Acclaimed author publishes collection of latest poetry

21 June 2017

NIGHT Divers is a collection of poetry which suggests time and circumstance can cure most ills.

Olive Broderick’s latest work shifts from the East Coast of Australia and New Zealand to Downpatrick, which she has made home over the past decade.

A constant source of inspiration, the Downpatrick base has resulted in poems inspired by everything from the magnificent migrating Brent Geese, to the more earth-bound Kelly’s Hardware shop.

Originally from Youghal in County Cork, Olive travelled north to undertake the Creative Writing MA programme at Queen’s University, Belfast, settling in Down in 2003.

She has previously published Darkhaired (Templar Pamphlet, 2010), which was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Pamphlet Award and Hennessy XO Literary Award for Emerging Poetry. She is also one of Lagan Online’s 12NOW recommended up-and-coming writers to watch out for and recently received an Arts Council Northern Ireland ACES award.

Locally, she runs Poems on a Sunday Afternoon with Down Arts Centre and helps facilitate the Words for Castle Ward reading group.

The jumping off point for writing Night Divers was around the Millennium when Olive was travelling in Australia with her sisters. It was normal “back packery” stuff around the Whitsunday islands, but she remembers one frightening evening when some of the party went night diving.

“I stood there really, really terrified in their behalf,” she explains. “It was this really beautiful setting, calm waters, but you could see these really ominous shapes, and this massive bright moon and two little lights in the water.

“I can’t dive, and I was thinking this was the most terrifying thing — thinking what if they don’t come back? When they came back, of course, they were in such high good form.

“In this situation they were prepared and the likelihood of something going wrong was small. For me, it was a metaphor for living in a lot of ways — we go out prepared and many of our fears are completely unfounded.

“The underpinnings of the collection is that we walk the balance between fear and enjoyment in a lot of our lives.”

Night Divers is also inspired by the recession in pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, emigration, and some personal grief. It is overall a hopeful as opposed to a melancholy collection.

“It’s about coming back from a time of grief and upset and returning to a sense of expectation that life would be good,” she says. “I will always write from personal experience; I may not tell you a direct story but the underpinnings have arms and legs.

“I lost a couple of people to suicide, it was the heart of really bad recession, everybody was in a state of chaos.

“It’s about return to a sense of the steadfast, when you begin to allow yourself to make the next move to hope and optimism again. Like the water bringing you back up — stay quiet in the water and the buoyancy will begin to lift.

“I also made the decision that I didn’t want to publish work that wouldn’t be relevant to somebody else, there is the sense of a bridge to other people’s experience. That’s my hope, it’s not the individual instances themselves.”

She says it is also interesting to see many of her themes at play again in recent years.

“Suicide is an issue now that is so prevalent,” she adds. “Everything that is going on at the minute, whether it’s the current government situation or something else, it is written out person by person. “Poetry has that strength. It can drive down to those small places where the bigger things in the world are happening. We are all participating in this world.”

And if we want to make the world a better place, it seems we can take inspiration from the humble Brent Goose — around 25,000 of which leave their breeding grounds in east Canada to travel to Strangford Lough for the winter.

“My poem Wetlands is about the Brent Geese,” she says. “How can that little goose go on a journey so lengthy and stop once only? It is magnificent.

“What I take from them is that they are very dynamic and efficient. They really organise themselves, they take turns at being the squadron leader and no-one takes the full hit. They create this slipstream which offers its own momentum to the geese.

“They would have great difficulty on their own, but it is much much easier for them to fly in formation. If a goose looks like it is in trouble they will try to maintain it. Nature can be brutal enough but they will do all they can to keep that pattern. A lot of what we need is that kind of organisation.”

‘Hanging a framed print of Dance me to the end of love’, is another poem that was written after Olive’s move to Downpatrick.

“In its simplest terms it’s about DIY, which wouldn’t be my strongest area, it’s about me going to Kelly’s Hardware and buying a hammer. But the context of this is that there is this very, very small hint of permanence, of putting down roots.”

Underpinning the entire Night Divers collection is, Olive argues, a “sense of time or circumstance bringing you back to the surface”. She adds: “But without knowing this you could open this collection anywhere, they can stand on their own, every poem is its own world.”

Night Divers was launched last week at the Belfast Book Festival. Some books are available at Down Arts Centre and it is available to order from Templar for £10. For details visit: https://templarpoetry.com/products/night-divers

Hanging a framed print of ‘Dance me to the end of love’

I buy a hammer in the old-style hardware shop on Market Street.

The man behind the counter asks whether I want a claw hammer. I am prepared for the question. I tell him what I want is an ordinary hammer. He smiles, then produces exactly what I am looking for.

Hidden in my kitchen are the books I bought when I first moved into this rented apartment.

Why do I feel a sense of permanence when I check that the small pins are securely fastened to the wall? Still the picture looks so fragile there held in place only by its string.

For days after, I enter the room gently, hardly daring to breathe.

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