This week our poetry team is thrilled to feature a new poem – 'MIRROR' – by Limerick-based writer Valentine Jones. The poem is here in its entirety.
Valentine Jones is a 17-year-old writer from Limerick. Valentine has been published in Paper Lanterns, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, the Poetry Ireland Review, the Irish Times Youth Supplement 2024, and is a recipient of the 2024 Edna O'Brien Young Writers Award. Valentine has a cat called Cookie.
Recently one of our editors Róisín Sheerin talked with the writer about how much recognition she's already received for her work, her inspirations, and how the new poem came to be. This is a transcript of their conversation:
Róisín Sheerin: You are young and have received a lot of recognition for your work already, published by The Irish Times and Poetry Ireland for example and receiving the Edna O’Brien Young Writers award. How does that make you feel?
Valentine Jones: Incredibly lucky! I believe that writing is fundamentally a skill, one that is learnt and practised, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have the time and space to develop my interest in writing. I know so many writers my age that produce incredible pieces of work, or have the capacity to do so, but feel unable to even attempt to publish them due to the social pressures to conform, and to not do anything out of the ordinary, that are particularly unrelenting for teenagers. I also feel proud, of course, and disbelieving. I am deeply grateful for every opportunity to publish my work that I have had, and I look forward to further opportunities in the future.
Róisín Sheerin: Who inspired you or continues to inspire you as a poet?
Valentine Jones: Without a shadow of a doubt, the poet whose work I have spent the most time thinking about and reflecting on is Michael Hartnett. I feel a deep connection his work, partly because we are both from Limerick and I’m able to bring to his poetry when I read it my personal experience of the places in Limerick that he writes about, partly because, as someone who has spent a lot of time struggling to improve mo chuid Gaeilge and be able to fully comprehend and explore Irish language poetry (something I have yet to achieve), I resonate with his struggle to reconcile his desire to write as Gaeilge with his work as Béarla. The connection and draw I feel towards his poetry goes beyond just those reasons, however. There is something so magnetic about his poetry to me. It is so different to so much of the poetry that I read, it is both familiar and unfamiliar at once. A lot of Hartnett’s work can be categorised and defined by the tension between two different modes of being and of seeing the world, which really strikes a chord for me for more reasons than just those pertaining to language. I feel inspired by Hartnett in that anytime I read his poetry, I feel my love, appreciation, and awe for what writing can achieve be reignited.
Róisín Sheerin: How old was the child you were in Mirror? Did you record the moment in someway then or was it just something that stuck in your memory?
Valentine Jones: The poem ‘Mirror’ isn’t so much a recounting of one particular moment, but rather an amalgamation of several similar ones. When I was in primary school, I used to be driven to my grandparent’s house after school a few days a week. It was a very long journey to my younger self, although in reality it was only about thirty minutes. The drive was through the countryside, passing numerous fields and farms along the way, and it etched itself into my mind in a very solid, immovable way. My understanding of the world as a child was that things fundamentally stayed the same, that my impressions of the way things were would be set in stone forever. However, one year when I was a child, there was particularly bad flooding that lasted for a few weeks. The world I saw through the windows of my granny’s car was transformed utterly in a way that really stuck with me. It was perhaps one of the first times I realised that things I took for granted, like the sight of fields and fields of green stretching from Limerick suburbs to my grandparent’s house near Adare, could be changed by forces beyond my control.
Róisín Sheerin: The images are very beautiful, though I know beautiful is a word writers are recommended not to use. They are very apt – the fields flooded with silver, splinters shattered on the green, jagged edges cutting the trees. Were you concerned about seven years' bad luck at all?
Valentine Jones: Thank you! And not really — I wouldn’t consider myself much of a superstitious person. With the imagery in my poem, I wanted to give the sense of a complete shift, a stutter in cognition, that seeing flooding like that as a small child caused me. Flooding isn’t (usually) an irreversible thing, but I suppose it also represents here the rebalancing of perception and understanding everyone goes through as they grow older and come to the realisation that things they considered immutable facts about the world are subject to change — that everything in the world, no matter what, ends up fundamentally altered, especially people. You realise this first, and most viscerally, as a child. When I was about nine, my grandparents moved house. They live much closer to us now which is wonderful, but I can’t help but miss that long drive I took so many times to visit them.
Róisín Sheerin: Do you write in other genres?
Valentine Jones: Yes, though not as extensively as I would like. Though writing poetry rarely takes me long at all, I find it takes me a very long time to write prose. I often abandon short stories before they’re finished when I get an idea for a different story, although I do try to come back and finish them. I particularly enjoy writing horror, sci-fi, and magical realism. I never write stories that don’t have at least a hint of the unbelievable, the fantastical, but rarely do I write full-blown fantasy.
Róisín Sheerin: When do you consider you first wrote a fully-fledged poem, and were you happy with your work?
Valentine Jones: My first fully-fledged poem that I have a record of is a limerick I wrote for school when I was in third class. It goes:
‘There once was a cat named Splat
his face was misshapen and flat
he was missing an ear
quite ugly I fear
he looked like a well trod-on mat!’
I suppose I must have been happy with it, despite the incorrect syllable count for a limerick! My first poem that I wrote purely out of the desire to write was when I was 12. It was in response to learning that many of the stars we see in the night sky are already dead, but it just takes so long for their light to reach us that we are still seeing them as they were. It goes:
Beautiful Lies
Stars are naught but beautiful lies
They hang above in the depthless sky
They are a window to the fathomless past
Their lies are all of them that will last
When their last true light is burnt out
Beautiful lies will to the universe shout
"I was once here, I existed, I shone.
I was a pinprick of light, just one!
Lost in the infinite majesty of the universe.
Now I am lost to the mists of time."
I often feel everything I have written since this poem is in an attempt to carry on a conversation (or an argument) with it, not because it’s of any great quality, but because it represents to me my deeply held fascination with the topics of science, space, and the universe, and their intersections and overlaps with poetry.
Róisín Sheerin: Do you go through many drafts, in general?
Valentine Jones: Many times when I write poetry, I will strip the first draft back as far as it will go until I am left with a few short lines that contain the essential essence of what I am trying to convey. Other times, I will be afraid to alter as much as a single word out of fear that I will wreck the whole piece. With my short stories, no matter how many drafts I go through, I never feel like I have done enough.
Róisín Sheerin: Reading through other poems by you have written, the environment is important to you, especially the relationship between the heavens, if not heaven, and earth. Do you fear for the future, or do you think forces like the power of literature and the campaigning/rebelling of the next generation to be in power can help save the world?
Valentine Jones: In poetry, I feel the intrinsic fact that humanity is a part of the environment, and as such we should be doing all we can to protect it, is frequently laid more bare than in other mediums, due to the propensity for poets to reflect on our relationship with nature. Such incredible damage has already been done to the environment, and will continue to be done into the future, unless there is a fundamental shift in society and in what we value. Too often people ignore the very basic truth that climate change is already in deadly effect, and has been for quite some time, because the vast majority of damage is being done by the global north, and the ones facing the consequences are those in the global south. I think what is vitally needed to negate and undo global warming is for campaigners in the global north to pay more attention and give more help to those currently being affected, rather than focusing our efforts on some nebulous future consequences that’ll impact us more severely. There needs to be more compassion in the fight for climate justice, and I absolutely believe that literature can help with that.
Róisín Sheerin: How do you see your career developing, or how would you like it to develop?
Valentine Jones: Currently, I’m just trying to get through my Leaving Cert! I’ve only the foggiest idea of what I’d like to do, career-wise. In the best possible scenario, I’d love to become a full-time writer. Failing that, I’d settle for some sort of history-based job. I plan on studying Irish and history in college, so I’ll see how that pans out.
Róisín Sheerin: There is a line in one of your other poems, The School is a Building Site, you are looking on at what might never be finished, watching from “History/Maths and French.” I love that idea. The world is turning on so quickly (unlike the building on the school in the poem); we are all in a way looking on from history, do you think?
Valentine Jones: ‘…A crane, tall and thin, insubstantial
as a dream: I watch from history
maths and French as it picks up crates
of wood and drops them steadily
on the ground, crossing gaps of air
like those yawning over oceans
in slow seconds…’
The school I attend is quite old. My dad and my uncles attended it long before I was born, and I have no doubt that my future nieces and nephews will be attending it themselves, years down the line. A lot of work has been done over the last few years with regards to updating it and building new structures. It has been strange to reflect, in my final few years in secondary school, that life in the school will continue unabated, with neither my input nor my observation, after I graduate. Each moment passes into history at its cessation. In history class, we spend so much time studying things that are now over, done, unchangeable, that it can be easy to forget that though we live in the mutable present, one day we will be resigned to the fixed and intangible past. I wrote that poem last year, when I was still sixteen. I am now a few months away from being eighteen. In a few years time, a few months, days, minutes, the time I have spent writing responses to these questions will be a memory, untouchable, intangible, and forever confined to history. I’ll bet the building work still won’t be finished by then though.
Valentine Jones
Valentine Jones is a 17-year-old writer from Limerick. Valentine has been published in Paper Lanterns, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, the Poetry Ireland Review, the Irish Times Youth Supplement 2024, and is a recipient of the 2024 Edna O'Brien Young Writers Award. Valentine has a cat called Cookie.
Róisín Sheerin
Róisín has performed in a number of roles including poet, actress and comedian. Having just completed the M.Phil. in Creative Writing at Trinity, and turning her writing hand to non-fiction, she is mostly appearing these days as herself.
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