'It’s important to me to bring this book home:' Derry poet Mícheál McCann launches 'Devotion'

Can you tell us about yourself?

I’m a poet originally from Derry, and live in Belfast with my partner and an improbably large black cat. I lived in South Belfast for a long time but have just moved to North Belfast, just by the Waterworks where Anna Burns’ Milkman begins. I left Derry at eighteen to study English at Queen’s University Belfast, but don’t feel like I left Derry entirely because (as most Derry emigrés do, I imagine) I converse with my mother daily via telephone. So my accent is still there. I’ve been writing seriously since my twenties, and I’m very fortunate to be launching a book of poems with Gallery Press, Ireland’s most prestigious poetry publisher. And more, I’m really happy to be bringing it to an event in Derry this month.

When and why did you start writing poetry?

I was one of those boringly precocious children that had a sense of where I wanted to go from a very young age. My mother recounts me wanting to read billboards from the age of three. What a brat! When I started reading poetry seriously as a teenager, I was compelled by how they held and withheld meaning, and for a young gay person in Derry who didn’t feel like he could state explicitly how he felt, poetry posed a vessel where I could encase what I was thinking or feeling, and it be a safe thing. The rest is history really. I keep doing it because it’s the way I see things now. Poems are these little mechanisms that contain time, how you felt about something at a certain time, an image of a sibling or a relationship or a tree that isn’t there anymore. Schools teach poetry so badly, there’s no mechanised way of reading or writing it. I think poetry is our greatest resource towards a history of human emotion, and I frankly feel privileged to contribute the tiniest little stitch on a very legendary bardic tradition in this country.

What inspires you and what are the subjects and issues you like to write about?

I don’t have a grand intention or narrative or directive behind what I write about. Simply, I write about what I’m interested in. What catches my eye might be totally inane to you. Poetry’s trick is to offer a poet’s way of seeing something to a reader, and then they might see something slightly differently, even if it’s just during the course of reading. I write about love poems a lot, being a gay Irish man nowadays, but also I write about animals (I am devoted to cats!), the Irish landscape, religious thought, swimming, food, and so on.

Can you tell me about your new book of poems and why you have decided to launch it?

Devotion, published by The Gallery Press in the Republic, is my first full collection of poems. I’d written smaller pamphlets of poems in 2020 and 2022, but this is a full-throated piece of work. It’s a book of poems that looks at the way we devote ourselves to different things, be that animals, romantic love, books, parents, children, and how life is only really bearable if you devote an aspect of your attention to something beyond yourself. There’s lots of monks and cats and love poems throughout, but the book, in part, is about devoting yourself to staying alive too. I’m launching it in Derry on 22nd May at Little Acorns Bookstore, mainly because poems are designed to communicated in some way, be that to a reader or a listener, so it’s a bit of a necessity!

Derry has a rich history, both historical and contemporary, of poets and writers, from Paul Wilkins to Colette Bryce to Emily Cooper, and it’s important to me to bring this book home, as it were. Jenni Doherty at Little Acorns Bookstore is such an amazing force in the book world in Derry, and we’re the richer for her. I’ll be launching the book with award-winning poet Stephen Sexton, and I’m really looking forward to it.

You have rewritten Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire - can you tell me about that please?

The Keen for Art O’Leary is probably one of the most famous Irish-language poems. It wasn’t written down by the keener (in the eighteen century in Macroom, County Cork), Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, but was recorded by other keening women, so ferocious and radical was the force of her keen. Her husband, Art O’Leary, was killed by British Forces for owning a horse that cost more than £5, and he was a bit of a braggadocio too. Her Caoineadh is full of descriptions of how much she fancied him, how impressive and charming he was. I was going through a very tragic death in my own family, and was hoaking around for poems that spoke to that, and then I found this poem. My partner shares an initial with Art, so I found myself compelled by this eighteen-century woman’s voice, and before I knew it I was writing a re-telling of this lament, where the lament became part love poem, part elegy. It’s also important to note that there isn’t any sense of queerness in Irish literary tradition, so I’ve superimposed something into a tradition I’m writing into, both elevating my own work, and bringing this old poem into the present in a totally new way. Ní Chonaill’s Keen for Art O’Leary is an extraordinary poem, and lots of poets have written translations of it. Check out Vona Groarke’s, it’s the best I think.