Creative Writing
o g n a T e h Tackling T
Eileen Casey discovers ‘a must for poetry lovers and lovers of tango’
...‘and out they went, cheek to cheek as though swept along by the swirling tide of the tango, as though they’d got lost in the tango’ Jorge Luis Borges (The Man on the Pink Corner) When poet and writer Liz McSkeane relocated from Scotland to Ireland in 1981, it wasn’t long before she found her way into Dublin’s literary circles. Born of mixed heritage (Glasgow father, Dublin mother), she didn’t begin to write poetry until she came to Ireland, working initially as a teacher of languages before moving into curriculum development and freelancing. ‘Writing was – and is – a very normal thing to do in her adopted city. Much less so in Scotland at that time,’ though she thinks it might have changed now. How might she define a good poem? The question brings a smile, ‘I wouldn’t even try! But I think I know it when I see it’. Her poem ‘Sculpture, Botanic Gardens’ which features in her second collection Snow at the Opera House (New Island, 2001) expresses something of her thoughts about what poetry and art, is. ‘I wrote it after seeing one of the first sculptures they started to put up in the Botanic Gardens in Dublin. It was a kind of a tripod, tepee-like construction.’ After reading the poem, her explanation makes perfect sense; 62 Senior Times l July - August 2021 l www.seniortimes.ie
...‘I love the skewedness/of it/and the slap-dash harmony/that mixes permissiveness and care/in just the right amounts; enough attention/to give it shape and make it hold its centre/but not too much, no search for perfection/or even symmetry in it, but freedom/to grow to itself, from its own wisdom.’ ‘Sculpture, Botanic Gardens’ and a second poem ‘Water Lilies, Botanic Gardens,’ won McSkeane a Hennessy/Sunday Tribune New Writer Award in 1999. No mean feat for a writer whose biggest obstacle, by her own admission, is getting started. ‘Someone once suggested telling myself that I was going to do just 15 minutes’ work, then I could go back to whatever I really wanted to do. I almost always find that when I am actually sitting down and writing, it just goes on and the morning has gone’. Her first novel Canticle was one of the 2016 winners of the Irish Writers’ Centre/Greenbean Novel Fair Competition. Based on the life of the Spanish mystic and poet, St John of the Cross, it was published in 2018. Readers of that very intriguing work will be glad to know that a second historical novel, now in its final stages of completion, will be published early in 2022. A big fan of detective fiction and spy novels, one of her favourite writers is John Le Carré. She’s currently reading Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhayna Mort, a poet from Belarus. ‘It’s
