A Door Opening

Abstract

A Door Opening Moya Cannon (bio) I came to write poetry in my early twenties as a means, literally, of ex-pression, of getting some of the pressures and conflicts of being a young adult out of my head and onto a page. It saved my sanity then and has since brought me into contact with many wonderful writers, living and dead. Patrick Kavanagh famously said, “I dabbled in verse and it became my life.” This is how it happens. I was not one of those young people who always knew that she wanted to be a writer. Apart from a few heartbroken lines written in real purple ink as a teenager (I remember mixing the red and blue Quink ink and being rather pleased with the color), I never wrote a poem until I was twenty-two. Where I came from, being “a writer” didn’t present itself as an option, and I was startled when an older brother suggested it to me as I was wondering what I should do when I left college. However, I cannot remember a time when I did not enjoy poetry. This was something that I received as a gift from my parents and teachers and from the culture that I encountered as a child and as a young adult. I grew up in Dunfanaghy, a village in northwest Donegal. My mother had a deep love and knowledge of English poetry. She had studied English at Queen’s University, Belfast, in the 1930s. She was the first of her family to go to college, and neither of her parents had more than a primary education. As neither of them could sing a note, at social gatherings in their farmhouse in east County Tyrone during her childhood, entertainment frequently took the form of the recitation of popular poems. There was a great deal of romantic, nationalist verse—“The Man from God Knows Where,” etc. My mother remembered her father reciting two of his favorites—Robbie Burns’s “A Man’s a Man for a’ That” and “Dawn on the White Hills of Ireland.” In my study I have a leather-bound copy of Burns’s poems, given to my grandfather by a young nurse when he was very ill in hospital in Belfast as a young man. Gifts of words, like good tunes, are passed on and on. As young adults my mother and her brother befriended the elderly poet Alice Milligan, who lived near them, at Mountfield, County Tyrone. Alice became an important presence in my mother’s life. The first poem that I learned, [End Page 9] apart from nursery rhymes and the rhymes in my infant school readers, was her “When I was a little girl in a garden playing.” My father was the principal of the local two-teacher primary school in Dunfanaghy. As a young man he had written poetry in Irish—lyrical, introverted, often religious poetry. He published under a female nom de plume, “Róise Nic a’Ghoill,” a play on a local place-name, “Ros Goill.” In teaching, he communicated to us his own pleasure in words, imagery, and rhythm as we chanted “The Little Waves of Breffny” or “The Daffodils” or “Duncan”: He is gone on the mountain,He is lost to the forest,Like a summer-dried fountainWhen our need was the sorest. I am reminded of Seamus Heaney saying, “A poem or a song learnt in childhood is fossil fuel for the soul.” (He did, of course, say this at a time when we still thought it was okay to burn fossil fuels.) I started secondary school in 1967, the year of the introduction of free secondary education, and had the great good luck to have the doors of English literature swung wide open by Augustine Martin, through his Exploring English and Soundings anthologies. I was taught by two exceptional English teachers. In the Franciscan convent school in Falcarragh, which I attended until intermediate certificate, we had a diminutive young Scottish nun, Sister Dolores, who was both demanding and passionate in her teaching. Octavio Paz says that enchantment is one of the necessary qualities of poetry. One of my paths into enchantment...