Honest Ulsterman - Features - Rooting in the Dark by Jessica Traynor

October 2026

features

Rooting in the Dark

by Jessica Traynor

Writing Pit Lullabies

Jessica Traynor is a poet, essayist and librettist, and poetry editor at Banshee. Her debut poetry collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. The Quick (Dedalus Press, 2018) was an Irish Times poetry book of the year. Awards include the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, the Listowel Poetry Prize, and Hennessy New Writer of the Year. Operas include Paper Boat, a commission from Irish National Opera and Music for Galway, and The Wanderer, commissioned by Irish Modern Dance Theatre. Recent residencies include the Yeats Society Sligo, the Seamus Heaney Home Place and dlr LexIcon. She is a Creative Fellow of UCD. Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe, 2022) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

When my time at university was over and I was living a relatively rudderless existence trying to write poems and send them out to journals, there came the opportunity to go to a workshop with the then Ireland Chair of Poetry, Michael Longley. I jumped at the chance. I’d never enjoyed academia, but it was nice to feel part of a group of aspiring writers and I missed that. Michael was generous and acerbic by turns, giving fulsome feedback on the work. Although his calm presence cushioned us from the directness of his comments, many of our poetic darlings were dispatched without mercy. I loved it. I like being told when the work is bad, so I don’t embarrass myself. I’m not sure everyone felt the same, but I left our sessions buoyed up with a sense of direction – this idea is bad; this one is better than you might have thought. At the end of his time at UCD we had a one-to-one session where he gave me plenty of encouragement, but finished by asking me with what felt like genuine concern, ‘But why are the poems all about death?’

The question left me feeling a bit silly, of course. Was my teenage goth still lurking somewhere in the work, lending everything a sense of fatalism? Nothing wrong with fatalism, you might think, but it’s nothing if not predictable. And I felt the question was possibly quite important. At this stage in my life I know I have good reason to write a lot about death and the expectation of death. But at 23 I wasn’t ready to take my own experience seriously enough to articulate this. And in the intervening years I’ve grappled with how to take these experiences seriously enough to write work that is itself serious, but not earnest.

After writing my second collection, The Quick, I had no particular plan for a third collection. I was busy moving jobs and house and then, busy having my first child. In the immediate aftermath of having my daughter, I leaned into the idea of writing love poems to my child; a genre I’d been a bit sceptical about before, in a way that I need to admit comes from a) a failure of imagination and b) internalised misogyny. But in fairness to myself, in relation to point b), I’m as allergic to sentimentality in love poems as I am in poems of parenthood. In any case, the poems that were coming out weren’t love poems. They were poems of confusion and physical hurt and deep, implacable anxiety. They were poems that seemed to hover above the subject matter of parental love like a predator. I felt predatory myself; an untrustworthy, hungry animal in a place that was meant to be all softness. This discomfort comes out in some of the earlier poems in the book, such as If You Can Tame A Wildcat, You Can Raise a Baby:

Lesson One

You have no shared contexts –

forget sentimentality.

The child recognises you

as a fox on a winter’s night

hears the owl shriek above it.

It’s also there in poems that deal with the visceral nature of the birth experience, which I, as the Modern Woman, had been sold as something I could control. Unfortunately due to birthing issues, my memory of my first labour is more like a dissociative episode. This was fine, until I was expected to function as a mother immediately afterwards:

then for some reason

I’m given a prize

but it’s a baby her eyes black

we look at each other

there must be some mistake

before she’s taken away

it’s quiet

when the clean up team arrives

there is so much blood

I’m sorry, but do you know if I’ve been cut?

Of course you have, they say

from ‘In The Birthing Room’

Then, in the immediate aftermath of the birth, death came creeping back in to the corner of my eye. I lay there in the hospital bed, revisiting the old question: But why is it all about death? In terms of my worldview I think that death seems an inescapable part of each narrative equation I apply to my life:

If x is house purchase and y is new job, then what is z?

If x is publication of poem and y is receipt of grant, then what is z?

If x is birth of child and y is completion of renovation work, then what is z?

(Answer: z is death)

For me, the inescapable post-birth equation was that all of the members of my family had been unceremoniously bumped from one link of the human chain to the next. Babies come, old people die. Parents become middle aged. It’s simple, it’s obvious, but it turns out it’s also enough to hang a major crisis on, especially when paired with the aftereffects of a traumatic birthing experience. I had several close friends at the time who had also experienced similar traumatic births, but who had been unluckier than me in that they’d been left with the kinds of injuries that it just seems unacceptable for women to experience these days, modern medicine being what it is. But there you go. It’s birth – what did you expect? Love is great and all, but it kills you nonetheless:

I once loved this man and let him slide inside my life until we both forgot ourselves and left to the world the image of our atoms locked together in a creation so complete it houses worlds; halls and cupboards, saucers, eggcups, stained glass windows, graveyards and gardens where blind roots slip between bricks

but what this takes is everything

our only measurable success not dying

until we do

From ‘What It Takes’

These were the early experiences that informed Pit Lullabies, and although they were difficult it was the first time I felt, as a writer, confident enough to explore this preoccupation with mortality head-on. I also wanted to lean in to the sense of the uncanny, of the disconnect that I felt when trying to write poems to my daughter.

‘Writing to’ had also become the operative phrase; as soon as my maternity leave ended I flung myself back into a career that demanded a lot of travel and time spent away from home. I told myself that taking on these opportunities would allow me to eventually achieve a better work-life balance for myself and my family, but as a I travelled around the country and further afield, the small voice of self-accusation kept whispering in my ear that I was unmaternal, selfish, that my instincts were all wrong. Life didn’t get easier when I was home, as I carried that guilt with me, allowed it to infect my interactions with my family. For someone who kept moving, I had never felt so stuck. From this sense of being trapped somewhere at a slight remove from everyone I loved came the sequence of Pit Lullabies than run throughout the book. Lullabies, of course, are night time things, but what if the dawn never comes? As I spent countless nights reading Judith Kerr’s Mog books to my daughter, who wouldn’t sleep, a quote from one of the books began to obsess me: Who else is here in the dark?

pit lullaby VII

When we turn off the light and I hold you close

your face becomes a puzzle – a wisp of hair

settling on a cheek, an eyebrow like a capstone

sinking in a restless sea. Here I whisper to you

broken thoughts that settle on the tangle

of our limbs. Mog sat in the dark and thought dark thoughts,

I say, because it is the only thing in any of your books

I recognize as true - a beast, alone out of doors,

and far from home. I lie in the dark

and think dark thoughts while your feet push my thighs away.

I make a weapon of the weight of my bones.

There are so many hours between us and the morning.

Life did get better, though. The light crept back in – I’m not sure how. My work circumstances changed, which played a big part in allowing me to find a new way to fit back into my family unit; the shape of which, had of course changed in the intervening time. I was glad that I had written my way through that sense of disconnectedness; that I had tried to keep a record of those moments where life and death felt so close as to be interchangeable. There’s a lesson in all of this, somewhere, I thought:

and after you? i still see death on my left shoulder

ready to flip this egg timer world but now

i save a space for you inside me

i wear the skin a little looser on my bones

From ‘Lessons’

I also decided it might be time to lean back into those love poems to my daughter, with what I hoped was a new maturity. Rather than straining always towards the light, I thought about what I, as a person who has spent a lot of time rooting around in the dark, might be able to offer her. After all, the darkness doesn’t just bury us – it protects and sustains us as well. It’s the only place our roots can thrive. The final poem I wrote to my daughter in those troubled days was still a lullaby, still a sound heard on the edge of sleep – inarticulate, perhaps, of the fullness of my love – but offering, I hope, the comfort of company in a dark place.

Lullaby

I have a lullaby for you at last,

so lie beside me, hold my hand,

follow me through the night’s amber lens

to Bull Island.

Here, the seals are waking

from their sleep, rolling into the surf

where in blue-black

they'll stretch the land-ache

from their muscles.

Here, the only touch is water.

Moonlight on scale. Dazzle of bubbles.