As Far as Turn Back

What an unexpected ‘turn for the books’, I’m tempted to say, to discover last week that my poem ‘As Far as Turn Back’ had, er, turned up on the Leaving Certificate Honours English paper as the ‘unseen’ poem. Unexpected and, in a sense, fitting.

In so many ways for me, the poem was ‘unseen’ from the get-go. For a start, it was never something that was written down, at least not until it was already pretty much complete. Like almost all of the poems in my collection ‘Hedge School’ which was published in late 2024, ‘As Far as Turn Back’ wasn’t ‘written’ in the usual sense (words put down on paper or on a computer screen) but ‘dictated’ to my iPhone Voice Memos app while I was out walking with my dog.

Over the period of Covid, and since, I’ve made extra efforts to get out more, to stay moving, not to become desk-bound and desk-bored, to encounter poetry not just on bookshelves but ‘on the hoof’, to be in the middle of it when I’m trying to capture it, in short to be more like a photographer or videographer rather than like William Wordsworth for whom poetry was “emotion recollected in tranquility”– i.e., the thing experienced, thought about and only afterwards described. I wanted to see what happened when you closed the gap between experience and description.

At a stage in the history of European painting (early to mid 19th century), the painters too seemed to have this same sense of ‘hang on,what are we at? It’s lovely outside. Let’s get out of here!’ And so was born the school of painting known as en plein air or out-of-doors. For the painters, this re-location to the shore of the local duck pond or coastline or hill-top could be quite a production: for a start they might need someone to help carry not only the easel and brushes and paints, but also a chair or two or three, a picnic hamper (glasses, bottles of vino, some nice bread and meat), oh and at least one good parasol — after all, what self-respecting artists wants to end up with a suntan that makes him look like a common agricultural worker fresh in from the fields! (Joke, OK, but you get the point.)

In my case, all I needed was my phone which I already had with me. In fact, over the last few years I also started to make short poetry films, again using only my phone (one hand restraining the energetic mutt, the other left free to record). At first I was making films of existing poems, but before long I was also making new poems (words and images) during the actual process of walking.

‘As Far as Turn Back’ is one of those poems (and will likely shortly be a film too, when I get around to it), and one that reflects on the act of walking itself, on the process of going out without a clear agenda or destination in mind. One of the first short poems/films I made during lockdown is about walking up over Muck Rock in Howth (again with the dog) and, having done so day after day, experiencing the uncanny feeling of meeting another version of myself and my dog coming up to meet me from the other side. ‘As Far as Turn Back’ is another poem about the circular nature of walking, but remembers too a phrase of my father’s which it has taken me almost 50 years (25 since his death) to understand the significance of.

Walking seems to me a fantastic way to prompt not just physical well-being but new pieces of writing: it gives the eye something to look at, the senses something to engage with, the mind a rhythm and a sense of, literally, forward motion — essential to almost all forms of storytelling and narrative. And, when it works well, the poems and other pieces of writing it results in have the attraction of putting the ‘writer’ and ‘reader’ in exactly the same place at the same time, of bringing them almost side-by-side in the ‘moment of creation’ itself. And that is, surely, one of the aims of any piece of writing worth its (sweat and) salt.