Observing the direction of travel

What is the poet’s place in today’s world? It’s a question that crops up in the literature that accompanies the launch of Noel Monahan’s new collection, ‘Journey Upstream’. While the question is phrased in terms of poets in general, Noel is self aware enough to understand he answers only for himself.

“The poet’s place is somebody who is taking time out to observe what we’re at, where we’re from, and where we are going. In this very fast changing world I think we have lost contact with nature.

“This collection, ‘Journey Upstream’, is really trying to reconnect us with nature and with our own lives, because after all we are in many ways, if we contemplate it, we are very insignificant people,” he says it with an air of lightness.

In reconnecting with nature in this his ninth collection, he takes a perspective from which to consider the big questions:

“What’s the purpose in life, and what are we here for? I don’t have the answers and that’s after all this contemplation and talking.”

Presumably for Noel at least, a big part of the answer is in poetry itself.

“It’s a big part of the answer and you are hoping that somebody may share that opinion with you.”

The title is intriguing, suggesting going against the current to return to the spawning ground.

“The poetry book itself is the spawning as far as I’m concerned. The art, that’s what you are going with. And against the current - it’s never easy being an artist, you have only to ask any playwright, poet, visual artist, musician.”

He knows plenty of artists to ask. A section titled, ‘Let the Images Unfold’ features work penned during Covid in collaboration with guitarists Daragh Slacke and Pat McManus and sculptor Tom Meskell. The cover of the collection meanwhile is a tranquil landscape painted by Pádraig Lynch.

“I’ve been privileged to be working in Cavan with wonderful people and the book itself celebrates that,” says Noel.

In the closing section of the book Noel reflects on his brief spell as a seminarian at Maynooth.

“There wasn’t much career guidance in those days,” he quips. “I didn’t like farming and I was a farmer’s son, so I decided: you don’t want to be a farmer, maybe you’ll be a priest. I think that’s why I left Maynooth so quickly - I wasn’t suited for there at all.”

While he says it somewhat flippantly, the Celt suggests it must have felt like an enormous decision at the time.

“It was massive and very hard, and very difficult to leave, because you are leaving an institution of which a lot of people felt - if you go there you stay there.”

When he left, he travelled to the States, to earn the funds he needed to return to college and complete his degree as a lay student. The Maynooth Calling section then closes with his triumphal is arrival in St Clare’s College in Ballyjamesduff for his first day there as a qualified teacher. His happy career saw him teach for 36 years and climb to the rank of deputy principal.

“I enjoyed every moment of it. It was great fun, I just loved teaching.”

Somewhat surprisingly teaching crops up again in the interview when the Celt asks him about people who are put off by poetry suspecting it is too daunting.

“Some of the reason for that is that over the years poetry has been badly taught in schools, because teachers can sometimes be afraid of it. They love teaching the novel, the short story, and the plays but they are very reluctant about poetry - and maybe they have received much the same attitude.”

While he thinks poetry is “very available” generally, he concedes: “When you get the book and it’s in your hands and you’re on your own, sometimes you can’t hear the music of the lines.”

He suggests hearing the poet read their own work to get a sense of the “poet’s music”.

In Journey Upstream, Noel’s poems truly are accessible as shown by ‘Erne I & II’, sibling poems he favours from the collection.

“It’s just about feelings, that’s all. My poems are very simple and very available, there’s nothing cryptic about it at all. Sometimes people criticise it and say they don’t rhyme - I do rhyme when it suits me, because we have had too much of rhyming poetry and they’ve exhausted the language.

“Hopefully the language is fresh, as fresh as the river water of the Erne.”

He’s delighted when the Celt notes he enjoyed penning the line:

‘I was born geo ages ago’/old enough to know all that I am’

“Upstream is just going back,” he says. “The Erne is the connecting world.”

The emphasis on the Erne makes sense for Noel, as born in Granard, he fished as a young lad at Gowna near where the river rises. He spent much of his adult life in Cavan, where the river “throws open the door to the lakes” as Noel puts it in Erne I.

“I think the river reminds us of our insignificance because really in ways this book, when you look at it from cover to cover, it’s not ostentatious it’s really just trying to say: we’re there. We think at an early stage we know understand everything and then as you grow older maybe you grow a little bit wiser and you come to grips with age, time and your own insignificance.

“The great questions of life have to do with infinite time and infinite space. Students used to ask me: ‘How old are you sir? And I would say, ‘I’m at least 3,000 years old.’”

He recalls writing a poem called Stone-Breaker in his previous collection that references Saxifraga.

“It’s a wild flower that lived through the Ice Age, and that would be 20,000 years ago, and that grows in Cavan up in Cuilcagh mountain. So it survived. That’s where I get a lot of inspiration - that’s where my mind is with the journey upstream - it’s about infinite time and infinite space and that’s more important than our little lives, that’s what that book is about.”

The closing lines of that wonderful poem read: Our only prayers that some seeds may fly/ With the winds of chance/ Into the open mouths of years to come.