"If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way" -- Seamus Heaney on my father, Jack Holland

Jun 4, 2023

This essay was originally sent out two years ago today. Since June 4th is my late father’s birthday, and most of my subscribers weren’t here two years ago, I thought it post it a second time. When you read it, you’ll understand why I want to share it again.

Seventy-four years ago today, my father was born — arse-first and very large — on the Crumlin Road in Belfast, in a hospital next door to a prison. Perhaps his difficult entry into the world infused in him a poet’s poignant outlook. Or maybe his poetic soul was formed in utero, where he had overstayed his welcome by close to a month; and that wayward spirit was the cause, not the result, of his traumatising trip down the birth canal the wrong way. Poets do not want to make life easy on themselves. Poetry is the salt mine of intellectual labour. I wouldn’t wish being a poet on my worst enemy.

Thankfully, my father did not devote his life to being a poet — earning a crust as a novelist and freelance journalist is tricky enough. But throughout his life he wrote a large number of poems, and all the ones I have read have been wonderful. (Personal fondness aside.) I’m sure his writing skill was enhanced by the fact that he was well taught by a teacher who went on to become a world-famous poet: Seamus Heaney (more on that below.)

In honour of his 74th birthday, I would like to share a few of my father’s poems with you. Starting with one of the last things he ever wrote, four months before he died: a Valentine’s Day love poem for my mother, Mary.

On St Valentine's Day 13/2/04
Misogynists get into line --
I wrote this for my Valentine,
A woman who your sort defame
And dare to pass along the blame
For all your ills and stunted lives:
Misogyny on misery thrives.
Misogynists get into line,
Hesiod, Cato, Augustine --
And the author of the Bible --
It's time that he was sued for liable --
All who thought it was their duty
To slander women and their beauty --
Misogynists get into line --
I celebrate my Valentine --
The gods of love attend our bed
And on my arm she rests her head --
A woman who in every part
Captivates both mind and heart.
Misogynists get into line --
For Mary is my Valentine!
Jack Holland and Mary Hudson, Belfast, 1991

Much of my parents’ social circle was made up of left-wing intellectual types, but my father was deeply skeptical of ideologues. So to be his friend, you had to be able to take a joke. Call it his working class common sense, but he thought most hard-line lefties were humourless, university-educated softies with zero understanding of working class culture. I came across this poem, written in 1982 to a close friend who was a Marxist-Leninist professor. It is a gentle and deftly written takedown. (I aspire to such subtlety, but I suspect I’m more of a fire-breathing polemicist. It’s my fierce feminine nature.)

The poem “Dear Gary - I have read your paper” written in 1982 by Jack Holland

And finally, a very short poem he wrote the day after I was born. It’s really quite a grim piece of writing, uncharacteristically pessimistic, indicating perhaps he had a momentary existential crisis after becoming a father to a daughter. He was always very jolly around me when I was growing up, but that clearly is not how he felt when he wrote this. Nonetheless, it is an incredibly taut, deep piece of writing.

As I mentioned above, my father was taught as a young teen by Seamus Heaney, who was himself just a young man starting out in life. Five years after my father died, a friend sent me an email to tell me that in the book Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll, Heaney was asked about his time at my father’s school, St Thomas’s (1962-63) in Ballymurphy, an infamously poor area of West Belfast.

The street in Belfast where my father grew up.

Heaney said:

“Put it this way: forty years on, I still remember five or six names and faces out of that fourth-year class – the more intelligent ones, admittedly, the ones with sensibility and personality… You’re right to see disadvantaged homes and impoverished conditions generally as a barrier to growth and self-realization. The sectarian realities, the unemployment, the eventual presence of the British army, the IRA recruiting machine, the peer pressure – hard to see teenagers who were simply returned from the school to the street corner being able to transcend all that…
One pupil, by the way, did triumph – the late Jack Holland, the novelist and writer on Northern Irish affairs, who eventually ended up in New York. Jack was in class 4B and his essays suggested he would make a path for himself. He had an appetite for language – and a sardonic sense of humor. If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.”

Happy birthday, Dad. Thanks for giving me the words.

My father and I reading a book of poems, Brooklyn, 1982

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Saving Culture (from itself)

"If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way" -- Seamus Heaney on my father, Jack Holland

On St Valentine's Day 13/2/04