My Poetry Paddy Bushe Almost everything I write is rooted in a particular landscape. I have written relatively few poems that I cannot account for in a very specific place, if not necessarily at a specific time. Two poems in this issue, for example, are about being depressed and how to deal with that, but they articulate this in terms of place, of weather, of vegetation. The poems in their final form don’t identify the places which I used as metaphor, but my identification with particular places allowed me to explore aspects of myself which otherwise might remain closed to me. The same is true of love poems I have written, of poems about poetry itself, of poems which explore aspects of history, of politics, of mythology. Very often the particular landscape might disappear in the poem’s final shape, but it remains always as a grounding and a source. This probably came about because of where I grew up. And while I was born and reared in suburban Dublin, I grew up imaginatively on the western seaboard, especially in Kerry. Long summer holidays surrounded by coastal mountains were the source of a great yearning during the rest of the year. And when I started to write poetry seriously, this landscape was my threshold into and my metaphor for explorations that went far beyond the landscape itself. Later, when I travelled, especially in China and Nepal, the landscapes I found there allowed me access to other imaginative worlds. This is how I write. I do not dare suggest that it is better, or worse, than any other way. General statements about the nature or function of poetry make me retreat. Statements that begin with “poetry should ….” or “the poet must …” or, God help us “the writer’s role is ….” make me cringe. It may be a cliché, but there is room for all sorts of poems, formal or free, private or public, plainspoken or mysterious.
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