OK RIGHT — POETRY & BELONGING

Here’s an interview I did for the Belfast Telegraph one of the main papers in my hometown: ‘Place is belonging and writing about place can be a search for belonging' (October 16, 2021). I slipped it in before life went pear shaped. The first poem in The Wear of my Face is not about pears for nothing. However, with floods and wars, other people’s lives are currently even more peary. 

This is what I was thinking at the time: ‘I sometimes think I write to find solid ground in a story of loss, migration, colonisation and class. For me, place is belonging and writing about place can be a search for belonging – an attempt to understand one’s own displacement or the displacement of others and what that must be like.’

PS OK so the photo was actually taken in Dublin (January this year) rather than Belfast.