BOOK REVIEW
Going Home to Wyoming, is a collection of a 20-year period of John Ennis’s poems.
The masterful poetry collection has many stories from being a homeless wanderer, divorced from family and place, to homelands by the year grown more virtual than real for many. Each piece is of significance and showcases his true love for words penning stories characterising each poem with elegance.
There’s good rhythmic pace when reading and not wanting to put the book down as the stories come to life in the readers’ imagination. As there’s great placement of the collective poems, the story is told pleasantly from hardships, emotional parts, and intriguing poems that are utterly terrific.
There’s depth to his writing as his poems reveal many intimate reflections for his love of storytelling with some heart wrenching moments of divorce and missing his children, that he never settled down again, and wisdom that brings the entire book together.
This book has impressive storytelling of historical events that tragicalling happened, yet penned so effortlessly in poetry form. Each poem has beautiful storytelling that will captivate the reader with the warmth of the content with a coldness to it. Although many hard stories are present, they are must reads with not all doom and gloom that will pull the reader in from the first piece.
John Ennis is a writer, poetry anthologist, and editor, with twenty-one publications to his credit to date. Retired from Education, he moves between his adopted Waterford and native Westmeath. He continues to espouse causes - his work is often polemic - and he has been green starred by Amnesty International. He believes in World Without War and tries to live up to Yeshua’s Beatitudes. He is presently working on his next collection Speaking of the Doves.
Words by Danielle Holian
INTERVIEW
Tell us a bit about your writing background.
Rural, country farm, some seventy-five acres, seven brothers, the scrapings of the pot. Lots of chores. Finding, secreting Murillo on a Christmas card. Dry or wet battery radio. Turned on for the cattle market report (him), Petronella O’Flanagan’s Between Ourselves (her). Din Joe. The Match. The radio exploding during an electrical storm. Darkness in the kitchen of a July Christy Ring Sunday. Mother whispering, we must all be in purgatory, bedlam in the torrents, no, the house is not on fire. . . .a quiet house (brothers out coortin’), with books in and out, both parents into westerns I grew up on as a boy, Luke Short, Louis l’Amour, Zane Grey. . . oil lamp, tilley lamp, ESB. Beg, borrow or steal to see a Sal Mineo in the Hibernian.
What, or who, inspired you to start writing?
A copy of the Everyman Collected Poems of John Milton given to me in the house by neighbour Kathleen Flanagan when I was fifteen. Reading the first book of Paradise Lost at one sitting. Had to walk it off in the forge field. Like too much Christmas Cake. But the nice taste remained. . . . . . .later, tutoring by Seán Lucy when I was a student at UCC, his comments “barbarous inkhorn stuff” . . . “one of the best long poems I’ve read this year”(Shoredwellers). Picking up every Cohen Anthology of Poetry in the original with English literal translations or in Spanish from round the world, haunting the Mercier Press 4 Bridge Street Cork.
And what influenced your book?
The Janus Face. The Later Selected 2000-2020, looking back, was made a bit easier by the editors doing the selection(poets have blind spots). Initially wanted a Selected as snappy as Lowell’s Faber Selected, but a longer narrative prevailed.
How has your life in general influenced your work in general?
Sometimes almost immediate, I wrote ten years of clerisy out of my system in a rush of some eighty poems (some published later in The Carra Days 2018; earlier some of the eighty made up a third of Night on Hibernia for the Kavanagh Award in 1975, but were excised from my first book of the same name). . . . at other times, the mills grind slowly but they grind, but the process can take a lifetime, if ever.
And how do you find the balance between writing about your own personal experiences and exploring topics that may not be autobiographical, but still speak to many people?
Poems can take the shape of the lyrical, personal “I”, or be written to order, the latter like the poet Rihaku mooning in the emperor’s marvellous garden all day, waiting for the order to write from the emperor as he passed by, and have it ready to read to him and his courtiers for entertainment after he’d finished dinner. The old Irish filidh were in the same boat. Every poem is like it or not revelatory of self: the poet of Pangur Bán was no Robbie Burns. . . . .Sometimes the res publica can land one in a minority of one; my seven-part poem “Referendum Seven”(one which disbelieved in both arguments for what was called the ”Abortion Referendum”) earned one frowning emoticon on Facebook. The poem opted for the solution outlined by Evie Kendal in her Equal Opportunity and the case for State-Sponsored Ectogenesis(Palgrave MacMillan 2015).
And finally, what advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Some writers write the ritual three hours a day. Their writing has the look of it. Still, write every day, the when or where or on what is immaterial. Keep in practice; sometimes a seam of gold opens up. To quote Yeats – unless your writing “seems like a moment’s thought, all your stitching and unstitching has been nought”. Always have the small notebook or whatever scrap to hand: the phrase that’s in your mind before you go to sleep will have absconded by the time you wake. Joyce’s early poems were written on the flip side of woodbine packets. Write with Attitude: a basic humility In the face of everything. Writers can be as conceited as religions are, full of themselves. The Movement greatly influenced the Hobsbaum group. Though whether individually or collectively, members of the latter could have written Dylan Thomas’s “A Winter’s Tale” is speculative, much less the short poem as memorable as “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”.
Grab a copy of 'Going Home to Wyoming' here