Q:1. How did you decide on what poems to send?

A number of concerns have dominated my poems in recent years: the family; the body and ageing; nature under threat; Dublin’s topography. Given the overall theme of the chapbook, I looked at those poems that address the climate crisis which were written since the publication of my most recent collection, Liffey Sequence, in 2021. I submitted three of these for consideration.

Q:2. What poetic form did it take, and why?

My first impulse is always toward free verse. I play freely on the page with thoughts, images, sounds, verbal clusters. It’s only once a certain ‘critical mass’ has been accumulated that I begin to play with form, so I guess I’m a believer in getting the clay onto the potter’s wheel before shaping the artefact. While I rarely go for preconceived forms or full-on rhyme, qualities such as rhythm, assonance and other acoustics are key to a poem’s evolution.

Q:3. How did you use the whiteness of the page in your poem?

In some of my poems, I’m very aware of how the poem will appear on the page, and play with the interaction between type and silence. In others, this interaction isn’t a consideration. ‘Cutting the Turf’ is among the latter, though I’d hope the regularity of line-length to some extent mirrors the laying out of parallel rails of wet turf.

Q:4. How did you decide on the title of your poem?

There’s a fine tradition of harnessing the ambivalence of the gerund in English poetry – think of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Seeing Things’, which hovers between both being objective and hallucinating, or Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’, which covers both the poet’s activity and the state of disuse of the chapel visited. In much the same way, ‘Cutting the Turf’ may be read as purely descriptive of the time-honoured process described – the Irish tradition of cutting and saving turf as a fuel from the local bog. This tradition is under fire as hazardous both to the local ecology and to the climate, so that the activity is in conflict with EU directives that we should be ‘cutting the (usage of) turf’. A ban is in place on the commercial harvesting of our bogs.

Q:5. Imagery, or narrative. Which was more important to you in writing the poem?

Interesting question. Having recently gained first-hand experience of the contemporary process in rural Kerry, I wanted to capture the various stages involved – bogs are no longer initially dug by hand, but the laborious technique of stacking the turf in ‘stooks’ to dry out the sods persists. At every stage I looked for imagery that might suggest something pernicious to nature, culminating in the stooks viewed as “box-braids/ on the scalp of the drying bog”. There is an ecological drive to re-wild and rewet Irish bogs which has run into considerable localised resistance.

Q:6. What do you think of where your poem is placed in the collection?

The order in which a poet, or editor, places the poems of a collection or anthology is always of interest. Different resonances are set off depending on which poems are placed contiguously to a given poem. This is not just a matter of themes – considerations such as voice or point-of-view, form and length also come into play. I was interested, and pleased, to find ‘Cutting the Turf’, which hints at the ecologically damaging practice of draining native bogland, was placed between two poems which have an arid setting – the ‘red soil, the too yellow-green scrub’ of Colorado in Jay Rafferty’s ‘Doghouse’ and the ‘orangey-yellow expanse’ of sand in Sue Finch’s ‘Desert Antlers’. The theme is later taken up in Vikki C’s ‘The Great Desertification’ and Paul Brookes’ ‘Sup A Well Earned’ Indeed, the final word of the chapbook is ‘wilderness’.

Q:7. Once they have read your poem what do you hope the reader will leave with?

Poetry, as Auden famously stated, makes nothing happen. To imagine that by articulating unease about climate change, say, a poet might in some way effect change in a reader’s politics is fanciful. That said, perhaps the point of poetry is precisely to ‘make happen’ an ambient ‘nothing’ – a space that allows the chosen subject to stand out for contemplation. If the reader comes away with an awareness of my thoughts on experiencing contemporary turf cutting practices, I’d consider the poem a success.

Bio and Links

David Butler

(born 1 January 1964) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet and actor. He has won several literary prizes, such as the Ted McNulty Award from Poetry Ireland and the Féile Filíochta International Award and the Fish Short Story Award.