Poet Tom French was propelled towards poetry by family tragedy. He talks to Arminta Wallace
It's a question poets must often be asked: "what made you start to write poetry?" The answers are many and various and sometimes inexpressible, but Tom French doesn't hesitate for a second. "It was the death of my brother that got me going," he says. "I was trying to avoid being struck dumb by the fact of total absence." It happened 15 years ago, when the Kilkenny-born French was 20. His brother, who was then 21, had just gone to Holland to take up a new job. "There were five of us in the family, but myself and my brother were particularly close; we went to boarding school together, worked on the same farm every summer." He pauses, shakes his head. "Maybe it was because he was away from home. I'd say it was nothing more serious than depression, really. It could have been dealt with: it wasn't. And so he jumped from the building he was living in, and that was that."
The stark simplicity of the words tells only part of the story. The poems tell other parts. Some of the most evocative pieces in French's award-winning début collection, Touching The Bones, are those which deal directly with his brother's death and its aftermath. 'A Sudden Passing' recreates the strange, skittish realities of a house on the day of a funeral; 'Burning the Greatcoat' bids an idiosyncratic farewell; the title poem, 'Touching the Bones', uses the image of a television wildlife documentary about elephants to describe a "great majestic grief".
French ranges widely for his subject matter in these delicate, dignified poems, which are full of wry juxtapositions and an almost hesitant humour. 'Antelopes Have Not Always Been Quadrupeds' is a retelling of a Siberian legend, with a nod to Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, while 'The Show House' follows a pair of newly-weds "head first into \ last hotpress". 'The Post-Hole' has a group of farmers making a pilgrimage to seek spiritual advice from a saint, only to find him up to his knees in muck, digging furiously in a field. 'Pity the Bastards' rages against the narrow horizons of modern life. Death is, however, a recurring theme in the book and the mood, while never morbid, is undoubtedly elegiac. Having been kick-started by his brother's death, did French deliberately set out to write about death as a kind of therapy?
"Not at all, no," he says. "It was just whatever presented itself - I only noticed afterwards that there were a disproportionate number of poems about death, and it was too late at that stage." And did his publisher, Peter Fallon of The Gallery Press, notice the same thing? "He did, yeah," says French, laughing. "The first time I met him, he said, 'So what's the story with all this stuff about death?' But anyhow, I don't think Touching the Bones treats death as a subject. It treats particular deaths." The book won the Waterstone's Prize for the best first poetry collection by the Forward Institute in London last year, earning French a useful £5,000.
The day job is in the public library service in Bray, Co Wicklow. "When people come into the library looking for what's new, if they do happen to pick up a book of poetry from the display case, they leave it down very deliberately. I don't know at what point people either get into reading poetry or out of it - but the vast majority of people certainly aren't into it." As a poet, does this bother him? He shakes his head again. "I suppose you like to think of your poems meaning something to somebody other than yourself - but I don't know whose obligation it is to get people to read poetry. Not the poet's, anyway. Poets are obliged only to do their own thing."
Touching the Bones is published by The Gallery Press at €10