Poet Gabriel Fitzmaurice on a new collection of his work . . .
I have been attracted to poetry since I was a child. First to nursery rhymes. Then to the rhymes we learned in the street, deliciously subversive poems about school, teachers and so forth. At home I was introduced by my mother to The Ballad Of Reading Gaol, Barbara Frietchie and other canonical poems which she would discuss at length with John Moriarty, the philosopher and mythologian, our neighbour. Then there were the poems we learned “off by heart” in school, poems in English and in the Irish language. In those days, it was the late 1950s/early 1960s, we learned poems by Wordsworth, Yeats, chunks of Shakespeare as well as classical poems in the Irish language, An Spailpín Fánach, Éamon an Chnoic, in primary school. In secondary school we learned poems by dead white males in English class, but in the Irish language class we encountered nua fhilíocht na Gaeilge, the new Irish language poetry ofMáire Mhac an Saoi, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Direáin et al which was exciting and introduced us to contemporary poetry.
I have always wanted to write poetry, to express myself in verse. From an early age, in primary school for instance, I attempted to rewrite The Iliad as a ballad! Then on to love poems in my teenage years in an attempt to woo convent girls in Listowel. I edited and wrote for the college magazine as a student teacher in Mary Immaculate College in Limerick in the early 1970’s. But my first breakthrough was in Writer’s’ Week Originals in the Kerryman newspaper in the early 1980’s. This was followed by publication in New Irish Writing in the Irish Press and various outlets in Ireland, England and America.
My first book, Rainsong, was published by Beaver Row Press in 1984. Precociously I explained in my Author’s Note that the purpose of the book was to sing the evolution from dispossession to repossession through the reconciliation of the self to its environment – physical, emotional and spiritual. Pretty heady stuff! And that’s what I’ve been attempting in my poetry ever since.
The Best-Loved Poems of Gabriel Fitzmaurice is a collection of the poems that have proved popular over countless readings in Ireland, England, Europe and the USA. On Friday, May 31, 2019, Currach Books published my A Farewell to Poetry, which was essentially a collection of the best of my poems for adults and children as well as a selection of my translations of poems from the Irish. On Friday, July 15, 2016, I wrote what I considered to be my last poem. I had said all I had to say. There was no point in repeating myself. Hence A Farewell to Poetry. That book is no longer available. But there still is demand for the best loved poems at readings, in bookshops and online. So, thanks to my dear friend Mary Feehan of Mercier Press, they are now available again. The Best-Loved Poems of Gabriel Fitzmaurice is thematically rather than chronologically arranged and contains my main themes spanning a writing career of 40 years.
Beginning with poetry and music, the book continues with poems of life and death, singers, spailpíns (wandering agricultural labourers),religious poems, poems about children and teaching (I was a primary teacher for 35 years), poems about the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Civil War and the how the G.A.A. helped to bring both sides together in Kerry and elsewhere in the aftermath of what Brendan Kennelly has described as a dirty end to a glorious fight, poems of family and love about which Declan Kiberd in his Introduction has said “mature married love has at last found a laureate”. There are also five new poems. As I have already said I stopped writing poems in July 2016. And for five years I kept silent. Then in early August 2021, I was moved to write a sonnet to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary which was on August 17 that year. It was subsequently published in the Irish Times for Valentine’s Day 2022. That encouraged me to write again. I have included that poem in this book as well as poems about the new Irish who have recently come to our shores and concluded with a poem celebrating life turning to art as I muse drinking coffee in Listowel, Co. Kerry.
These poems have touched the minds and hearts of countless readers all over the English-speaking world. A singer, I have always been a lover of rhythm and rhyme. My early poems were described as having been written in ballad-sprung rhythm. Over the years I have matured and my poems are now written mostly in form – in rhyme and rhythm. This may be considered old fashioned and may win no prizes, but the poems are prized by readers who like poems that nourish them and also happen to be a good read.
(c) Gabriel Fitzmaurice
About The Best-Loved Poems of Gabriel Fitzmaurice:
In Best-Loved Poems, Gabriel Fitzmaurice, ‘the people’s poet’, gathers favourite poems written over a career spanning more than forty years, poems that have touched the minds and hearts of people all over the English-speaking world. Formally assured, he writes with a singer’s ear for rhythm and rhyme.
In this collection, Fitzmaurice celebrates love, grief and joy, people and place, faith, family and friends in visionary, durable and deceptively simple poems.
Order your copy online here.
