'Dependency is our greatest strength': Cork teacher to release debut poetry collection 

My parents didn’t know what to do with me when I started writing poetry as a child. It wasn’t an interest of theirs, but that didn’t stop them from ing me.

Without delay, I was sent off to Mary Curtin, a magic-maker of a Speech and Drama teacher living not too far from the city. She got me through exams, and I can still recite ages of poetry and drama off by heart - but more than anything she gifted me a love of words.

She taught me to love the shapers of words too. So much so that, by 15, my bedroom was lined with pictures of Wilde, Yeats, and Plath. 

Without even knowing a lot of their work, they became mine, a part of me. It was intensely romantic, all of it, hazy and romantic.

Mary Curtin took the spark of my earliest scrawls and turned it into a flame – one that has warmed me since. As a teacher, this is what I try to do too. Yes, I must prepare students for the Leaving Cert, but the real victory comes when I see them arriving to class with a well-thumbed book under their arm. That’s when I know they’re flying. Usually, their joy of reading starts long before they meet me, but I encourage them on.

I was never short of encouragement. As well as sending me off to drama class, my parents asked me to write to my mother’s aunt in Waterford every week, and with each letter they suggested I send a poem. It’s funny now to think how my grandaunt must have felt, receiving those little envelopes in the post every week.

I like to think I made her smile. I picture her in her little garden on Rosebank Villa in Tramore, hearing the postman raise the latch on the black iron gate outside, knowing my letter had arrived. Living alone all those years, I hope they provided some company.

Every Christmas then, having gathered a stack from my grandaunt’s house, my dad asked his secretary to collate them into a book – a fair stretch beyond her job description but a task she did lovingly nonetheless – choosing little graphics to reflect the themes.

And now, aged almost 45, I am launching my first collection, Care.

I’m not sure now how I would survive without writing poetry. It’s a process I need, a habit, a particular way of being in the world that helps me make sense of it.

“When I’m walking down a road, and particularly when I’m walking, I’m paying attention. I’m open to what I’m seeing and feeling. It’s a lovely way to live and I’m intensely grateful for the gift of it. Certainly, it’s satisfying when a poem works, but the impulse to write is what sustains me, whatever the outcome.

So, whatever its merit, one outcome of hours of thinking and scribbling is this – Care, a book that asks for more care in society, only it doesn’t feel like it’s only me asking. The poems are full of other voices, and intentionally so.

This is also why I have asked Cork-based activists to read some of the poems at my launch in the City Library on April 24, as part of the World Book Day celebrations.

Care is the product of my absolute dependency on other people. It wouldn’t exist without them. It is also a manifesto for an acknowledgement of that dependency.

I want to launch it with people by my side, individuals who care deeply about other people and places and injustices – as I do. Dependency, as I view it, is not a weakness; it is our greatest strength.

I have separated the book into parts to acknowledge the divisions that exist in our world. It comprises five sections: for her; for him; for them; for us, and then, most importantly – for what can bring us back together again. The collection aims to look at people closely, close enough to reveal that we are far more alike than different.

We are human – equally in need of care and love, and equally important.

Care – it’s a simple message, an imperative. Before everything else, we are human, and humans are inherently, beautifully, vulnerable. We need one another.

Care, I make very clear in my first section, should not be the work of women only – it is intensely and necessarily the work of everyone.

The collection wouldn’t exist without the people who have loved me since I was a child. It is extended in the spirit of that love, and with hope, of finding a reader, yes, but also of finding a better world.

Care will launch in Cork City Library on the April 24 at 6.30pm. It is available to buy in bookshops and online at https://www.doirepress.com/books/poetry/feminist-poetry/care