During the early 1970s I used to spend a lot of time on the CIE coach between Galway and Ballina as my girl was from the town. Occasionally I travelled by train from Athlone via the mysteriously named Manulla Junction. Ballina intrigued me. Especially the wonderful River Moy, but also the stories that attached themselves to various arts and parts nearby, including the stone-clad boat, the Crete Boom, and the naming of Boher-na-Sup, and the story about Ardnaree, also known as Abyssinia, as it was the last place in the town for electrification – a metaphor I’ve been musing over as a book-title for more years that I care to admit.
Over the many years of spending summers and winters, springtime and autumn, it perplexed me that, so far as I knew, little had indeed been written out of this terrain. Now it is different. One only has to think of Michelle O'Sullivan, the curator of this special event on Dorothy Molloy, and her captivating poetry as proof. But back in time there seems to have been an absence, a little like the sense of absence that emigration brings in its wake.
Often those who left towns like Ballina throughout the country took a little of the imaginative light with them and I could certainly name several women from this town as proof of that too, including, of course, Dorothy Molloy.
For me, however, Dorothy Molloy and her poems do not represent a loss. Instead I read them as a powerful statement of self-worth and self-confidence in being in the world at large. There is no self-pity here but rather a concentration on making out of what came her way – her roots, experience, education, travel, love, marriage, friendships, her tragic illness, her religious inheritances, her reading, her love of painting – of making out of this fabric of living, a vivid and challenging form of literary art.
Her poems are full of the energy that comes from not sitting back but of embracing the world in all its multifarious reality; what Louis MacNeice heralded as “crazier and more of it than we think/incorrigibly plural”.
I hear this loud and clear in Dorothy Molloy’s poems, so I hope the two poems I have selected illustrate my point – they are The dream-world of my pillow from Gethsemane Day and, from Long-distance Swimmer, Waiting for Julio.
Gerald Dawe’s most recent collections include Selected Poems (2012) and Mickey Finn’s Air (2014). He teaches at Trinity College Dublin
