I learned to appreciate poetry at school in Cork. Work by Yeats, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, and Seán Ó Ríordáin was particularly inspirational. Outside of school my interest gravitated towards Leonard Cohen’s poetry, and I still find pleasure in returning to his early collections: Let Us Compare Mythologies, The Spice-Box of Earth, and Flowers for Hitler. As to favourite lines of poetry, what come to mind are lines by Coleridge, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.”; and Joyce Mansour, “Offer your throat to the night / Obsessive Africa / Spit your teeth your waste / Your dizziness / In the whipped cream / Of the church”.
I enjoy poetry of all varieties but tend to prefer the more experimental approaches. I often find Surrealist and Beat poetry more rewarding than more mainstream narrative or confessional work. But one of the benefits of reviewing poetry is that it involves a concentration on contextual merit irrespective of genre, and this encourages me towards remaining appreciative of all styles. In 2017 I broke through a long-standing creative block by beginning an enduring practice of writing haiku, so I also read a lot of haiku and related Japanese forms.
My reviewing career progressed from haiku books to poetry pamphlets to full-length collections. Reviewing poetry involves a type of intense reading and concentrated analysis that I feel improves my own creative writing, and the reviewing process, when conducted respectfully and constructively, also hopefully benefits the reviewed author and the broader poetry community.
My displacement activities when I should be writing long form poetry are writing haiku and reviews. When I’m trying to write and failing completely, I generally spend time walking, running, reading, painting, and playing chess.
