Eithne Hand On A Life Of Rhyme

It’s in the everyday…

s Poetry Day Ireland hits Greystones on Thursday, May 1st – with a sunrise stone circle at The Cove and an all-star shindig in The Whale in the evening – Eithne Hand might just be in her element.

Growing up in a Greystones house full of poetry, Hand turned her hand to creating her own poetry with Fox Trousers being published in February 2021.

Ms Hand

And now, as her second collection, Tickle, gets ready to launch in June, we asked Ms Hand to reveal just how poetry took a hold, and why the world today offers up plenty of reasons to rhyme…

Over to Eithne…

The brilliant Irish poet, Paula Meehan, tells the story of how, when she was in junior school, she was asked to write an essay.

At home she saw her older sister’s book of Emily Dickinson’s poems and she thought it would be good to write the essay in the style of Emily Dickinson, which was a pretty unusual style – the way she used the space on the page and the short lines and punctuation etc. So, Paula wrote her essay like that and she was delighted with herself.

She brought it in but the teacher held up the page to the class and ridiculed her, telling her that it was less than useless. Paula was sent to kneel in the corner, facing the wall for the rest of the day and the teacher even sprinkled sugar on the floor so that it would be actually painful. Paula says that from that day she realised that poetry had the potential to be dangerous. Maybe that goes some way to explaining why it’s having a renaissance moment in these treacherous times.

Sometimes people are a little afraid of poetry – it’s easier to watch Netflix than to pick up a book. We all worry that we won’t understand them or will feel stupid if we don’t ‘get it’. But really any poem you like – is a good poem. It can keep you company. Some poems have an amazing way of reaching in and touching you at the very core of yourself. They can take you by surprise, revolt you or just make you think, “Oh yeah, I know that feeling”.

I was exposed to poetry very early on – growing up in a house where our mother read poems to us that were all fantastically rhythmical. Poems that started with lines like ‘Do you remember an Inn, Miranda – do you remember an Inn?‘ or ‘Is there anybody there, said the traveller’. I can remember tapping out the beat as she read.

Meanwhile our dad was busy putting Yeats’ poems to music, so it was probably inevitable that poetry seeped in.

For my ninth birthday I got a gift from a family friend of a book called A Child’s Treasury of Poetry, which I loved, not just because it was a big hardback book all of my own but because I came to love so many of the story poems and funny poems and even the artwork on those pages. That’s where I would have come across Ogden Nash, e.e.cummings, Emily Dickinson and a whole lot of others. I still have that book and I always tell people to buy books like that for nine-year olds!

The years of the Covid pandemic were a game changer for many people. Lots of people started reading or re-reading poetry – often online – and they found funny or thought-provoking new verses and new poets. Maybe it was because they had extra time or they needed something to help them through a strange and quite threatening experience. People were dying and they were stuck at home, not allowed to do normal things and having to obey all those rules. That turn to poetry has thankfully stayed that way. Just this week I was talking with Fenella Murphy from The Village Bookshop and she said that poetry books are still selling much more significantly now than five or eight years ago. Not just the big hitters like Heaney, Eavan Boland or Yeats but people are also on the lookout for new poems and writers.

They often want contemporary poems, so they might pick up a collection by Carol Ann Duffy or Rita Ann Higgins – she writes such clever, wry poetry about our society right now. Or Jane Clarke’s lyrical eco poetry or Martin Dyar, a Wicklow-based poet originally from Mayo. His poem, Death and the Post Office, is a brilliant, no holds barred take on how rural life has been affected by the closure of local offices. Martin’s poem ended up on the Leaving Cert, which would have been inconceivable when I was in school.

I published my first collection, Fox Trousers, during Covid – I remember that moment when I realised that there would be no launch, no assembly of friends and family. Everything moved online and yet it was still an unbelievable event for me – I had never written a poem with any seriousness until I was 44 and my younger self would have laughed at even the notion of me ever publishing a book of poetry. But sometimes things happen when you least expect them.

When you think about it, people are always looking for poems – when someone dies or if there’s a marriage coming up – there’s a hunt for the ‘good poem’, and it has always been like this. With all the clamour and noise of social media, when our attention span is being pushed and pulled all the time, reading a poem can just slow you down, make you more aware of being alive.

So, it’s always going to be worth checking out events like Bealtaine Poem Circles at The Whale on Thursday May 1st to mark Poetry Day Ireland. That night local poets will be reading new work written especially for May Day. There’ll be other poems, plus music and even some sound therapy.

It should be an evening of fun with a promise of rhymes and maybe even a bit of danger…

Eithne Hand’s second poetry collection, Tickle, will be published on June 5th 2025, available online here. But better to go to The Village Bookshop. Tickets for Bealtaine Poem Circles on May 1st at The Whale here. More details here.