Writers who have inspired me

My first grown up book and my first real love was Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. It was a romance, adventure story and history lesson all in one. It was the book -- bought for me by my mother at the local University bookstore -- that sent me, head reeling, into grown-up fiction.

Having lived in Ireland, I am a huge fan of Irish literature. Contemporary writers like Dermot Healy, Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Edna O’Brien and Anne Enright have had a significant influence on my voice. There is something about the cadence and lilt of Irish literature, the poetic musicality of even the fiction that I take to.

In the late eighties when I first started writing seriously I had a friend who sent me books. He introduced me to the work of Michael Ondaatje and Elizabeth Smart, Canadians, both of whom had a huge influence on my developing style. In fiction I tend to favour poet-novelists because the work tends to be ‘voice driven’ and because there is an ‘aboutness’ to the fiction that makes the story seem to be as much about plot as it is about epistemology.

The past two years I’ve been particularly influenced by American poetry. Carolyn Forche’s new book Blue Hour is, for me, that rare book that made me question why I should keep writing when someone else has said so much so well. Lucie Brock-Broido, Robert Hass, WS Merwin, Li Young-Lee and Galway Kinnell are a few of my recent favourites.

Because I write poetry and fiction and am an avid reader of non-fiction I find it hard to make time to explore new literature. My preoccupation with the past makes me want to go back and read the ‘greats’ although there is an equally pressing desire in me to stay abreast of contemporary Irish, English and Canadian literature (my academic specialties) and to explore the literature of other cultures.

My interest at present has to do with how writers live in the world. I’m questioning what a Tibetan monk once called 'the luxury of inconsequence'. In poetry the work of exiles, of the oppressed, of writers such as Carolyn Forche, Yehuda Amichai, Mahmoud Darwish, Dennis Brutus, Ariel Dorfman, and Otto Rene Castillo has influenced me in ways that have little to do with my poems themselves. I think the best writers ask us to look at how we live in this world -- they don’t show us the world we know, they show us the world we think we know, the world we maybe should know -- and that’s why I return to the above writers again and again.

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