So ‘The Next Big Thing’ is a chain-letter of sorts,
though hopefully one worth reading, were one writer asks another to answer
some questions on their current project. The questions are clearly designed for
prose-writing folk as everyone knows that the next big thing will most probably
not be a book of poetry! That said, I’m
very happy to take part and my thanks to Colin Bell for passing the baton to
me. Colin discussed his forthcoming novel Stephen
Dearsley’s Summer of Love, in his blog last week. It’s both very
enter-taining and insightful and has certainly piqued my interest in the novel,
which I really look forward to reading. You can find what Colin had to say
about it at:
Now for my answers!
1) What is the
working title of your next book?
The working title, for the last two years, has been On Light & Carbon. I should say that
my first collection had a different title until about a month before it went to
print, so things can change! In this case I’m pretty sure this title is a good
summary of the concerns of the collection and will be on the cover.
2) Where did the idea
come from for the book?
In a way, by finishing my first collection, which had
roughly taken fifteen years to write due to some missteps and misadventures
along the way. I recognised, once it was completed, that I had been locked into
the sensibility of that book since my late twenties, so I was certain that my
next collection would be different, both in terms of imagery and tone. I
started this book as I turned forty and naturally that had a bearing. One thing
I really like in poetry is the power of the concrete and lucid image. In the
new book I employ this strategy again, though I hope the new poems are a little
less lyrical and have a more philosophical edge. My first collection drew quite
heavily from science – particularly from the natural world with a number of poems
about insects, for example – alongside more personal material. While this book
does something broadly similar, this time I've tried to push deeper into the
science (and bring the reader with me, hopefully) exploring the physics of
light, in its many wondrous guises, as well as the carbon of the title: the
basis for all life. Really, what I’m
trying to do is connect science to life in some way – and vice versa. It’s also
about the role of art and the artist in all this.
3) What genre does
your book fall under?
We don’t tend to talk of poetry in terms of genre, though
that’s not to say that there aren’t very different traditions and schools
within poetry. I hope my work falls somewhere between the metaphysical and the
lyrical.
4) What actors would
you choose to play the part of the characters in the movie rendition?
Well, this is a tricky one for poetry, isn’t it! It’s almost
like asking who I would I like to see play myself! That said, there are a
number of portraits in the collection. I’m most proud of the one about the 11th
Century (in what we call now the Common Era) Islamic scientist Ibn al-Haytham, popularly
known as Alhazen, who wrote his masterwork on optics while under house-arrest. In
real terms, he was the first person to employ the scientific method. And all
this happened six centuries before Newton, I should point out. I’d love to see
that story told more fully. I’d cast the brilliant actor Saïd Taghmaoui (first
seen in La Haine) to play Alhazen.
But to twist the question into a more meaningful one: who would I like to read
the audio book? John Hurt or Ralph Fiennes would do very nicely!
5) What is a one-line
synopsis of your book?
To try to show the deepest aspect of our humanity and
curiosity against the canvas and backdrop that science has provided us with.
6) Will your book be
self-published or represented by an agent?
Neither. An agent who took on a poet would have to be one
who had taken a vow of poverty. In my experience they are not the kind of
people attracted to that particular business. Then again, the absence of agents
is perhaps what keeps poetry poor and pure. The book will be published by Ward
Wood Publishing (without a go-between) in September 2013.
7) How long did it
take you to write a first draft of the manuscript?
Well, I feel I’m nearly there, but a book isn’t finished
till it goes to the printer. The book was written in three distinct phases so I
could say I had a first draft after about a year, but so much has been cut and
added since then it doesn’t seem like a meaningful answer. To get to the point of
having what I’d call a good ‘working draft’ has taken about two and half years.
By my standards that’s been very quick! Partly this has been down to employing
a new approach to writing poetry. I tried (though didn’t always conform) to the
idea of writing a decent draft of a poem in one day. This seemed to help keep
the general intent behind a piece in a clearer focus, as well as leaving room
for unexpected shifts of perspective. That said, writing this way later leads
to lots of finessing and rewriting and there is one very long piece based
around archaeological artefacts that took months to write... and then more
months to revise!
8) What other books
would you compare this story to within your genre?
I’m not sure. There are a number of poets who are scientists
or have a background in science. I really admire the work of undoubtedly the most
famous of these in Miroslav Holub, though I think I write about science in a
very different way, and from a very different tradition. Perhaps a bigger influence would be the work of the Irish poet
Thomas Kinsella – particularly his poetry from the early sixties to the mid-seventies. I hope, in
some way, that I have emulated the movement between abstract
thought to iron-cast images that you find in his collections such as
Downstream and Nightwalker &
other poems. I’ve always loved his work, though its presence is felt more
in this collection than my first. Having said that, I’d be loathe to even suggest
I’m in the same league as the great man.
9) Who or what
inspired you to write this book?
Partly it was the tenor of the debate around science and
religion of recent years. It seems to me that we are creeping towards a notion
that science is the only form of reliable knowledge, with Stephen Hawking stating recently that “science has made philosophy
redundant”. I think this is a far more complex and interesting question than such
statements suggest, so I wanted to explore the different ways we comprehend the world and put them together to
create a bigger picture of ourselves – whether it be through science, art, myth
or personal experience.
10) What else about
the book might pique the reader’s interest?
Well, you will encounter such figures as August Kekulé who is said to have discovered the structure of benzene (the base of all organic life, not just petroleum) in a dream. Then there is the curious figure of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch merchant
draper who was one of the key pioneers
of the optical microscope. The fact he was a draper isn’t incidental as they were one of the first trades to exploit lenses, here using them to examine the quality of stitching in fabric. Having realised that using two of these
lenses would massively increase magnification, van Leeuwenhoek used his new instrument to first peer
into water, naturally enough. So excited was he by what he’d seen, he then
looked at his own urine and excrement. Never has a trip to the privy been so giddily
anticipated, I’ll wager!
Having done my best to convince you to check out my
collection when it appears, I’m delighted to introduce two fine writers who I
have chosen to tag and who will post next Wednesday about their latest work. They
are the poet Nessa O’Mahony and fictioner Valerie Sirr. Here’s a little more
information about them both.
Nessa O’Mahony was born and lives in Dublin. Her poetry has
appeared in a number of Irish, UK, and North American periodicals, has been
translated into several European languages. She won the National Women’s Poetry
Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and
Hennessy Literature Awards. Her second poetry collection, Trapping a
Ghost, was published by bluechrome publishing in 2005. A verse
novel, In Sight of Home, was published
by Salmon Poetry in May 2009. She was awarded an Irish Arts Council literature
bursary in 2004. She completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the
University of Wales, Bangor, in 2007. She was also artist in residence at the
John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at University College Dublin and Assistant
Editor of UK literary journal Orbis.
http://nessaomahony.blogspot.ie/
http://nessaomahony.blogspot.ie/
Valerie
Sirr has published short fiction and flash fiction in Ireland, UK, US,
Australia and Asia. Publications include The
Irish Times, The Sunday Tribune, The New Writer, The Stinging Fly. Some
poems are forthcoming in anthologies from Revival Press (Ireland) and Poetry
Lostock (UK). Awards include 2007 Hennessy New Irish Writer Award, two Arts
Council of Ireland bursaries and other national and international literature
prizes, most recently a flash fiction award (2011) from The New Writer Magazine (UK), judged by British poet and writer
Catherine Smith. She holds an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College,
Dublin. She teaches creative writing and blogs on writing at: www.valeriesirr.wordpress.com. She hopes to publish her short story collection soon.
