Mary O’Malley was born in Connemara, and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for eight years and taught at the Universidade Nova there. She served several years on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cuirt International Poetry Festival for eight years. She was the author of its educational programme. She taught on the MA programmes for Writing and Education in the Arts at the University of Galway for many years,  held the Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2013, and has held Residencies in Paris, Tarragona, New York, and Trinity College, as well as in Derry, Belfast and Mayo. She has also worked on poetry translation from Irish, Spanish and Catalan. She has been active in Environmental education for over twenty years with a specific interest in the Sea and Bogland, working with a team of marine scientists and musicians. In the early 1990’s, she co-organised a Province wide schools programme, arising out of her work on the organising committee of an international Conference on demilitarisation of the Ocean, held in the University of Galway.  Mary is a member of Aosdana and has won a number of awards for her poetry, in Ireland, the U.S. and Spain. She writes for RTE Radio and broadcasts her work regularly.  She lectures and teaches widely, in the U.S. and Europe,  particularly in Paris and in various parts of Spain.  She has been Writer in Association with the RHA Gallery in Dublin, and was the 2019 Writer Fellow in Trinity College Dublin. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Galway University in 2021. She has published nine books of poetry, including ‘Valparaiso’ arising out of her Residency on the national marine research ship.  Her latest Collection, The Shark Nursery, has just been published by Carcanet.

Emily Cullen: Firstly, congratulations Mary on the publication of your tenth collection - a milestone for any writer - and The Shark Nursery (Carcanet Press, 2024) clearly shows a poet at the height of her powers. One of the big themes in this book is Time, in its broadest sense - mythic time, compressed time, history, astrophysics. Indeed, many of the poems themselves are like a holding ground that momentarily stop and expand time. What drives your fascination with exploring this theme? Why might poetry be uniquely placed to interrogate time?

Mary O’Malley: I think time is as much a given for the poet as it is for the composer or musician. In my own case, ever since I first read Genesis in the King James version, when I was safely into my late 20’s or early 30’s, its poetry caught me. Then that same scene of divining harmony from chaos is played out in Milton. Time is a constant presence in Yeats from the very early to the late poems:' But O, sick children of the world/Of all the many changing things/In dreary dancing past us whirled/To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,/Words alone are certain good.’

Perhaps he’s onto something there, that words are the poet’s attempt to figure time out.

On a more immediate level, I try and keep up with the way time is changing, the nature of it seems to be in flux and that cheers me up no end. During lockdown, there was a sense in which chronological time didn’t really work, and that compression and expansion that good poetry and good music effect on time, drawing it out and making it fly at the same time, became more and more obvious as the world shut down, so it’s not surprising that so many of the poems are soaked in it. And there is, of course, getting older, to which I have never given much thought. Here’s Neruda’s vision in ‘Ode To Time’: 'Time is resolute, we do not hear it toll; it grows and roams within us, it appears, a bottomless well, in our gaze, at the corner of your burnt-chestnut eyes a filament, the course of a diminutive river, a shooting star streaking toward your lips.’

Lockdown was a giant experiment, like being caught in a very weird play, where Beckett meets Shakespeare and they both meet Myles na gCopaleen [Flann O’Brien]. Wasn’t it Myles who wrote ‘It is helpful sometimes to view the future in retrospect’? 

E.C: What a memorable analogy for Lockdown! There is a striking continuum in this book with your previous collection, Gaudent Angeli (Carcanet Press, 2019), which also addressed time, myth, cosmology. A gorgeous constellation of poems you composed during lockdown, which appears in the middle section of this book, reckons with those unprecedented times. Can you tell us about the gestation of those poems?

MO’M: I keep thinking at the end of each book that next time, I’ll write a completely different book, but what can we do about our obsessions?  And what else, in the end, is there? But I agree, The Shark Nursery is, in many ways, on a continuum with Gaudent Angeli. 

That middle section opens with a poem called ‘Another Plague Season’ because Shakespeare wrote in a time of plague, and theatres closed and opened accordingly. These poems were mostly written, at least in first draft, during lockdown and there are many more that I haven’t included in the collection. I was struck by the sheer beauty of the world that was closing down: the skies darkening, the cities going out, one after another. I also felt trapped and my only way of escape was by sea. When the skies were empty, the seas’ roads were busy with ships bringing fuel and goods all over the world. I used to log into the shipping site and check out which vessels were coming and going around the coast. Sometimes I’d go to New York or Barcelona or Valparaiso to check which ships were leaving and arriving. I’ve put one of those ships, The Arosa, in a poem on the death of Derek Mahon (for the next book) and their invisible roads are the way I negotiated the poems in that section, a kind of hidden cartography. The section ends with a poem commissioned through Poetry Ireland for the National Day of Remembrance. The turn in the poem was based on the day  I saw a gaggle of children run onto the local GAA pitch for the first time - it was a very strange moment and I sat in the car for a long while after, thinking about all the lost faces and delighted at their joy. 

EC: And you capture that spontaneous elation, as lockdown restrictions are lifting, so well. I think we can all recall those emotions clearly… As we often find in a Mary O’Malley collection, there are poems in dialogue with classical mythology. ‘Diana’s Regret’ is one such striking poem. At the launch in Kenny’s Bookshop on Thursday, 4 July, you mentioned that it was largely inspired by our changing relationship to myth over time. Can you elaborate?

MO’M: One of the reasons certain myths survive is that they tell a story we can all find ourselves in. Or perhaps on the outside of. As we grow up, obviously we identify with different characters in different ways - that is a great part of the power of myth. We can also imagine a character as growing older with us, and having regrets, as in the case of Diana. I think this is one of the reasons we keep coming back to the Greeks - we see our changing selves in the different characters. An older Diana might have been more compassionate and thought about the limitations of her power, about consequence, if you like. Or so we are free to pretend or imagine. Adrienne Rich is very good on this, and Eavan Boland ’s poem ‘Daphne, With her Thighs In Bark’ opens with ‘Save face, sister.’/ Fall. Stumble.’ 

EC: Yes, the Daphne-Apollo myth is one I keep returning to myself. I think it has real resonance for women, especially around themes of consent. There is a dreamlike quality to many of your poems in this collection that speaks so well to our post-pandemic moment - often with adumbrations, such as the visit of Azrael in the poem ‘Erasure’ and the ethereal figures of ‘The Ghost Library.’ The line ‘A man on fire is running through the house’ in ‘Medea’s Dream’ feels prophetic in the wake of Aaron Bushnell’s tragic death. How much do dreams influence your writing? Do you record your dreams on a regular basis?

MO’M: I don’t keep a dream diary, but I write down certain dreams, and have always written the occasional dream poem, if it happens. Medea’s Dreams were quite close to actual dreams, culled from a sequence of very vivid lockdown dreams, disturbing and very real and of a different tone to my usual nights. They were etched, if you like, and there they are, worked on and given to Medea, who might have had such dreams. I know that a lot of people felt the quality of their dreams change during that period. I just put down a little sequence in short poems because they seemed almost like visions, or at least very vivid. 

The burning man - we have a lot of burning boys around - a lot of desperate people, trying to make themselves fit into a world they have no place in. Women too, of course. 

EC: True, it has a real iconic resonance, sadly. As its title suggests, The Shark Nursery is shot through with various creatures which often appear as reminders of earth’s fragility, but also as beacons of hope, sometimes even adding a note of levity, as in ‘In the marine library’ and the dogfish who gets ‘promoted’ to shark. How important was it to foreground the natural world? 

MO’M: I think most artists riff off the natural world in some way - Mallarmé’s faun, the Hispanic writer’s fabulas, Lorca’s lizards. 

I’m no naturalist, but I have regularly worked alongside marine scientists and fishermen and spent time in their world. It’s not a conscious decision, but all those creatures that are given voices in the poems were central to my world as a child, and still are in many ways. Horses, which grew in the fields like flowers, as I saw it as a child. Seals, basking sharks, dolphins and fish of all sorts. Yes, ecosystems are very fragile. The fishing communities I grew up in are all but destroyed, as is the culture they supported and were part of. How do you deal with that, especially the part of the destruction that is wanton? I think that may be part of what comes into the poems, but in truth, the creatures turn up. In recent years, the rat has joined them. What can you do?  There is a long tradition of poetic Bestiaries. I haven’t even started on my cats.  

I value the inhabited landscape, not an empty one, and the same is true for the sea.

EC: Yes, and your short poem, ‘Epitaph on a stone’ evokes the disolving fishing village of ‘Aillebrack’. These are poems that open up spaces in our minds, poems that resonate and expand, sometimes through a striking image, sometimes through the surprise of wit, like in your poem 'Rat': ‘I am a descendant of the rat that ate / the vellum of the Book of Leinster / without salt and found nourishment.’ What do you think poetry can do that other forms of writing can’t?

MO’M: I’ve rarely given much thought to what poetry can do - it’s more something poets have to do. I think poetry can compress language in ways that render it powerful and concise. It can bear witness. It can praise. 

To do that, the poet needs to learn the ropes, the craft, and then practice it. I hope poetry can sing, to both the jangled and the melodic tunes; and sometimes, when the poem demands it, it screams. I agree with Walcott that the greatest poetry is beyond the idea of mortality, and beyond the idea of the ephemeral, but it can, at times, be luminous. Poets differ on their definition of poetry, but I think poetry can play with the rules, and break them when necessary. ‘The act of poetry is a rebel act’. Michael Hartnett. Perhaps above all, poetry remains true to language, in tone and temperature. A good tuning fork never goes amiss.

EC: Your fork chimes nicely with my next question. As a fellow teacher of poetry, I can't help but note, and delight in, your cadences and melodic half-rhymes in lines such as: ‘Like a god in the house of Atreus / he makes a play of our sacrifice.’ (‘Circus Act’) and I want to ask you something about your process. How important is music, tonality and sound when you're writing poems? Does it tend to come early on, or later, when you’re revising?

MO’M: Cadence is important - my early love of poetry (and the need to write it) came from Irish. Tone is vital, of course, and I love rhyme, probably for the same reason. I have a great fondness for the sonnet (the little song) and the ballad, and for the right deployment of dipthongs. I draft and re-write when necessary and just occasionally know when not to do that. I go to the desk, take a few lines, find the rhythm, and mess around on the page until I have something taking shape. That might take days, or months or an hour. The only constant is that I work very fast towards the end of a collection. 

I write, always a blue pen because I’m superstitious that way. Then I type the poem up, print it and mark the page and put my changes on that, and so on. When I need to, I can go back and map the changes in the written drafts. 

I usually leave poem to sit while I get on with new work, and at a certain point I go back and see if I think it’s worth polishing them up – I’m a cutter. Sometimes if the tone is wrong, I try it in Irish - that sets something for me, takes out any danger of sentimentality that might be creeping in. Then I start again, in English and often the problem has been fixed, even if the linguistic absence is still there. 

I often write with music playing - opera mostly, or classical, Kathleen Ferrier, Maria Callas. Or orchestral - Bach, Sibelius. I love Casals cello in the background. After a while, you don’t hear the music and don’t notice it going off.

EC: It’s so interesting to hear that you draft in longhand first, with your trusty blue pen, and often with your favourite music carrying you into the creative space. And also that you sometimes remedy tone by switching into Irish and loop back again! Comhairle iontach! Having come this far – the publication of your tenth collection - and looking back on your many years of honing the craft, is there any final advice you would have for other poets and writers?

MO’M: Having taught for so long myself, I have very little advice except find your own pattern. Learn your craft and practice it. Keep reading and keep turning up.