Digging deep for book of poems
O’Sullivan always wanted to be a writer. “I was a bit of a dreamer and a very sensitive kid. I was all eyes and ears, like a sponge, taking in a lot. I was always telling myself stories and writing them down.”
O’Sullivan’s powers of observation have served her well. The Mining Road is her third volume of poetry, and is rooted in Beara, where she was born and reared. It’s an astutely observed take on the West Cork landscape, inspired by the disused copper mines around Allihies, near her family home.
Mining is literal and metaphorical in O’Sullivan’s book, and linked to storytelling and family. “The book is about digging down, with effort. It’s about the landscape, and it’s also about cultural memory and trying to see things in a new light.”
The 30-year-old is fascinated by imagining what Allihies looked like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was a mining village. She read about mining, and its history in Allihies.
The title poem is evocative. It opens: “Where moss is gold in the copper pools/my mother dreams her mother on the road/sitting up ahead, among whistled reeds/and ocean steaming rocks.”
The poem is based on a dream O’Sullivan’s mother had about her mother (O’Sullivan’s grandmother), who had undergone an operation for cancer, and was involved in a knitting project. “In the dream, Nan had unravelled the cardigan to start all over again. As she was knitting it, her wounds from the operation were beginning to heal. Healing takes work. It doesn’t just happen; you have to put in the effort.”
O’Sullivan is inspired by walking Beara and looking out to sea. Nature is a succour, if not spiritual. Is she religious? “I don’t know. I would have taken religion very seriously up to my early 20s, going to mass, and things like that. But it kind of fell away. I still love going to mass. I love the theatre of it and the smells of churches... A lot of my writing is around mythologies and stories. Mythology often tells us how we can think about our origins. One of the greatest gifts I got from going to college was learning to read stories. I can read stories from the Bible in the same way I’d read Shakespeare.”
* Leanne O’Sullivan will read at the Allihies Language and Arts Centre on Saturday at 8pm.
