The three poems I have in the latest edition of The Lonely Crowd share little in common in terms of themes but they do share a common thread in the natural world and noticing things. For me, the natural world has always been an important source of inspiration, and I think for all poets and writers noticing things is a vital skill. What writing poetry has taught me more than anything else is that no experience, no piece of reading, no moment is wasted. Years later or sometimes decades later you’ll sit down to write a poem, and a memory or image will pop up as though it is asking to be noticed and written. Anytime this happens I am both surprised and comforted that so many memories of experiences and things I’ve read and seen are waiting for just the right time to be written. Like a seed growing in the dark, waiting for the right conditions for it to sprout and burst through the soil towards the light and into life.Only once did I see an old photograph of my ex-husband’s grandmother [Oma] and yet that image came to mind over 20 years later when I sat down to write a poem about finding my way around a crowded market in Laos. In that market, I saw a woman who looked just like her selling charcoal. The light in the remembered photograph was perfect, shades of dark and light, something about it like a Vermeer painting. She had a rosy, plump, and wrinkled face and wore an old-fashioned floral house coat, beloved of old women in both Ireland and East Germany in the 1970’s. She was sorting eggs on a kitchen table, and one fell and as the photograph was taken, she was reaching out to catch the egg. It felt like her hand was reaching out from the photograph from one place to another and almost across time and isn’t that what the best poetry does. It reaches out from one place to another to each of us across time.

It’s also of course about language and the language we use when writing can often surprise the writer themselves. One of my earliest childhood memories is a visit to Dublin Zoo and getting what seemed like then an enormous book with a huge tiger on the cover with his long tail curling all the way around the back of the book. It was an encyclopaedia of animals and along with the amazing drawings, it had a description of each animal including their names in Latin and a taxonomic description. I had this book for many years, and I never failed to find something in it that wasn’t utterly fascinating, including the words which seemed to be magical, but they weren’t magical, they were scientific. In the times we currently live in, in which science has become part of the culture wars in many issues, we would do well to remember that science has described the world for a very long time in words that are both accurate, beautiful, and often poetic. When I was writing a poem about my experience of nature and visiting natural history museums, this is where my mind went, to the descriptions of the human brain provided by science. Mapping that important organ as a landscape to be understood. It may not make sense in reality but in a poem why not have a black bear walking through this place or a blue whale floating near the brain stem? Poems don’t have to make sense all the time and they can make sense on their own terms, inviting the reader into a new place the writing has created.

I sometimes feel that I am out of sync with poetry as it is written now, I often write about things other than nature, but some workshops and commentary can make me feel like I should not look at nature so much, as though we have left behind fields of daffodils or the call of the nightingale. Shouldn’t we be writing about other things, things that are more political, more current, more edgy?

Maybe I should and many people do but it’s not for me because nature is a constant source of inspiration and revelation. It is also extremely political and current and indeed even edgy. As we navigate the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and associated issues, poetry has a vital role to play in connecting more and more people with these issues. Poetry can make people connect with what is happening and feel it’s important. Unless people feel an emotional connection, most people won’t respond, poetry about nature today asks poets to be more than just witnesses but also advocates for those who can’t speak to us – the corncrakes, the wolves, the herons, and the natterjack toads. Feeling and connection can lead to action and action is urgently what is required now. As the poet Gary Synder said ‘nature is not a place to visit. It is home.’

For me, all of this is about noticing things and realising that no experience or learning we have is wasted. If you write, notice as much as you can and in time the connections will become clear. The writing will emerge through your own practice. This is a bit scary at times as it means trusting yourself and your own voice and practice. That time spent reading a book about taxonomy or hours spent in a museum or time spent floating in Lough Ree, the time adds up to create poems in the future that are the only ones you could have written. None of this is to say that writing poetry is a spontaneous muse-inspired act, it requires like most things in life, discipline.

The American poet Mary Oliver described it best in her book The Poetry Handbook. She described the discipline required for writing as akin to a love affair like Romeo and Juliet, patience requires turning up at the same time in the same place as much as possible so that the various parts of you necessary to write will appear. She describes writing a poem as:

a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens. That part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem — the heat of the star as opposed to the shape of the star, let us say — exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits; it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself — soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.

Noticing, attention, detail, these are all important in poetry and in the act of writing poetry. Allowing the details to cling to each other to create something entirely new. That makes it sound like hard work, and it is at times, but it’s also a type of work that is filled with joy and discovery, like the best kind of love affairs are.

Only you can write what you were born to write, you are the final arbiter and myth maker of your own being and creativity. Rejoice in noticing things and remember as Louis McNiece wrote; ‘the world is what we make, and we can only discover life in the life we make.’

Listen to Jackie read ‘The Natural History Museum in my Mind’ here.

Jackie Gorman’s debut collection The Wounded Stork, published by the Onslaught Press in 2019, was described by Dr Martin Dyar in Poetry Ireland Review as ‘an engrossing and ecologically attuned debut.’ She has received two Agility Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland for work on ecology and sense of place. In 2024 she was awarded the John Broderick Emerging Writer Bursary and is currently working on a second collection.