MARY O'Malley mentions literary influences as diverse as Pablo Neruda. Fernando Pessoa, Eavan Boland and Richard Murphy. But the childhood experiences of growing up in Connemara - near Roundstone seem the real driving force behind her work, which is full of boats, storms and sea lore (including the irresistible 16th century pirate queen, Granuaile - an earlier O'Malley). O'Malley has recently published her third collection of poetry, The Knife In The Wave, with the Galway based Salmon Press.
She has always written in English but would have preferred otherwise: "I would have liked to write poetry in Irish but I didn't feel I was good enough. I grew up feeling inarticulate in both languages. What caused me real pain was being inarticulate in the language that was mine by right. My grandmothers spoke Irish, and the deep structure of our language was Irish, and all our names for fish and birds were Irish."
In her second collection, Where The Rocks Float (1993), she comes to terms with the realm of the Big House that "had been built on the backs of my, people" and was full of "Englishmen with intimidating accents. Her friendship with the late British poet, George Macbeth, who lived for a time in Moyne Park, led to a reconciliation: "We who were dispossessed/made free in borrowed elegance, made an entrance/and silently I exulted./From those high cold rooms/any of us could have ridden forth, sleek with assurance./When you left, the house died. I will not mourn it./Thanks to you, I would no longer burn it.
She learned that she could use the "hard and slippery" English words she had reluctantly inherited to make her own kind of poetry: "We took it by the neck and shook it./We sheared it, carded it fleeced it/and finally wove it/into something of our own,/fit for curses and blessings/for sweet talk and spite,/and the sound of hearts rending."
"I am a fisherman's daughter and a blacksmith's niece and was surrounded by strong shapes and deep rhythms from the time I could talk," she says. "I knew the need for craft and skill early and I knew that in the right combination of the two could lie the difference between life and death."
The rhythmic grace of her poetry comes not only "from the Irish", but is also influenced by the music sessions she attended as a child. Many of her poetry readings are now given as part of an evening of music. The Knife In The Wave contains a series of poems commissioned by RTE to commemorate the late, acclaimed sean nos singer, Joe Heaney.
In a further twist on her links with music, she has begun to envision her lungs as a musical instrument since her recent struggle with pulmonary illness. After severe lung collapse, she had an operation which involved "stapling, one lung to my ribcage it gave me a kind of drumhead, bodhran effect".
She found, in her speech, that "the hardness of consonants in English began, literally, to hurt". In The Knife In The Wave she likens this physical scar to the psychic scar of having lost Irish: "my stolen language, an echo that tugs".
O'Malley was the first in her family to have a third level education. At UCG she delighted in directing plays. After graduation, she and her husband, Mike Gallagher, went to teach English in Lisbon for eight years: "I wanted to get as far away from Ireland as possible. It was fabulous. I stepped off the plane into this wonderful, velvety air. It was the first time in my life associated with absolute radiance."
Many of the poems in A Consideration of Silk (1990), her first collection, were inspired by that sensual liberation: "That man is an occasion of some delicious sin ... He is like a whole box/Of very rich dark chocolates/With a hint of mint in the tail./The kind that only tantalise the lips,/linger on the tongue/and slowly settle on the hips" (from `Gluttony').
At the same time she has always been aware of the abuse of human rights in a global context, and she expresses her chagrin that "Consenting acts of love/Are only enjoyed/Over the staked thighs/Of the unsaved women of El Salvador" (in `Credo'). She explains: "I can't dismiss these difficult questions. As a mother I always feel I have to measure art against the eyes of a starving child. The Latins are fantastic at being able to live with life and death, without having to section things off. They know the importance of being able to celebrate your life in as many ways as you can.
She found it hard to return to Connemara after her time in Portugal (she now lives in the Moycullen Gaeltacht), but she had two small children and she and her husband felt the need to come home. Although Ireland in 1986 was "in the depths of an economic depression", her move home was good for her poetry. She joined the Galway Writers' Workshop, where she met fellow poets Rita Ann Higgins and Anne Kennedy, and was "nurtured" by Jessie Lendennie of Salmon Press to become one of their bestselling authors.
She began to develop a real sense of belonging in her native landscape, however unforgiving it could appear. Even while recuperating after her lung operation in 1993 she took on a job running writers' workshops on the Aran Islands and was exhilarated by the rough winter ferry crossings: "The sea always strengthens me. It best approximates to the source of my poetry that indefinable world beneath the intellectual."
Her frequent theme of crossing the rift between two worlds Connemara and Portugal: the storm and the hearth: the Irish and English language - has led her to describe herself as "a changeling". In the new book, the two most memorable characters are the folkloric Otter Woman and Seal Woman, both of whom must make the transition from their native element, the water, to the land, because of their love for land men: "It is about the polarity of the sexes, the magnetism between opposites," O'Malley says.
In the power struggle that ensues, the Seal Woman tries to bring her human lover under water, but the lovers cannot survive for long in each others' element. The Seal Woman remains in her "murky" home, while her lover returns to his work of rebuilding Galway city.
`The Seal Woman', the longest poem O'Malley has written, is, of necessity, much looser in form than her other, more closely crafted work, she observes. As well as its "fish out of water" motif, the poem is critical of the redevelopment of Galway city: "Now all is laid open for the tawdry/Assault of the pastel merchants/Ready with paint and balcony".
She explains: "There has been strategic planning in Galway by someone without a vision. It is an economic game gone mad, more dangerous than people realise. The most offensive thing is bad planning when there is the money to do it right."
In addition to voicing her disapproval of the way the architectural face of Galway is changing, O'Malley also protests about the lack of pain relief she was offered during her illness: "I underwent excruciating pain. I felt as though I was being tortured. The casualness of it was disturbing.
"When I went to Dublin for surgery they brought in a woman who was in charge of controlling my pain. I concluded that the young lads in Galway had never really tell pain themselves. Otherwise why would they withhold pain relief when it was available?"
Outspoken, dreamy and irreverent, it seems she is busy earning the epitaph she would most like for herself: "At the end/She was peaceful/Though up to that she gave everyone hell."
