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Profile
Born in Templeglantine, Co Limerick, Seán Body has lived all his adult life in the Greater Manchester area, working as an accounts clerk prior to training as a probation officer. Subsequently he worked for Manchester Probation Service, transferring with the implementation of the 1969 Children Act to the newly formed Social Services Department where he undertook a variety of roles, including training. Most recently, he has run his own training agency, specialising in child care. He joined Manchester Poets in 1988, establishing Tarantula as a Manchester Poets imprint. A founder member of Manchester Irish Writers. In 1998 he reconstituted Tarantula Publications as an independent publisher and launched the thrice yearly magazine Brando’s Hat. His poetry has won prizes in several competitions, including, Ver Poets, Peterloo and Bridport. A short story won the Irish Post Listowel Writers Competition. In recent years, family illness has forced him to curtail his activities.
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Creative Work
Blight
for Noel Connor
A decade of collaborations:
Drawn to words… But this
is silence, stillness
so deep it moves
the eye. An expectation
of ocean.
These colours belong
somewhere. Indeterminate
outlines suggest a bird,
some fish, two seals—
or just a west coast beach
picked out in stone.
You could tell our history
in stone: this a shawled head
back to the land
expects no one;
the weight of its grief
binding like roots.
A bruised sun lies low,
hardly revealed
by the small wing of shadow.
I almost listen
for the dry throated cormorant—
And I’m back
walking a winter strand.
Everywhere the eye turns
is tormented:
Loss a witching note
snaring the soul.
This poem won the first prize in the Ver Poets Open Poetry Competition 1999, and was published in the prizewinners pamphlet,Vision on (Ver poets 1999). It was subsequently published in a joint pamphlet with Ian Parks, Lines of Dissent (Tarantula 2001).
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Reflection
Easy enough to identify the occasion of this poem, an exhibition of paintings by Noel Connor at The Portico Library & Gallery in Mosley Street, Manchester. The exhibition was called Drawn To Words and consisted mainly of collaborations with poets. I had been invited because Noel had used some lines of mine for a mini series he was doing called Poetry Instants: Rub off the box and find a poem… As well as the collaborative pieces, Noel had also included a small selection of abstract paintings, one of which, with its bleak outlines, vague shifting forms and winter colours called up for me something far from that pleasant crowded evening in the warm, friendly gallery; and I was back // walking a winter strand. But much further back also, back in the mid nineteenth century with its raging famine, the abandoned, abandoning people, the decimated land; those evocative, half trancelike images interchanging and shifting like the forms in Noel’s painting.
My poems are frequently driven by memory, not necessarily my own, but a folk memory, composed largely of images, word associations, the oral history and stories that, in childhood, establish who we are. When I was growing up in rural West Limerick, the Great Famine, though it had been a hundred years before, had become part of consciousness, seared into the very geography, the half-obliterated paths; those defeated, hopeless people setting out on tortuous journeys, ending in death or exile, the people with their backs to the land. For centuries, the Irish peasantry had known suffering and oppression, all wars had ended in defeat, but now nature had turned on them, the native earth which they had extolled in song and story. It was time to leave, a mass emigration that continued for the next hundred years, which I was forced to join at one of its peaks.
Allied with this was the story of how my mother’s family had been evicted from their home: an uneducated man tricked by another’s facility with words; evicted then because through his labour, a piece of worthless moor, given as his stipend, had become fertile, was valuable. So, Everywhere the eye turns: a recurring history of disinheritance and loss, like a leitmotif disposing the psyche; which explains the slightly bitter note on which the poem closes.
But poetry can be life affirming, creating art from adversity; an act of defiance and, if successful, of triumph.
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Publications
Seasons, Glass Head Press (Limited Edition), 2003
Lines of Dissent (joint pamphlet with Ian Parks), Tarantula 2001
Witness, Tarantula, 1995/1998
At the end of the Rodden, Ed. (Manchester Irish Writers) Scríbhneoírí, 1997
Poems from the Readaround, Ed. (Manchester Poets), Tarantula, 1995
For Tarantula Collections edited by Seán Body see www.seanbody.co.uk/tarantula.htm
Brando’s Hat archive (Issues 1-12) available at www.poetrymagazines.org.uk
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Contact & Links
Email: sean@seanbody.co.uk
Website: www.seanbody.co.uk
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