For the new Lyric Feature documentary The Shaky Bridge - the second of two programmes broadcast during Seachtain Na Gaeilge with bilingual Irish poets - poet Louis de Paor explores his childhood home town of Cork. Listen above...
Both being a Corkman and being an Irish speaker are central to Louis's identity and his poetry, as he explains below...
I had my first experience of living away from Cork in 1983-4 when I went to Galway for a year to get closer to the Connemara dialect of Irish that is as central to the work of Máirtín Ó Cadhain as Dublin English is to that of James Joyce. Then, as now, the people of Connemara were indulgent of the way I spoke, a peculiar mix of literary and vernacular Munster Irish with a Cork accent. It was a different story in the 'city', where the locals occasionally affected not to understand what I was saying in English, the first time I had a sense of myself as a stranger at home in my first language. Irish, meanwhile, continued to open doors into new communities, new worlds, new corners of myself, as it had done since I first encountered it in the classroom at the age of four in Scoil an Spioraid Naoimh.
One of the joys of making this programme with producer Claire Cunningham was the opportunity to touch base with others for whom the experience of two languages was part of growing up in a city open to the past and to the wider world. For Diarmuid Ó Drisceoil, Claire Ní Mhuirthile and Dónal Gallagher, Irish was also part of their formation as Cork people. How that came to pass in an Anglophone city is one of the questions we tried to answer in The Shaky Bridge. The restless ghost of Seán Ó Ríordáin, whose poems provide stepping stones between Irish and English, past and present, brought us part of the way, as did Rory Gallagher whose Irish-speaking grandmother's pub in MacCurtain Street was a haven for traditional singers and visitors from Baile Mhuirne.
What Liam Ó Muirthile referred to as 'monabhar na sinsear', the murmur of the ancestors, was audible at every twist and turn of our visit to Cork as I realised my knowledge of the city is part of what I inherited from my father and his family before him. I haven't lived in Cork for 40 years now but the poems I write still drop anchor there on Merchant's Quay, where my granny's family were ship chandlers, before moving out to Gaol Cross, where my father grew up in turbulent times, and across the shaky bridge of time that connects my world and theirs. As you will hear in the programme, the poems themselves are fragile structures, just about able to carry some of the weight of history and imagination, as we walk through the reclaimed marsh that is Corcaigh-Cork. Téanam ort ...
The Shaky Bridge, presented by Louis de Paor, is the Lyric Feature on Sunday 16th March at 6 pm and will be available after broadcast as a Lyric Feature podcast. You can listen to more Lyric Features here.
