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

I wrote ‘Allochory’ especially in response to Alan’s call for poems. Or rather, when that invitation came I found that a poem, which had been circling around in my thoughts, had found its purpose.
I live in the Highlands of Scotland above the Cromarty firth, at the foot of a mountain, and so the closeness; the beauty and the fierceness of climate and environment are part of everyday living for me. If the first rule of finding a subject in poetry is to look out your window, I’m off to a flying start. But more than that, this place also calls out a kind of gathering behaviour in me. I’m alert to the opportunities that might kiss themselves to me as poems, be it watching the way a blackbird fanflicks its tail when landing on the fence in front of my house; or spotting the still wet warm hollow left by a deer’s hoof in the woodlands beside us. All of this happens alongside my awareness of the news of the rest of the world; and knowing that it can be challenging for people, and all life, in the other places that share this planet.
Having become fascinated recently by the activity of trees in their persistence in sustainment, including innovating ways to spread their seeds, I felt that a poem, which spoke to that idea of nature both as a wilful force and a collaborative prophecy of possibility, refuting all that would deaden life (all that ruin and decay that we name as natural, so often aided by our own alien actions, but which is only part of nature’s cycle, which also includes resurgence and regeneration) would be good for this moment. I felt the poem brought a necessary story, that these wonder birds, the jays, making their need for seed food a gift, becoming a cooperation with oak trees; taking up and storing their acorns, then forgetting just enough of them, leaving them buried to grow into new woodlands. All the light in it.

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

For me, even before I start drafting a poem, the form it might take starts suggesting itself. This may change, and often does as I write. I write fast for the initial draft, and in the case of this poem the free verse format became evident as I spilled its words onto the page. The whole notion of allochory; a force of hopeful regeneration propelled by flight and then ‘grounding’, echoed in a narrative voice that transgresses linear time, required freedom. This was intensified as I edited that first scatter of the poem, which I did as I usually do, by reading the poem out to myself; listening for that all important quality in every poem – breath.

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

The poem parries between a formal arrangement of three-line stanzas and darting lines where I hoped to intimate the to and fro movements of the jays who are the agents of allochory – seed scatter – flitting between the feet of the oaks (where the acorns they seek are found), and their hoarding sites. In inviting readers to follow these movements as they read I’d also imagined introducing some sensation of the poem’s voice, it’s ease with transgressing linear time, connoting a bridge of memories that we might recognise, but which also cannot be ours, because they are deeper in time than us. All of this suggested information – not written directly in the poem, at all – requires space and breath in order for it to emerge. Leaving that space on the page is all a poet can do, really, printing an impression of thoughts distilled into the words of each line

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

I decided to call the poem ‘Allochory’ because it is a striking word. Being the scientific term for dispersal of seeds by animals or birds, it is derived from Greek and so also, I felt, offered that sense of an ‘outganger’ word, uncanny and perhaps mythological. In this respect, the action of assisting seed dispersal becomes something more; enters into the arena of metaphor. I felt this ‘outwith’ present paradigms quality enhanced the tone of the poem as a narrative of care, and as a prophecy of hope and possibility.

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

I think the composition of this poem is led by the alignment between these two elements. The part of the Highlands of Scotland where I live sits at the confluence of several important watery navigation routes, and this has supported the coming together of a rich linguistic legacy. This local languaging is rich in compound words and words that act as imagistic routeways across linguistic boundaries. This marries with a time-deep oral tradition of sharing news and information in stories. Still, today, you will hear people in coffee shops and on buses sharing the pleasure of furnishing time spent together with stories. It’s a kind of social grooming; sustaining the bonds of fortitude for life lived through northern winters. I think my poem is borne out of this Ross-shire voicing; referencing the innovation in both describing the material and the abstract, and in sharing a narrative that brings traditional framing to present-day concerns – how our ecologies are being threatened by our own seduction into economies of extractivism and exploitation; how this takes us from sustainment (leaving us with parched imaginations), and an idea of how we might refute this, choosing more collaborative, hopeful possibilities.

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

It’s uncanny isn’t it how these individual poems, drafted in all the airts and pairts of this wide world have become such evident companions. That’s the gift of having an excellent editor! I really appreciate the rhythm of the collection travelling the intimated routeways from the sea to the inland fraying of watercourses, or their absence, over terrains that we imagine as loamful or desert. There is a journey here, and a kind of terrible hardness of beauty too – always in balance with the truth of what we are living today, queasy with the knowledge of our impact on all the life that we are given to share this above all natural world with. The pacing of the shorter incantations and observations alongside longer poems is so beautifully executed. I am particularly pleased that ‘Allochory’ is bookended by the brilliantly upending of the sustained yet succinctly executed metaphor of Paul Brookes’ ‘Sup a Well Earned’ – inviting us to drench ourselves in the groundtruth of our relationship with nature, and the warning in it – and Matthew M C Smith’s deeply relational narrative ache; an entreaty, pleading the healing of the ‘humming trails of the flower field’, ‘the unstoppering of water’. Each poem feel like an empathetic friend alongside my own poem’s intimations.

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

While Allochory might evoke some stark thoughts concerning our surrender to recognising our own smallness, ultimately, in front of the innovative persistence of life apart from, indeed, in spite of the consequences of our human failings to recognise that we cannot tame nature, I hope that it also assembles its words into imagining ourselves collaborators for more possible futures; planting oaks like jays.

Bios and Links

Cait O’Neil McCullagh

A Highland-Irish archaeologist and anthropologist, and child of migrants (with a pen thirsty for words about place and people, and becoming into belonging), Cáit has been writing poetry, at home in Ross-shire, since December 2020. Since that time more than 70 of her poems have been published widely in print and online. She also writes essays and articles, and her work has been stowed into anthologies alongside pieces by A L Kennedy, Irvine Welsh, Kathleen Jamie, and others whose works have populated her own reading for more than a few years. Cáit enjoys being invited to perform her ework at festivals and other literary gatherings, both in-person and virtually. A Co-winner of Dreich Press’ ‘Classic Chapbook 2022’, In 2023, she received a Saboteur Award, and was longlisted for the Bridport Prize. Her first full-length poetry collection, invited by Drunk Muse Press, will be published in June 2024. She continues to outrun cancer, first diagnosed in the spring of 2022.