![]() ![]() The craft of poetry is, of course, a lifelong endeavor. I mean, I don't have a huge confidence in my talent as a fake poet.ĮNRIGHT. Did you ever say, I'm not going to have him write a line that good? He doesn't deserve it.ĮNRIGHT: It was really important that the lines be good enough. SIMON: Well, but let me put this very practically. But to make him as a poet - that took a lot of work. I knew his self-serving self-pity, as well as that feeling of reach and inspiration and freedom. They spent a lot of time figuring them out, so they might have knowledge of men that isn't returned because it's really in their interest to. Claire Keegan, the wonderful Irish writer, said in an interview recently that women are so attuned to male authority, as it were. I mean, Phil McDaragh walked into my head, and I know these guys. So how did you put yourself into the mind and skin of Phil McDaragh?ĮNRIGHT: Yeah. My bluebell, Protestant girl in the skirt she wore for Sundays. Through Angelica and firs, twice-scented meadow sweet, releasing coconut, almond, cardamom, some note beyond my heart's circumference. I'm going to read a poem that Phil wrote for his wife when they were courting because his poetry, as far as he was concerned, was his gift for her. SIMON: May I ask you to read one of Phil McDaragh's poems?ĮNRIGHT: Yeah. So she has a kind of evolved crush on this guy who treats her kind of sporadically badly and then less sporadically badly. Love was always helpless and infatuated and yearning and waiting. She embarks on a doomed love the way that love was always doomed in poetry. I am not really interested in those kind of simplicities. I mean, some people say on reading the book that she gets involved with a bad man because her grandfather was a bad man. Should she see some of those same signs in him?ĮNRIGHT: Well, yeah. SIMON: Nell is involved with a man when we meet her. She is determined to live a poetic, slightly self-absorbed kind of life. She is a little bit like her grandfather, Phil. She's that little toddler who's heading for the horizon in that way. And Nell is just one of those children that comes out completely and utterly themselves. And very practically, then, she decided she would have a child of her own and that she wouldn't involve any father, thank you very much, because they were not in any way, in her mind, reliable. So she made her life in a very practical sort of way. She kind of shut down and became the person who would tell other people to get over yourself. And she used all that kind of literal-minded, tough-minded, pragmatic, all those talents. ![]() So Carmel, who was 12 at the time, was a kind of very sensible, stolid sort of little girl. SIMON: And when we say sick, we just don't mean a cold or flu.ĮNRIGHT: No, no. He abandons the family when their mother gets sick. How does that shadow fall over their lives?ĮNRIGHT: Yeah, he walks out when Carmel is 12, and he leaves not in an anguished sort of way. SIMON: And help us understand Carmel, his daughter, and her daughter, Nell, who's just starting out as a writer herself. The poet is looking for something beautiful and the people around him are left with all - are bereft or left with all (laughter) the other stuff that he's escaping from, mostly himself, it has to be said. So those connections or those differences were at the heart of the book. And I was interested in how when we were so bereft, we were looking for something lyrical - I was looking for something lyrical and sweet and high. Poetry was what I reached for in times of difficulty. I had been reading Irish poetry during lockdowns in 2020. So it was extremely cheeky of me to go there at all. SIMON: How do you create a fictional but famous poet realizing that the Irish poet is, alas, a stereotype for a lot of people anyway?ĮNRIGHT: Well, there's always some truth in a cliche, and in this instance there's much beauty and honor in the Irish poetic tradition. And the Booker Prize-winning novelist joins us now from Dublin. It's at the heart of the novel "The Wren, The Wren" by Anne Enright. Now those women contend with that conflicted legacy of professional beauty and personal pain. They still live with the emotional rubble two generations later. The poet abandoned his family on the way to fame. Phil McDaragh is pure fiction, but he comes alive through poetry like, the wren, the wren was a panic of feathered air in my opening hand so fierce and light I did not feel the push of her ascent away from me. ![]() One such man is the famed Irish poet at the heart of a new novel. You can make a long list of men considered geniuses, writers, statesmen, scientists, artists who were also abusive husbands, neglectful fathers and utter boors. ![]()
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