Life

Nuala McCann: Poetic treasures live on in the heart - and in my mother's notebook

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Nuala was blessed with a love of literature - particularly poetry - by her mother
Nuala was blessed with a love of literature - particularly poetry - by her mother Nuala was blessed with a love of literature - particularly poetry - by her mother

IT'S a good time for standing at the water's edge and gazing across at ghosts on the far shore.

More of them gather every year.

I catch myself reading the death notices in the paper and picking out the people I know.

It reminds me of strolls with my father through the graveyard in the long ago.

"I know more people under the ground than on top of it," he joked.

But now it seems right to pause at the turn of the year and remember... like that moment when you pitch up at a wooden gate on a long walk in the hills and lean on it, drinking in the stillness of the day.

And as the year turns, take time to imagine that everyone you have ever loved and lost is gathered on a far shore, just across the water.

You can wave at them and send love on the sea mist.

At night, light candles and see their faces in the yellow glow.

Turning orphan is no fun, even if you're 59 when it happens... a big lump of an orphan at that.

But as the old year ebbed to a close, it was a time to look back.

And I think that my mother's love of literature set my life on a certain path.

Poems were the magical spells that we wove together.

Some were simple nursery rhymes.

So that, when the last stroke robbed her of nearly all her words, she'd still manage: "Jiggity jig," when I drove her up to the door at home.

A few months after she died, I remembered the old nursery rhyme she used to recite: "To market, to market to buy a fine pig; home again, home again, jiggety jig."

In her own way, she was telling me how happy she was to be home.

My mother loved literature and, above all, poetry.

She kept a notebook where she wrote down her favourite poems.

She added to it as she uncovered new treasure.

She taught me Elizabeth Browning's Love Sonnets from the Portuguese; Wordsworth's Upon Westminster Bridge; Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney.

She had first editions signed by Heaney.

She loved Dickens and could recite whole pages from David Copperfield or Dombey and Son.

Unsurprising then that I followed her into that world of literature... a degree in English; a life in journalism.

It's the poems that I first read as a child that stay with me.

Robert Louis Stevenson's "Faster than fairies, faster than witches" captured the exciting rush of a train journey.

Years later, I sat with another anthology of poetry reading to my young son.

"I wish I lived in a caravan, with a horse to drive

Like the pedlar man.

Where he comes from, nobody knows,

Or where he goes to, but on he goes."

My son's favourite was another Stevenson poem about a small boy sick in bed who creates a whole world on his bed, The Land of Counterpane.

At primary school, Mrs Murphy taught us to recite together, poems like:

"Kate, Kate, don't be late. Here is your satchel and here is your slate."

Or the goblin poem over heard on a long ago salt march: "Nymph, nymph, give me your beads!"

The rhythm of a poem whisked us to another time:

"Do you remember an inn, Miranda?" whirled with the beat of the Tarantella, only to suddenly change to a sombre and wistful note at the end: "Never again, Miranda, never again."

It was as a child that I formed the habit of learning poetry by heart - you carry it in your heart, find a line to lean on in difficult times.

At A-Level, our English teacher brought poems that were far from our ken.

He surprised us - it was like we'd been weaned on classical art and here was a flash of the modern.

The poem that read like a note on the fridge sticks with me: "This is just to say, I have eaten the plums that were in the ice box."

Was it a poem? Did it mean something else entirely? If so, what?

I wrote a 3,000 word essay on it, but I'm still none the wiser.

And if you asked, me, I'd say there is always a beautiful new poem waiting to be found.

Still, I treasure my mother's old notebook and the favourites she returned to again and again.