Session number 12, 06/12/2023

Posted on: 13 February 2024 by Paddy Brennan in Creative Writing group

Our final meeting of 2023 took place at the Belvedere on the 6th December. In this, the bleak midwinter, the inhospitable weather kept a number of our coterie at bay, but what we lacked in numbers we made up for in festive cheer – not to mention literary wit, depth and pathos!

First up to read was David Tierney with his poem, ‘Heron.’ From the outset, the rugged, onomatopoeic textures of David’s verse were apparent, with “escarpment,” “curved claws,” “cadence,” and “cracks,” all contributing to a cacophonic feast. This intense aural quality calls to mind Seamus Heaney’s noted predilection for “the spiky consonants of speech.” David’s poem moves fluidly from the personal to the local to the global, broaching the all-too topical subjects of microplastic pollution and sewage runoff in rivers, yet grounding these apocalyptic challenges within the incongruous setting of the speaker’s bedroom. For all the urgency of its subject matter, David’s vocabulary is careful and precise, with the grotesque image of a decomposing seagull acquiring a perverse kind of beauty when viewed through the speaker’s eyes. The final verse then gestures toward something altogether more intimate, suggesting untapped depths within this haunting, mercurial poem.

Next up was Saul Leslie who, prior to reading, shared with us some exciting news about that most elusive and sought-after thing for a writer – publication. Saul then read a further instalment of his novel, drolly named A Working Title I Want to Change. Based on a journal of his lived experiences working in a supermarket (whose name has been tactfully omitted in this account), Saul’s writing is jam-packed full of the kind of absurdity and dystopian overtones so unbelievable that they could only ever come from real-life. The Orwellian elements of Austerity-era Britian as depicted in Saul’s novel have been commented on during previous meet-ups, and they were present in abundance here, yet they were combined with a distinctly Kafkaesque sensibility. The supermarket’s dictionary of jargon terms represents the apogee of bureaucratic mismanagement, as rather than enlightening staff members, it only serves to heighten semantic confusion within the workplace, with plain English and corporate-speak each fighting for supremacy. Saul’s writing revels in the comedic possibilities of this confusion and is replete with razor-sharp wordplay, combining lowbrow and highbrow cultural touchstones (and even a faux-Latin coinage!) with a deft touch.

Last but not least, Holly Dempster-Edwards read a piece titled Blues and Reds. The prose here is deceptively simple, as the unnamed narrator gives an account of her day – teaching in the morning, a bus ride back into town in the afternoon and watching Wales play in the Six Nations in the evening – all expressed in a neutral yet precise register which calls to mind the writing of Sally Rooney. Holly’s close attention to the finer details of the world she evokes, from the chemical smell of nail polish to the overdressed pensioners on the bus, elevates what might otherwise seem banal into something lively and eclectic. Whilst the narrator is exhausted by her day of work, this careful observation testifies to the fact that she has not yet succumbed to world-weariness and remains intensely sensitive to the noisy bustle of life as it presents itself to her. So too, moments of poignancy and pathos are seen to rupture Holly’s neutral prose as, in one touching moment, the narrator wonders whether the children she teaches will remember her in forty years.

Our session concluded, we agreed to meet again on the 21^st February, allowing a generous break for fresh ideas to take root and flourish in the new year.