What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
There are so many. Going way back to the very beginning, I think of Eavan Boland and Samuel Beckett. Eavan Boland was pivotal to my writing because for the first time I became aware of what it really meant to be a woman writer and to explore issues relating to my gender. She was a fierce advocate of women poets, a light-bearer. On a personal level, I always felt a kinship because I grew up abroad (my father was also a diplomat) and that disconnect from a home/homeland and my cultural identity has always been something that I really struggled with. I am also a painter and I have always loved that connection between Eavan and her mother, the painter Frances Kelly. The description of colours and details in her poetry have that connection. I go to Boland for language and connection. However my poems have little of the domestic “dailiness” that marks so much of her work.
Samuel Becket because I am attracted to the experimental, abstract and intellectual nature of his work. I love his poetry as much as his plays. Nearly all of my early poems were abstract and quite avant-garde and I would never have written them without studying Samuel Beckett. I still enjoy playing with allegory and pushing language and form.
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