You spent six weeks in Antarctica. What surprised you about your time there?

Antarctica is a sublime place, and that trip was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, thanks to the National Science Foundation’s Writers and Artists Program. I was based at Palmer Station on the Antarctic Peninsula, which involved a crossing of Drake’s Passage from Punta Arenas in Chile. There were several things I did not expect  — things that were a surprise — and they all had to do with the landscape, with the interface of the external — land — and the internal — my own inner world.

The light! I was there in summer, so it never got truly dark. Even with blackout curtains, the body knows this somehow, so sleep was broken and there was a certain manic energy I felt much of the time.

We think of Antarctica as the great White South, as Shackleton called it, but there are so many hues and shades of blue; my memories are of blues, rather than whites. As well as the sounds of birds and penguins and surfacing seals and whales, the ice itself was noisy. We were close to a glacier and there was constant noise: water melt, slight shifts in the ice, ice falls, and ice bergs interacting with seawater.

As a Brit, I grew up with the stories of Scott and Shackleton — I was in awe of how they endured isolation. At Palmer we had the Internet, and I could make phone calls to my parents in Ireland and friends in the USA. It was totally mind-bending to think of how the actual metaphor of Antarctica has changed since the time of the great Antarctic explorers; that they were literally out of touch with the world for months, years; that they had no idea what was happening in the wider world and no one knew if they were still alive during their absence. In many ways the mystery of the great White South has been obliterated by technology, and a certain awe has been lost.

Perhaps the most significant thing, in terms of my own work and process, was discovering how difficult it was to write about a landscape that had no human history. The history of Antarctica is geological — it’s deep time. I am drawn to uninhabited places and dark skies: I need that experience. But as a narrative poet, I need a landscape that has been marked by human history. I suppose I hadn’t fully understood this until I was in Antarctica and began to write. I painted a lot — I also have a degree in fine art printmaking — but the poetry was difficult for me — I worked on shorter lyric pieces, but no narratives.

You’ve said that an interest in death animates your work. Do you find inspiration from poets like Donne who grappled with morbidity?

I think all artists grapple with mortality in their work. Certainly, for me, writing is a stand against vanishing, against silence; it’s a way to bend time and make the dead sing, to keep the dead, and the self, in the world. You mention Maclean in another question, and he has certainly been an influence in this regard. I have no problem claiming the elegiac as a poetic terrain. I wouldn’t say Donne has been a direct influence on my work, but I am certainly interested in the work and philosophy of the metaphysical poets.

You have a deep connection to Ireland. What about the country inspires you?

The fact that my parents ended up living in Ireland has allowed me to connect with a particular community and landscape. My parents ended up in the West of Ireland, on the Atlantic Coast, so I have a small house there now, and when I go back I tend to stay local, exploring that particular peninsula, getting to know the physical terrain and the local stories.

You’ve said that you were influenced by Wordsworth, in part because he was from your part of England. What’s a poem you keep coming back to?

Well, it has to be “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” I am fascinated by childhood and was fortunate to have happy one; while I don’t have Wordsworth’s faith in the “heavenly life,” I do think of my childhood as a place of grace and magic, of an almost feral sensibility where the boundaries between the body and the natural world were permeable. I am nostalgic for that way of being in the world, of being at home in the body, as children mostly are.

You won a prize for your poem “Dead Drift.” The image of your father fishing in the river reminded me of Maclean. Was that poem cathartic to write?

I had that poem inside me for over 30 years. The memory of my father fishing on the River Wharfe in Yorkshire — more than one memory, obviously, which became compressed — has been a part of my imaginative life for so long: the feel of those times. The poem is not just about my father, of course; it’s about time — deep time  — and human history, and the birth of consciousness. Cathartic? In some ways yes, because the poem had been a lingering potential for decades; as a love poem/elegy for my father it was cathartic because I met him again in the poem. But for me the poem has a darker energy, too, because it places the speaker and the father in cosmic time and that scale is so different.

What is next for you?

I am working towards a new manuscript. It’s taken its title from a subtitle in a new longer poem: Afraid of the Ruins. I am going back to childhood again here. I want to use my childhood and explore the point where adult consciousness breaks through, and ruins, a child’s experience of the world as a way to explore different kinds of ruination. I think it was John le Carré who said childhood is paradise regained: so, exploring this loss of childhood awareness and its paradise as a way into other losses. Taking on the ruination of the planet is, of course, a huge, fraught subject and I want a new way into this. I am currently reading, and getting inspiration from, Fiona Benson’s Bioluminescent Baby, in which she focuses on insects as a way to explore the human condition.