Poems from Pandemia: Chapter and verse of perspectives on the current situation

The hopes and fears of poets from Cork and across the world have been compiled by Patrick Cotter in a book published by the Munster Literature Centre

Tue, 12 Jan, 2021 - 08:30

Colette Sheridan

A record on the dark times we are living through is how Patrick Cotter describes Poems from Pandemia, a new anthology of poetry he has edited and to which he has contributed. Cotter, director of the Munster Literature Centre and an award-winning poet, put out a call in April 2020 to poets to submit works of hope - or its lack - dealing with Covid-19 or historical plagues. The remit was broad, including autobiographical work or surrealist poetry. The result is a collection of 69 poems by both established and emerging poets from across the English speaking world. Contributors include James Harpur, Derek Mahon, Thomas McCarthy, and Breda Joyce.

Cotter, who produced the publication from his home, was very unwell back in March of last year. "I'll never know whether I had Covid or not. At the time, the testing regime became overwhelmed. The only thing I can say is that it lasted longer than any flu I've ever had. I was in bed for a week with a bag packed in case I needed to go to hospital. Two months later, I was still feeling very debilitated. It was a weird one; I was very fatigued."

In inviting poets to submit work, Cotter knew he wanted the anthology to have a historical perspective. "I knew that James Harpur's poem (Magna Karistia) about the Black Death was going to be in the book. Also I know how difficult it can be for creative people to write to order so I wanted to give the poets as broad a perspective as possible while still having parameters to stay on message."

The anthology is divided into seven different categories of poems including 'Banes of Yore', 'Imaginary Pestilences,' 'Isolation', 'The Dead and the Dying' and 'Hope/Between Waves' . There are only four poems of hope which is hardly surprising.

Cotter is pleased that the anthology is "a good balance between established names and emerging names. There's Olga Dugan, an African-American poet I'd never heard of before. She wrote a poem about her brother who was in hospital with Covid at the time she sent it in. By the time the book was ready to go to print, he had died."

Cotter's own poem, 'March 2020' was partly inspired by a Filipino woman which made him think of nurses from the Philippines working here. He recalls that at the beginning of the pandemic, some people were being racist towards Asian people because of the origin of the virus in China.

I was in the middle of an online poetry workshop. I looked out the window and saw a young Asian woman who looked like she worked in some caring capacity.

This led to Cotter's line in his poem that reads: 'the sight of her, stopping my heart turning hard again.' This is a reference to Yeats' poem, 'Easter 1916' who wrote that 'Too long a sacrifice/can make a stone of the heart.'

In the preface to the anthology, Cotter writes movingly about his grandmother losing two infant daughters to whooping cough and a husband to tuberculosis. "Her demonstrations of love included never letting me eat an apple without peeling the skin, who insisted on all raw food being scrubbed clean before being eaten... She had learnt the hard way the malevolent power of microbes and their tendency to rely on thoughtless trust to spread and multiply. Growing up with an armful of vaccinations and a well-stocked chemist shop on every street corner, I learnt to forget those lessons. But the loss of children, the subsequent despair, is a Jungian heirloom one cannot renounce, even when never talked about."

Under the heading of 'The New Normal', Patrick Holloway has written a poem entitled 'Don't Forget to Love'. It deals with the quotidian but imbues it with love and simple appreciation: 'Wash your hands,/show them love as your fingers/Fold in on each other. Enjoy the water/Rinsing away what lingers. Wash away too/Those negative thoughts that build up like walls.'

Cotter says that "in a world where people have been unable to touch one another, it has reinforced the whole importance of love." And poetry. The anthology owes its origins to the cancelled 2020 Cork International Poetry Festival that was scheduled for last March. Cotter used what was left of the festival budget on emergency Covid bursaries for local writers and on fees for the anthology. A positive move in a world where positivity is in short supply.