It’s Personal

Author Aisling Fahey.

Aisling Fahey thought of writing a poem on the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and felt her roots in her bones. “My bones know their history/That wasn’t taught at my East London State Secondary School/Lately it has been pulsing/Frantic in its desire to discover it…” she writes. The poem, Recovering History, is among those she read at the Long Night of LiteratureS at Instituto Cervantes on Friday.

Fahey, 21, is the Young Poet Laureate for London and tasked with showcasing its potential to a wider spectrum of readers. “Poetry is the distilling of a moment. There is something very beautiful in being able to say everything that has to be said with one line and an image,” she says. Her links with verse date to when, at 13, she participated in a school competition and was introduced to the world of poets.

Poetry has been her method of processing things. “There was a period of a few months when I could not write a thing. And it felt as if my tongue had been cut off,” she says. When she began to write, she created an abstract set of new poems with imageries. In another powerful poem, she forms a spectrum that stretches from the earth mother to her own, and gives it “probably the longest title of a poem I have ever written”. Mother, Juggler of Clouds, Expert in Holding the Sky When it Threatens to Fall, When the Gods Strike their Fists and the Thunder Heads Mercilessly to the Earth came to her as “little vision”.

In India, Fahey looks forward to travelling. “I wish to see the Akshardham temple. It will be amazing to spend time away from the noise to reflect,” she says.