Peter Kay, pictured, is currently living in Donnybrook. He has published three collections of poetry and won prizes for his work.

Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote?
Yes, it was called ‘Sunset’. ‘The purple tinted clouds seem heavy with remorse’ is all I remember of it. At 14 I wrote ‘Sea Dreams’: ‘I visualise its greenish hue/ its radiant deep enchanting blue/ cascading back and forth and free/ to roam about the world’.

I kept my poems in an exercise book in a box. I drew a brown autumn leaf on my poetry book as a sort of symbol of poetry.

The brown autumn leaf reminds me of Archibald Mac Leish’s poem about the art of writing poetry, ‘Ars Poetica’. One couplet in that poem is ‘for all the history of grief/ an empty doorway and a maple leaf’.
Yes, the leaf seems dead, but in fact is full of nutrients for new growth. To me, it is the cycle of the devastation wrought by experience and spiritual recovery which leads to growth as a human being and as a poet. Grief and rebirth are necessary for poets

Did you experiment early on with different poetic styles?
I got into the habit of writing 17 line free verse poems when I was 16. For instance: ‘Love’s the song moves in the air/ and I am chasing after/ over the sudden bright mountains of dawn/ followed by my laughter’. This is a poem to which I have added a stanza about every decade. It has evolved based on my changing experiences of love.

Was there any poet who inspired you?
William Blake. My immersion in his work has been gradual over a lifetime. I see him as the towering eminence of western mystical writing.

Do you consider yourself to be a mystical poet?
I don’t, but I hope God does.

Can you tell us about your publications?
‘Over by the River’ was published in late 1988. A kindly retired schoolteacher, Pat Lawlor and Audrey Meredith, a well-known drama teacher from Sandycove, helped me. In 1995, I published ‘Dresden’, which was about the destruction of this city by Allied bombs on 13 February, 1945.

The book came out on the 50th anniversary of the attack. It was illustrated by Oisin Roche and the poem and illustrations were exhibited in the Irish Writers Museum. We travelled to Dresden after, and met the Burgermeister of the Frauenkirch Rebuilding Project.

I read an article about the bombing in The Irish Times about 1978, and it sowed seeds in my imagination. I was struck by the fact that it was one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and about the size of Dublin then.
Over 600,000 incendiary bombs were dropped with no warning, and the whole city was destroyed in a firestorm in about seven hours. About 40,000 civilians died. Dresden had never been bombed before during the course of the war and the people thought the Allies would spare it.

The novelist Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner in a slaughterhouse in Dresden during the war. He remembered the city as an exquisitely beautiful place that after bombing resembled the surface of the moon.

It was rebuilt, but not restored. Vonnegut said it was something like Dayton, Ohio, or in our terms, some kind of vast Ballymun.

My third book, ‘Lover to the Ocean’, was published in 2003,

What is your method of work?
I write every day. An idea comes into my head and I follow it through until it stops. To me a good poem works like a spark plug in a car engine: if the gap between the points is too wide, the spark can’t leap the distance (obscurity). If the points are touching, the spark doesn’t need to jump [banal prose]. In an ideal process, just enough obscurity exists for the reader to have to use the spark of his or her imagination to connect with the electricity of the poem. A good poem is 100 poems for a 100 people, and they are all different.

Do you revise your poetry?
Not now. But ‘Dresden’ was written over 12 years with 19 drafts. A new anthology from my writers’ group, Airfield Writers, ‘Gates of Ivory and Horn’, will come out in June, and I am editing two collections, ‘Sacred Salt’ and ‘Profane Pepper’. The first contains mystical and spiritual work, while the second book is humorous.

One of Peter’s poems is on our Poetry Place page.