I notice that I keep mentioning ‘themes’ on this blog as if anyone reading the posts here (or indeed I) knew what I was talking about. So I thought it might be interesting to try to write about the ideas I’ve been ruminating on over the last five years – the timespan of the writing of the poems that I hope will be included in Resurrection… .
This isn’t to say that the shortish ‘essays’ I’ll post here explain the poems, or (worse) that the poems were written to illustrate any kind of philosophical position. I’m not that smart any more, if ever I was.
But insofar as I’ve thought about poetry in the last half-decade (and for much of that period I’ve had grave doubts about whether there’s actually something called ‘poetry’ to think about) it must be the case that the ideas that have bothered me will somehow have informed the poems I appear to have written around the same time.
Feel free to argue…
The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen 
This has nothing to do with this book but we found your poem A protestant school on slugger o’toole and would like to get in contact with you. We are two freelance journalists from Sweden doing a story on the segregation in schools in Northern Ireland and would really appreciate it if you could tell us a little bit about it. We’re going to be in Belfast in a couple of weeks so please email me if this sounds interesting!
Natalija
Thank you for your interest, but you may be reading the poem too literally. It’s autobiographical and looks to a very specific historical period: it’s not a statement on the educational system, and I don’t think I’m any more qualified than the next person to make such a statement.
Good luck with the research, though.
Martin
Sent from my iPhone