Voters were wrong in choosing Seamus Heaney’s ‘When All The Others Were Away At Mass’ as best Irish poem of the 20th century. Voters always get these things wrong.

The poem to plump for was Paula Meehan’s ‘The Statue Of The Virgin At Granard Speaks’, the BVM in her grotto railing against religion for having emptied her of humanity. “She lay down alone at my feet/without midwife or doctor or friend to hold her hand/and she pushed her secret out into the night,/far from the town tucked up in little scandals,/bargains struck, words broken, prayers, promises,/and though she cried out to me in extremis/I did not move,/I didn’t lift a finger to help her,/I didn’t intercede with heaven,/nor whisper the charmed word in God’s ear.”
No Irish poem has ever so unblinkingly stared down religion’s stony face.
Still, Seamus is so well-loved, and his sonnet so softly perfectly-formed, evoking such an exquisite moment of secret memory, that the gong was in the bag from the get-go. The parish priest at his mother’s bedside going hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying, and he cherishing in his mind that morning when all the rest were out at mass and the pair of them in the kitchen were peeling potatoes... ”I remembered her head bent towards my head,/Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives–/Never closer the whole rest of our lives.”
Some of the other shortlisted efforts elicited a sigh. ‘Making Love Outside Aras an Uachtarain’. Aye, right. Been there, done that, slithered on the grass.
Meantime, the Bogman’s Cannon Irish People’s Poetry Prize went to Sarah Clancy for ‘And Yet We Must Live In These Times’, a shout-out against the tyranny of low expectations stifling the genius of all by setting each against each. “I write down past-tense love-affairs, all the while getting older and worn-out./What good is it, resuscitating old lovers for nothing, recycling our slogans, our dictums/If I cannot write about real things, why bother?/If I cannot write about the sign on the wall at the welfare which says after two decades of working that now I am likely to drink in the daytime/To have poor personal hygiene/or to spit and swear at the people who work there, and who are only paying their bills same as anyone./I fool myself. One of these days I might do it/might hurt someone, wreck something. That’s human, so they tell me/competition and viciousness. Well, I say/that’s fiction. We won’t let it happen. The truth is I don’t have it in me. I am lacking some cruelty/because I think what’s human is order and interdependence/What’s human is balance and humour and kindness/and us coming up with some way we can live in these times without violence.
“I for one might need some help with it.”
You have to hear it declaimed on a defiant platform, words restrained with effort, held back just long enough for hearing, then whipped away in the storm.
There, too, I didn’t pick the winner, having been entranced by Appalachian woman Erin Fornoff’s ‘Opposite of a Thank-You’ – an aspirant writer remembers a coffee-shop assignation with an academic letch in crinkly jeans, “I can populate my mind with 100 perfect lines/Only when the moment is past/as the waiter asks who’s paying/I am sitting quiet in the din of a great disheartening/ and in the face of his gaze and of all the things I didn’t say/I still worry about how mad I’ll make him/for recalling his lines out here verbatim/and that is the most disheartening thing of all/So if I seem freaked/If he mistook my quietness for weakness/It’s just that I am distinctly fatigued by this tired casting couch cliché/as he sat across me in this hipster Dublin cafe/to say that the keys to the kingdom are down his jeans/This is the opposite of a thank you letter/It is a manifesto for better/than we can be beyond the sordid things/that we can lift each other up without any strings/we can grow to be more than where we’ve come from/with men with power and women with none/and I guess I’m here to speak after the fact and hope I’m heard/Because you’ve got a lot of contacts in the literary world/and all I have is words.”
Poetry is good for the soul. Somebody must already have said that. Poetry can send you back, as if on a mission, to recover a soulfulness inadvertently left behind. Here’s my all-time favourite number from the poetess of Dublin punk, Roisin Sheerin: “Early days in her punk career/When her friends still tended to keep clear/She went to see the Virgin Prunes/Indulging in their peculiar tunes./She locked her bike up carefully/And entered McGonagles warily./More serious punks/Formed into a pack/At the front of the audience/She moved to the back/When the gig was over she went outside/Preparing herself for her bicycle ride/But when she got back to the railing/Her bike was gone. She started wailing/People around thought she was strange/But were in awe of her vocal range.”
I prefer it even over her classic ‘Chambermaiding’ – “I’m going mad/My hair is moulting/Chambermaiding is revolting.”
Her latest is a lament for loss, although not, she says, of car keys. “I lost you/I lost you/I lost you/I lost you/I lost you/I lost you/But I did the right thing.”
God is dead. But poetry is everywhere. The soul of struggle lives, and gives life.