Craic in Clonakilty leaves poet Dave Lordan well versed

DAVE LORDAN has always enjoyed fooling with words. When he was a kid growing up in Clonakilty, Co Cork, he was surrounded by people who enjoyed playing with words telling jokes, storytelling, singing funny songs and the likes.

Wed, 04 Feb, 2015 - 00:00

Richard Fitzpatrick

“There would have been a lot of nonsense rhymes,” he says. “Some day I’m going to release the collected poems of my father. This is the first one: ‘Ten and ten, twenty/Give a horse plenty/When he’s done, wipe his bum/Ten and ten, twenty.’

“My father would say to me if a man took two weeks to dig a hole, how many weeks would it take to dig half a hole?”

A week? “No – there’s no such thing as a half a hole,” he answers.

“Language used to trick people, to make you laugh, to realise that words are more complicated than their face value, that they can do more than describe facts, that they can penetrate a region that we don’t normally keep in contact with, and break the rhythm of ordinary life, because ordinary life in Clonakilty in the 1980s — certainly where I grew up — was boring, frustrating and all the things to do with a place that had an extremely high level of unemployment, probably 50%. That language could suddenly expel us from this boredom or frustration and take us out of it to a place where there was craic and laughter and entertainment.

“I would have been surrounded by that sort of thing — people who enjoyed having fun with words — rather than literature. I come from an oral, working class culture rather than a literary culture. I think that sunk in.

“When I went on in life I tried writing a couple of poems at the age of 13. I found that I was good at it. I could rhyme. I could versify. And I got good praise from teachers and friends.

“I wasn’t good at fighting, drinking or hurling so I had limited things to boast about, so being able to write poems was the thing I got into as a teenager and it became part of my identity and I stuck at it.”

As well as working as a researcher on Rick O’Shea’s Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio 1, Lordan has carved a career out of being a wordsmith.

He lectures in creative writing. He’s written a play, published a short story collection and has churned out a few collections of his poetry, including the recent Lost Tribe of the Wicklow Mountains.

He can see the mountains from where he lives in Greystones, Co Wicklow.

“The thing that brought up the poem Lost Tribe of the Wicklow Mountains was that after the 1798 Rising — which was put down very brutally, 100,000 executed, or whatever it was — a small group of partisans, with their families, fled to the mountains. They managed to last up there for about five or six years. How did they manage? It’s pretty cold up there.

“I thought: imagine if they’re still up there, and there’s a whole tribe up there, and all of the beautiful losers of history, all the people who were fighting for justice and peace and independence, all of the people who lost and were crushed and beaten, they’re all up there. We as living people have to live up to them.

“A lot of the collection is about the dead and the dying, and for me the dead are not beneath us, they’re above us. They’re something we have to live up to. We create the dream of a just, beautiful society. The poem creates the dream of that and we have to try and live up to it.”