round…

And then I came to the haggard gate,

And I knew as I entered that I had come

Through fields that were part of no earthly estate.

Patrick Kavanagh

(1904 – 1967)