The Monthly interviews poet Deirdre Cartmill – Part 2 – The path to a first collection

What is the path you take when writing your first collection?

My first collection, Midnight Solo, started out in a really ad hoc way. I was writing about my life up until then, so there are a lot of poems about my childhood. My dad was diagnosed with cancer and passed away as I was writing the book, so there are poems about my dad, about him being a Paramedic and being out at the aftermath of bombings and how that impacted him. I think I was able to say things that perhaps before I felt I couldn’t say. The book really was a reflection of my life rather than it actually being shaped as something specific.

What about your second collection?

In the second collection, The Return of the Buffalo, I was writing about being married, and trying to have children, and sadly that didn’t happen; I lost a baby at 9 weeks. That book really was about loss, and I was still writing then about the loss of my dad.

When I actually sat down about halfway through writing the book, to think about what I wanted to say, I realised that I wanted to write about a journey back to hope. It was that idea which shaped the book. I went back through a lot of the poems and rewrote them.

I think a lot of my writing, my poetry, scripts and plays, they may start at the depths of despair, but there is always a journey back to hope.

The question of hope is a recurring theme in your writing?

Absolutely, hope and redemption. What I loved about reading was the feeling certain writers could give you. I really loved Jonathan Livingston Seagull. That was the book that made me want to write. In that book Jonathan Livingstone Seagull says that most seagulls aren’t interested in flying, and are only interested in eating to survive, but Jonathan he felt there had to be more to life, and he wanted to fly for the pure joy of it, and to find that more. When I read those words I felt that I was no longer alone, that there was someone out there who felt the same way as me. That was a profound moment for me. It still gives me shivers to this day. I want my writing to give people that feeling, that there is more out there and people can be so much more than even they themselves think they can be.

Who were your influences?

Yeats was a very early influence, especially his love poems. Seamus Heaney became an influence, although I hated Heaney in school, probably because we were told to like him. But I did grow up in that rural background, so when I started to write I would go back to Heaney to see how he worked, and so there is a connection there. One thing Heaney offers is a sense of validation that it is okay to write about where you come from, to look into your Mid Ulster background, and use language from your upbringing. I love the texture of his language. It’s not gentle; it’s tough and real and hardworn, the living language we would have used at home.

I was reading a lot of eastern European poets, Nina Cassian at the start, and there was an anthology of Romanian poets, When the Tunnels Meet edited by John Fairleigh, that really impacted how I wrote and what I wrote about. I just seemed to relate to those eastern European poets’ work. I was also interested in the war poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and people like that.