Lifestyle – Máire Holmes is a woman of many parts. A GAA fan, a performer, a teacher, a warm person who loves company but who also needs solitude and silence to nourish her creativity. Her latest book is a tribute to her mother who died when the poet was still a child. She tells DARA BRADLEY how it came into being.

Soon after settling into the front room of Máire Holmes’ cottage by the sea in An Spidéal, it becomes clear why she insisted on a face-to-face rather than telephone interview.

Because, in truth, spending two hours in the company of one of Galway’s most loved poets and writers is more like attending a live theatrical performance than conducting a conventional interview.

After the pleasantries (coffee with coffee cake or apple tart), the widow dives straight into what fascinates her – ‘the mysterious element of poetry’.

She uses words and then theatre to convey the scene. Standing at her kitchen sink, Máire mimics her late husband, Tom Breathnach, peeling potatoes one day in 1993. The couple, whose only child, Iarflaith, was two at the time, chatted about whether they would visit Kilkenny or Ballynahinch that weekend.

Suddenly Máire grabs a sweeping brush, like she had done in that moment almost three decades ago, and theatrically recites the poem that came to her that day.

“I swept the floor,” she declares.

“Gathered dust from the beginning of time and gone back and searched for more. Moved by rhythm. No particle can gather all the fragments, moving like scattered words in search of meaning. The surface of a sentence knows the shadow of its substance but in truth I have failed words, and dust creeps deeper across fragile fragments, fighting the rhythm of another silent sweeping.”

She then reverts to Tom-mode at the sink. “Gosh, yes, not the same way sweeping the floor affects us all,” she says, imitating his reply.

Back in the now, Máire bursts out laughing; she still enjoys his droll response.

She loves that he’s central to that story, and retells it not for the poem Sweeping itself, but for the “mystery it self-articulated”, as she describes it.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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