Enda Wyley – Someone to Say Yes

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2025

Someone to Say Yes, guest editorial by Enda Wyley.

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Someone to Say Yes

The child is delirious with fever, shouting about lions. The next day in the garden, in a state of weak recovery, he makes a sundial from stones. The woman observes the boy closely. She is his concerned and watchful mother – but also, although she doesn’t realise it just yet, a poet in the making. As he creates the makeshift sundial, she reaches for a pen and begins her own work, vividly detailing the intimacy of her son’s illness and his slow recovery. She sees him crouch, ‘slightly / trembling with fever, calculating / the mathematics of sunshine.’ She comes to understand how ‘the wave of fever taught silence / and immobility for the first time.’ The poem fills the page, builds with emotional intensity, and reaches an eight-line crescendo:

Here, in his enforced rest, he found
deliberation and the slow finger
of light, quieter than night lions,
more worthy of his concentration.
All day he told the time to me.
All day he felt and watched the sun
caged in its white diurnal heat,
pointing at us with his black stick.

She stops writing, crumples the page, and throws it in the bin. It isn’t good enough. Who could possibly want to read about a sick boy building a sundial? But her husband at the time rescues the poem from the wastepaper basket. He flattens it out, carefully reads it, irons it, an idea coming to him. He will post it off to the magazine Poetry Wales. The poem is immediately accepted, and it becomes the title poem of her first collection, The Sundial, published by the Welsh publishing house Gwasg Gomer in 1978.

Gillian Clarke tells me all this as we sit on the edge of her bed in a Dublin hotel. It is autumn 1999, and I have come to interview the acclaimed Welsh poet for Poetry Ireland Review. The lobby had been too noisy, so she invited me to her room. It was an unorthodox interview setting, but an unforgettable one. There, with my pencil flying across my notebook and my small tape recorder pressed to play, I listened.

‘In those days,’ she tells me, ‘it was very difficult to get a book published and, until The Sundial came out, the TLS had never reviewed a book of poems by a Welsh poet.’ She was lucky, she says. Her journey as a published poet began because of the inspired action of someone who believed in her poem, sent it off to an editor who instantly recognised it as what it was, and still remains: a real poem. ‘We all need someone to say yes to us,’ she concludes.

Writing this editorial now, I think back to that afternoon in the late nineties and how her story resonated with me, the younger Irish poet, so intensely listening. Back then, I was starting off as a poet, having published two collections, Eating Baby Jesus (1993) and Socrates in the Garden (1998).

But my real beginnings went back even further, to when I was ten years old and wrote my first attempt at a poem. Like Gillian Clarke, I threw it away, only for it to be found by my mother who, like Clarke’s husband, took an iron to it and posted it off from Dublin to a poetry competition in Cork, where she was from. To my surprise, I won. My prize? A volume of Literary Life: Prose and Poems by Canon Sheehan, presented to me by Professor John A. Murphy from U.C.C. at the North Cork Literature Festival in Doneraile. A peculiar award for a young child – but not even that dour, dark-covered book could dampen my enthusiasm for words.

What mattered most to me wasn’t the prize. It was that someone had said yes to my fledgling poem. Because of this, I set off in my own way, filling notebooks, playing with words, and being rewarded with a feeling of intense joy and possibility that has never left me, most especially when, even now, I reach for a pen and feel the rush of a new poem claiming the page.

Other writers, too, have been buoyed by that vital early encouragement. Dennis O’Driscoll, for instance, was famous for sending handwritten postcards to fellow poets – simple affirmations that validated and inspired. His writing was distinctive – dark ink curls that poets in Ireland were always chuffed to receive. As though a new poem or collection wasn’t fully complete without the O’Driscoll stamp of approval. The flap of a card falling onto a hall floor. Words to goad you on to new poems, better ways of writing. Dennis, after all, was well skilled in writing postcards.

He had written to Enid Blyton when he was a child, and she had replied, praising his handwriting! He’d also written to W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Stevie Smith, and Brian Patten – and received responses from them, too. No wonder, then, that he wrote to us Irish poets. Yes, you can do it. Yes, you are doing it, his messages seemed to say. Keep going.

David Marcus, too – Ireland’s most influential literary editor of the twentieth century – offered his ‘yes’ through his editorship of the New Irish Writing page in The Irish Press. Between 1968 and 1986, he showcased emerging voices like Claire Keegan, Colum McCann, and Kevin Barry. As a teenager still in school, I was thrilled to see my poems appear alongside Paul Durcan’s. Marcus sent me feedback that sharpened my craft, and his publication of my early work remains one of my most cherished memories.

These encouragements matter. Think of Elizabeth Bishop, whose fateful first meeting with Marianne Moore – on a bench outside the main reading room of the New York Public Library in March 1934 – sparked a decades-long friendship, with poetry as its central force. Bishop wrote in her essay on Moore, Efforts of Affection, “It seems to me that Marianne talked to me steadily for the next thirty-five years… her talk, like her poetry, was quite different from anyone else’s in the world.”

Moore became Bishop’s earliest advocate, championing her work, nurturing a talent that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Nearly all of Bishop’s early poems were published in magazines thanks to Moore. She also wrote an introduction for Bishop’s poetry in an anthology of work by younger poets, where she praised her for her “methodically oblique, intent way of working,” while also recognising the inspiration Bishop drew from earlier poets: “One notices the deferences and vigilances in Miss Bishop’s writing, and the debt to Donne and to Gerard Hopkins.”

When they first met that day in the library, Bishop reportedly asked Moore if she’d like to go to the circus — not realising that Moore never missed a single one. Their second meeting was, in fact, at the circus, where Moore arrived with brown bread to feed the elephants, instructing Bishop to distract the enormous creatures with the bread while she tried to snip elephant hair from their heads. It was to be used for a bracelet she had, a special gift from her brother, made from elephant hair that needed mending.

Shortly after this encounter, Bishop wrote to a friend, ‘I’ve seen her only twice and I think I have enough anecdotes to meditate on for years.’ Elephants and the circus aside, it was poetry that was to always remain central to their friendship.

Not every writer or poet, however, has had someone to say yes to them. Many remained relatively unknown in their lifetimes. Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems, yet just a handful were published while she was alive. Only after her death in 1886 were her complete works published, leading to her recognition as one of America’s greatest poets.

Similarly, John Keats, too, struggled for recognition in his short life, publishing only a few poems. Yet after his death in 1821, he became one of the most celebrated of the Romantic poets. But whether championed or ignored, poets and writers have always shared one trait: a fierce creative resilience. That resilience is the mark of the writer. And always, it is sustained by reading.

Elizabeth Bishop may have been lucky to meet Marianne Moore at the New York Public Library. But with or without that encounter, she would still have made her daily visits there in the years after she moved to the city, finding guidance and inspiration in the books she discovered on its shelves. There, she read Charles Darwin, George Herbert, John Donne, and Sigmund Freud. There, she read herself into becoming a poet.

Reading, in its own mysterious way, reminds us of what is possible. As the poet Mark Strand said: “When I read poetry, I want to feel myself suddenly larger … in touch with—or at least close to—what I deem magical, astonishing. I want to experience a kind of wonderment. And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the strangeness of a world sort of recombined and reordered in the depths of a poet’s soul, the world looks fresher somehow. Your daily world has been taken out of context. It has the voice of the poet written all over it, for one thing, but it also seems suddenly more alive …” (The Art of Poetry No. 77, 1998).

I value the poems I have read and carried with me over the years. What would I have done without Philip Larkin’s wise words? His poem, ‘The Mower,’ hangs over my desk, encourages me to keep going, says, ‘we should be careful/ of each other, we should be kind/ while there is still time.’ Then there’s Miroslav Holub’s poem, ‘The Door,’ that always puts a spring in my step;  ‘go and open the door./At least/ there’ll be/a draught.’

There’s Thomas Hardy’s woman calling, Edward Thomas on a train that stops at Adlestrop, Louis Mac Neice peeling an orange while snow outside falls, Sylvia Plath’s morning song of motherhood, Maxine Kumin rummaging in the coat pocket of her dead friend Anne Sexton, Eavan Boland on a bridge over the Iowa river remembering the early intense years of her marriage, W.S. Graham laying a poem at the ear of his love before she wakes, Heaney’s tinsmith’s scoop of love in Mossbawn. These are just some of the powerful poems and vivid poetic scenes that I return to over and over, to be renewed by them.

Reading is a journey that knows no end, surprises and inspires. Just this morning, for instance, my day came suddenly alive when I read the opening poem ‘Monet in Árann,’ from Moya Cannon’s new book, Bunting’s Honey, Carcanet Press, 2025. How wonderful to be ‘ambushed by the sway/ and scent of a July meadow.’ This is the joy of reading – to be caught, ‘in the blurry, summery sway of it.’

So, we all need someone to say yes to us – a mentor, a reader, a kindred spirit, a gifted editor who sees something worth saving in our writing. But even more, we need books and poems – read and reread – until the world gleams again, strange and new. And sometimes, if we’re very lucky, someone who might even reach into that waste paper basket.

A poem is ironed, the sundial is complete.

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© Enda Wyley

Enda Wyley’s six poetry collections are Sudden Light (due October 2025), The Painter on his Bike (2019), To Wake to This (2009), Poems for Breakfast ( 2004 ), Socrates in the Garden (1998 ) and Eating Baby Jesus (1993). She has also published Borrowed Space: New and Selected Poems (2014), all from Dedalus Press.

Awards include the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, Melbourne University and a Reading Association of Ireland Award. Enda has been widely translated and anthologised. including in The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, Lines of Vision, The National Gallery of Ireland and If Ever You Go, One City, One Book. Enda’s work has also been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1.

She is an experienced teacher of poetry, co-hosts the popular podcast Books for Breakfast and is a member of Aosdána. ‘Enda Wyley is a true poet,’ The Irish Times.

Enda Wyley, Sudden Light (23 October, 2025).
Pre-order https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sudden-Light-Enda-Wyley/dp/1915629454