Off the record! Eoin Devereux talks poetry, Morrissey and class

BETWEEN clicking cups and lively chatter, Eoin Devereux waves and nods at colleagues and friends walking into The Scholars Club - a popular coffee spot at the University of Limerick. Wearing a Morrissey T-Shirt, he takes a sip of his Americano before taking Limerick Live down memory lane. 

His poem, The Bullfield, is part of Vital Signs, a new poetry collection curated by Martin Dyar, and published by Poetry Ireland. 

Speaking of his contribution, The Bullfield, Eoin takes us down memory lane. Particularly, to Kennedy Park, the Limerick estate he grew up in. “Before it was built in the mid-1960s, the land there was known locally as The Bullfield and was used by the psychiatric hospital, St. Joseph's in Limerick.” 

After his mother passed, Eoin was packing up her belongings when he looked back on a place and a time. “A strong memory came back to me about the men in the psychiatric hospital who were put to work on the mental hospital's farm. They would have looked after cattle, wrecked turf, would have sewn, they would've grown carrots and turnips to feed the hospital,” recalls Eoin. 

As he attended Coláiste Mhichíl on Sexton Street, Eoin remembered seeing the men who were "enslaved to this work" on his way to school. "Ironically St. Joseph is the patron saint of the workers, and they were selling their labour for free, essentially, for bed and board in the psychiatric hospital." 

Poetry came naturally to the Limerick writer, who would describe his work as political and personal. 

As a teenager, Eoin would fill notebooks with poems. “I wrote a great deal, and at the time, I thought I was writing poetry. In reality, I think I was writing song lyrics because I was very influenced by punk rock and punk culture.” 

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A few years ago, he returned to writing short stories and flash fiction, which were shortlisted in competitions and broadcasted on RTÉ. However, it’s the poetry that kept “leaking out” of his brain. 

“I was very reluctant to it. I kind of struggled with this idea of focusing on poetry for a long time. Then, about four years ago, I decided to really focus on poetry as the way in which I would express myself through creative writing.” 

His poem, The Bodhi Tree, was published in The Irish Times and somehow made its way to a forest trail in Vermont, in the northeast New England region of the United States. 

“I was thinking about the people on the hiking trail in Vermont, coming across a poem that was conceived during a soundcheck in Dolan's Warehouse in Limerick. It wasn't chosen because somebody said, that guy’s got a funny haircut. The poem was standing on its own, and to me was more important.” 

Cultural sociologist and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Popular Music and Popular Culture at the University of Limerick, Eoin Devereux, has written extensively about music and media. “My original training was social sciences and I suppose one of the tensions initially when I began as a creative writer was to almost unlearn how to write as an academic, and how to write as a creative writer,” he explains.   

Something that has been on his mind quite a lot. "I've actually found that being a creative writer has really benefited my academic writing because I think I've become more of a risk-taker in my academic writing."   

In recent years, he has published extensively on David Bowie, Joy Division and Morrissey - songwriter and, formerly, frontman of The Smiths. The latter, plays an important role in Eoin’s life, as well as in his wardrobe.    

As Morrissey is quite the controversial character, this reporter wonders if you can disassociate someone from their art.   

“I’ve thought a lot about the number of singers and artists who have done and said things that I fundamentally disagree with. I have struggled a lot with many of the statements that Morrissey is reported to have made, however, the music and the art is too important to me personally. I can separate the songs of The Smiths and Morrissey's solo work, but that wasn’t an easy thing to do.”   

Speaking of Morrissey and Bowie, he notes: “I think part of their success and part of their obvious talent is that the lyrics they created, speak to people. People can see something of themselves in the song.” 

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For people to see themselves in his poetry, that’s what Eoin wants. “The key thing for me is the ability of the poem to speak to other people, that it's not just some abstract, indulgent piece, so personal that a reader won't understand.” 

In April, Eoin curated "April Is The Cruellest Month", a Limerick Poetry Broadsheet featuring work by Donal Ryan, Denise Chaila, and Kerrie O’Brien. His own poem, Penny Boy looks at how the working-class is often looked down upon. 

“ Penny Boy is about social class, and the ways in which working-class people are often judged according to where they live, their address, their accent. I’ve found people can relate to it because they’ve had this experience of being marginalized or stigmatized.” 

Eoin always wanted to ensure his work never felt like a lecture or a sermon. I find great liberation in writing poetry in terms of the themes in the poetry, there's a lot of stuff there about class and about homelessness. 

How can working-class people be better represented in the arts? 

“Through more participation,” says Eoin. “I belong to a writer's cooperative called Right Pace, which was founded by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald. We’re coming to the end of a major arts council project called Walls of Limerick, and the project has included voices of people who are often marginalized in the arts.”  

Being from a working-class background himself, Eoin fundamentally believes in the right of everybody to express their experience and have their voices heard.   

“I grew up in an environment that was very much about social justice, and I feel very strongly about that. I suppose I'm one of these people who benefited from an education.”   

The professor teaches a module called Creative Writers in the Community, through which he works closely with underrepresented groups.   

“School students, members of the Traveller community, people in direct provision are given the opportunity to write about their experiences in their own words and to perform and read their work in a public setting. I think the module is becoming impactful, in a variety of schools and other settings in Limerick”, says Eoin.   

As book recommendations kept piling up throughout the conversation, this reporter wonders if there is a book the professor is guilty of not having read yet.   

“I haven't finished Ulysses,” admits Eoin. “ I get probably a little more than halfway in and stop. And then what I've done of course is I've cheated, and I've read the last part of the book, the famous passage.”

THE BULLFIELD
by Eoin Devereux

On All Souls’ Day
I knelt down on the mottled Tundra clay.
Ear cupped to the frozen ground,
I could faintly hear
the murmurings of men
buried, nameless in the paupers’ grave.

Simple men like Francie Murphy and Brendan Plunkett,
let out for the day,
to belly crawl over damp drills,
handpicking potatoes, Greyhound Cabbage, carrots, turnips, mangles.
It takes a lot of work to feed a hospital.

In the Bullfield,
I see Mattie Keane and Pa O’Brien,
able-bodied innocents,
chopping wood or ricking turf,
thrown the odd Players or Woodbine
as payment for their toil.

In the Bullfield,
I also see tormented men like Jim Sullivan and Dinny Ryan,
fattening pigs with sour milk and potato skins,
slopping out greeny brown scutter from their pens.

I see them all, and somehow cannot deny them,
men who were dumped in silence at first light,
from the back of a blue Ford tractor,
exchanging their labour,
for bed and board,
in the madhouse, named after
the Patron Saint of Workers.