Exhaling – an inspiring view from Dzogchen Beara
Not all of the MA in Creative Writing takes place in the classroom. Luckily for the 2016 students of the spring semester poetry module, the final workshop took place in the west Cork writers retreat, Anam Cara http://www.anamcararetreat.com/, on the Beara peninsula, writes PhD student Maeve Bancroft.
The workshop – like all of the poetry elements of the MA – is led by west Cork poet Leanne O’Sullivanhttp://creativewritingucc.com/www/people/leanne-osullivan/, who was born and grew up on Beara, so this is her native – and poetic – territory.
Leanne has published three acclaimed collections with the Bloodaxe imprint and was the winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2010. She has also been awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry.
Beara is only two hours from Cork city yet it’s a world apart, a place steeped in Celtic mythology and literature, where the stories and poems are written in the landscape, waiting, through the centuries, to be transcribed.
Our retreat ran from Friday to Monday in April. To shake off the minor trials and tribulations of the previous week (life!) a couple of us attended the nearby Buddhist Meditation Centre, Dzogchen Beara, http://dzogchen beara.org for the free Friday afternoon meditation. An hour later (two, if you add in the coffee and cake we had at the café), we felt renewed and ready to move forward while stepping back in time.
As part of the retreat, Leanne guided us to some of the ancient sites dotted around the Beara peninsula. We listened to the stories of place – and this part of west Cork is poetically very much her place – then took out our notebooks to write, to sketch or to daydream to inspire future writing.
Leanne OSullivan – showing the way
One of our first stops of the weekend was on the coast road between Eyeries and Ardgroom to visit the Cailleach Beara (The Hag of Beara). This is a lump of weathered rock said to be the mythological crone of Beara who gazes out to sea in search of her husband, Manannan, the god of the sea. The Cailleach is said to have ruled winter months – being turned to stone at Bealtine (1 May) and regaining human form at Samhain (November 1).
The Cailleach is the focus of many poems and spiritual writings – including Leanne’s 2009 collection, Cailleach: The Hag of Beara – and going back as far as the 10th century poem, “Lament of the Old Woman of Beara”.
We took in the nearby Kilcatherine Church, dating to the 7th century, and stood amongst gravestone and daffodils overlooking Coulagh Bay.
On the edge of a quiet country road just outside the seaside village of Allihies we visited another site associated with the legend of the Children of Lir. The stone is said to be the grave of the three children who were said to be turned into swans by their jealous stepmother. Finally we stopped at Dereenatagart stone circle near Castletownbere, standing on the spot where the stones are arranged to catch the light once a year. As Leanne put it, trying to snare the light in Dereenatagart is very much like writing poetry. “We create a space to try to let the light through, fleetingly but lastingly.”
The stone circle at Dereenatagart
Photographs: Maeve Bancroft