Killough home is just perfect for poet Paul

Killough home is just perfect for poet Paul

13 February 2019

LEADING poet Sinéad Morrissey has hailed a new collection from Co Down poet Paul Maddern as a “tour de force”.

The Tipping Line is a sophisticated and wide-ranging anthology from a poet who opened The River Mill, a new writer’s retreat, on the Ballyclander Road, near Killough, last May.

It has received a major endorsement from Morrissey, a TS Eliot and Forward Prize winner, who said: “Partly set in Donegal, it is an outward-looking transatlantic tour de force”.

The Tipping Line is the fourth collection from Maddern, who only began writing poetry in 2004 after he returned home to Northern Ireland to help care for his mother who was raised in Bangor.

He was born and raised in Bermuda after his parents moved to the Caribbean British island territory due to his Cornish-born father’s government work. 

Maddern’s work has already won a Bermuda Government Literary Award and he’s due to receive another one in weeks.

He initially pursued a career in ballet as a young teen before accepting that his dream was never going to happen.

After living and working in the US for six years, he moved to London where he became the head waiter in the famous Groucho Club in Soho. He also worked for some time at the Fontana restaurant in Holywood, Co Down.

All of these influences — from the Caribbean to Europe, to Donegal and home — can be found in this collection, which is published by Templar Poetry.

Written in the form of eight long ‘letters’ to a young actor, the connected poems are part reflection on World War One and part homage to the creature from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Published in the shadows of both the bicentenary of Frankenstein’s publication and the centenary of the WW1 armistice, Maddern’s collection serves as a timely reminder that these two events continue to influence our lives and events today.

The 56 year-old explained the inspiration for his collection. 

He said: “It’s more biographical than anything I’ve written before but I hope it’s much more than that too.

“I started writing a poem in 2012 for Rowan Vickers, the son of my best friend who was going to study at the Julliard school for performing arts in New York. I had already written poems for his sister when she went off to study law so I thought I better write something for him.

“I was in Donegal and it’s such an inspirational place so I started writing a poem and it just mutated into this much longer thing of the years. 

“The first part brings in Rowan’s grandfather, the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers, who  was one of the greatest voices of the last century, and it segways into a movie I was watching at the time called Gods and Monsters about the famous Hollywood director James Whale, who directed Frankenstein.

“Whale had also fought in the World War One and I supposed Frankenstein and Whale began to play on my mind with the monster being a metaphor for the resurrected bodies of soldiers as a means of Whale somehow salvaging the men that he knew who died in the war.”

Maddern believes that his next collection is likely to be based on his writing retreat, which he describes as “a peaceful place for writing and reading”.

“There’s the history of the building of course but there is also this dominance of stone and I’ve just realised that I’ve been writing a lot about stone as it’s just everywhere,” he added.

The five bedroom former ruin sits down a country lane with a running stream in its garden and lots of little nooks and hidden corners for writers to sit and soak up the peace of the countryside.

The writers — whether they are creative writers or non-fiction writers or students working for their MA or PhD — are well looked after by Maddern, who is an excellent cook after picking up tips from years of working in hospitality. 

“So far the response has been brilliant to the River Mill and I’ve writers who have come back here three times,” he said. 

“I feel that this is the most settled time in my life so far and I think the River Mill has a lot to do with that.”

Maddern gained his MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre, at Queen’s University Belfast. He has taught at the universities of Leeds, Edinburgh as well as the Heaney Centre and has facilitated workshops for writing schools and groups throughout Northern Ireland.

His work has been recognised by two Bermuda Government Literary Awards and he received one of the first Arts Council of Northern Ireland ACES awards, worth £5,000, in 2012.

Further details for renting The River Mill, visiting www.the-river-mill.co.uk.