First Thoughts: Madelaine Nerson MacNamara turns serendipities into poetry in The Riddle of Waterfalls

MADELAINE Nerson MacNamara nursed a dream of becoming a poet when she was in her teens.

She thought it was “the highest thing you could do” and she read a lot of poetry, including Baudelaire, who became her “lodestar” later in life.

Madelaine’s French businessman father put her off becoming a poet, pointing out the difficulty of making a living out of writing.

But the instinct to write a poem manifested itself one day while waiting to collect her two young sons from school in Roubaix, a town in the north of France near Lille, where her Irish academic husband, Mattie MacNamara, was on sabbatical.

Madelaine, a quietly spoken 69-year-old with white cropped hair, explains that she had an hour to kill, sitting in her car, on that fateful day. She became bored and starting writing.

Decades later, she won the Cork Literary Review Poetry Manuscript Competition, in 2014.

The prize is the publication of her debut collection, The Riddle of Waterfalls.

Born in London, Madelaine grew up in Paris and has been living in Cork since 1967. Her work has been published in various magazine and anthologies.

That first poem she wrote in her car was in French. “When I came back to Ireland, I started writing in English. It wasn’t difficult, even though I was really brought up in French,” says this daughter of an Irish woman.

Her father was Jewish but not religious. He fought in the Free France Movement in World War II. Madelaine was reared as a Catholic.

Twenty years after writing her first poem, Madelaine, an arts graduate who chose to be a stay-at-home mother, started sending out her work to competitions and journals. Why the delay?

“That was because for a long time, my poetry was very gushing and emotional. I had to let go of dross. The first response I got to my poetry was in 1997 when I was runner-up in the South Tipperary Literary Festival competition. I attended all the workshops at the festival. I went to a wonderful workshop run by the poet, Michael Coady, whose work I admire very much. That was the start of me going to workshops.”

Madelaine benefited from attending workshops run by the late poets, Patrick Galvin and Gregory O’Donoghue, at the Munster literature Centre. “We would sit around a table with tea and biscuits and they would critique my work.

By then, I had a bit more confidence. Even if the criticism was a little harsh, it was okay because I could appreciate it and see the value of it. I learned to cut back and to not be so self-indulgent.”

Describing her poetry as celebratory, Madelaine writes elegant love poems and poetry about nature and the environment.

She also writes about “the serendipities and small events that, if you pay attention to them, they can expand meaningfully.”

Honouring people that have been part of the tapestry of her life is another element of Madelaine’s subject matter.

‘The Fort’ is a narrative poem about her paternal “Paris grandmother” who “holds the fort for her sons” fighting in World War II. One day, Madelaine’s grandmother goes for a walk and on the way back, meets “the courageous concierge/ posted round a corner./ He warns her to move on./The busy Gestapo/is emptying her home/to the last toilet brush.”

Madelaine’s grandmother evades the Gestapo and moves to a home “for retired posh ladies”.

Her dream comes true shortly before her death with news that her sons have survived the war.

Madelaine was born 15 months after her grandmother passed away — and she was named after her.

She read her grandmother’s diary with its tales of survival “which counts a lot for Jews,” says Madelaine quietly.

The Riddle of Waterfalls

Madelaine Nerson MacNamara

Bradshaw Books, €12