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Olive Broderick Winner of Emerging Poetry Award at the Hennessy X.O Literary Awards at Trinity College Dublin-photo Kieran Harnett
Olive Broderick’s poem, Misconception, describing how airplanes seemed about to merge into a daylight December moon, was one of two works that earned her the prestigious 2010 Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry. Her second poem, Market Forces, reflected the trauma and uncertainty of redundancy and is based on the closure of a factory in the Carrigaline area. Her honour brought her a commemorative trophy and €1,500 prize money.
Olive hails from Ashe Street and is the second of five daughters born to retired schoolteachers William and Teresa. She attended Youghal’s Loreto Convent prior to gaining a Commerce degree in UCC. She subsequently acquired a post-grad Masters in Business Studies before working as a Projects Officer for Age Action Ireland and then as an Information officer with the Higher Education Authority.
While studying for a Creative Writing Masters in Queen’s University Belfast during a year’s leave in 2002, her job at the Higher Education Authority’s Equality Unit was abolished but she undertook a similar position with Voluntary Arts Ireland. She has been based in Downpatrick, Co. Down in this capacity ever since. “I love it here but it is a bit far from home,” she says with the slight lament befitting of a poet.
Through the window…through the pain
Working alone in her office one day in 2008, Olive glanced out at a moon “three quarters visible -buttermilk against delphinium- as framed in a pane of this window.” A temporary closure of Belfast airport had diverted flights into this vision and days later she penned her impressions of the “sequence of airplanes with short contrails, swimming through the blue”, whence they “seemed sure to merge with the stationary orb –but missed it by what looked like little more that a millimetre.” She laughs, “It was all an illusion of course, as they were in a different sphere entirely, but it was gorgeous to watch. There is of course the other, coincidental picture it paints of misconception in the biological sense,” she adds.
The Youghal woman’s works pertain to the school of non-rhyme, laden with profound and insightful imagery. Her poems came before the Hennessy judges by through the Sunday Tribune’s monthly New Irish Writing page, from where they were included in a shortlist of six from a year’s contributors. The awards honour Best Fiction, Best Emerging Fiction and Best Emerging Poetry.
Olive’s second poem, Market Forces, could be metaphorically termed as more down to earth. “I have close relatives in Carrigaline and when a factory closed in the area, even before he Celtic Tiger disappeared, I was contemplating how awful it must be for workers with big mortgages and so on to be going home with that grim news.”
The poem reduces a momentous disruption to the minutiae of reality. The narrator reflects on “the faint ‘ching, ching, ching’ of the breeze” against the masts of nearby yachts upon leaving the workplace, with little to be done except to “figure out how best to tell the children.” It is a work of timeless application with strong contemporary relevance, as the upturned life ponders, “when I get home, I imagine, we will talk ’til well past midnight, trying to read between the lines of a far-off dissertation.” It harbours hope also though, as all sadness must do to retain life and sanity: “But still, hearing in our minds the voices of our parents, repeat assurances of how this might well bring something better. And in the small hours glad to have each other, whispering, where will we be this time next year?”
Olive Broderick
Nursery rhymes
The writer’s love for poetry was initiated by nursery rhymes from “about seven” and nurtured by her parent’s proclivity for “breaking into recitation now and then.”
Like most adolescents, she wrote verse (“some of it cringing I’m sure”), through teenage musings partial to the English and Gaelic works of “modern poets with a romantic leaning” such as Louise MacNiece, Sean O’Riordain and the then emerging Seamus Heaney. “I didn’t take it very seriously but it was a way of marking out who I was in the world,” she explains. “I still find poetry a good way of thinking about one’s self and one’s self in the greater picture.”
She also found the Shakespearean sonnets “so beautiful” and is keen to acknowledge the fine influence of teachers like “Peg Mehegan and Pat McSwiney, who further fostered her interest. The adult Olive, a member of the Queen’s Writers Group, would include Northern Ireland poets Ciarán Carson and Sinead Morrissey amongst “so many wonderful Irish writers” to whom she affords respect and admiration.
Olive’s poetry has featured in various publications. She mostly uses her words to relay her observances and interpretations of life’s everyday offerings, “not so much politically, but on the economic, social and political impact that events have on people’s lives,” she surmises. From that, she perceives a power that most people overlook. “Poetry has a way saying things that are difficult to say in other ways.
Some poems seem to shine a spotlight on a moment in time such that people can be affected by it and navigate where they are going from it to some extent.”
One success behind her, she would like the future to bring some of hundreds of accumulated poems to published collection. “That’s an ambition but there’s a lot of poets out there. It isn’t easy to get published,” she explains, “but I’ll keep trying.” And why not –who better understands what its like to reach for the moon?
Market Forces
Tonight, love, the moon is big over Drake’s Pool
and the wood on the far bank is clearly defined
in shadow. The air is so clear that I can hear
the faint ‘ching, ching, ching’ of the breeze against
the masts of the yachts that are moored there.
There is too much sweetness about all this.
Tomorrow everything will be as normal.
All of that has been organised already.
The school run, the groceries, the monthly
payments
- all confidently sorted. Nothing to do now
but figure out how best to tell the children.
When I get home, I imagine, we will talk
’til well past midnight, trying to read between
the lines of a far-off dissertation; and how
the turn of a page can have such disastrous
consequences. But still, hearing in our minds
the voices of our parents, repeat assurances
of how this might well bring something better.
And in the small hours glad to have each other,
whispering, where will we be this time next year?
Misconception
This is a poem about a moon
that was visible one clear day
in December: three quarters visible
buttermilk against delphinium -
as framed in a pane of this window:
and a sequence of airplanes
with short contrails, swimming
through the blue, in its direction,
particularly the first seemed sure
to merge with the stationary orb –
but missed it by what looked like
little more that a millimetre.
