Project Description
‘The Poetry and Processing of Anger’
By
Sam Burnside
unpublished
Isn’t there something pathetically pitiful when any man decides to interrupt the eternal plan of God and end a human life completely out of season?1
Fr John McCullagh, BBC Radio Ulster
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
Robert Frost
What legitimatisation does one need, in order to feel anger about many of the things done in Northern Ireland during the past thirty years? Why does one feel disposed to rejecting, or keeping silent about, feelings of anger, as I certainly do? In my poem ‘The Grey Eye’ the unremitting violence is seen as allied to a potent mix of history and mythology. The poem combines use of traditional form that locks it in to Irish history and culture, with contemporary feelings of threat of violence from an unnamed source, thus avoiding a direct reference to any actors in the Ulster drama:
Out beyond Malin More
Like spun lightning
Threading the waves:
Six herrings
Feast of Salmon
Six salmon
Feast of Seal
Six Seal
Feast of whale
Whale
Feast of the great beast of the entire world. 2The poem then moves to presenting a ‘mute’ anger:
As the day opens
Bang your spoon upon the plate
From Larne and from Portaferry we have watched the sun rise
The sky, and the water beneath, transformed daily
The horizon where they met, parting to spew the birth-spray
Of every rich colour known to man, or nature
And as dusk falls, blindly as any shy lover
Bang your spoon upon the plate:
From Malin Head to the harbour at Mullaghmore
We have watched the sun set
The sky, and the water beneath, changed
The horizon where they marry, signalling a mute celebration
Of every shade of crimson; now all turns black
Brought into a dark presence behind the sun’s going.
Bang your spoon how you will, the plate
is empty.
Frogs are sentinels
they have two lives
they live on land and in water.Like a cold air on bare skin
the meeting of his eye and your eye
as he concludes his business, with you.Blowing hot and cold, no words come,
I find.What I do is
I send a penny, two pennies
by way of a thought.
I know that, somewhere, beyond the aegis of silence,
some flesh-and-bone hand
is tumbling someone off the face of the earth,
sending them falling into a spanned eternity,
down into the acidic liquidity of memory.Mark and tally
all those who are sent, tongue-tied,
to lie mouth-stitched, inside another’s skull
shape melting, in there, where
there is no clock, no calendar, no wall to scratch on.conjure the iris; then, pupil to expanding pupil; then,
there, the last retina to hold you, stripped down, like that
so close the two breaths commingle
inhalation and exhalation, coupling.3
Is a shared vision possible? In a situation of competing choices, is the necessary compromise possible? Answering these questions may bring us back to where some of the themes to emerge in this discussion come together: to place and identity; anger and reticence. An answer may be that, in real politics, or within politics in the real world, something exists that actually prevents us from achieving, as a society, the condition that the Verbal Arts Centre stands for.
I am aware that these questions merely bring us to the starting point: I believe that the nature of our future is limited only by our imaginations. One key question has been: are there differences between Catholic and Protestant imaginations? Instinctively I feel that there are not, and cannot be, at root. Yet, we are all too ready to give ourselves up to our perceived inheritances: we are too prone to pledge ourselves to loyalties already established for us. In part, this account has been about my finding my own way, through my own movement and not through a sense of mission, to express myself through writing. By extension, it is also about my attempting to bring that possibility to the foreground in community development and adult education ambiences, so that others might also find their voices.
It is customary at this point in such a discussion to attempt a summing up, to gather together the threads and to provide, if only for the immediate reader and for the moment, a sense of completion. In one sense the Verbal Arts Centre stands as a completed project for it manifests in real terms an attempt to respond to many of the issues facing our society. However, it is in essence a fragile thing and cannot on its own cope with the babel of voices that surround its walls.
I find difficulty with the notion of completion, both personally and in relation to the cultural issues that I am responding to. If completion is to be found it may emerge, to return to Hewitt’s solution, as a variety of cultural regionalism; as an acceptance of the ‘Ulster thing’; that is, as an acceptance of our ability as people who share a place, a landscape and a vocabulary to build on that and to share trust and understanding and to develop an agreed vision. Such an agreed place has to engender a sense of belonging and provide succour to a multiplicity of homes.
In my poetry, the interplay between my public and private voice takes place against a social and cultural background where political violence has stood as an obstruction to what I envision as evolutionary linkages between the past, present and future. Northern Ireland has emerged as a place where the individual’s rights to identity are restricted for his ability to find his own voice is restricted. The process of working with the raw material of human experience (feelings labelled by words) is not an attempt to create an ethic by which we can live. Literature, it seems to me, is one way of creating a kind of communication that, of its nature, composes and articulates messages that say ‘this is what it feels like to be me’ and that invites a response along the lines of ‘can you, or will you, empathise with me, as I live through these feelings?’
In times of threat, danger or grief we turn instinctively to what we know; we travel within existing ways of knowing; we avoid the potential crossing points; we rest on habit; we resist the unknown and turn our eyes away from new horizons. If myth objectifies our profound but often indefinable instincts and feelings about gods, beings or things greater than us and beyond the grasp of our immediate senses, then art and poetry may be said, in turn, to objectify our sense of what lies behind our myths. A natural response to events and actions that strongly offend our human sense of self, of worth, of justice, is anger. Yet, anger, unspoken, can develop and gain strength, as Blake knew:
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.4
‘Telling one’s anger’ is another way of dealing with it through the creative making of art, a way of positively recognising and dealing with a real experience.
An essential or inescapable (negative) signal of the absence of life is silence. During the period of thirty years of political and related violence I have looked at very many television images of fallen bodies, lying huddled or crumpled, silent, on Ulster streets and country roads. Their image, as was intended, no doubt, speaks a message, but the articulation is not theirs, their lips have been sealed. Although embedded in memory, there is a blot on our landscape that our instinct will want to wash away, but cannot; in the meantime, as Shakespeare put it ‘no bird sings’5. In my memory, all of those images lie silent, huddled in narrow urban streets or in the far distance of narrow border roadways. In my poetic memory sits a red wheelbarrow;6 it has remained there for years, mute but powerful and constant.
One of my favourite poems is ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ by William Carlos Williams. It is a piece of writing that is characterised by a sense of reticent directness but one that nevertheless communicates the freshness and vitality of the aliveness of the world perceived, caught and made present. Williams said that:
…the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things, which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose.7
TE Hulme, like Williams, an imagist, believed and wrote, and I think rightly, that ‘there is a kind of gossamer web, woven between … real things … we get the curious phenomena of men explaining themselves by means of the gossamer web … language becomes a disease…’8. He believed also, that the writer should always remember that he is ‘mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas’.9 This gets to the heart of poetry’s value which has to do with the nature of the relationship between the viewer and the viewed and, ultimately, between the poem and the reader/listener. The ‘red wheelbarrow’ as seen and given to us by the Williams, is not a symbol of something else ¬ it is itself. In this sense
So, in order to convey my sense of the reality of killings and the resulting silence, and in order to assert that they must not be forgotten, I allude to that imagist poem in this extract from ‘Markings’. The attempt is to draw out the contrast between death and aliveness, to avoid the ‘gossamer web’ of language and to attempt to see freshly, that is clearly, the reality that the viewing of so many television and newspaper images had made, almost, a thing without real meaning:
so much dependedona black binlinerthe humped plasticglazedwith purerain water
as is the black
tarmacadamthe blackthorn
hedge.10
The rainwater provides, in addition to a sense of life, an ablution, a washing away. There is a tension between the desire not to forget (which is different from remembering) and the desire or instinct to seek renewal, to wash away the past.
The townland of Ballyshaskey,11 just outside Derry is a place apart – it is atypical and unlike many of the roads that have played host to murder or to bodies in black bin-liners and is thus a piece of land not requiring to be cleansed.12 It is uncontaminated by our particular history ¬ having been left untouched and forgotten during the Plantation of Ulster – indeed, it is a place characterised by joy and natural play of the crows and by its potential as a bridge between two cultures. Yet, in the world depicted by the majority of my body the seed germ of history, with its crop of politics and violence, lies beneath the surface of my awareness, as a matter of course. For example, in ‘Chicken, Chicken’, a short story about the natural world published by David Marcus in New Irish Writing in 1977, the narrative concerns a chicken who smashed her own eggs as soon as she laid them.
…the farmer’s wife came down to the orchard. It was a heavy summer’s afternoon, still and humid. She came looking for peace and quiet. She was restless; a kind of wildness had taken her over and she felt the desire to roam free of the house. She heard the laying cackle of a hen, and later, spotting the chicken coming out of the nettle patch, she unthinkingly wandered over to look for the egg she knew would be there.
A great shimmering mess of gummy orange yolk, a litter of smashed shells met her blank gaze; a battleground of crazy tanks, their innards gutted open, sagging entrails creeping out and around, shocked the woman.
She sat down on a stone and stared. Then she began to cry. The mess was so horrible: like death, she thought, so final, so irreparable.
The story ends:
…and the farmer, suspecting infanticide, said she was a useless hen, eating food and producing nothing. The following Sunday he and his wife ate chicken soup, and later, sitting beside the fire, they pulled in childish fun, a wishing bone, each desiring surprises for the other.13
This short story explores violence: it speaks of the corrosive, invasive and cancerous nature of violence and of how acceptance of it creeps in, under the level of conscious awareness. The unlikely figure of a chicken engaging in a physical and destructive attack upon her own freshly laid egg, presented in a richly fertile world of the farmhouse garden, is offset by the consequences of that act. One piece of violence begets another. This story was published in 1977, just a few years after the start of the Troubles. Twenty-five years later, the Northern Irish society in which the story was set is characterised by this headline in a national newspaper: ‘Kneecapped by His Father’s Own Thugs: the Brutality of Belfast Visits “Mad Pup” Adair.’14
‘When a boy’s father is known as Mad Dog, has been in the thick of Belfast violence for more than a decade and survives numerous assassination attempts, the offspring has little chance of a normal upbringing. So it has proved for Jonathan Adair who, at the age of 17, has just been kneecapped in both legs by his father’s own paramilitary organisation. It is a reminder of just how brutal are the facts of Belfast backstreet life.’ The article goes on to make the point that the incident stands as an example of the ‘extreme effect three decades of troubles can have on a family’.
Since 1996 I have been engaged in a form of collaborative partnership with a visual artist, Leslie Nicholl. Initially, our interest was a technical one and lay in exploring the challenge presented by bringing image and text together in equal partnership. We were concerned that the text should not be a comment on the image nor the image an illustration of the text. These collaborations have found expression in a number of exhibitions:15
In this we have paid attention to the placing of the Northern Irish experience within a European context and have done so by addressing issues and not just ideologies. The Grey Eye exhibition brought together poetic text, free-standing sculptural forms and paintings, together with the spoken word (recorded and played in the gallery space).
The Orchard Gallery in Derry and the Old Museum Gallery in Belfast mounted the exhibition – its physical movement from Derry to Belfast following the journey depicted in this poem:
And all around the little hills of Derry
Lights dim and go off, go off. Some are merry.
And all about the meetinghouses echo
Eerily, the dire whispers, Take to the Road.And out on the cutting sea, a lone boat to be tossed
(With only an anchor, with no radio) soon to be lost.16
The poem articulates a very different perception and feeling to that expressed in the long poem, ‘The Cathedral’. In it:
Spreading out, a dozen here, a dozen there,
The land bestowed her favours on them
For they were ardent in their husband ship of the valleys, and the hills
Exciting the meadows and the rich rising ground to such fecundity
As this land had not known, seducing cold rivers
Into mill races, easing back the forests, securing
The range and extent of all influence.17
‘The Cathedral’ alludes to the inward flow of people into Ulster (moving east to west, for example, during the early seventeenth century Plantation of Ulster, and probably the largest such plantation to have taken place in Europe). ‘The Grey Eye’, on the other hand, depicts an imaginary journey across the north of Ireland; this time the journey is from west to east. In the exhibition and poetry text there are indications that we are dealing with the plantation in retreat ¬ and, by implication, to the population movements and re-location of populations that have been an inherent part of the history and common experience of the last thirty years in Northern Ireland.18
At the time of writing ¬ situation is always fluid ¬ something like seventy million people can be designated as being refugees – a great mass of human beings who are rootless and in flight. As we move into the twentieth-first century, these displacements must stand as painful and stark images of what is a wider and chronic human condition. The poem The Grey Eye refers to St Columba leaving of Derry, and Ireland: it is said that he looked back with tears in his eyes. The poem unfolds around a community of travellers, making an eastward journey across the old province of Ulster. In some ways this is a mirror image of the westward journey across the northern part of the island that occurred three centuries ago, but with reference that firmly roots the text’s concerns within the context of European culture, history and experience. In addition, there is embedded within the poem something of the germ of insecurity that I believe lives within the Planter/Protestant community, and that results in a feeling of ‘insecurity of tenure’19 as James Simmons has experienced it.
There is a clear trajectory of concern in the writing that grew out of the collaborative process: from the 1996 exploration of the repercussions of small and large population movements undertaken against the background of fluid and volatile political events in Northern Ireland and central Europe to the 1998 work that culminated in Gatekeepers. The collaboration and the concerns that emerged have progressed to an exploration of the nature of the power that an individual (or ethnic or other group) can at times acquire, and the cultural and other legacies that can be destroyed as a result. During the research and preparation for this, Nicholl visited Auschwitz. Here, the ‘gatekeepers’ whose ghosts he sought to discover were desk-bound people, uniformed clerks and people managers. (The linking of the day-to-day, the mundane and ordinary into global affairs has been one of the central features to emerge from these exhibitions.) The process has been useful: it has enabled me to raise my eyes beyond the close horizons of my experience in Northern Ireland and to explore my emotions, beliefs and identity in the context of a larger world.
Three years after Gatekeepers I took up what became the most challenging issue to grow out of the collaborations. This combined memories of rural childhood in Co. Antrim, images of the concentration camps and an awareness that underneath the ordinary and human there can lie an underworld that is often comprised of confusion and despair, if we seek to find it.
The pages of my diary are uncut, my ghosts imprisoned therein; my book of days is a flux of matter, fenced in by the rule of calendar.20
The resulting exhibition, Closely Observed Trains was put on at the Engine Room Gallery in Belfast from 3 – 25 August, 2001. By coincidence it was shown immediately after a somewhat controversial exhibition of work created by the Loyalist Michael Stone. Helen Lewis, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Stutthof death camps and of a harrowing death march, launched Closely Observed Trains.
In anticipation of Holocaust Memorial Day, the Linen Hall Library decided to mount an appropriate exhibition to coincide with the date, the 27 January 2003. The library’s interests and those of the writer and artist coincided at this point. The concerns of the two artists lie in an exploration of memory and its relation to identity, and these lie at the core of the collaboration and the resultant work. A programme note says:
In this further collaboration, Burnside and Nicholl explore large and abstract notions concerning history, memory, truth and freedom but do so with images and words that are rooted in the actuality of daily life.
At the core of this work is a concern with the human: the artist and writer are mindful of the dichotomy intrinsic to each human being – vulnerable yet strong, time bound yet eternal, breakable yet indestructible, capable both of good and of evil and available always to experiences of shame and of pride.21
Just as Nicholl had visited Poland in 1998, I had visited Prague in the early part of 2002; my abiding memory is of music – music in the streets, in churches and in concert halls. Prague, home of Kafka was the place where a writer rose to be president. The human history in which the city is steeped is one of turmoil (bullet holes can still be seen in walls) but the city’s architecture, the most visible of the expressive human arts, triumphs over it. By contrast, my most abiding memory of Geneva, supposed home of freedom, was of seeing a handcuffed prisoner resting on his knees on the pavement while a policeman rested against his police car. The world is multifarious and richly mysterious and never past confounding our expectations or our pre-conceptions. We can find diversity and complexity, even in those whom we might sometimes regard as doers of evil. In ‘The Guard’ I take this up:
He checks that all is secure and goes home
he washes, he eats, he smokes in the garden,
he goes to bed, settling between fresh sheets
he loves their crispness; he loves their coolness,
he reads, he listens to radio music.
He sleeps. He dreams, for he cannot do other.
He dreams, always, of moonscapes set out in monochrome,
fixed in rising sun or in setting sun,
it is all the same; the long-thrown shadows
of craters, enact the forms, the contours,
of scattered human skulls, textured, pitted, dry,
grey, buried under such weights of silences.
And, he is not present; and, yet, he is always present.
Turning again in his damp bed, he protests:
Why? Why cannot I dream of well-grazed fields?
with an early sun seducing the dew
into a hazy blanket, and it not presenting evidence
of the handiwork of those men and women who lived,
who ploughed fields, hooked postholes, laid foundations?
Eyelids lowered, he answers, without use of words
All such legacies will, shall, be free, for
in some place beyond thought or speech he knows
such will not, shall not, yield to lock or to key.22
This work is influenced by concerns with the local and the universal in human experience. The issue of making a work that touches on such a major issue as the holocaust and the experiences of Auschwitz is one that is demanding and challenging, requiring a commitment to consider the actuality of human behaviour and to the deployment of tact in dealing with a subject that involves the pain and suffering of others. One vital dimension that is under threat is that of the person and I believe that the assertion of self (or of the selfhood of others, if that is possible) is one way to combat that ever-present threat. ‘I am’, seeks to take account of the frailty of the self:
I am
We existed.
We are here.
That must be marked.We cherish the caught moment:
light on grass,
shadow on water,
a child’s shoe,
a delph teapot,
a blue and white dish,
a wooden bowl,
its rim bruised,
bruise upon bruise,
as if thumb-printed
by all those women
who were here, also.I am the brown of ripe chestnuts.
I am the brown earth of potato drills
freshly run-up and still damp,
or baked by the sun and turned hard and gritty.
I am the green leaf of potato foliage.
I am the green of cooking apples,
just off the tree.
I am the beat of the drum;
I am the beat of my heart;
I am the measure of waves beating upon continents.
I am the brown of newly cut turf –
and of turf cut and weathered by wind and rain.
I am wet and smooth; I am dry and scabrous.
I am the green, damp heart of fresh cow dung.
I am the deep brown pool of a cow’s eye,
deeper, deeper than human time.
I am both planter and planted.23
The stated purpose of the exhibition was to stimulate thinking, feeling and empathy among members of the audience. It had the following aims: to offer users of the public space that constitutes the library an opportunity to experience poetry as public text and as something they can take away and explore in private; to provide onlookers with an opportunity to experience and to consider visual image and poetic text as complementary but different ways of investigating response to experience; and, to create a dynamic between text and image in the experience of the onlooker
This work, as combined text and image, aspires to extend beyond individual concerns: the placing of such an exhibition in a library, with the relationship between totalitarian states, books, censorship and freedom of expression being an obvious issue to arise. The fact that the Linen Hall Library a symbol of radical thought in Ireland was itself subject to a bomb attack, while not being directly addressed, was certainly in my mind when the work was being planned. To this extent, the placing of a body of text that is concerned with questions of freedom is imbued with other significances and ones that result from the words being read in a particular context.
This collection of twenty-one poems stands parallel to a series of paintings; both were created with awareness of the place (the Linen Hall Library, with its very particular set of values and a unique place in our history) and the date around which the paintings are created.
Benedict Kiely has described writing as a form of pastiche: ‘You pick a bit from here and a bit from there’. I believe this is true, as far as it goes:
…a scattering of this and that, bridling the chaos of all small things, marks, signs, sounds, signals half apprehended in passing, indifferent in themselves as to whether meaning was taken or not.24
In picking the bits that became Proxopera, Kiely brought to bear a considerable anger, anger directed towards the reality made and represented by those Irish people whose acts of violence maimed and killed. It is probably impossible to have lived through the thirty years of violence and to have experienced the persistent litany of news and to have breathed the air in which it has occurred, without feelings of despair, confusion and anger.
My strong feeling is that, as someone who attempts to make sense of the world and of experience by writing, my role or job is not to have a view on violence. In a sense, I feel too much a part of the complex and complicated reality that is Northern Irish society to have a right to engage in the pointing of fingers, making of comments or weeping of tears. What I can do is to stand, as it were, in my bare feet, feel the soil of my place and receive the trembling motion of people, place and history. This, of course, is dangerous, for the sands may be shifting:
Footless,
Moving out from Londonderry
Surveying
Up between Fanad and Insihowen
You find you can swim in the Swilly
Waist deep in sludge
Or clear water, deciding which
Is which, or what is
What, that is the real
Conundrum:
Big shadows on the sand
Could be those of geese coming
Or swans going, busy
While our marks melt away
Behind us,
As is by magic sucked… 25
The challenge is to perceive the resulting feelings, meanings or senses and to name them in the only language I have. I am a reporter of, a witness to, these experiences:
To what, yesterday was lawn, to surrendered orchard;
The final harvest having been boxed and seen off; the corn
Mown for the last time and well mourned, if passively so.26
The fecund optimism that lay behind the writing of The Cathedral has turned, after experiencing the continuation of so many attacks on small farmsteads dotted along the border, and the subsequent leave taking of the land, to a much darker view: ‘the final harvest having been boxed’. The chronology is important: The Cathedral was written, perhaps as the result of feeling that responses of despair caused by such attacks should be resisted (the poem was published in 1989) however, a year later, the sense that ‘Toad-grass and choking Ivy’ were laying claim to the ditched barnyard(s) has found a voice. Our apparent powerlessness to move out of the reach of an aggressive history of the kind that provides shackles made from myth and memories and all the things that shadow our imaginations finds expression here.
One of the things I can report on is anger, the ‘adversarial spirit’ as it is termed by Andrew Motion. The recognition and then the channelling of this response to circumstances beyond one’s immediate control through controlled expression is one constructive way of dealing with a situation that is ever present; the situation, oddly, has a face that is without feature or expression – this results in one feeling alienated and without power in the world.
Like Patrick Kavanagh, I live in a small parish but one that has many conduits to and from the wider world and it seems to me another way of dealing with life in Northern Ireland, or to take control of its impact is to understand its universal implications. In this way, the Gatekeepers exhibition (following on directly from The Grey Eye exhibition) moved to questions of the nature of identity and presence within a person’s own land. This is an issue with European dimensions, as well as being a deeply a local one, and both Leslie Nicholl and I were concerned to look at what the nature of an individual might consist of (my name and my place; my word and my tongue) and, then, to look at the key presence within a landscape of ‘the gatekeeper’ figure – someone who, in a privileged position in society (rightly or wrongly gained, but held as of right) who has the power to destroy the personal or cultural identity of others. The exhibition was mounted immediately following and in the same gallery as ‘The Hand of a Killer’ exhibition. The exhibition was the work of a convicted terrorist and I happened to meet the artist in the doorway as I entered. I recognised him from newspapers and television. The meeting, in its coincidence, brevity, directness and impact brought home to me something of the physicality and of the unpredictability of meetings and relationships between individuals in this society. In such meetings what is the nature of one’s immediate and longer term responses?
Anger can easily become self-reflected anger, for we must all accept some responsibility for how things are. I believe it was Aristotle who said that anyone can become angry being angry is easy, but to be angry with the appropriate person, persons or indeed ideology, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that, he implied, is not easy. The channelling of emotion’s energy into creative enterprise may be one way.
Bibliography
1. Fr John McCullagh, ‘Thought for the Day’, BBC Radio Ulster, quoted in John Dunlop, A Precarious Belonging, Presbyterians and the Conflict in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995), p. 123. (NB: the title, ‘A Precarious Belonging’ is taken from a poem by John Hewitt.)
2. ‘The Grey Eye’, The Grey Eye, op. cit.
3. Sam Burnside, ‘Gatekeepers’, Pages from a Book, op. cit.
4. William Blake, ‘A Poison Tree’, Blake The Complete Writings, Geoffrey Keynes, ed., (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p.218.
5. Sam Burnside, ‘Six Loughs’, Walking the Marches, op. cit., p. 9.
6. William Carlow Williams, ‘A Red Wheelbarrow’, The William Carlos Williams Reader, ML Rosenthal, ed., (London: McGibben and Kee Ltd. 1966), p. xviii.
7. William Carlos Williams, ‘Prologue’, Kora in Hell, op. cit., xix.
8. TE Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ in John Press, A Map of Modern English Verse, (Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 37.
9. Ibid., p. 36.
10. Sam Burnside, ‘Markings’, The Recorder; The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, op. cit., p. 36.
11. See Chapter IV.
12. Cf. John Wilson Foster’s discussion of the blighted land as theme and motif in Ulster writing in Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction, (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1974).
13. Sam Burnside, ‘Chicken, Chicken’, New Irish Writing, David Marcus, ed., Irish Press, Dublin, 9 July, 1977.
14. The Independent, 9 August 2002, p. 3.
15. Closely Observed Trains (Engine Room Gallery, Belfast, 2001); Gatekeepers (Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast, Writers Museum, Dublin; The Bridge Gallery, Dublin, 1998); The Grey Eye (Orchard Gallery, Derry/Londonderry; Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast, April and May, 1996). An initial collaboration appeared in Crazy Knot (Seacourt Print Workshop, Bangor, 1996), a limited edition publication of original prints and poems that accompanied an Arts Council of Northern Ireland Touring exhibition mounted in the same year. Markings, a ten-piece collection of poem and images, are on permanent public exhibition in the Millennium Theatre and Conference Centre, in Londonderry. NB The full text was published as Sam Burnside, ‘ Markings’, The Recorder; The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, op. cit., pp. 36-53
16. Sam Burnside, The Grey Eye, op. cit.
17. Sam Burnside, ‘The Nave’, The Cathedral, op. cit., p.6.
18. The poem, ‘The Grey Eye’ was part of a collaboration in which the three artists are, in a sense, journeymen bringing their crafts to bear on the experiences gained from an imaginary journey in a real place. Colin Corkey, the sculptor, used clay and other materials taken from various locations identified in the poem. He used these to create free-standing sculptural pieces the forms of which were inspired by ancient boundary markers as well as by the elongated form of the familiar standing stone. Words from the poem were incorporated into the sculptures and the painting by Leslie Nicholl.
19. John Brown, ‘James Simmons’, In the Chair, op. cit., p. 71.
20. Sam Burnside, ‘Markings’, op cit. p.1.
21. Sam Burnside, A Will to Remember, Background note, op. cit., p.32.
22. Ibid., p. 1.
23. Ibid., p. 12.
24. Sam Burnside, ‘Markings’, in Closely Observed Trains, (Belfast: Engine Room Gallery, 3-25 August, 2001).
25. Sam Burnside, ‘Going Walkabout on Water’ ‘News Letter Poems’, No. 16, Belfast News Letter, 4 February, 1991
26. Ibid.
