Cork-based poet on abuse: ‘I don’t want shame to stop me or anyone’

DAVID McLoghlin identifies the benefits of being an outsider for any writer.

“I always had a sense of not being from anywhere,” he says.

 “My parents are both Irish, but my family lived in Belgium and the United States when I was young.

“I returned to Limerick in 1985, at the age of 12. I always felt at a bit of an angle.

“Belonging has always been a challenge for me. That’s something I explore in my poetry.”

It had its downsides.

“It meant I was bullied quite a bit. You learn to watch out for threats; you become aware of how group dynamics work, and the way cultural identities are constructs.

“Language plays a role. People would throw in Irish words, and I wouldn’t have a clue. Then, when I learned it, it felt like I belonged.

But there’s a lot of pretending that goes into belonging. People can put on the mask of belonging.

Travel features throughout the poet’s work.

“You see your own culture from an angle, which is what writers need. I’ve lived in Spain and also. I know a lot about other cultures.

“I feel like a bit of chameleon. When I speak Spanish, I feel more alive. I don’t change fundamentally but various parts of my personality come out.”

Indeed, McLoghlin’s second Collection, Santiago Sketches was written abroad, during his Erasmus year in Spain in 1993. He re the time fondly.

“I would go around with notebooks in my pocket. It was inspiring to be in this culture that I loved but didn’t know much about, just observing daily life in the city every day.

“I didn’t quite know how to transfer a thousand pages of notebook into a 60-page poetry collection. I didn’t attempt anything until 20 years later, finally getting it published in 2017.”

The 20 years in between were given to a “private poetry life”, as McLoghlin calls it.

He came second in the prestigious Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2008 and in 2012 he released his first collection Waiting For St Brendan And Other Poems.

Since 2020, and following ten years in America, he has been happily based in Cork with his American wife, and young daughter.

The move back coincided with the pandemic, so things were on hold for the family for a while, but the poet is happy to find himself in Cork.

People are very friendly. It is a beautiful city, quirky and creative. It has character.

“I’ve been teaching with secondary school children. Poetry is taught in schools here, but they are following a curriculum. They are interpreting literature, but not necessarily writing it themselves.

“Doing creative writing workshops with kids is hugely rewarding.”

New Collection

This latest collection, Crash Centre was supposed to come out in 2020 but McLoghlin is grateful for the delay, given the nature of the book.

“I didn’t want to discuss this work over Zoom.

 The book deals with trauma, and I didn’t want to re-traumatise myself online through the alienating medium of Zoom.

The sexual abuse he suffered in school appears in his first collection Waiting For St Brendan and he found himself writing more about it in the run-up to its release.

“I made the decision to put the more metaphorical pieces in that collection. This collection is different. I have taken out that figurative language. It is more direct.

“Being a survivor of sexual abuse, you need time to process. I wasn’t ready to release this collection any earlier than now, and then there were the mental health issues of Covid."

The sexual abuse occurred while he was in fifth and sixth year in school.

“He was tricking me into thinking this was a relationship and not something abusive,” McLoghlin says of his ab.

“If he had put a foot wrong, I would have realised, but he didn’t. He kept hypnotising me into believing it was normal. The whole thing was mixed up with mentoring; he was a teacher in my school.

“I was 16 when the grooming started. He waited to do anything physical until I was 17. These people are extremely intelligent and sociopathic. They know exactly what they’re doing.”

In this also, language mattered.

I had no words. There were no words available at that time. And I was also in total denial.

Thirty-five years later, writing has helped the poet heal.

“You put things into words. The process is interesting. I can feel a trauma as I work on a poem. It is still molten.

“When it’s done, it’s cool, as if the radiation is contained.

“You write it not quite to control it, but to contain it in some way, and to put a shape on it. You can’t let anger take over as the poem would not be successful then, the same goes for sentimentality.”

It hasn’t been plain sailing, however.

“It’s also about knowing when to do it, and when not to do it. I have written about it when I wasn’t ready, and got bombarded with the traumatic experience. You must listen to what you need. Put it on hold and go on with your life.”

His struggle has been a long and considerable one.

“I reported him to the school in 2005. They removed him and the Vatican got involved. It took me until 2016 to report him to gardaí. Nothing had happened to him previously, as the gardaí can’t do anything until the victim makes a report.

“The issue with going further with it was this idea that I had consented. But I was 17. I was tricked into it. It was a strange, slow, manipulative process, something like Stockholm Syndrome.”

Writing provided the closure McLoghlin could not get through the courts.

“I want to move on. It is only one story among many stories, even though it takes up a lot of emotional space. But when I am having a good day, I realise that. It’s almost as if the experience is a whirlpool. When you are in it, you can’t see out of it. Other days, I see my life is a river, not just a whirlpool. 

I wrote it for myself but dedicated it to my daughter.

McLoghlin recalls his ab, a priest, telling him he would never marry or have children.

“Living well is the best revenge. Becoming a father has been a huge experience of love and renewal. There is a sense of a future moving on. The priest was wrong on many counts.”

McLoghlin also hopes to help others who may have suffered a similar catastrophe.

“I don’t want shame to stop me or to stop anyone. I am a man, and I am aware that sexual abuse happens more commonly to women. My book is also a way of ing other people. At least, I hope it might be.”

Crash Centre is published by Salmon Press.