Afterlife

"Not really. R S Thomas was coming at God, most of the time, from a negative point of view. He was struggling with God and with belief. Pádraig’s work has never struggled with belief, as such, but it has struggled with the view of God as a loving God. So that he reached his lowest spiritual and emotional depths when he found that the people he was dealing with were suffering so much that he felt forced to see God as a cruel God. We have in Ireland a so-called sport that is known as coursing, and it’s where a hare is let loose and the hounds chase the hare. The collection that Pádraig produced was called The Voice of the Hare and the poems began to shout at God and say how can you possibly do this sort of thing? So it was never a question of faith, it was an examining of what kind of God this was. But he has advanced from that period and come back with Afterlife . He has and maybe we all do that as we get older. In fact, I will be out with him tomorrow evening. We go out together for relaxation, which means into a pub and a few pints. After a while we discuss poetry, and he has been a mentor for me in many ways and it’s nice to be a friend of somebody who is developing all the time. Yes. Well, it’s the struggle that makes poetry rather than the complacency. Poetry can touch the spirit of somebody else with the depths of experience. Poetry has been a way of coming to terms with life. I’ve been trying to live as honestly as I can. To earn a poem it can come as a gift. The people will appreciate it and maybe see a new angle to it. A poem is a learning process and it teaches me something about myself and the world we live in, and that’s always an excitement. Yes, I do and it’s magical. When the form works, I think: whatever, whoever, thank you for that!"