Like Wine through Water

I don’t read a lot of poetry. I can’t. A hopeless multi-tasker, I can usually only concentrate on one poem, one book, one poet at a time. I get easily overloaded.

In 1999, I returned to live in Belfast after nine years away, having missed out by a matter of months on the chance to vote for the Good Friday Agreement. I was in my middle-twenties. I had published one collection with Carcanet, moved to Japan, got married, fallen ill, stopped writing altogether, moved to New Zealand, been ambushed by home sickness in the wake of a peace process I had never really credited before, and now I was back. A new beginning, then, for me, and for the country I’d been born in, simultaneously. If I was ever to start writing again, it would be here.

What did I know? Very little. But a great deal of that little, I gleaned from the pages of PN Review. Poems in PN Review – solitary poems on their own, by writers I didn’t know – showed me what was possible as I started the painful, arduous, stop-start process of starting to write again.

I rented a flat in Merville Garden Village with a snot-green bathroom and no central heating. I worked as a receptionist for temping agencies. I earned £100 a week. PN Review, Volume 25, no. 6, July-August 1999, fell through the letterbox. And I read this:

They said, ‘Why do you want to go to that place? There is nothing to see.’

And this:

We met two young salesmen from Usak who sang for us on the summit
Of the fortress rock, which ...