The birth of her second child reminded Aoife of something initially noticed with her first – fine grit trapped in the folds of skin on a baby’s hands: “I unfurl each newborn finger and, with the tip of my smallest nail, lift thedaily sediment away.” The poem Silt from Mother Nature immortalises in words an example. Me! I wanted to capture all the small stuff about motherhood, the small things that you can’t capture with a camera or video on a phone.'

When asked about whether she had an audience in mind when she wrote her first collection, Aoife said 'Yes. And she added that you find out more about your work deciding for yourself where you want to sell poems – “some self-publish, others publish traditionally and others are on video, she said giving the prolific Holly McNish as an example.

Aoife had an early aim to write her first poetry collection as her goal “.it can take five or 20 years” she said. Her second collection, The Day Before, is complete and Aoife is now working on her third.Īnd throughout the evening – which ended with questions from the audience frankly and fully answered – the poet offered snippets of gold-dust advice for the people in the room and online who both wrote poetry and wanted to know more about getting published. In the poem a precisely-described toy makes a resonant image aboard a pregnant woman’s stomach: “So I tell the man behind the till it is for you/ this plush octopus all tentacles and soft stitching./ Home, price pulled off, and care label cut/ I rest him on the marbled coral of my stomach/ I watch him float on the tide of rising limbs.” “Others have taken much longer!” she said. “This was one of those,” Aoife said, introducing a reading of her poem Octopus from her first collection. She quoted the late Highland poet Norman MacCaig who had said his poems took the length of smoking one cigarette or two to write. “Billy Collins says stuff about that,” she added, one of many references to other poets to set people off on their own journeys of discovery. “If you don’t do anything but sit at your desk, you won’t have anything to write about,” she laughed.

Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean