| Ireland 2000
The Poetry Project
Download 'Entering Irish Landscape', an essay I wrote for Thylazine Magazine in Microsoft Reader Format (You'll need Microsoft Reader)
Right: Rocks at Carrowmore near Sligo |
The
project I was working on was to develop further poems of landscape and
memory that I've been working on for the past couple of years. You can
read about the Landscape and Memory project on my poetry website, but the
poetry project is based loosely around Simon Schama's divisions; wood,
water, rock. The poems are centred around the idea of landscape; how we
know it, the archetypal forms and the relationships we have with it. During
my stay there the boundaries between these forms loosened and blurred.
For me, working for a short time in Ireland was more than a pleasant backdrop to the work; the stone walls and monuments, the ancient divisions of farmland, the European and indeed Celtic background to the landscape were central, to what I was attempting in the project. The intended end result of the project was to bring together a collection of poems around these ideas. These ideas did appear, albeit in a somewhat revised form, in my third book, The State of the Rivers and Streams, published by Five Islands Press in 2002.
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