It’s a long way from “the stony grey soil” of Monaghan that inspired Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry to the lush landscapes of New Zealand. But that’s where the winner of this year’s Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Prize lives. Caoilinn Hughes (27), from Claregalway in Co Galway, has always loved poetry.
She did a Master’s degree in theatre studies in Queen’s University, Belfast, and while she was there she signed up to do a marathon in Auckland, in New Zealand. That’s where love changed her life –love of New Zealand and love of a man she met while running the marathon.
“After 10km, I had fallen in love with the country; after 20, I’d fallen in love with a redheaded English physicist who was running as well,” Caoilinn said. She settled in Auckland before later moving to Wellington.
This year’s judge was poet and novelist Brian Lynch. “Caoilinn Hughes is one of the cleverest, wittiest and most heartfelt young poets I have ever come across,” Mr Lynch said. The Kavanagh Prize is given for a collection of 20 poems by a poet who has not yet published a book. The award and €1,000 prize was presented to Caoilinn at the Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen, Co Monaghan, yesterday.
Below is a poem by Caoilinn originally published in the Irish Times in January.
We Are Experiencing Delay
We are experiencing a delay due to a body on the tracks
the broadcaster drones. Fluid pools in lower limbs that have been disowned.
A body is experiencing delay among the ballast and the black.
We throttle our tabloids like pillowcases, as if to rid the newscasts
of their creases, though headlines cannot compete with the coroner megaphone.
We are experiencing a delay due to a body on the tracks.
No one is reading a love letter behind a Henry James hardback.
Neither sympathies, books nor lovers have been taken out on loan.
A body is experiencing delay among the ballast and the black.
Aside sleepers, we search Perseus’s shield for cracks:
we see our sorry forms in darkened perspex. We are not as we are shown.
We are experiencing a delay due to a body on the tracks.
Home is an idea that comes and goes. The idea is carried on our backs;
now silk-lined, now boned. All there is of its embodiment are steppingstones.
A body is experiencing delay among the ballast and the black.
There will be no tombstone in the landscape for a page marker, for a fact.
The speaker intones: We will not be long. Headlines, epitaphs: He is not alone.
We are experiencing a delay due to a body on the tracks.
A body is experiencing delay among the ballast and the black.
