Writing about ‘place’ cannot be separated from language, as a language is not just a unique form of communication, it is embedded in the culture, politics & history, nature. Some things are better said, some can only be said, in a certain language. Others are better conveyed using that language too, which i guess is why in addition to Manx Gaelic there is a Manx dialect too, which takes its roots from both English, Irish & Manx Gaelic. Place names (other than the Anglicised names of towns well known to the Welsh and Indians for example) are frequently in Manx Gaelic and ‘translating the name of a place’ to me would be sacrilege — And anyway the names offer up their own poetics in sound, aesthetics and/or meaning. One of my favourite unused place names is Rhullick-y-lagg-shliggagh [graveyard of the valley of broken slates] which is yet to reach a poem, but I have written three about the place: ‘Cronk Meayll’ and ‘Twelve Graves’ in The Whole Island and ‘Meayll Circle’ in Throatbone. Whilst I struggle learning the language, including it in my poetry is doing that little bit to keep it alive, after it was wrongly pronounced dead in 1979 by UNESCO. There is also an added bonus, and it is a bonus, in that the language adds to the lexicon available too, which is a gift no-one should give back!

The Whole Island was one of the first poems written for the pamphlet, and as a long poem was always seen as the central poem of the pamphlet, as it encapsulated the scope of what I wanted to explore, hence it seemed natural to call the pamphlet the same thing. At the least minute, the titular poem title was changed to the Manx Gaelic, Yn Clane Ellan. The poem was inspired by La Isla en Peso a 15-page poem by the 20th Century queer Cuban poet, Virgilio Piñera, published in 1968. I used the version translated as The Whole Island by Mark Weiss (Shearsman, 2010) which is available to download for free from Shearman’s website. Interestingly for me, the literal translation of La Isla en Peso is The Weight of the Island which Piñera’s poem (and hopefully my version too) captured in the sense of how heavily, or lightly, the whole of Cuba weighed upon him.

Q:7. How do you achieve a balance between Imagistic and narrative in your poetry?

I find it more difficult with ‘historical poems’ like in my queer manx history pamphlet, Isle of Sin, but one can be helped out by homophobes who hold a bible in one hand, a fisting manual in the other. I guess if the poetic imagery doesn’t come through in a first draft, then further editing can create poetry through metaphor, unusual verbs, replacing abstractions like shame with imagery. The major way, of course, is to make sure that one writes poems a mix of poems, ones that aren’t narrative at all — poems that are ‘about’ and ‘about’ something, which is easier if that ‘something’ is a place rather than with a story. I enjoy experimenting with form and I guess the balance depends on the purpose of the pamphlet. My fifth pamphlet, a finger in derek jarman’s mouth, out with Polari Press on the 30th anniversary of his death in Feb 2024, is much more imagistic and sparse and whilst some of the poems my still have a ’narrative’ they aren’t captured by prose, but by a series of imagery, often an obscure ekphrastic of a sculpture or plants in his garden, his artwork or even one of his films, like War Requiem.