Harbour: Poems and Essays

Harbour is a collection of poems and an essay. The poems address many themes, from silence to childhood, boarding school, Dublin and heartbreak. The essay will focus on silence and how this affects my poems. As I will explain more fully in the essay, at the core of the poems are two kinds of silence. The first is the silent trauma that dominates the poems, both in form and subject. This can be explored in terms of Lacan’s definition of trauma from his January 20th 1954 seminar (ed. by J-A Miller), which he later defined as part of the ‘Real’ in ‘The Imaginary, The Real, and the Symbolic’. This appears in ‘The Dream of Irma’s Injection (Conclusion)’, in the seminar from March 23rd 1955 (Lacan 33). Lacan explains that trauma is that which cannot be expressed; it is the flux of meaning, the ‘glimmers of light’ that hit us before they can be symbolized. In Part I of the essay I explore Lacan’s notion of trauma, as well as its responses, through ambivalence and mysticism. Part I will thus take the form of auto-criticism and examine where the trauma or its responses have made their mark on my poems. In Part II I will explore the silence that accompanies the materiality of language. I am thus arguing that in my poems my attention to the materiality of language creates a detachment from meaning, which equates to the experience of silence. For example, my use of minimal form, careful lineation that is often more vertical than horizontal, and lyricism, briefly distracts the reader from ‘meaning’, and creates silence. To support this argument, I will examine the poet Thomas A Clark’s use of material silence in his concrete, visual and page poetry; I will also consider some of my poems that were inspired by his materiality and silence. Parts I and II of the essay will thus offer an insight into how silence affects my poems from two separate angles – while exploring the broader cultural and poetic context that supports each of these.