‘Unless I listen to your part of the story, then I’m stuck in my own certitude’

A new collection of poems by Ballyhaise writer Tom Conaty delves into the ambiguous spaces of boundaries, identity and truth will be launched this week with a special event in Townhall Cavan.

Smothered in hues of greens, the Drawing on Memory’s cover is a distorted combination of landscapes, where the features that offer the gaze some sort of foothold from which to make sense of the image, are a few mature trees, a laneway and a bungalow. Tom describes this photo collage as a “synchronistic movement”.

The image taken by photographer Anne McCabe formed part of an arts project in which Tom had been involved in 2008.

It was only when he received an invite to the launch, featuring this same image that he realised – the bungalow was his own family home.

“What I liked about it was the boundaries are blurred, and a lot of the book is dealing with that whole sense of boundaries, and how our identity is made up of who we interact with, the natural world, but also the fact of living on a border,” says Tom who having worked in a national school in Ballyhaise set up two Educate Together schools in County Dublin.

As a teenager Tom recalls hearing of “death, and mayhem and murder” in news reports from the north, but feeling it was a world away. He was denuded of that illusion in 1972 when Belturbet and Clones were bombed.

“I was in Inter Cert, 16 at the time, and somebody I knew was injured, and it was only then that I realised, this is an island and there’s war going on, and a lot of people are suffering the consequence of this just down the road.

“The last thing they want to hear is us pronouncing that we know what’s going on.”

He feels an instinctive distrust, and disdain for those who express with certainty the rights and wrongs of an issue, a preachiness that has frequently shadowed and stymied discussions of religion and politics in Ireland.

“There’s always those who step forward with the: ‘I know’. And they give you the verbatim truths,” he says. While some may suspect truth is elusive, he believes a truth can be discerned by seeking a multitude of perspectives, a community of truths.

“Unless I listen to your part of the story, then I’m stuck in my own certitude: ‘I’ve a degree in politics. I know this story’,” he says affecting a pompous tone, “Whereas in fact, how can you?”

A section of Tom’s book is cleverly titled ‘Truth Lies Here’ where he lays into deceitful “dominant voice”, even his own at times. This perspective imbues the poems in this section with an energy and edge that’s reminiscent of early 1960s Bob Dylan, such as Masters of War.

Do all the muscles employed

to create that fake smile of yours

know that they have been recruited,

frogmarched for deception?

Do the nerve endings and sensilla

on your palm have any idea

that the handshake closed on

a treacherous deal.

The Celt asks if Tom, through pointing the finger at people he suspects of expressing this mask of knowledge, isn’t guilty of the same certitude?

“No. I’m saying I witnessed it. To witness is different from saying, ‘I’m all clear’,” he counters.

“It’s an interrogation of cultural memory – when we are looking at memory there is the individual memory, but there is also the cultural memory. What is the culture that we are propagating?

“And I’ve been one of those dominant voices – teachers are a very dominant voice, and I always felt as a teacher, that one word could propel a child’s life into incredible achievement, success, self-worth and value. One word can nail them. And they can remember that booming in their head for a long, long time until someone undoes it.”

Drawing on Memory is necessarily concerned with mining, and reflecting on the past, but it concludes with an eye to the future.

“I wrote those over a long period of time, and what they are dealing with is ambiguity, and life is ambiguous. In the end, the final poems are poems of love. F**k the whole thing, what do you do? Try your best to love and be kind to people, and that’s all you can do.”

Fellow poet Noel Monahan helps Tom launch Drawing on Memory on Thursday, November 10 at the Townhall Theatre, Cavan, 8pm. Head along.