Life, death, and nature at the heart of new book by Cork poet

Cork woman Bernadette Gallagher had been writing prose for years, but only recently realised she had a penchant for poetry too.

Now the Lissarda woman has published her debut collection of poems, The Risen Tree.

“Poetry came to me,” explains Bernadette.

“I had been writing a journal for many years and mainly prose, so I thought it would be prose that I would eventually write. You could say poetry chose me.”

Her poems are thought-provoking and contemplative, touching upon themes such as nature, growth, and human connection.

Bernadette has lived in Lissarda since 1986, and is originally from Donegal. She liked how a recent newspaper article announced her as “a Cork woman”.

“It was a great validation, and it was really nice. “It made me feel even more welcome after all these years,” says Bernadette, who is married to musician and painter John Philip Murray. The couple have a son and a granddaughter.

It is plain to be seen where the inspiration for Bernadette’s thoughtful and insightful poetry comes from.

She lives inland on a hill in Co. Cork with a view of the Cork and Kerry mountains, working the land beside a small forest that she and John planted in the mid-1980s.

“Coming to Lissarda was one of life’s accidents,” says Bernadette.

“We had already been living and working in North Cork. 

We wanted to live in the countryside but beside a city.

“In the end, the house here in Lissarda was within our bracket and we fell in love with the surrounding area.”

There was another plus.

“John had played jazz in Dublin for many years and also played in Cork, so the Jazz Festival was partly responsible for us moving here.”

Bernadette worked in administration and IT for most of her career.

She knew she would eventually settle down to write, and after a long number of years, her writing materialised into poetry.

Her poems have been published in various journals and anthologies, and Bernadette has received awards from the Arts Council and Cork County Council.

“And you are the first to know I am the proud recipient of the Bread and Roses Poetry Award 2024,” says Bernadette. “I am delighted.”

She is driven to write poetry.

“It is like a vocation,” she says.

Bernadette has a gift.

It was a gift that was given to me, and I work at it.

“Getting published and sharing my work is a privilege.”

She finds gardening very rewarding in terms of eating her produce, giving her scythe-cut hay to her neighbouring farmers, and delighting in the beauty of flowers and plants.

“I’ve lived in cities at various times of my life,” says Bernadette. “Living here in the countryside, I spend a lot of my time gardening.

“I love observing the seasons that can mimic the seasons of our lives. Being near to the soil is grounding and feeds my soul.”

Her poem The Middle Path shows her connection to nature;

Our local forest has three levels.

High up on the roughly south facing slope grow dark spruce where mushrooms sprout and needles carpet the underfoot.

Here I have seen a red squirrel dance tree to tree forging for cones

Golden against blue sky.

From the pathway I look down to the valley where light shines

Through a forest of ash sprinkled at he sides

With ditches from when this was Wall’s Farm.

A steel barn empty a stone house in ruin.

Here we sat with Jack in his tidy home.

Sometimes we reach for the Heavens to find darkness

And from the depths of hell we find light.

What is the essence of Bernadette’s poems?

“They are essentially about humanity, about the life cycle and how we treat each other, about inevitable death.”

Each poem in The Risen Tree, according to Orla Fay in her review of the book on booksirelandmaazine.org, “is a meditation on a Psalm. This is a collection about the possibility of life overcoming death, about memory, mortality, and morality. Throughout, Bernadette questions morality. “

The final poem, Lifeline stoically accepts that death is part of life as much as death.

The Man Who Is Near To Death

Knows There Is No Going Back,

No Better. Imagining Delaying A Birth

Bernadette says her poems are not morbid.

“They are about the inevitability of life and how one human treats another.

“My first poem in the book is to do with growth in the garden that dies off and then regrows again.”

On my run yesterday I noticed a tree

Fallen, branches growing straight up

There must have been at least twenty

Though I didn’t stop to count

I think of all the dead below us

feeding us

sustaining us

wanting us to go on

How soon we forget, need to forget, to go on.

Another runner runs towards me,

fast stride and a greeting that only runners share.

He buoys me up as I feel my pace increase.

I go on as he goes on.

Bernadete says she listens even more closely as she gets older.

“I feel I am paying more attention and like the phrase ‘exquisite listening’.”

She is in a number of local writers’ groups.

"I like to acknowledge the people in my life and the people who have supported me,” says Bernadette.

Her household, full of poetry, music, painting, and gardening, is a creative one.

“It makes for interesting conversation over breakfast!” laughs Bernadette.

The Risen Tree has an interesting, emotional feel to it, focusing on nature and the human condition. The poems speak to us, and they resonate with us, woven with care and compassion by a very talented Cork poet.

The Risen Tree is available in Waterstones Cork, direct from publishers Revival Press, and from O’Mahony’s Booksellers, Limerick; Charlie Byrne’s, Galway; and Macroom Bookshop.