WHILE STILL a teenager, Caoilinn Hughes was a featured reader at the first Over The Edge Open Readings in the Galway City Library.
I remember her taking part in early Galway Arts Centre poetry slams in the basement of The Cellar Bar. Her talent for language and enthusiasm for poetry were obvious, but these are qualities many a failed poet has.
What makes a poet is when raw talent and enthusiasm are combined with doggedness - the readiness to stick with a poem until it is the best possible version of itself. If you have such a streak of necessary stubbornness in your soul, you have a chance of making it as a poet. If you do not, your ‘poems’ will remain ongoing expressions of literary flatulence which, come next week - never mind posterity - no one, bar your auntie, will be interested in reading.
There is something about the act of getting the words as exactly right as you can which makes a poem come alive, actually be about something, and so speak to people the poet will probably never meet.
Reading Caoilinn Hughes’s debut collection, Gathering Evidence, published by Carcanet, it is clear she is stubborn as well as talented. Like Walt Whitman and Eamon Grennan, her lines are much longer than the average and this gives her poems a very particular look.
It is a young collection in that, occasionally, there is a certain feeling of poet-in-search-of-subject-matter. It is also, though, a collection in which very little appears to happen by accident.
In ‘Catechism’ she shows a good eye for paradox and, even, the absurd: “My aunt cried ‘Up the Reds!’ between Hail Marys/and was sent to bed.” The ‘Reds’ in question were, I think it’s safe to assume, of the Communist rather than the Manchester United variety.
In the fine closing poem ‘Legacy’ – “‘These estates were gambled in a card game in the twenties,’/he tells me ” – Hughes proves herself able to make good use of actually spoken words. This is an important ability for a poet to have, as so much of the best poetry is made from the exotic and, on occasion, profound utterances that emerge from everyday mouths.
In ‘The Moon Should Be Turned’ she makes poetry of dark material indeed: “The cells that were scraped and cut from her/beleaguered cervix – permission neither required/nor sought – were no longer, the court ruled, her belongings.”
Hughes is keenly aware of the power of understatement. A standout poem for me, though, is the perfectly achieved and quite chilling ‘We Are Experiencing Delay’. The delay is caused by “a body on the tracks”. The narrator/observer is waiting for a train and never sees the body, but knows it is there; that someone has decided to end his/her life today. Formal repetition is skilfully used to build the tension until the final couplet hits: “We are experiencing a delay due to a body on the tracks./A body is experiencing delay among the ballast and the black.”
