The Monthly interviews poet Deirdre Cartmill – Part 3 – Rebuilding a life and a third collection

How does your third collection come about?

I had two heart attacks when I was 43, and they happened in the space of a week. So I wasn’t really trying to write a collection, I was trying to rebuild my life at that point in time, although the call to poetry is always there and you can’t ignore it.

I was writing to heal myself and to make sense of what had happened, and I started asking myself a number of questions, “What does it mean to live, What does it mean to love, and What does it mean to have faith in something greater.” Those questions are the thread that runs through the new collection The Wind Stills to Listen. There was also a sense of exploring thresholds, boundaries and borderlines – that pivot, that moment where one thing crosses over into another.

Please find links to the audio for two poems from the new collection, The Wind Stills to Listen.

Blossom  Torn

That sounds like an extremely difficult situation?

At one point, as I was being wheeled down to a theatre, I had a profound moment. There was a lot of emotional pain flooding through me, and I was asking myself whether I wanted to live. But then something just washed over me, this most beautiful feeling of peace, and I knew there was something more beyond the pain, something greater than me. I knew I’d come into this world for a reason, and whatever that reason was, I hadn’t done it yet, and in that moment I chose to live.

That sounds like this collection emerged out of this horrific situation?

It was horrific and I suffered from anxiety for a year after the attacks, but that experience also sent me on another journey. I became a healer and a meditation teacher and that has been an important development. I actually had another minor heart attack after catching Covid, but I am alright now.

I think all writing is in some ways born from chaos, and while you can’t contain it, and you shouldn’t imprison it, you can harness and shape things around you.

Before writing this book, I felt that I was moving in two directions, the healing, spiritual, meditative life and the life as a writer, and I think that this new collection brings those two lives together.

How did you manage to do that?

I did struggle to write about those profound moments in some sort of concrete tangible way, so I used another voice, the voice of Mary Magdalene, to convey a number of thoughts and ideas that I don’t think I could have written in my own voice.

Where to now?

Things are really good. I have lots of projects on the go. I was Writer in Residence at Belfast Cathedral for the last two years. From that period, I have a lot of poems in draft form and that will make up my fourth collection although it will take a bit of work to pull everything into shape.

I was given some funding from the Lyric Theatre to write a new play and I am working on the second draft of that, and that will be sent out into the world quite soon. I am also working on a new non-fiction work which will look at my experiences since my heart attacks and that will be part memoir and part spiritual guidebook.

The Wind Stills to Listen was published in June by Arlen House and I’m enjoying the public readings and events celebrating the book’s publication. So I am a very happy writer at this point in my life.