REVIEW: Why Aoife Lyall's HighlandLIT night was pure poetry
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At HighlandLIT’s April writer event, Aoife Lyall said she remembered the moment when someone had first introduced her as "Poet”.
“I had never called myself that with a capital P!” she said.
It was a subject she returned to in a night where she read poems from her published first collection Mother Nature, her second due out next year, and the third being written now – as well as sharing the illuminating account of what she called her Journey To Publication.
Aoife went on to quote the late Irish poet Eavan Boland who had said in her book A Journey With Two Maps – “First you are a poet, then you become one.”
Now Aoife, who is Irish but who lives with her family in Inverness where she previously worked as a teacher, is now writing full-time.
And there was no mistaking how important being a poet was to her, how blessed she felt to have the time to devote to it and how seriously she took the craft of the work, the mission to always improve and allow herself to be inspired in many different ways – from relearning the art of lino-cutting to collaborating with others at every opportunity including the making of a video with one of her poems. The poet also told the audience she gave herself the freedom to explore different aspects of the world to feed her work – clearly in an art she is passionate about.
“If you don’t do anything but sit at your desk, you won’t have anything to write about,” she laughed. “Billy Collins [the American poet] says stuff about that,” she added, one of many references to other poets to set people off on their own journeys of discovery.
She quoted the late Highland poet Norman MacCaig who had said his poems took the length of smoking one cigarette or two to write.
“This was one of those,” Aoife said, introducing a reading of her poem Octopus from her first collection.
“Others have taken much longer!” she said.
In the poem a precisely-described toy makes a resonant image aboard a pregnant woman’s stomach: “So I tell the man behind the till it is for you/ this plush octopus all tentacles and soft stitching./ Home, price pulled off, and care label cut/ I rest him on the marbled coral of my stomach/ I watch him float on the tide of rising limbs.”
Her second collection, The Day Before, is complete and Aoife is now working on her third.
And throughout the evening – which ended with questions from the audience frankly and fully answered – the poet offered snippets of gold-dust advice for the people in the room and online who both wrote poetry and wanted to know more about getting published. Aoife had an early aim to write her first poetry collection as her goal “...it can take five or 20 years” she said. And she added that you find out more about your work deciding for yourself where you want to sell poems – “some self-publish, others publish traditionally and others are on video, she said giving the prolific Holly McNish as an example.
When asked about whether she had an audience in mind when she wrote her first collection, Aoife said; "Yes. Me! I wanted to capture all the small stuff about motherhood, the small things that you can’t capture with a camera or video on a phone."
The poem Silt from Mother Nature immortalises in words an example. The birth of her second child reminded Aoife of something initially noticed with her first – fine grit trapped in the folds of skin on a baby’s hands: “I unfurl each newborn finger and, with the tip of my smallest nail, lift thedaily sediment away.”
There was a gift for each of the HighlandLIT crowd from her, a sheet of paper with a poem called Here that we had heard the poet read to us earlier from her second collection out next year. The poem’s words themselves mirrored the gifting of the piece of paper with poem: “Here – I am giving it to you … to light a fire or catch a spider …to fold in four and tuck away because love can be hard to hold…use it. I am giving it to you Here –“
The impact poems can have on others was made clear in the poet’s story of reading from her sequence of raw poems about miscarriage at the start of Mother Nature at an early morning event at festival Belladrum. Later, a woman gets in touch to thank Aoife. In telling family about what she heard Aoife read, she can broach the subject of her own miscarrying experience for the first time.
Another touching moment came as the poet told the story of giving a lift home to a friend of her daughter’s who asked what Aoife does for a living and her daughter replied ‘Writer’.
“I felt as if she had said ‘Superhero’,” Aoife laughed.
Mother Nature (Bloodaxe, £9.95), which was nominated for a Saltire Society First Book Award, is out now. More: Mother Nature and aoifelyall.com
The next HighlandLIT event is the postponed January event with Conon Bridge-based writer Shona MacLean, talking about her career, latest book and researching and writing historical fiction, such as her latest Sunday Times bestseller The Bookseller Of Inverness, longlisted by the Crime Writer Association for a Golden Dagger for best crime novel and also the Dagger Award for Historical Fiction. The event will be in person and livestreamed on Zoom on Tuesday, May 16. From 6-7pm socialising at the in-person event then Shona will talk from 7-9pm. More:
