The Poet's Eye

Foreword This is a selection of poetry written by my mother, Celia O'Neill. Mum began writing at an early age and her talent was recognised whilst at school where she won a nationwide competition. She excelled at English Literature during A-levels and went on to study History and French at the University of East Anglia. Mum had various professional roles during her working life - ranging from Librarian and Archivist, to Executive Recruiter - but it was through writing that she really found her passion. On most mornings she would be up at the break of dawn to work on her novels and many times I would come down for breakfast to find the dining room table commandeered. It was a sight for bleary eyes to behold: folders of manuscript, covered from top to bottom in near illegible script, a seated figure hunched to a crescent and a scrawling hand ablaze, feverishly propelled by a mind not content to respect the rules of the ungodly hour in which it worked. It was this passion and level of commitment that saw Mum win prizes in international competitions for her poems, some of which were included in published anthologies, but there was no collection published that consisted solely of her own poems. The Poet's Eye is a collection of her poems that were bought together posthumously. The poems here lie broadly in two main kinds with various other topics and themes woven in. The first kind considers (what Mum liked to discuss with us until well into many a night) the more poignant side of personal experience we, or others, may face; love, family, spirituality, loss, choice, ageing, death and God. The second kind details the smaller `first world problems' (and perks!) that come and go but yet remain integral to our lives. To talk with Mum, one would often be engaged in a topic at either end of this spectrum and I think the poems here perfectly express that duality of her persona. Mum was, by her own admission, a bit of an `outsider', never content to do things (or think!) much like everyone else, and this in turn cultivated her particular way of embracing her own experiences and those of others with whom she felt an affinity. She was deeply empathetic to the tragedies which people face, as expressed in poems such as `The refugee' and `To a spouse with Alzheimers'. She was in awe of the metaphysical nature of ourselves and of situations: `The people I never knew', `If Nana had married Arthur Underwood'; and she wasn't afraid to embrace the darker, more macabre side of herself in poems such as `The stalker' and `Crows at high tide'. Mum was never shy and was always only a step away from poking fun at herself, as shown in `Relaxation tape' and `Yoga'. Although melancholy manifests in some of Mum's poems, there is always evidence of an undeniable omnipresent spirit; from the stories she created and illustrated as a child, the small `Post-it' note messages she'd leave for me if she were out, to her novels and the poems collected here, all contain the endearingly playful idiosyncrasies that made her unique and that we loved her for. Patrick O'Neill * * * * * You see merely an old grey stone, whereas I see still life magic. Celia O'Neill