Poet Patrick returning to his roots to launch latest book

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Mullagh man Patrick Deely, who has lived in Dublin for most of his life, will enjoy a celebratory homecoming to Galway on June 6, when he gives a public reading at Loughrea Library to launch his latest poetry collection.

Groundswell: New and Selected Poems has recently been published by Dedalus Press with a foreword by well-known poet and broadcaster Theo Dorgan.

Patrick was delighted by Dorgan’s observations, which singled out the Mullagh man for his “profound sense of communion with the living and the dead of his native place” while also being a “considerable poet of the city” who has retained his “sense of wonder at the world”.

“I don’t know him very well. We’d meet occasionally and when we do, we talk hurling,” says Patrick of Theo Dorgan.

Patrick was born in Mullagh outside Loughrea in 1953, to a family who were immersed in the local community.

His father set up a workshop in the mid 1930s, where he and Patrick’s uncles made hurleys, farm implements, and even branched into coffins at one stage. His father’s death in a tree-felling accident in the mid 1970s was really the spark for Patrick’s development as a poet.

“I wanted to celebrate him and people like him, who worked with their hands all their lives. A lot of people who do that are not celebrated,” says Patrick.

While both his brothers inherited their father’s skill with physical craft, Patrick found his pathway through words.

He describes writing poems as “trying to hold his ground” and says that ground is Dublin, Europe and always his own part of Galway.

He sees himself as following in the footsteps of those people who traditionally chronicled life in local areas, but in a way that lets him gives local lore and stories his own particular, poetic twist.

Although he has been happily settled in Dublin since adulthood, where he worked first as a teacher and then as a school principal in Ballyfermot, Galway still exerts a huge hold.  Largely thanks to his mother, Patrick was exposed to a wealth of nature in childhood and developed a love for it.

“I used to go the callows with my mother, who was the farmer in the family, as a child,” he recalls.

These were fields with four small rivers running into each other which flooded every autumn and spring, and later led him to write about how “Land was aspiring to be water; water wanted to be land” in the poem Keaveney’s Well.

After secondary school in St Brendan’s in Loughrea, Patrick moved to Dublin to train as a primary teacher and worked in education until taking early retirement recently.

While working, Patrick made time at night to write. He penned several children’s books which were published by O’Brien Press and won him a wide readership. The Lost Orchard, his novel for young readers won the Eilís Dillon Book of the Year Award in 2001.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.