Jackie Leven Feature Interview

Preview of Leven's Ireland tour in autumn 2001, written by Liam Carson (then at Lilliput Press, later founder of the Irish Language Literature Festival IMRAM) for the Irish Examiner and the Irish News. The text opens with Leven's quotation from a Yeats poem about the feeling of being blessed and able to bless, and makes blessing, friendship, community and poetic tradition its leitmotif. Leven talks about Fife's coal mines, wool and paper mills in the 50s and 60s and about women washing at stone communal troughs in the snow. He describes Doll by Doll as the opposite of punk's “cartoon violence”; formerly a vision drove him, today he is interested in the dream world. He criticises a culture that wants to analyse everything – images should work on their own. He explains at length how “Call Mother A Lonely Field” came about (a winter morning on a frozen field by the Thames at Maidenhead, a sudden longing for his mother). Defending Ancient Springs refers to Kathleen Raine's study, Creatures of Light and Darkness contains “My Spanish Dad” about his late father and a setting of Robert Frost. With Bly he sees “unexpressed grief” as the root of collective evils. To close: Leven as a bard with rogue's tales, who has spent a lot of time in Cork and Kerry. Overall tone: hymnic.