Monahan celebrates the notion of splendid isolation

CULTURE NIGHT REVIEW: Local poet mulls over the necessity of being alone for creativity

Poets feature strongly in this year's Culture Night offering, and amongst their number is Noel Monahan taking to YouTube to dazzle.

This reviewer can feel almost embattled by the rich onslaught of language when listening to unfamiliar poetry - I just can't absorb it. Such rich truffles should be savoured with modest nibbles, and so it was that Monahan served up a five minute taster of his exquisite poetry.

"Creativity by its very nature requires you find your place in isolation, and you remain there for quite a while, sifting through the artform" proclaims Monahan in a monologue that should be beamed into TVs in Dublin tonight. The capital will soon be bustling with a pandemic poets at this rate.

Such wisdom is echoed in his recent poem 'Advice to a Young Poet'. Dedicated to the memory of Tom MacIntyre, you can imagine him appreciating lines such as:

Listen to the hills clapping hands,

Crab apples dropping into the ditch.

Moving on he opines, 'Often times creativity is a reconnection with something we have lost or have forgotten'. He proceeds to explain that the latin for city - 'urbs' was originally the word for mouldboard, that part of a plough which turns the earth over. A self proclaimed 'word farmer' Monahan delights in dwelling on what's become of the land, how it gives way to 'drills of smoking chimneys/headlands of high rise'. Wonderful!

It's worth spending five minutes alone with this video.