The Irish word for a poet is ‘file’ and its ancient roots give it the meaning of a seer, someone who can see far beyond what most mortals can. Peter Makem is certainly a file, a seer.
The Armagh poet – and the Orchard County’s former senior Gaelic football manager – has been probing the difference between being a being and Being.
While that might sound like material from a Two Ronnies sketch, it is in fact a profound and beautiful way of looking at our existence, yours and mine, and elucidated by Peter in his stunning new book of poetry, The Tribe of Earth, a collection that straddles the worldly and the mystical.
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Peter himself describes it best in the introduction: “There is a difference between what exists, a being, and the manner or dynamic of its existence – the Being of a being.
“The term ‘Being’ is here given a capital ‘B’ throughout, merely to identify it from beings, from a being, and does not refer to such as a ‘Supreme Being,’ which is a different phenomenon.”
The ability to express this in poetic form goes a long way back in the Makem DNA.
“I was reared on the ballad tradition where both my grandmother Sarah and my uncle Tommy were celebrated singers and my very early poems followed this, often putting new words to old songs,” Peter recalls.
“My father was one of the first uilleann pipers in south Ulster in modern times and I was very acquainted with the traditional music scene as a player and enthusiast.
“However, when I turned my hand seriously to verse when I was about 20, I never got involved in mainstream poetry but kept to myself and so I’ve approached things very differently from the general body of Irish poets.
“My themes were closely related to a parallel work I’ve been putting together for almost 30 years, a new understanding of the unresolved problem of the Being of beings and how the notion of the mystical was removed from the domain of hermits and specific historic people when it was, in reality, the natural dynamic of the human being.”
Peter spent 20 years studying philosophy formally and was obsessed by one particular thing – why nobody has ever worked out the great mysteries of existence, even with all the advances in science.
“Why don’t we know how the brain works with consciousness, the origin of life, the origin of consciousness, all those things?” he asks.
“Why has nobody ever been able to say what art is? What love is? What beauty is?” asks Peter.
Through his poetry, Peter believes he has found the missing factor.
“With the most advanced science and thought going back over the last 3,000 years, we cannot grasp the one thing that is missing,” he explains.
“And the answer is the understanding of the Being of beings. And that is a thing that I cracked in another work that’s ready for publication and my poetry runs parallel to that because I believe I have answered the questions.”
For Peter, having a sense of mysticism in our everyday lives is something that would enable people to achieve their full potential.
I was reared on the ballad tradition where both my grandmother Sarah and my uncle Tommy were celebrated singers and my very early poems followed this, often putting new words to old songs
— Peter Makem
“The notion of the mystical that we used to be taught only belongs to hermits like Catherine of Siena and others, that is no longer the truth,” he says.
“The truth is that every human being is fundamentally a mystical creature.
“And so, whenever I say that, in every poem that I had, even when it is about the elements of traditional music – the uilleann pipes, the reels, the ballad singers, dancers – all these are written in that mystical gear.”
I tell Peter that I believe that I am living life, that I am Being, that I am searching for Being by doing what it is I do – talking to philosophers, listening to native American drumming, listening to the experiences of real people who have lived through terrible times, but at the same time, exalting in the music I hear, in the people I know.
But I then ask, is it not a good thing that we haven’t found an answer to what art is - what Being is - in that if we did have a definitive answer, then there would be no need to search anymore and that an important part of Being, I suggest, is in the searching?
“Well, that’s true,” says Peter, “but then you could search afresh into what comes up and that is what I set out to do, this is what I wanted to get across.”
Tribe of Earth starts of with a series of lyrical poems influenced in part by WB Yeats.
“You are always influenced by people who have gone before you,” explains Peter.
“Beethoven inherited the sonata for example but the style and structure that suited me was that of Yeats but of course, you have to have your own style and I was brought up in the ballad tradition, with its rhyming and structure. So I inherited that but then I developed my own intensity.
“I always wanted to see rhyme in the poetry because a rhyme is the setting of a destination and a fulfilment. And then there had to be rhythm where I could build up the intensity as I went along with a beginning, a middle and an end. It had to be a complete entity.”
He adds: “If I don’t make a deep, deep impact on a reader, then I’ve failed. The main theme of the book is the mystical element in the human being what I call ‘the missing and transformative layer of existence.
“The mystical forces me to do this, to write this poetry. I have to do this. I also have to do my book.”
Another theme in The Tribe of Earth is a ‘Fifth Age of the Ireland of the Light’, “where the identification and development of the Being of beings represents the basis of such a new age”.
According to Peter, Ireland has gone through four ages – the Neolithic, in the raising of the early monuments; the monastic age, 5th to 9th century involving the great Irish schools and missions to Europe; the cultural and artistic restoration in the latter half of the 19th century; and Imperium Hibernium, when people from both traditions made such an impact on the civilization of the world over the past two centuries.
Through getting in touch with our mystical selves, a fifth age could be possible.
