{"id":1512,"date":"2010-06-21T14:30:27","date_gmt":"2010-06-21T13:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whatsonni.com\/blog\/?p=1512"},"modified":"2010-06-21T14:30:27","modified_gmt":"2010-06-21T13:30:27","slug":"a-father%e2%80%99s-sorrow-reverberates-in-new-collection-from-poet-r-a-welch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/2010\/06\/a-father%e2%80%99s-sorrow-reverberates-in-new-collection-from-poet-r-a-welch\/","title":{"rendered":"A FATHER\u2019S SORROW REVERBERATES IN NEW COLLECTION FROM POET R.A. WELCH"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u2018Iron hopeless sorrow\u2019 is the overarching tone of Constanza<\/em><\/strong>, the new poetry collection from poet and critic Robert Anthony Welch, written in the aftermath of the accidental death of his 26-year-old son \u00a0Egan three years ago.<\/p>\n

The collection of 40 poems represents the poet\u2019s deeply personal reflections and meditation on the loss of his son in particular, and mortality in general.<\/p>\n

Constanza, <\/em><\/strong>published by Lagan Press, with support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, is named after a city in Romania on the Black Sea, once known as Tomis.<\/p>\n

Welch explains:\u00a0 \u201cI had been reading a Latin poet called Ovid, a book of his with the wonderful title Tristia<\/strong><\/em>, <\/em>meaning something like ‘sadnesses’. It is a book of poems lamenting the fact that the poet, Ovid, has been banished from Rome for some offence he has caused the Emperor. This exile from Rome is like an exile from life, so that Ovid, in his grief in exile, is a man cut off from all that he loves.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is sent to a place called Tomis, now known as Constanza. The mood of Ovid in his bleak exile seemed to match my own mood in my grief, and I worked on some of his poems translating their sadness into my own.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn doing this I hope that I widened my grief by taking it into another person’s life, another time. When I read Ovid’s description of what it was like to sail through the storms and heavy seas on the way to Tomis, it seemed very like what it was like to go through the sheer mass and bulk of the sorrow you feel at the death of someone you love beyond speech or saying.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reference to \u2018iron sorrow\u2019 comes from a poem called Lost to Those Waters, <\/em><\/strong>where the sense of loss is palpable and immense \u2013<\/p>\n

Iron sorrow wrung his poor
\nexhausted heart, drove a shockwave
\nfrom his stomach to his eyes all
\nfull of tears.\u00a0 He opened wide his arms
\nto hold his mother, found
\nshe was the river.<\/p>\n

\"Bob<\/a>
Poet, Bob Welch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Welch is relentless in his need to address his pain and that of his family, with the result that his work directly makes the reader feel and mourn for his or her own loss and grief.<\/p>\n

This finely crafted and reworked unburdening, the \u2018improvement of truth\u2019 which poetry essentially represents, is what Welch believes is the job of a poet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no hiding place from sorrow or tragedy.\u00a0 This is what poets try to do, otherwise they are not poets. We must write as truthfully as we can about what scares the bejaysus out of us. We must face the terror of what it is to be us lot,\u201d added Welch.<\/p>\n

While writing the poems undoubtedly had a therapeutic effect, Welch was conscious of his role as poet.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the work is true, then you need to move out of your own particular circumstance, otherwise you are just howling away in the prison of your ego, and you will lose your audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the poems, for instance The Track in Sun,<\/em><\/strong> flowed out of the poet, but most of the others were reworked many times, with The Binary <\/em><\/strong>being the poet\u2019s more favoured as he believes he most successfully captures his son\u2019s humour and fierce intelligence.<\/p>\n

There will be a reading from Constanza<\/em><\/strong> on Tuesday, June 22, at a reception in the University of Ulster\u2019s Coleraine Campus (Room H215) from 6.30pm with an introduction from poet Ciaran Carson and on Wednesday, June 23, at the Members\u2019 Room, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin from 6pm with an introduction from poet Anthony Cronin and reading from the actor Richard Dormer, Welch\u2019s son-in-law.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Constanza <\/strong>is priced at \u00a38.99 and is available from all good book shops and on line from the publisher Lagan Press at www.lagan-press.org.uk<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Iron hopeless sorrow\u2019 is the overarching tone of Constanza, the new poetry collection from poet and critic Robert Anthony Welch, written in the aftermath of the accidental death of his 26-year-old son \u00a0Egan three years ago. The collection of 40 poems represents the poet\u2019s deeply personal reflections and meditation on the loss of his son … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[511,513,512],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1512"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1519,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions\/1519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonni.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}