Teresa Corish, 79 from Doon, Co Limerick was diagnosed with terminal cancer in May 2011 and died the following November.
Monica and her sister are trained nurses so along with their two other siblings and extended family they were able to care for Teresa in her own home until her death in November 2011. Monica said they got invaluable support from home care nurses from Milford Hospice during this time.
“For six months I travelled every week by train from Leitrim to Limerick, writing my way through those journeys, coming to terms with what was happening, making sense of the changes in my mother, the strains in our family, and my own reactions – the writing of the poems helped to contain my grief,” Monica said.
In the month’s following her mother’s death she began to realise that the poems had a “universal quality” despite being particular to one death, one family and one set of relationships.
Monica said: “It has been suggested to me that the collection describes a particularly Irish way of death, and I can see how that might be true.”
Monica’s father Michael Corish, 89 died in July 2013. Monica was there to care for her father too.
She said: “His death was very different to my mother’s: less of a tragedy, more expected, even welcomed by him, after a chronic and debilitating illness of many years’ duration.”
Monica added: “It wasn’t all easy by any means caring for either mam or dad while they were dying, but the residual tangles and snarls of our child-parent relationships burned away, and we came into an easy place together.”
Irish Hospice Foundation, Head of Education, Research and Bereavement said Monica’s account of caring for her mother is “unflinching”.
She said: “The most profound journeys of life are facing your own or surviving another’s death. It can be both a lonely and intimate terrain.
“Monica’s observations are acute and her poems capture some essence of the shifting, the confusion, the insights and the deep, deep feeling of many kinds at these times.
“She is true to relationship as they were in the past, and as they change. The poems must but have been cathartic for Monica but I can further see them lending themselves out to others, bringing comfort.”
The new book is published by The Irish Hospice Foundation. Fifty per cent of profits from the sale of this book will got the Irish Hospice Foundation and to local hospices. Irish Hospice Foundation chief executive Sharon Foley described Monica’s work as a “joy to read” in a foreword to the collection.
Ms Foley said: “Hospice is about living well to the end and Monica’s poems embody this spirit but with cutting honesty – she does not hide from the struggle this living can involve.”
Poet Jane Clarke who launched the book said the collection, while contemplating suffering and loss, is ultimately a celebration of commitment and love.
“The poems courageously convey the depth and breadth of emotions evoked through the months of giving over one’s life to caring for someone through the days of illness and approaching death,” Jane Clarke said.
Poet, playwright and novelist Dermot Bolger said: “This is an elegy for a lost mother and a courageous insight into a journey of loss, but also a celebration of the memories that bind tight as part of the ongoing story that links those have gone before us with those who remain behind.”
Note: Monica Corish started her career studying science. After graduating from college University College Dublin she travelled to Africa. She later trained as a nurse and worked in South Sudan, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Angola. Monica moved to Kinlough, Co Leitrim in 2005. She developed chronic cervical and lumbar disc injuries and had to give up nursing and working overseas. She is now a full-time writer and writing workshop leader. Monica was the winner of the North West Words Poetry Prize, 2013. She was commended, 2014 and 2016 Hippocrates prize for Poetry and Medicine.
Previous collections by Monica Corish include Slow Mysteries (2012), for which she received an Arts Council bursary, and Gleanings (2015). Her poems have been published widely in Irish and UK literary journals, including Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Cyphers, The Shop, The North, Southword, The Galway Review, The Interpreter’s House, and Ink Sweat & Tears.
A Dying Language is available to buy on-line at www.monicacorish.ie. The book costs €12 plus €2 post and packaging to customers from Ireland. For overseas customers the book costs €12 plus €4 post and packaging. It is stocked in The Winding Stair bookshop, Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin.
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