Thanks for the poetry, Sarah

SARAH Clancy needed a break. After a day’s work as a development officer with Amnesty International, the Salthill native’s spare time was consumed with campaigning, including opposing the construction of the Shell gas pipeline in Rossport. The divisions between her professional and personal life were starting to blur. On a week’s holiday in Norway in 2009, Sarah remembered she always wanted to write. She returned to Galway with 10 poems and joined a creative writing class with poet Kevin Higgins.
Three years later, she has three books of poetry to her name. Thanks for Nothing, Hippies, published recently by Clare’s Salmon Poetry, burns with the author’s commitment to justice and blends it with blackly funny poems about the obstacles of the everyday and tender explorations of heartbreak.
“One of my biggest trip-ups is that I can have my cappuccino life in Ireland and the next I can be in Mexico, where six of my friends happen to have been murdered because they’re human rights’ activists,” Sarah says of the origins of her new book.
“The difference between those two worlds coexisting is what fascinates me. I was trying to put all of those contrasts in there, to go, ‘This is true but this is also true’.”
Five of the poems are dedicated to the memory of those killed during Mexico’s drug wars. Ms Clancy has a “ridiculous obsession” with the country. Her poems have featured in Mexican publications and she has spent time working there in programmes dedicated to Central American migrants, who arrive in Mexico intending to enter the US.
“Mexico is the biggest contradiction on the planet. It’s the nicest place you could travel to, it’s spectacularly beautiful – you could travel as a tourist and not see anything. And, yet, it has bloodshed happening daily on a scale you can’t comprehend. It is a war zone. There are a lot of cultural parallels between Ireland and Mexico: post-colonial, post-Catholic cultures and a self-depreciating sense of humour. In some ways, Mexico is where the extremes of today’s capitalism are being played out. It’s like we all exist in some sort of facsimile of that.”
Thanks for Nothing, Hippies mixes the international and the local. Set on Fanore beach, Cave Paintings suggests “the bleak small Burren hills appear dramatic/like some imposing Afghan mountain range”.
“It’s really a poem about the bleakness of the Burren in the winter time,” explains Sarah. “It’s probably my favourite time to be down there. Yesterday, it was full of flowers and blue sea and it was really twee looking. You’re kind of annoyed with it – ‘you’re just showing off’. It’s like someone with their best manners on for the visitors. It’s also a poem about trying to escape your past.”
Nods and Winks opens with a striking declaration, “There wasn’t a wild amount of hedonism abroad then in Ennis mart/just the usual doses of steamed windows, mashed spuds/of limp cabbage philosophies, hanging out from tweed caps”. The poem draws on early experiences.
“It’s a big lie made out of true incidents,” Sarah laughs. “I spent an awful lot of my young life farming in South Galway – in Kilcolgan and Gort. Ennis would’ve been our market town. I was trying to capture the humour, the turn of phrase and the despair that was involved in farming in the late ’80s, when farming was utterly in the doldrums. At the same time, there’s a turn of phrase and a humour and an Irishism about the poem.”
Sarah, who has been shortlisted for a number of prestigious prizes, including the Patrick Kavanagh Award, thinks her work resonates with a number of writers, such as Dubliner Colm Keegan. Frustrated with the staleness of the debate about contemporary Ireland, they belong to a “much more boisterous and chaotic world” than is typically associated with published authors.
“There has been a little wave that coincided with the uncertainty that came with the economic bust,” Sarah says. “It seems that, up to 2006, the majority of people knew what they were doing. All of these chaotic writers arrived exactly at the time when everybody was saying, ‘We don’t know what the hell we’re doing’. Maybe we, ever so slightly, hit the zeitgeist.”
During the writing process, Sarah uses social media to hone her work, frequently publishing first drafts of her poems on Facebook to get feedback.
“It’s been really helpful,” she explains. “In some bizarre way, what used to be a very lonely pursuit has kind of become sociable. You can write something and say, ‘Hey look at this. What do you think?’ You can learn an awful lot from it.”
The author has read from her work at festivals in Ireland and abroad, winning the Cúirt International Festival of Literature Grand Slam 2011 and gains valuable clues about new poems from performance.
“I really wasn’t a comfortable performer to start off with. I’m not comfortable but people seem to enjoy it,” she laughs. “It’s like you can publicly experiment. It’s a great way of sharpening up your poems. You can be very self-indulgent when you’re writing something. But if you’re performing it, you’ll really see the point where people are starting to think, ‘I wonder did I switch off the iron?’
“You can really see that happening. You wouldn’t know that in the written form. A friend of mine, Michéal Tierney, said to me at the beginning that he never knows a poem is finished until he’s performed it. I found that’s really true.”
It’s been a whirlwind three years for Sarah. “In some ways, it happened so quickly that I’m trying to take stock of it and go ‘What kind of a writer do I want to be?’,” she says. “It’s like I did the fast-food version up to here and now I just need to stall and have a look at it.”
Time for another break.

Thanks for Nothing, Hippies is published by Salmon Poetry.