Over the last number of years I’ve come to revise my understanding of what poetry can be. I used to think the poet’s purpose, so to speak, was to offer either praise or consolation in a world that seemed to have little space for either, and all within a paradigm of self-expression that allowed the memories and emotions of the individual who was writing to enter the lives of the strangers who would, eventually, read and respond, in one way or another. These days I don’t reject that literary model so much as wish to push back against the limitations that it subtly places on both poet and audience.

I see now that a poem can challenge, interrogate, incite, or accuse (itself as well as the world); that it can be a means of critique and querying, an object that resists its own commodification, by affirming and giving shape to the gnarlier aspects of human thought and perception – those instincts that tend towards dissatisfaction with the status quo, literary and political. As the twenty-first century bares its claws, the challenges of chronicle and rebuttal are arguably as necessary to the poet’s traditional vocation as melodic meditation. Perhaps it was ever thus.

I tried to concretize these considerations while writing and editing my third collection, Prophetstown, recently published by The Irish Pages Press. I found myself attempting to explore a fuller range of the lyric poem’s capacities, without losing the luminosity and inwardness that I associated with my original conception of the craft. I may not have succeeded, but the effort, at least, was sincere.

The opening poem in the book is something between an interpretation and a poetic adaptation of The Natural History of Selborne (1789), a memoir by the Gilbert White – the founding father of British nature writing, who managed to live through a revolutionary age seemingly without thinking too much or too deeply about life beyond the vibrant vales of his parish. The poem sets out to honour his eloquence and erudition, his powers of inspired attentiveness, while also foregrounding questions of force and property, entrenched hegemony and communal resistance, that can be glimpsed (if we allow ourselves to look) between the lines of his celebrated notations. 

Later poems in the collection take up a similar theme – of the relationship of the nature writer, say, or indeed the nature poem, to the patterns and infrastructures of exploitation and expropriation that continue to fuel what most of us think of as civilization – in a series of pieces drawn from news reports published over the past half decade. In this sequence, a parallel concern also emerges, whereby the poems implicitly scrutinize how a language of seeming neutrality and objectivity (whether journalistic or scientific) may be freighted with inflations, obfuscations, and biases from the outset, which in turn render the prospect of critical thought and understanding more elusive. The poems inspired by real-time accounts of events (and atrocities) in Gaza and Ukraine dramatize this dilemma, I hope, as do those that document the intertwined effects of inequality, environmental degradation, and hunger across a variety of regions and crisis-areas.

Broadly put, the first half of the book might be regarded as an effort, on my part, to come to terms not only with the material implications of war and climate change for human societies and natural habitats, but with the various hopes and visions of an alternative future that figures as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Rosa Luxemburg, Kathleen Lynn and Bobby Sands either embodied or articulated. The second half of the book then tries to ground and aerate those (sometimes bleak) historical excursions, by paying tribute to artists and writers whose work has fortified me personally, and indeed to people in my own life whose company (or memory, as the case may be) I cherish – including my young niece, and my late grandmother. I’d like to think that the emotional texture of the collection is consistent, and that, read together, its different sections might be seen as offering a reasonably accurate and honest portrait of my own inner life, during the years of its writing. Readers, needless to say, can have the final word.

The following is an excerpt from the “Author’s Note” that closes the book:

The title of this collection was originally intended as a salute to the gathered medley of voices in the opening pages, voices drawn from the recollections and writings of a range of historical figures, many of whom imagined a future far more humane and radical than the one that eventually materialised. Prophetstown is also the name of an actual place and polity, the site – in present-day Indiana, USA – where an alliance of indigenous tribes was formed in 1808, in opposition to settler colonialism and at the urging of the Shawnee warrior and spiritual leader, Tecumseh (c. 1768-1813). Tecumseh was later killed, and Prophetstown levelled to the ground, but the memory of a commonly shared and guarded Native America retains its resonance, especially in our age of climate breakdown, resurgent totalitarianism, and genocidal atrocity.

The latter make for grim themes, and even grimmer realities, but to avoid them on the basis of a preferential lyric solipsism would be to fail both the victims of those crimes and the art in which poets everywhere profess to believe. With this in mind, another strand runs through the first half of the book: a myth cycle that uses daily news stories – rather than Irish, Arthurian, or ancient Greek and Roman texts – as its source material. There are semi-exceptions in the series. “The Prince”, for one, is based not on contemporary news reports, but on the Chronicles of the fourteenth-century court historian, Jean Froissart. “The Prophet”, another, adapts a number of passages from the Koran recounting the life and works of Isa, son of Mariam: a doppelganger for the figure Christians refer to as Jesus, son of God. Even in these pieces, however, the structure and guiding principles are broadly consistent.

Among other things, by combining a quasi-journalistic perspective with the language of fable, I hoped to clear the path towards a new kind of nature poetry: one that moves beyond the conventional pieties of the genre, in order to examine the actualities of power that undergird (and in many cases, determine) our relationship with the natural world. “Pigs’ Meat”, and others like it, may be seen as an attempt to put this idea into practice.

The book also includes pieces that are more immediately personal in scope, which don’t, I think, require additional explication. Likewise, the literary and artistic tributes that punctuate the collection can be allowed to speak for themselves. Throughout, I wanted to catch something of the sensation of living – of being and feeling alive in time – even in the face of those looming catastrophes that are predicted to engulf our warming planet. The enclosed poems are products of that tension and desire.