There are certain things that are formative in creating the poet’s symbol-use or their worldview. These can be fragmented, outwardly absurd, or even non-traceable through their poetry output where they might exist as familiar objects. More than anything poetry is a highly adaptable literary art, that can lend itself to other tasks with agility. I am of the mind that it is very close to the musical and theatrical arts, more so than to the fictional arts. This might be just me, I have the patience of a gnat, and want the hit off poetry that I cannot get from fiction or ‘extended’ prose.

There are things that we as poets carry with us. I carry an image of a tributary-bed, sunlit and cast with golden nets, an image of a moor-hen, and an image of a room full of laughing teens attempting to Elizabethan dance to “Under the Greenwood Tree” (from ‘As You Like It’). The moor-hen is always Ganymede in my imagination. Then, there is the image created by encountering a poem which is really about encountering a world-view, and that is what I am slowly getting to in this piece. I did not like college at all. I found ways and means to escape tutorials, these involved rogue cinema-going, hanging out of trees and discussing life philosophies with the callow youths who inhabited the campuses back when I was a student. The type who would cast you as Joyce’s Penelope because it was the only scent of a woman that the college had prepared them for, but they wouldn’t let you join their bloody all-male chess group. I got tired of dealing with the well-mannered middle-class boy, being first in my family to actually get into a college through a grant and scholarship system. BUT, I found and was genuinely surprised to find there, in a taught curriculum no less, the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon period. Gold Friend is a carried image, an image that I learned from a translated text called The Wanderer.

This image, my Gold friend, is about a displacement, an exilic condition, a separation brought by loss that was advised by not alone the translation of ‘The Wanderer’, but by the words of the original text which (then) I could read and understand.  It was a worldview that I recognised and adored from the moment of my encounter with it. I did not know it fully then, it might have taken another decade to sort out the impact it had on my life. I have described variously the location that formed “Gold Friend”, and even some of the people who inhabit this rich world in a few places. Last week, someone turned up with an anthology “All the Worlds Between: A Collaborative Poetry Project  between India & Ireland”, edited by K. Srilata & Fiona Bolger,, YODA Press. I hadn’t seen the book for a while, and so I went into it to read my poems - which had elicited a few emails from my collaborator. One of the poems in the anthology was never collected, I have never collected it, as it details a displacement that I do not have to revisit. The “Gold Friend” image, then, is lighter, the addressed displacement began quite early - in fact, it has always been there. I was born after a stillbirth tragedy and not knowing or understanding the concept of loss or death, I accepted that my dead brother was in fact growing and learning alongside me. It is jarring to find that this in fact is not the case, and it caused that original displacement for which I did not have words yet. The Anglo-Saxons had the words and created the image and condition that fitted the narrative I was trying to achieve.

Little did I know when I left UCD two years into my degree to become a stone cutter that I was carrying “The Wanderer” with me. It was growing in me in a remarkable way. I went back to UCD a decade later to finish my degree and then on to work in the Bots (National Botanic Gardens) in Glasnevin. I carried the sense of displacement and exile right into the Bots and to the banks of the River Tolka where I finally laid my brother to rest. A series of poems, sculptures and etchings derived from that longish journey. They were exhibited in the Hugh Lane Gallery in an exhibition entitled Ramus. Gold Friend is about precise location in a way. Glas Naíon means ‘The Stream of the Infants’, the Tolka breasts both the National Botanic Gardens and Glasnevin Cemetery, where it is assumed that my brother is buried. There are no records however, so we have not had his name inscribed,

          The Rosemary

          She said that Aisling

          let her cut the sprigs.

          It is 3.15 p.m, it is Thursday,

          I am examining two rosemary sprigs

           their blue-green

           their silver underlights–

           She is stripping the small base leaves from a third,

           tapping its heel,

          putting it in a glass

          of crystal-clear-water

          for planting out with the roses in October.

          I can taste lamb stew

          with rowanberries,

          counting her trees

          alternating Crab-apple,

          Rowanberry,        Crab

          -apple,      Rowanberry

          they syncopated her drive —

          Memory insists that I stand on a bank of the River Tolka,

                       upstream from Socrates

                       and his garden of roses,

                       those colours we tasted –

          for here is the place

          that we committed him

          to memory,

          that black water–

          Glas Naíon,

          the stream of the infants

          With petals,

          With flower-heads.

Grief displacement is imprecise in our language, the language we use to describe our world. That is why we need resting places in order to convince ourselves that what happened to us is in fact traceable to a geographical location. The Wanderer creates a world that exists on a curve that intersects ours. It is a world of tangible objects and of the noise of a society. When I carried that out of UCD, into Drimnagh Castle, into the castles and churches that I worked in and ultimately to the edge of a river to throw down my flowers - I created my first poetic image. A tiny still pool, under a huge yew tree that did not physically exist at the location of my brother’s burial site, but it created the corner of a world that was filled with darklight, reflected fabrics, metal objects and light. Some of the symbols of “Gold Friend” have turned up in previous books, in prose pieces, in essays or in etchings. They are never fully finished as I am searching for a holistic language and symbolism that describes a world that has always felt adjacent to and pervasive in my work.

Chris Murray lives in Dublin with her children. She founded and curates Poethead, a website dedicated to platforming work by women poets, their translators, and editors. She is a member of Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon, a groupthat seeks to celebrate and draw awareness to the rich cultural heritage of Irish women poets through readings. Her most recent book ‘Gold Friend’ was published in Autumn 2020. (Turas Press, Dublin). Chris is currently archiving objects related to the canonical neglect of women poets at RASCAL, Queen's University, Belfast, and she is working on a new book.

Twitter   Poethead   Linkedin   Fired! Irish Poets    RASCAL (QUB)   Poethead Archive Project 2008-2021

Gold Friend is available here: https://turaspress.ie/shop/gold-friend-by-chris-murray/