An unflinching look at death through poetry

A poetry collection composed by an artists and three members of the public, will get a new lease of life with next week’s launch of ‘Pen the Pain’.

Arts facilitator Helen Keenan is thrilled to see the poems she and a trio of participants wrote published in book form. It’s the latest development of a project that commenced more than a year ago under the intriguing ‘Art of Life’ scheme. The Art of Life encourages artists to come up with engaging ideas to help normalise conversations around end-of-life, advanced care planning, death, loss and grief.

Kildare native Helen deigned a series of imaginative workshops to encourage participants - Bob Dilbert, Ann O’Donoghue, and Brian McDermott - to compose poems related to these themes.

“It wasn’t a traditional way to create poetry,” she happily volunteers.

Helen’s arts practice usually involves dance and drama, but here she indulged her hobby of poetry.

“I felt really called to this, and so I decided – do you know what would be fun - let’s do some different creative tasks as an entry way into creating poetry, instead of just sitting down and trying to write something.

“So over the four weeks we had a different session - in every week. One week we had visualisation, one week we had dance, another week we had collage, and another week we just swapped stories and had some reminiscences with some influenced by myself to try to ignite conversations around these key themes. We used these different ways in to create poetry.

“A lot of the responses were uniquely different and absolutely beautiful.”

That work resulted in a collection of poems which got their first airing in Johnston Central Library in late November 2024. Now a year on, the work – approximately 30 poems - has been revived in book form

“The actual book will be in libraries in their ‘Death Positive’ section, which is really, really special. And on the Library system as well – on Borrowbox we will soon have an audio version that we recorded earlier this year with all the participants recording their own poetry, which is really special.”

For Helen, the act of writing the poems brought back her own experience of grief when her mother passed away, aged just 54 back in 2012. The Celt wondered if the project helped Helen process her own grief?

“I don’t think we ever fully process a death, I think there’s always work to do on it. But with this project bringing those feelings back up, it definitely unlocked another layer. Maybe it hasn’t so much helped me process it, but it brings it back up and you are aware of your resilience, because you are like, ‘F*ck – I actually went through that! But I came out the other end.’

“And you think you are over it and you are writing poetry and you’re bawling.

“So 12 years on, the pain is still there – hence Pen the Pain - get the pain out. You can process a grief but it doesn’t mean that you’re done with processing it.”

The launch of Pen the Pain will be held on Wednesday, December 3 at 10.30am in Virginia Library. The morning will feature live poetry readings from contributing local authors, a special performance of The Good Grief Club, which is billed as a ‘lively and comedic’ conversation around planning for end of life, death and dying. All welcome.