Galway poet Stephen brings it all back home for launch of first collection
Stephen de Búrca’s many happy memories of his Galway childhood include regular Saturday visits to Charlie Byrne’s with his parents, Olivia and Tomás (widely known as T), and brother, Lorcan, browsing and picking out their reading material.
So, the launch of his debut poetry collection, 'Atlantic Fret', in that same bookshop this Friday, June 12, will be a special occasion for Stephen, Olivia and Lorcan, especially as many of the poems are about T, who died in 2006 when Stephen was 16.
Now living in Belfast, Stephen usually gets home to Galway City once a month, but that hasn’t been so straightforward recently.
“It’s been a whirlwind few months since I signed the contract with Gallery, but it’s been wonderful,” he says about signing with the Meath-based poetry publishers.
Stephen's poems in 'Atlantic Fret' grew from one simple wish.
“I just wanted to write about the sea and after a few poems, I thought, ‘can I do more of this?’.
The answer is a resounding yes.
From the Blasket Islands to Iceland, Stephen has drawn on the sea, particularly the Atlantic Ocean, in a measured, powerful collection that explores grief, climate change, memory, relationships and more.
Once he started writing, his father became intrinsic to the work.
“The more I wrote, the more my father came into it. I’d had no real intention of writing about my dad, but then there was no way I could write a poem that wasn’t about my dad, which in itself was a beautiful thing. And the more I went with it, it became easier,” Stephen says.
It’s been almost 20 years since Tomás’s death, and “I thought I had processed it and grieved”, he adds.
But creating these poems gave him a new perspective.
“As I was writing, I noticed a shift and that my relationship with him was beginning to change. He was a good father and up until writing the book, I thought of him from a teen perspective. Writing the book, I was having a conversation with him. It made me understand the relationship could still change.”
Stephen's connection with the sea goes back to childhood and is deeply entwined with his memories of his dad.
T worked as technical officer with Bord Iascaigh Mhara for many years and it was he who introduced his son to the force that inspired this debut collection. After T's death, BIM named two boats in his memory.
“I just found myself drawn to the sea,” Stephen says of a relationship that’s fundamental to his own life.
“If I was wandering aimlessly, I’d find myself wandering in the direction of the sea. It’s been where the compass is pointed.”
And he doesn’t like being landlocked.
“Being near the sea brings an enormous sense of comfort; that huge vastness I’ll never understand. I find it oddly reassuring.”
While working on this collection, Stephen was conscious of the growing impact of climate change and the impossibility of ignoring it, even as we seek nurture in nature.
“It’s constantly in the background now. In the past, people could just go to places of nature, but now we are becoming more aware of the changes and it’s becoming more complicated.”
The ability of humans to ignore the reality of climate change amazes him; “being convinced it’ll all be fine when there’s so much evidence to the contrary”.
Stephen doesn’t ignore it in this collection, which he’s been working on for more than a decade.
Some of the poems in 'Atlantic Fret' have existed “in some capacity” for the past 10 or 15 years”, says the poet, who graduated with an MFA from the University of Florida in 2020.
He subsequently moved to Belfast to begin a PhD in the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, by which time, he had a solid foundation for the finished book. That was helped by his time in the USA.
“It takes distance to write, not just about Galway but Ireland, to look at things a bit more objectively. And being in Belfast is helpful to writing about Galway in a way I couldn’t if I lived there,” he reflects.
“But I wasn’t trying to get away from it,” he adds of his native city, stressing his regular visits home.
The Galway-Belfast connection was strengthened earlier this year, when Stephen, a runner-up in the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing 2022, was awarded the inaugural Gerald Dawe Poetry Ireland Poetry Bursary.
It’s in memory of the Belfast poet who died in 2024 and who'd lived in Galway from the mid-1970s – moving here to do an MA at the then UCG – to the 1990s. By then, Gerald was lecturing in Trinity, and settled with his family in Dún Laoghaire.
The bursary in his memory was awarded by Poetry Ireland, Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council and Belfast’s Linen Hall Library to help poets develop new work that connects with his life and legacy. The recipient – in this case, Stephen – has access to Gerald's collections in all three places, including the poet’s home library in Dún Laoghaire.
Stephen was already familiar with Gerald’s poetry but not his essays – they have been a revelation.
“He has incredible way of writing about a place in poetry and in prose that casts a new light on it, whether it is Dublin, Belfast or Galway, His writing on Galway is beautiful.”
Describing Gerald’s writing as “a lesson in paying attention”, Stephen adds, “reading it would sit you up straight”.
When it comes to his own work, “I tend to pay attention to poetic form. Rhyme and metre are important to me”.
But he also writes in a more free and loose style, although he finds that more difficult. It's all decided by language.
Essentially, “the language has to be right . . . it is always about language and that’s always the fundamental for me”.
When it comes to the poets he admires, Derek Mahon is a “big figure” and a lot of Stephen’s PhD was spent studying the Belfast poet's work. He’s currently enjoying Pearse Hutchinson’s collection ‘Climbing to the Light’ and mentions, US poets Elizabeth Bishop and James Schuyler as well as contemporary Irish poets “who regularly offer something new”.
Stephen who loves teaching as well as writing, currently hosts workshops in Belfast, in the Seamus Heaney Home Place in Derry and in Dún Laoghaire's dlr Lexicon.
“I’ve always enjoyed teaching and the whole environment and I’d love to keep doing it.”
Last month, he received the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel award, receiving €2,000 to help him research the poetry of Hungarian poet Amy Károlyi who died in 2003. That will involve spending time in Budapest, far away from the sea as he works on his next collection.
But, this weekend Stephen will be in Galway, launching 'Atlantic Fret' in Charlie Byrne’s this Friday, June 12, at 6pm.
“It will be emotional thinking about my dad and there will be a poignancy to it, but it will be a really nice thing.”