Born in Toronto, Denis Stokes is the author of six chapbooks, plus the collections Tunnel Jumping and The Blackstock Children. His work has appeared in anthologies and journals in Canada, the U.S. and Ireland. He has taught in several Canadian provinces. A dual citizen of Canada and Ireland, he teaches Creative Writing at Nipissing University. 

Csilla Toldy: I met the Irish-Canadian poet, Denis Stokes at a Creative Writing Conference organised by SRC in Newry in 2018, and through time and epistolary conversations, we became friends.

In the same year, in 2018, I asked him to contribute a haibun to the book I was editing, The Trees of Kilbroney Park. The poem’s Joycean flow impressed me in such a way that I, in the role of the new-born publisher, took the liberty to nominate his poem, Rostrevor Elegy, for the Pushcart Prize.

Denis is a prolific writer, author of eight poetry collections published in Canada. He grew up in Scarborough, Ontario. He teaches creative writing in Quebec and hosts the Conspiracy of 3 Reading Series in North Bay, ON, one of the longest-running series in Ontario.

Savouring his two recent poetry collections, Tunnel Jumping (2020) and the blackstock children (2021) both published by Scarlet Leaf Press in Toronto, I came up with some questions that I hope, will shed light on his thinking and many-layered poetry.

Can you talk about your Irish origins? How did you discover them? How do they influence your writing?

Denis Stokes: My dad’s father was born in Cabra, close to Thurles. He worked as a labourer on the railways. We often wonder how he met my granny, who came from Mayo.  We are pretty certain it is her, at four years of age, in the workhouse in Castlebar in 1901. As historical events often do, their relatively stable life was disturbed by the Depression. She ran a small inn in Bray, where my dad was born. It seems then all hell broke loose: my granny’s stability, financial peace…My father lived in at least 28 places during childhood. It was a little like Frank McCourt’s upbringing, sans alcohol. Dad moved with his brother to Toronto, his sister moved to California. Another sister to Toronto after my granny’s death. My dad’s youngest brother is living in B.C. The Stokes boys seemed to have a weakness for Canadian girls…. So, the family on this side involves diaspora and tentative returns.  My father came to Canada without the ability to read. After studies in Canada, he developed a great respect for the poet.  His support was immeasurable. ‘The Enfield Searches” about trying to find Keats explores this… In the light of his journey, to say to myself that Scriobhaim  leabhar makes me tremble. He started as a streetcar sweeper, retired as a subway electrician and assistant business agent of the Toronto Transit Union.

CT: Yes, I can see this echoed in the protest poem The Dickens Bridge one of the sequences of the blackstock children. Here, you address the issue of child poverty in modern society.

     “A monstrous neglect of education…He teaches

     His own heart the hurried patience of waiting

     For words for each rotten round.

     The child accepts even as he wants for more.”

DS: My mom grew up in humble circumstances too. Her mother was French Canadian. Her father’s grandfather hailed from the Blackwater Valley, Co. Cork. They arrived with the Peter Robinson group in the 1820’s during the time of agrarian unrest, forming the community of Peterborough, Ontario. My grandpa wrote a little poetry, as did my mother. She was not particularly well-educated but was incredibly well-read. With her sense of literacy and literature and my dad’s sense of oratory, they made quite the pair.

Switch then to my marrying a woman from County Armagh, near Portadown. Now all the oral histories, all my reading of Irish history and literature, especially Portrait (of the Artist as a Young Man) in an optional unit during grade 13 and my studying Yeats, Joyce and Beckett with the renowned Yeats master, Robert O’Driscoll at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, gathered a new flesh and blood as I spent more and more time in Ireland-probably 4,5 years over our marriage.…I came to love Northern Ireland, its countryside and people, especially my new family.

CT: The Blackstock Children collection is drawing from family and memories…

DS: Both books, I believe are as Margaret Laurence put it, ‘rampant with memory’.

Tunnel Jumping folds in while expanding its own references and implications through mostly Toronto, southern Ontario, as its introductory quotations suggests (from  Seán Ó Faoláin to Ian McCulloch to Simone Weil), not only witness to the place of origins, but the origins within origins. So, there are poems about my grandfather, poems about my dad, especially drawing from his Irish story, after his passing. There is a poem about keeping vigil with my aunt during her last days in a nursing home, “Half Penny”.  That sense of reality the title poem explores, the ministries and manipulations of fear even as this involves kids hanging a life-sized corpse from a tunnel’s entrance, is meant to hearken back to hangings in apartheid prisons, or the Niger Delta.  The African poems come out of a trip to Malawi. I hope they counterbalance these North American and mainly Irish scenarios. The final poem, “Arriving Light”, although meant to capture a universal, elemental sense of divine gift in human life and natural process, was composed after a dawn Easter service in Labasheeda, overlooking the Shannon Estuary.  I would hope then to offer hope, as Simone Weil suggests, out of a faith in the nature of things, a commitment to facing reality that Heaney celebrates about his own people in his Nobel address.

CT: Yes, “Arriving Light” gave me consolation in the darkest moments of my past two years of personal anguish. Let me quote:

     ”………………….It will sweep us, drop us to God

     knows where as though in a film when out of sudden

     dark, a picture changes and we will arrive, light

     on our shoulders, faces, amazing hands,

     weaving only the old shadows we will have soon

     forgotten, of the light we have come to know the light

     by, the shapes in light, colours, this endless forgiving

     even as it has been cast, light searching out now and

     now, the pain it allows, balm given, each to each other.”

DS: With the title poem in The Blackstock Children, the essential gift in memory is my father’s story.  He was confined to hospital for a year as a child, suffering from dysentery, then later to a bed in his final throes of cancer. This is paralleled, while he was dying, which is the heart of the story, with a sad and sickening case of children confined to their crib by their parents in a small town outside Oshawa, east of Toronto. For a poem like that, I drew strength in that tragic, simultaneous, and dramatic irony from the poems of Pasternak and writers like Sinead Morrissey.

Here, the book explores layers both in time and place, influences and causalities as well as patterns and dispositions, concerns, and strategies of detachment.  The first section begins with poems about my dad- “Dublin in the Sunlight”, followed by a haiku about Balleyfermot where my granny spent her last decades. Then I move into the relationships and discoveries, within Ireland itself, imagining the childhood of one’s beloved, as David Wojahn puts it, to engagements with her fun and welcoming family.  “Hills” for example, renders the tension and joy while walking as we often did, visiting her Mom’s family, in the countryside of Tyrone. 

CT: I can hear the Irish fiddle in this poem, too.

     “this land, memory blighted,

     barely alive among these hills

     where green and gold now communed

     with rich humous, reclaimed

     from the moss of poverty, where

     worried sheep once roamed from hedge-

     wire to wire, stoned wall to wall, under

     sudden shadows, wind, misted trees.”

DS: The book engages with not just Ireland.  One section, “The Dickens Bridge”, mentioned above, is a meditation on child poverty.  There is a later poem, “Pibroch”, an elegy for our dear Scottish friend, Irene (nee) Gray.

My brother-in-law, Harry, died suddenly, way before his time. We were great friends: going on trips to Donegal, Mayo, or delivering veggies all over the North. This section is probably my first serious witness and exploration of grief. Here, the echoes of Irish poets (I began, in my sadness, with a phrase from Montague) combine with a wide range in form and style to facilitate the witness of his remarkable and lost presence, while at the same time offering some healing. The last section of the book covers considerable territory, with a sense of grateful inheritance: spirituality, the land, language, poems as prayers offering friends spiritual strength …but there is also, as many poems convey, a sense of as Milosz says an effort  ‘to begin where I am”, whether it’s in my writing cabin in Northern Ontario while contemplating satellites from the Armagh Planetarium, the church bell heard beside the LOL back in Ontario, or watching my Irish nephew play with our kids at the foot of Callander Mountain in our backyard.

CT: Would you like them to find an Irish readership?

DS: A genuine readership is part of a poet’s dream.  I would hope the poems speak and sing to whomever might find some authentic, worthy and worthwhile witness and rendering of experience, on either side of the water.

CT: Please talk about the time you spent in Ireland with Seamus Heaney and other poets.

DS: The poem, “At Whitehead” captures part of this.  Several of us at the Poet’s House, Port Muck, since we befriended a writer Heaney knew, stayed up late into the morning after the readings and workshops. The whole experience was steeped in luck and gift. In a handful of hours, often in one-on-one encounters, grabbing a beer from the fridge, looking out a window, Heaney would stop and ask a question about a poem of mine, or drop such nuggets meant for only me it almost seemed, I still carry with much sacred valuing. He was patient with one cub, as he put it, nattering about his own poems, Christ-like in his firmness and forgiveness. Of course, the stories of his marvellous, almost miraculous presence, like a Rumi astral projecting into other consciousnesses, dwelling within an eternal moment, speak to the bigness of the man himself. To use his own language, he was the embodiment of that covenant between master and unpublished writer of which he would often speak. Incarnate otherness.

I found out about the conference through American writer friends at Vermont College, some of whom attended. I had three kids. There was no way I could afford it. As a graduation gift for my MFA, my mom and dad forked out the registration fee, with a great joy. Dad was very moved to know I had met Seamus Heaney. Several Irish writers in particular made the experience all the richer by their gracious presence. Alas, I wish I’d kept in touch more, but much of their work leaves many of them among my revered contemporaries. For example, while getting through spinal surgery ten years ago, to save the use of my legs, I drew much strength from Joan Newman’s Prone. On a different note, there was a young poet who impressed much with his virtu…This poet and publisher of Abbey Press, Mel McMahon, has been a faithful friend over all these years. The host there, James Simmons, I hope to spend silence with in Falcarragh. Our stay last year in Gortahork had to be cancelled because of technical problems.

CT: Could you explain your work with First Nations people and what parallels you see between their lives and your Irish ancestors (if any)?

DS: A retired secondary teacher, a significant part of my teaching and writing has involved work with first nations: students, fellow teachers, artists, especially with Long Point in north-western Quebec. My next book, just sent out to publishers, in search of a home, is called A Wolf Rages Down the Little Jocko. It is rich with experiences of the Canadian north.

The school at which I taught in North Bay for many years has students from varied backgrounds, but we had a good number of Indigenous students. I have had several promising young Indigenous writers in my classes at Nipissing University. There are several First Nations within an hour’s drive from North Bay. I’m acquainted or friendly with many there, through art, sports, and other involvements. I taught the first Aboriginal history (as it was called) at the school.  A few years later, after I’d retired, I returned to Long Point to teach a similar course there- a great honour and sign of trust, perhaps.  I could go on, but there were sad disturbing events at times.  Nevertheless, there was great magic, like hanging out in Cork City for 2-3 days, great craic.

Here, though I’m far from an expert, invites a rich critical compelling essay. The words around which I would cluster my observations, reflections and arguments would be land, sacred and dispossessed, language as conduit for naming, clarity of counsel, praising…, eviscerated spirituality…the drum’s heart, attack upon and collapses of clan and family. Christ compromised, the Church and shadow. The simple word my friend Henry, chief of a first nation, once offered, (the fact of experienced) oppression. The timing is different, but both stories involve a reclaiming of these selfsame touchstones of identity and community, beyond mere decolonization…Not unlike the early 20th century, seen in Irish literature, there is within the indigenous community a rich, heartening upswelling of remarkable art, literature, political will, the insistence upon the truth which must set the stage for redress. Consequently, out of commitment to such concerns, not to wax sentimental or naïve, the voices not only offer strength to the Indigenous community itself, but a space, a story towards dialogue with the settlers and of course, the settler immigrants, many dispossessed themselves. My chum Frank Polson has made some tremendous art around this need. My own work has been small; at the same time, the inspiring fact comes not only from student’s hopes, varying within the social, geographic and historical contexts of specific communities, but the artists, teachers and leaders I’ve known who have recovered this not only for first nations, but the ‘nation’ of Canada itself.  My friend Terry Dokis, an Indigenous Studies professor, artist and community leader, saw over thirty years ago many parallels between the Celtic and Indigenous story…The shaman, drum. The intimate dance with the land. The gathering terrors after first contact.

My best friend, Ian McCulloch’s novel, Joe Pete, will be released, alas posthumously, next fall. It explores with a hard, luminescent poetry, the journey of his Cree mother’s family down the Missinaibi River, from Moose factory near James Bay. It was a trip we had planned twice but couldn’t pull off. Tasked with writing the introduction, pure purgatory to me, I canoed to the island on Pine Lake where we camped first out of our many trips, there to begin my notes. I have learned so much from Indigenous students and friends. The work takes me where it will, in this (of those too long disregarded…) regard.

These implications and resemblances with my grandad’s family in Tipperary, my granny in Mayo, like so many indigenous children, taken from her home, or my Geary clan on the estate of Lord Ennismore in the Black Valley, not to mention my father’s evictions (see “Benedictions”) quite similar to urban indigenous struggles, are rich and disturbing in human injustice, suffering and courage, as so much of the Indigenous inheritance itself.

CT: We have not talked about form, but let me just add that ‘Benediction’ is a sequence of two sonnets, mirroring each other. The poem is rich with memory but inherited as well as imagined, given the fact that memory is unreliable. The poem starts with the image of a boy drowning in Dublin Bay or the Liffey, but saved by the uncle and ends with a hint at making up stories from memories:

     “Or perhaps, all told, we’re just some Author’s ass

     the traveller nudges, cross-backed with luck,

     devil’s parody…. pinned into a tale, all pluck

     and wit. There they are: Grandad decides to pass

     O’Coneire another shilling. They are seated on a rock,

     wrists turned towards the water, as if to bless.”

Thank you, Denis.

Csilla Toldy is a writer and translator from Hungary. Her publications include various literary magazines in the UK and Ireland, as well as three pamphlets: Red Roots - Orange Sky (2013), The Emigrant Woman’s Tale (2015) and Vertical Montage (2018) with Lapwing Belfast.  Her poetry was anthologised by Demeter Press (CAN), Dedalus, Arlen House (ROI), and Recent Works Press (AU) and Seren Books (UK). Her short stories were compiled in Angel Fur and other stories (2019) by Stupor Mundi, Fife. Her novel is published by Wrecking Ball Press in the UK (2023) with the title Bed Table Door.