The Honest Ulsterman asked me to write an article describing how my latest collection came into being and the rationale behind the book. As you might imagine, it’s a bit of a long story. I wrote it from the heart, in the style of a piece for this blog. My article has now been published in the journal (https://humag.co/features/paul-jeffcutt). I reproduce the text below, with thanks to the editor. I hope you find it illuminating. Please let me know what you think.
"Exactly ten years separate my first and second collections of poetry. This long time-span wasn’t deliberate. It was unavoidable.
My new
collection, The Skylark’s Call, explores
memories and meanings at the borderland between life and death. I was
catapulted into that strange and complex territory just a few months after the
launch of my debut collection, Latch.
It was Good Friday 2011 and I had spent a sleepless night on a trolley in A&E
at the City Hospital, Belfast. The doctor pulled the curtain around my bed and
told me straight. I had Stage 3 cancer. The tumour had grown most of the way
from my kidney to my heart. I shrank into the sheets, unable to speak.
I endured a
month in hospital being prepared for a very big operation that might save my
life. Bad news travels extremely fast. Family and friends, some of whom I
hadn’t seen for decades, came long distances to see me. Between visiting times
I moped, gazing at people who were walking unconcernedly along the pavements
below. The hospital offered access to
the internet, so I was able to cancel my reading tour of Ireland and England
from my bed.
The big
operation took around eight hours and involved three teams of surgeons. I needed
three blood transfusions and spent a week in intensive care and the high
dependency unit. I was sedated and have few memories of these days. Afterwards my
doctors told me that my health and fitness had got me through the ordeal. They also
told me that they expected the cancer to return and spread. They concluded that
I would be lucky to live beyond two years. Unable to cope with this prognosis,
my partner left me.
Back home, I
sat in an armchair and stared out at summer clouds scudding over the horizon. I
was truly alone. My situation seemed hopeless and I felt helpless. Somehow, from
these depths I was able to reach out. I saw a counsellor from Cancer Focus. Her
support got me through the darkest of these early days.
My life had
become stark and simplified. I realised that there were lots of things I wasn’t
going to be doing again in the time that remained. Writing poetry was just one
of them. Instead, I began to revisit places across these islands that I had
loved, and looked up old friends that I hadn’t seen for decades. I was sort of
paying my last respects.
At the same
time, I desperately wanted to go back to where and who I was before. But all of
my efforts were doomed, for these options had been removed. I had an exhausting
whirl of conflicting emotions. I could only go on as best I could. Death was no
longer a remote possibility. It walked beside me at every step. I could smell
and taste it. I had to learn to live with this very present threat.
My new life
was intensely stressful, filled with anxiety and fear. But it was also
strangely liberating, for normal life could not be maintained and continued in
the face of this threat. The peculiar borderland that I was in had an odd mix
of dark and light, it was a place of vulnerability and of vitality.
It took me
well over a year to recover from that big operation. I spent a lot of time on
the internet. I found a blog by an American cancer patient which expressed
exactly how I was feeling. He described himself as a ‘survivor’ and wrote openly
about his cancer experience and how it was affecting his life. I corresponded
with him. He told me he was trying to gain a small measure of empowerment over
a deeply disempowering disease. This struck a chord with me. I decided to begin
my own blog. I called it ‘Writing to Survive’, with the sub-title ‘writing from
the here and now’. Since then, I have written a weekly blog describing what was
happening with me and how I was feeling about it. My blog has hundreds of
regular readers and has gained many accolades.
As time went
on, I could find no inspiration to write poetry. Instead, I set myself little
writing challenges. Like picking a word at random from the dictionary and trying
to write a poem around it. For an experiment, I also tried to write poems that
were stimulated by real-life stories I came across in news media. They weren’t
found poems. The story was the jumping off point into a poem. But the poem also
remained grounded in the story. They were separate but connected. I had begun
to write poetry in a new and different register and I was enjoying it.
My two year
anniversary came and went. I was getting regular surveillance scans, which
showed that the cancer hadn’t returned. The fear was at times overwhelming but
it didn’t stop me from trying new things. I was learning to live in the
borderland. I returned to the Writers’ Group at the Seamus Heaney Centre and
presented my new poems. The late Ciaran Carson was very encouraging and christened
them my ‘discovered poems’. Looking back, I see that I was particularly attracted
to real-life stories of loss and also those of rediscovery. I began to submit
these poems to competitions and journals, with some success.
To mark the
third anniversary of my big operation I went to my first literary event since
2010. On the first day of the John Hewitt Summer School, I met the woman who
was to become my wife. It must have been written in the stars, for my dearest T
was attending the event for the very first time. We went on holiday to Orkney,
staying with a friend I hadn’t seen since I was nine years old. We explored
Neolithic settlements, burial chambers and standing stones, marvelled at the
Italian Chapel and got spectacularly close to plenty of wildlife. It was an
inspiring trip that stimulated plenty of new poems.
Despite our
hoping against hope, my doctors were eventually proved correct. My cancer returned
in 2015 and again in 2016. What’s more, it had spread to the right side of my
abdomen and my liver. I had advanced cancer and was given another poor
prognosis, this time of just one year. My dearest T stood by me throughout the
three major operations I needed.
I ended up
spending a series of weeks in four different NI hospitals. I could write the
Trip Advisor reports for each. The Royal and the Mater were excellent, but I’d
have to mark the City down for putting me on a saline drip for twelve days
without any food. Due to this, I had to spend Christmas Day 2015 on the ward.
My dearest T decorated my bed with fairy lights and tinsel. The nurses called
it Santa’s Grotto.
Cancer is a
very hard taskmaster. I’ve gained so many scars on my torso that I could be a
body double for a pirate without the need for make-up. After my last big
operation, I had to rest sitting up in bed for three months and drink liquid
morphine every couple of hours to get through the night. I had my cold turkey
during Christmas 2017, and I’m not referring to the festive food.
Despite all
of this, I think the physical pain of cancer treatment is easier to cope with
than the mental stress of living with the threat of recurrence and death. This
fear rises and falls in intensity, but it never actually goes away. I’ve been
clear of cancer for four years now. But the type of cancer I had has been known
to recur even twenty years later. So I will be living in the borderland for the
rest of my life.
Looking
back on my journey thus far, I know that I’ve gained much more than I’ve lost.
I’ve learned to live in the here and now. I’ve learned to do what matters, and
to do it as well as I can. I’ve learned not to waste time and energy on what
doesn’t matter. I’ve found a resilience that got me through some serious
ordeals. I travel hopefully but remain vigilant.
I’ve weathered
a sea change in my life. And through it I’ve become a more developed person and
a more developed writer too. I’m now more appreciative of what I do have, more
aware of my strengths and limitations, more understanding of others and more
open and honest.
After
recuperating from my years of treatment, I took stock of the poems I’d written
since 2013. What began as a creative trickle had built into a steady flow. There
were well over a hundred new poems. Twenty three had won awards in competitions
in Ireland, the UK and the USA. Fifty had been published, some of them in highly-regarded
literary journals in Europe, North America and the UK.
I recall the late Ciaran Carson describing the meaning
and rationale of a collection as something that emerges over time. You write a
poem because you are inspired by something that fires your imagination. It is
only when you begin to put a number of poems together that the themes which
interconnect these pieces of writing can start to appear. And it may be some
time before you are able to discern these relationships and underlying
meanings. They are likely to not have been apparent to you at the time of
writing the poems themselves.
Over some eighteen months I went through a good number
of iterations of my second collection and tried a range of different titles. Special
thanks are due to the late Ciaran Carson, Moyra Donaldson and Damian Smyth for
their feedback. As Lagan Press had stopped publishing collections some years previously,
I needed to find a new home for my work. Roger Robinson, the winner of the TS
Eliot Prize 2019, said that after his manuscript got dozens of rejections from
publishers, he was told to hone his craft and keep trying. I followed this
excellent advice. Despite the rejections I received, I kept improving my
manuscript and early last year my collection was taken by Dempsey & Windle,
an independent publisher based in England.
The Skylark’s Call comprises
fifty-two poems. Around a third of these are autobiographical. Only two of them
are concerned with my cancer treatment. Some poems are mythic, some spiritual,
some historical, some geo-political, and some are environmental. About half of
the poems in the book are ‘discovered poems’. The poems span four continents
and seven millennia, for the human condition is timeless and universal. All of
the poems are in some way concerned with memories and meanings at the complex
borderland between life and death. Together they explore the vitality and
vulnerability of everyday life.
The poems that make up this collection are of course
informed by my experience over the past decade. During that time I have been a
cancer patient and a survivor. But that does not define me, nor does it define the
scope of the collection. The emotional substance of my life over the past
decade has been wide ranging and extremely diverse. The changes that have taken
place in me as a person and as a writer are considerable in their scale and in
their horizons. The scope and character of my new collection reflects this.
I began
this period not expecting to survive beyond two years. I didn’t think I would write
poetry again and I certainly never imagined that I would complete a second
collection. I learned to live for each day. I’m of course delighted that these
and plenty more good things have come to pass. Life has so many and varied ways
of surprising us.
The Skylark’s Call was
launched two months ago. It seems to have struck a chord with many readers and sales have been brisk.
Enthusiastic comments about the poems have been posted on social media. Perhaps
the coronavirus pandemic has played a part, for the territory that the
collection explores is one that we are all now having to deal with."
The Skylark’s Call is available to purchase from Dempsey & Windle https://www.dempseyandwindle.com/pauljeffcutt.html
Paul Jeffcutt is offering readers personalised signed copies of the book http://www.pauljeffcutt.net/buy%20books.html
