‘He was in a different space to most of us’
IN THE SECOND OF OUR FEATURES ON PHILIP CASEY WE SPEAK TO HIS LITERARY PEERS
ALL it took was one email, a hastily composed missive to a writer I’d been told was a friend of Philip Casey’s.
That email led to a phone call and a suggestion that I perhaps contact someone else, another friend of Philip’s. And so it continued.
It soon became apparent that in Irish literary circles Philip was something of a legendary figure, loved just as much for his ‘booming laugh’ as his unflinching prose. I could have spoken to dozens of poets, authors and novelists about Philip, listened to one after another tell me how special he was. But that job may be for someone else, a biographer perhaps. In the meantime, here’s what some of those who knew him best had to say about the late Philip Casey.
Katie Donovan is a poet originally from Camolin.
‘Philip was part of a group of writers from my native North Wexford, whom I met when I was a teenage poet in the late 1970s. My father was keen to nurture my literary leanings, and introduced me to James Liddy, poet and editor of the wonderfully entitled literary magazine ‘The Gorey Detail’. Through the ebullient James and the artist Paul Funge – co-creators of the Gorey Arts Festival – I met a group that included Philip, Eamonn Wall, Mick Considine and Paddy Kehoe. I gave my first public reading, aged 16, trying my best to look like I knew what I was doing.
As we were both living in Dublin and both writing poetry, Philip and I soon established a firm friendship of our own, one that lasted 40 years. Philip was a vocal supporter of my work and introduced me to many of his writer friends. This was typical of Philip. He brought writers together. For decades, his deep and merry laugh could be heard at a many a book launch in Dublin and beyond.
In 2015, in honour of Philip’s 65th birthday and the publication of his Selected Poems, Dermot Bolger and I planned a special gathering at the Mansion House. A huge crowd of family, friends and well-wishers appeared to fete Philip. Modest and dignified as ever, he blushed with delight when he entered that packed gathering to celebrate his own achievements.
For a man whose life involved many vicissitudes, Philip had an inimitable gift for laughter. He eschewed self-pity, but could write with tenderness and poignancy about suffering. His writing shines with the outrage of injustice and the quest for integration.
Although he spent most of his adult life in Dublin, right in the centre of its bustle and commerce, his poems about his youth in rural Wexford have a fresh and lasting ring to them. He was comfortable writing about Hamburg, 18th century Montserrat, or 1950s London.
Like all the great Irish writers, his broad vision encompassed both the wider cosmopolitan world, and the intimate details of the beloved local scene.’
Paddy Doyle is the author of The God Squad and is a disability activist.
Paddy first met Philip when they were both patients at the Cappagh Hospital in Dublin. Teenagers at the time, the pair formed a friendship which would endure until Philip’s passing in 2018. Although Paddy has breathing difficulties and long conversations are a strain, he was determined to speak to me about his friend and lifelong ally.
‘I spent many years in Cappagh with Philip, and in later years I’d come down to Gorey in my wheelchair and we’d sit at the bridge watching the trout go by. We used to spend a lot of time at the bridge where the plaque now stands.
He was best man at my wedding. Before that we shared a flat, if you could call it that, it was more of a kip, in Dublin, for many years. We had many parties, they’d start on Friday nights and go on until Sunday when we had to go to bed so we could get up for work.
He wasn’t affected by success. I always got mad when he did better than me in class at Cappagh, we had school of a sort there. You could see he was going to be a writer even then. We used to slag each other when I became the more successful of the two when the God Squad was published. But he was the first to wish me well. For Philip’s first book of poetry, I took the photo of him swinging on a tyre on a tree in the garden of my house in Inchicore and that picture was on the back of the book.
Philip was a good character, a great friend and a man that would go to the end of the earth to help somebody out.’
Mary O’Donnell is a poet and novelist.
‘We met in Dublin, in Bewley’s café, at a book launch for another author in the early 90s. The minute I met him he greeted me as if he already knew me, he had that including warmth about him.
I began to visit him, he moved into the house on Arran St around that time. I wrote to him after I’d read the Fabulists, something in it clicked with me; his handling of erotica. He started to get some traction in England after that; Erika Wagner reviewed him in the Times and that was a big help to his career. He was becoming a novelist in the years when the support for Irish authors was there, he was part of that surge in the mid nineties.
However, as a writer he never made anything of being Irish, he was much more European through his reading and experiences than Irish, while still being part of Ireland, His writing fit into many cultures. His house in Arran St attracted literary types of people and hosted many great nights, but even then you couldn’t help but be aware of his passion for the natural world, he was into environmental protection long before it was a done thing.
When he received a poor review I asked him about it and he simply said, “I carry no animus”; he was in a different space to most of us. Wexford is saturated with names of great writers, but Philip was slightly outside the pale and he was all the better for it as a writer and a thinker, he didn’t do the moves most writers did.
His writing will be considered quite significant over time, it will become of great interest to academics.’
Thomas Lynch is an American poet and essayist.
‘I was familiar with Philip before we met. Someone had given him a book of my poems and he returned it to me with a written note containing some very complimentary words. But that was Philip, there was so much humanity in him - beyond the fiction and the poetry.
I remember reading one of his poems and being stopped in my tracks by it. He was a beautiful human, but his humanity was ratcheted up because of his past; he was a broken man in many ways, physically. But the way he lived was a triumph over that, a quiet and lifelong triumph.
He was generous always and wrote from real intelligence. While a lot writers’ primary interest is in their own work, Philip was interested in the art and the whole chorus of people involved. It’s often said the army of Irish poets never falls below five thousand and every one of them is armed, but Philip was contrary to that, he had a zero gains mentality; his attitude was always “the more the merrier”.
He wanted to see everyone’s work upheld. There would have been writers fighting for busaries, for publishing deals, but he wasn’t that way. His work often talked about encumberance and troubles. And when I think of Philip getting around Dublin, that was valour, he didn’t move easily, but he did so with grace. There was such dignity in how he carried himself.
I recall doing a reading in Kilkenny and looking up to see him entering the room: “here comes Philip”. He had made it. And at that time it wasn’t easy for him to come from Arran Street to Kilkenny. I’ll always remember that big laugh, it was so deep, there was a lot of joy coming out of him. He had the richest internal life of any man I’ve ever known.’
Anthony Glavin is a short story writer and literary editor.
‘I’d reviewed The Fabulists for the Irish Tribune and subsequently received a postcard of thanks from Philip. We met up, and along with Kevin Connolly, became firm friends, a trio of sorts. We would sit and drink together in the snug in Hughes’ Pub in Stoneybatter.
From a physiological sense, what struck you was his laughter, his eyes, the continued strength he showed while on his crutches. But above all his heart, Philip was the most generous soul I’ve ever met. You could only marvel at how light-hearted he was, considering what he went through. He was a spiritual heavyweight. I wrote a piece after his passing where I described him as a secular saint, and I could imagine him chastising me for that.
I would have been at his house in Arran St often, the evenings there were beyond belief. I can remember on the way home one night at 2 a.m., attempting to give my first crossbar to a fellow writer, we got about 15 metres.
In terms of Philip’s writing, it was the language to begin with. He had a wonderful graphic sense, it went near sentiment but it wasn’t sentimental. There was
huge heart in his writing. And he managed, through his writing, to draw upon all he had learned throughout his life. He was as modest as they came.’
Ronan Sheehan is a novelist, short story writer and essayist
‘In Book Two of The Aeneid Aeneas describes the fall of Troy. The Greek besiegers withdraw from their positions. But they leave behind Sinon, a kind of double agent, hoping that the Trojans will collect him and bring him into the city - so that he can unlock the Wooden Horse.
In 1798 a Wexford army, complete with pikes and green shoots in their caubeens, appeared in Dublin. They flitted through the streets for a few hours and vanished. It seems that, like the Greeks at Troy, they left a Sinon behind them...Philip Casey. From his secret bunker in East Arran Street, he has been beavering away for decades in the cause of Wexford and The United Irishmen.’
Heather Brett is a poet and short-story writer
‘I knew Philip very well since I first came to Dublin in 1984. Dermot Bolger first published us in Raven Arts Press and I had my first reading with him in St Canice’s Church, Finglas. We were published in many of the same poetry outlets.
We also went to Sicily on an Ireland Exchange Programme with Poetry Ireland and I was invited to his tribute night in the National. Philip had a great spirit, was a dedicated writer and a wonderful friend and I miss him dearly.’
Heather wrote three poems for Philip, Indian Summer in 1991, Not an Obituary in 2017, and The Red Loss Poem in 2018. The latter is published below.
A Red Loss Poem for Philip
I was driving home trying to outrun the clammy reach of guilt, of family, noticing the twilight, how the clouds darken and scuff the sky, how the bare wisps of branches create a fuzz low down on the trees, how it makes the whole blur a soft pencil sketch, hint of maroon dogwood some impression of green that may only have been there as an expectation, the entire, drab, brunette haze. I was eating raspberries, thinking how superior they were to strawberries, an elegance, something akin to a kiss, probing of scented tongues, a fleeting rush of remembered taste, textured nubs read in the mouth. You were beside me in the deepening dark, your body angled close to bend an arm and lay your hand on my shoulder.
I brushed your knuckles with my jaw, the air charged as always with your words spoken, remembered, whatever… the silence making room. I wanted to drive forever, the car swallowing the lengths of tarmac, time stretching, curving, sweet dusky rhinestones glowing between us.