Interview in Poetry Ireland Review 142 (April 2024) by Mary O'Donnell

MO’D: At what point in your career did you realise that a focus on your home town of Downpatrick would be important to your work?

DS: It was always at the centre, right from poems in Young Irish Writing, then the adult version in The Irish Press in the 70s and 80s – everything starts with David Marcus and that platform. But I went a long time in the 80s and 90s at college really writing nothing, struggling with a voice and seeing themes from contemporaries I couldn’t relate to. The poems of my first collection, Downpatrick Races (2000) – which I thought would be my only one – arrived because certain things needed to be said about family and place, and I knew it looked like a limited topic. But the sound of the opening line of that first book, ‘Tracks’ (‘The evening he was blown up by his own bomb at the racecourse / he had shaved and showered as though meeting a girlfriend’), is the voice that recurs now through all I write – matter of fact, narrational.

MO’D: What drove you to focus in the long poem The Down Recorder (2004) on these stories of kinship and murder, on generational pilgrimages and the taints and strokes of fortune or misfortune?

DS: The Down Recorder is the local paper – founded in 1836 – and the library held early copies up to 1886 on microfiche. The small rural market town talks to itself in those pages – a man called Stockdale makes a habit of bringing outsize potatoes and apples to the offices for a feature, year after year, and then his own death notice appears. His final gift to the news. This is the only way poor people make it into the world – being drunk, disorderly, miraculously cured at Knock, or walking backwards for 100 miles going over the same mile multiple times, or being murdered. That’s the mob I was raised among, I’m afraid, good people mostly with misfortunate lives. The big influences on me were a documentary called Wisconsin Death Trip, Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River, all of John Hewitt, above all WC Williams in Paterson. Everything is a poem – maps drawn for directions, shopping lists, prescriptions, audits of medical equipment, every fleeting thought. What a liberation WCW was.

MO’D: Your attention to this town could be described as both precise but also Byzantine in its detailing of place in space, place as ‘thing’, place as elegiac site. How do you respond to that?

DS: There is always mourning over time passing, and a place needn’t always be a good thing. People need to leave, sometimes – the place can be doleful and hurtful and messy and even fatal to oneself. The place is full of inhospitality too; Downpatrick had a good relationship with Travellers, for instance, going back 200 years, and then in the 80s it turned into a very shameful one indeed. Now there is a Bulgarian Shop on Irish Street and Syrians, I believe, working in the venison plant with blue bonnets on. It’s important to get it all in. Everyone belongs in so far as they wish to. Everyone knows what a nod of the head means and what a thumbs up means – that’s international relations on the pavement right there.

MO’D: Your work describes the narrative of the local but also secures a trajectory to experience far beyond the local. I notice this especially in the collection Mesopotamia (2014). Even the name Mesopotamia, situated within the Tigris-Euphrates river system and in present day Iraq, seems to have been deliberately chosen.

DS: One of the pioneers of deciphering Assyrian cuneiform in the 19th century was a Corkman, Edward Hincks, who spent his whole life until his death in 1866 as Church of Ireland rector in Killyleagh, six miles from Downpatrick. He never travelled further than the British Museum, which sent him tracings of newly-discovered inscriptions from the Levant. He is the spirit guide for that collection. The whole process is a metaphor for poetry, and the poems are ways of teasing that out. It is also about finding what is strange and unfamiliar in the everyday – Mesopotamia, which is now a geographical designation rather than a country, is like an Irish townland – no borders between as such, just a sense of being somewhere else suddenly. You stumble into very foreign places especially at home.

MO’D: The tone of your work – although sometimes darkly-humorous in vernacular utterance – is frequently elegiac. To develop this a little, is having absorbed an undercurrent of grief and loss part of the experience of having grown up in Northern Ireland, for your generation in particular?

DS: Proximity to violence will register somewhere in the psyche. By degrees, such presence will damage, focus, haunt ideas of the self. That’s unavoidable. You know this from your novel Where They Lie. People who are ‘clipped’ by violence as victims, say, directly or indirectly hurt, or also people who are actual heroes – that is, those who say I will not harm my neighbour nor will I assist you doing so, even at the risk of my own life – those are the wonder-workers of our day.

MO’D: Do the personal and the political have things in common for you as a poet when it comes to grief?

DS: I take everything personally – that’s why I had a heart attack ten years ago. I was asked one time why in a book about Downpatrick I had a poem about the murder of Jean McConville, as that didn’t happen in Downpatrick. I said we did have TV though. People pay a price, so a dead IRA volunteer will appear in poems, so will a coalman who was part-time UDR, so will Mary Travers who was shot dead a street away from me in Belfast, and victims of the Loughinisland massacre. But this isn’t an almanac of the Troubles or a competitive catalogue, it’s about being alive in a particular place and time, with others.

MO’D: In my role as editor of Poetry Ireland Review, I’ve noticed as I went through hundreds of submissions, how the personal lyric still dominates, that apprentice poets in particular are less likely to venture outside certain areas of feeling, what I’d call familiar constellations of the inter-personal. In a well-made poem there is nothing wrong with this, but in your work the weight of feeling is centred beyond the self, whilst still coming from that self. I’m thinking in particular of your marvellous poem in memory of Ciaran Carson, ‘The Franco-Prussian War 1870- 1871’, in which the prescience of art is brought into focus, and its role as witness-bearer.

DS: The lyric is now a parody of poetry, especially when it seems to be exclusive to love, wee animals, and being a nice person. Carson calls for another kind of poetry. There are so many books of his, poetry and prose, and I can’t think of one where you would say, ‘But here Carson’s view is ...’. He didn’t buy into the anglocentric version of selfhood or personality, which still holds sway in the west. We need a working version of identity in order to regulate a civic society, but that shouldn’t mean every artistic expression should follow it. So much of fiction just trundles along conventional pathways of cause and effect. Everyone talks about Camus’ L’Étranger, but few have taken to heart the fact Meursault killed an Arab on the beach because it was a hot day, not because of a chain of pseudo-psychological constructs passing implausibly as motive. So, that poem of mine you refer to builds Ciaran out of bits of his own poems, bits of his city, some of his excellent couture, evocations of paintings by Pissarro, the opening of the Ormeau Park in Belfast, and the first edition of the Belfast Telegraph, both in 1870. He’s there. I see that gent in Pissarro’s ‘Fox Hill, Upper Norwood’ in London, striding down the middle of the road, as in fact Ciaran. That’s where he is now post-mortem. Or one of the places he is, along with in the hearts of his loved ones and of course his poems. Once you break out of the lyric as a construct and include it if you want as a mood, a really modern poetry occurs. ‘Modern’ in the sense that it is 60 years since the last book of Paterson!

MO’D: Do you believe in the idea that a poet’s work develops or should develop over the years? I once asked a poet of note how he viewed his work in the context of a lifetime’s development, to which he replied, ‘Ah now, I’m just a simple country boy ...’

DS: I think I’ve been writing the same three or so poems all my life, over and over, finding another way to go at it. There is an endless fascination, for me anyway, in a simple set of reactions in human life – those who run and those who sit their ground, those who collude and those who aren’t having it at all.

MO’D: It sometimes appears as if a slight tension exists between poets from both sections of the island of Ireland. If you agree with this, is it remediable? And ought it be remedied?

DS: I think there are tensions all over the place, within, across, through and one to one! There are also pleasant affinities and these are important too. I hugely admired the late Philip Casey, not only for his writing, but for his selfless promotion of the art. Chris Murray also. When you look at the visibility of poets in that context we see Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Victoria Kennefick, Ailbhe Darcy, Jane Clarke, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, in the running for or winning big prizes, alongside Stephen Sexton, Susannah Dickey, Padraig Regan. But I believe in the noble calling of the minor poet, also – WR Rodgers, a predecessor of mine at the Arts Council, felt that what we end up calling ‘great literature’ grows in among a healthy culture of, well, ordinary books being written. Our job as writers is just to write books. Get on with it. The wonderful social activist Roberta Black, John Hewitt’s spouse, suggested her autobiography should be entitled I Married A Minor.

MO’D: Speaking of tension, contemporary and younger readers might not recall how, during the 1980s for example, certain poets envied the poets of the former Eastern Bloc, due to the mythic notion that due to repression and censorship football stadiums were packed for poetry readings. In the same way, and although it may seem contentious, there was a feeling that pervaded some poetry circles in the Republic, that poets in the North had it easier due to their access to the BBC and the interest taken at that time by the UK in Northern Irish cultural affairs. How do you respond to this?

DS: I’ve heard that or versions of it all my life, from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the north of England too, and I don’t think it’s true from any perspective. No one can really mean that Heaney, Longley, Mahon, McGuckian, Muldoon, Paulin, got attention because of where they were from, not the quality of their work. Especially since at the same time there were all the Ks – Kavanagh, Kinsella, Kennelly, Kerry Hardie – and Boland and the powerhouses of Ní Dhomhnaill and Rita Ann Higgins. Paula Meehan barnstorming at the Royal Festival Hall. Durcan did almost a stadium tour of GB in the 90s that was more like Prince than Andrew Motion. There is a vast culture with more than 60 million people next door and a colossal publishing industry servicing them and the world. If you are not part of that, if you are Irish, say, in order to be visible within it you really need to win a Nobel Prize; whereas most poetry published in England wouldn’t see the light of day in Ireland. Not good enough.

There are of course many outstanding writers there also. In Ireland, people like Nessa O’Mahony, Enda Wyley, Colin Dardis, Peter Sirr, promote the artform they practice in public ways which is essential – getting poetry out of the seminar room. It does strike me still how it took to the end of the second decade of the 2000s for the Dublin bombings to feature substantially in poetry – in Rachael Hegarty’s extraordinary May Day 1974.

MO’D: In ‘Thing’, an essay published in The Tangerine, Issue Six, where you wrote about the 1960 movie The Time Machine, you comment that ‘… there is an enduring desire to win from any character or “thing” a plausible version of reality; an evidence. This is the craving for relics which leads at one extreme to hoarders crushed by pillars or rotting newspapers in their homes or starved by having walled themselves in with toasters, fridges and white goods; through religious adherents staring at the sun-dried tomato of a saint’s preserved heart.’ Does this straining towards a ‘plausible reality’ perhaps fit in with your attentions to Downpatrick, to an intentional sifting through it, street by street, but also emotionally, historically, and in terms of a war in Northern Ireland?

DS: Williams in Paterson talked about ‘a poetry such as I did not know’. This was linked to his slogan ‘no ideas but in things’, and resonated with me because I had studied phenomenology, and the rallying-cry of that school of thought was ‘Back to the things themselves’. It’s all absurd, of course – the notion of a rallying-cry in philosophy or poetry is hilarious – but there was something about looking for the concrete substance, putting pressure on everything to test its corners, and in Williams’s case, putting everything literally in. I think that helped me understand about form – syntax in particular. I am a hoarder – drawn to the talismanic qualities of junk, more or less. I have the altar cloth from the Downpatrick Asylum, an iron bolt from a burnt-out coal boat, the Hilda Parnell, that turns up in many of my poems, relics of all sorts. Objective correlatives. There are crutches hanging in branches at holy wells. Syringes now in the little stone cells. There is a Calvary in Omeath with an actual nail from the crucifixion embedded in glass behind it. That’s been in my head for fifty years.

MO’D: Your presence and voice in the context of Ireland North and South is understated, intense, serious, and has contributed to an unusual and enlightened perspective on the past and the present. You eschew all agenda, it seems to me. Could you comment on this?

DS: I don’t know if I have a presence as such. The spirit guide of Irish Street, Paddy McVeigh, a lollipop man – he is on the cover with a bottle of milk – was first with the news, always dramatic, almost always a fib. Geordie Best had broken his leg, they had found the Yeti up in the Mournes, Concorde had crashed at the Flying Horse Estate and the famous nose cone had ploughed into the fishing village of Ardglass. It’s not noticed enough, but that person is essential in every place, utterly essential. For communal sanity, there must always be someone making it up as they go along. But it’s important to the fib that it is this place rather than another – the more specific it is the more credible it is. Like it has to be Glassdrummond chapel in Kavanagh’s ‘Shancoduff’.

MO’D: I should probably add a question to do with ‘position’ and all that. Influences? Heaney looms large for many. Mahon, Longley too. Who did you admire in poetry when you were a younger poet?

DS: There were no books, but the poems I learned early were ‘The Old Woman of the Roads’, ‘The Host of the Air’ off the Clancy Brothers records, ‘The Listeners’, ‘Flannan Isle’, ‘Shalott’, ‘Young Lochinvar’. Those were the ghostly presences – I thought ‘that’s a poem alright’ because the hairs went up on my arms. That happens with spoken word poets also – we all should have rhetorical skills in our toolkit. I was lucky in that the Heaney books appeared in my lifetime in my late teens/early 20s as current affairs rather than historical documents. The anticipation over Field Work, for instance, was amazing, and he did a reading at Queen’s with Craig Raine where they both arrived by helicopter like Elvis in Aloha from Hawaii. His poems are packed with people, from mourners, to blacksmiths, to family, to bystanders, whereas the lyric tends to be depopu- lated or a republic of one, like Mahon. But I remember Kinsella’s Another September and The Táin, Montague’s The Rough Field, Boland’s Night Feed, the lovely Leland Bardwell’s The Fly and the Bedbug, your own debut Reading the Sunflowers in September. I went to school with Damian Gorman and John Hughes, two poets of real achievement. John asked me to do an interview with John Hewitt for North magazine, and that’s how I got to know and love that amazing individual, with his unparalleled wisdom on history, politics, poetry, Protestants, and the art of the curmudgeon, in which I am still an inept but keen novice. Everything counts, really.

MO’D: But – a different question – who leaned over and helped you be a better poet?

DS: Hewitt did personally, as has Sinéad Morrissey in practice. Every poem by her is a school day, moving so easily through ideas and history and opening a potent psychic space. Leontia Flynn, Gail McConnell, latterly Regan, Sexton, Dickey, Patterson, Dawn Watson, and Scott McKendry – perspectives always shift when reading good new work, and some of that one hopes will impact sooner or later on one’s own practice. The atmospheric pressure exerted on every single word in each poem – what most of us like to think we do, these poets do in fact and their work finds other ways of being distinctive and unique and quite intimidating.

MO’D: Finally, you jobshare as Head of Literature and Drama for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Was holding a balance between that world and the private world of your work as a poet sometimes challenging?

DS: I was eight years in the Arts Council before I moved into the artform area. I have always been wary of using that platform in the arts as a way to boost my own profile as a writer. Of all the professional temptations, that is the most alluring and giving into it is the most despicable. But the deal is: I get a stable job for 30 years with a pension if I keep my nose clean, which is far more than most freelance writers will get. In return, the corporate social media I curate is not used by me to promote my own work; I don’t muscle my way in to publications where there is an implication my presence is because they think it will help get funding or because they only knew I existed because of my visibility as an administrator. It wasn’t a bad deal. My friend and former publisher Patrick Ramsey told me when I got the job to sit on my backside for 30 years and he never wanted to hear me complain again. I’ve kept my promise.