A River of Time: The Making of Gaps Between My Dreams
“There was a river of Time, and I was in its flow…”
Much of Gaps Between My Dreams is themed around the historical experience. In doing this, I drew on a lifetime of knowledge of the history of Limerick City and east Co. Clare. This started with a child’s sense of wonder. When I was in third or fourth class, an island in Doon Lake, not far from where I lived, was discovered to be a crannóg, and a local diver found two dugout canoes. Wonder at the people who lived there and used those crafts tickled my imagination. Also, near the family home there was a tower house, Ballycullen Castle, and nearby in Castlecrine there was a ringfort. There were also ruined big houses and a War of Independence ambush site, and a famine road that was never completed. The wandering trip on the school bus revealed a landscape that was alive with historical narrative.
I also had heritage, through my grandmother, in the social history of Limerick City. Her uncle James Carr was one of the organisers of the Limerick Soviet. First from my father, and then through two teachers in primary school, I was encouraged to investigate my surrounding temporal environment and place my own life in its context. There was a river of time, and I was in its flow, along with everybody, and everything, else.
Local History
Before I started in the public service, I spent three years writing on the local history of Limerick city for Limerick Civic Trust, who also published two of my poems in one of their publications. I studied for a MA in Local History at the University of Limerick, focusing on public health and housing, so very much the history of ordinary people.
But such wonder and immersion would not suffice. Along with an appreciation of history came an awareness, as I grew older, of the frailty of human lives as lived, indeed in my own life, and the lives of my family and my community. I felt challenged to marry these human vulnerabilities to the dates and grand events in the pages of history books. Perhaps that is why I created the fictional character of Eilís Thanaí (Thin Lizzie), a witness to the Williamite sieges of Limerick, an imperfect narrator, through whose eyes we encounter the also-imperfect war hero, Patrick Sarsfield. Maybe, also, this is why I portray Joan of Arc as a young girl who bit off more than she could chew, or place a schoolyard game of soldiers in the context of the Cold War of the 1980s.
A Love of the Sound of Words
The third and vital ingredient was a growing love of the sounds of words, the rhythms of metre, and their collective power to spark emotion and ideas. I learned poetry from the Leaving Cert syllabus in both English and Irish. A favourite was the poem Siollabadh by Seán Ó Riordáin, where the poet re-creates the rhythms of the heartbeat and the rhythms of the hospital ward, and the rhythm of prayer, using just the syllables of the words as beats.
The first non-schoolbook book of poetry I bought was Station Island by Seamus Heaney. I also had the honour, while an undergraduate in UCG in 1994, of hearing Heaney read at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, and realising that, while the words on the page revealed much, the sound of the voice of the poet reading their own poems was vital to arrive at an understanding of their work. I also met Innti poet Michael Davitt at the same festival some years later. I was very much the groupie seeking autographs, but we did correspond, before his untimely death.
Gaps Between My Dreams
This collection evolved through a number of drafts and revisions over years before finding its way into publication. I attended two Arvon courses and visited the Casa Ana Writers’ Retreat in Andalusia in Spain on a number of occasions and used these opportunities to discover what these poems wanted to become. Like a lot of emerging authors, I was writing in my spare time, so the opportunity to focus all my energy on writing was a welcome luxury.
I also submitted poems to literary journals and was fortunate enough to place some of them in publications such as Crannóg magazine. During a pandemic lockdown I spent a week workshopping the poems that would form the bedrock of the collection with Limerick poet Ciaran O’Driscoll, a member of Aosdána, all done online, even though we were living within three miles of each other, but such was the reality of that point in time.
A Crown of Sonnets
It was at an Arvon course that the tutor noticed that I had written some sonnets and challenged me to write a Crown of Sonnets, a set of interlinking fourteen-line poems that had be about a common theme. This took some months. The theme I used was my own sense of identity. This prompted one friend to comment jocularly that I had succeeded in writing fifteen poems about myself, but I hope that such an exploration might aid the reader in discovering their own sense of self.
While the collection is largely composed of historical poems, there are other poems that fall outside that description, such as the opening poem, Yardstick, where I vouch that everyone has an intimate self that they do not share with others. Poems such as this one can come in a first draft followed by a tidy-up and are among the most satisfying when they ‘land’. Other poems require redraft after redraft before they are finished or abandoned.
Gaps Between My Dreams has been a long and rewarding journey. As I finally launch it into the world, I do so with both a sense of achievement and the bittersweet awareness that it is no longer mine alone.
Thoughts and themes are already circulating in my mind and heart that have yet to find their form for a second collection.
(c) Ciarán Ó Gríofa
https://www.facebook.com/groups/112335460845
About Gaps Between My Dreams by Ciaran O Griofa:
In Gaps Between My Dreams, Ó Gríofa explores the connections between memory, family, history and place. The poems move effortlessly from a technical drawing classroom to the 1690 Siege of Limerick, from a mother’s hospital ward to a grandfather’s IRA ambush site, creating a deeply personal yet widely resonant portrait of life in Limerick and east Clare.
Written in both English and Irish, these poems are marked by wit, tenderness and a strong sense of belonging. The collection reflects on how we measure our lives against the people, landscapes and stories that shape us.
Order your copy of Gaps Between My Dreams online here.
Abd read more Meet the Author of Poetry on Writing.ie here.
