Annemarie Ní Churreáin

Annemarie Ní Churreáin Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Kelly Sullivan annemarie ní churreáin is from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her collections include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021). She is a recipient of the Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award, a co-recipient of The Markievicz Award and a former literary fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany). Ní Churreáin is editor of issue 140 of Poetry Ireland Review and she is the new poetry editor of The Stinging Fly. ________ Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Kelly Sullivan communicated by email between April and August 2023. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. kelly sullivan: Do you remember when you first encountered Heaney’s poetry? annemarie ní churreáin: My first encounter with Heaney was through “Mid-Term Break” (Death of A Naturalist, 1966). I was a schoolgirl living at home with my family in northwest Donegal and my parents, who were also foster carers, had recently relinquished a young infant from their care. I remember that overnight the house fell into a deep, flowering quiet. I packed away the infant cot, the blankets, the bottle sterilizing equipment into the attic. It was not, of course, a death, but it was a deathly absence. What I recognized in Heaney’s poem was what it means to be a child among adults bewildered by grief. When I later sat with North in my hands I was not yet old enough to absorb the full impact of the poems, but I found myself every bit as moved by the solemnity of the body laid out in the bog as I had been by the solemnity of the deceased child laid out in the coffin. These were my first early lessons in language as ceremony. [End Page 209] sullivan: Were you actively working on your own poetry at that time? ní churreáin: I was not actively working on my first poetry collection until I undertook an M.Phil. in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin in 2009, but even as a child I’d been in the habit of tinkering with language. Gaeilge (Irish) is my first tongue, and living between it and English gave me an early instinct for the transformative nature of language. It also rooted in me the sense that language is of a place. I grew up in the 1980s, flanked on one side by the Atlantic Ocean and on the other by a troubled political border, so I was alert to what language under pressure sounds like. It was a landscape full of shadows and echoes, and it exposed me to the relationship between story and place. At the same time, the people I was raised among were mostly preoccupied with the ordinary, day-to-day challenges of trying to survive. My father cut turf, fished on trawlers, brought milk from house to house. My mother hosted Irish-language students and in the off-season months knit Aran jumpers to order. To this day I’m drawn to take whatever raw material I have at hand and to make out of it a thing by which I can survive. Poetry has always been an extension of the place I come from and its culture. sullivan: I’m fascinated by this idea of “language as ceremony” as one of your first responses to Heaney’s work. Do you think your sense of that concept changed or grew as you began writing your own poetry? ní churreáin: Let me backtrack and correct myself because it’s more accurate of me to say that North was among my first lessons in the English language as ceremony. That knowledge was already being acquired, if even only subconsciously, through my own native Gaeilge. I had a grandmother, Mary Thaidhg, who instilled in me a great belief in the oral tradition. She was full of folklore, cures, superstitions, and tall tales about her years in New York as a teenager. She also had a delicious talent for cursing. To curse is, often, to draw a thing closer to you; ironically, it is to pay a kind...