Creative space is testament to poetry's healing power
Having emerged from a personal hell, Christina Reihill tells Emily Hourican how writing has been her salvation
AS far as neat boom-bust metaphors go, Christina's Reihill's new art installation is perfect. In what used to be a very chic shoe shop on Blackrock's main street, she has created a pop-up poetry shop, a temporary gallery space filled with lines from poems, quotes, chalk drawings and hop-scotch markings.
Everyone is invited to enter, and encouraged to read, to reflect, and maybe to leave a thought of their own. If, indeed, we as a nation are rediscovering some of our more spiritual side, as those who look for a bright side to our current woes insist, then this is how we're doing it -- by replacing reflexive shopping with a reflected spirituality.
The space, next door to Khan boutique, on the Main Street of Blackrock, Co Dublin, has been stripped bare and painted a lovely dark olive colour. A window set into the back wall frames a perfect view of sea and sky, and the natural progression of the shop is to lead one through the dark interior towards this square of light, bypassing a heady selection of words -- quotes from Nietzsche, Yeats, Rilke and Pooh Bear, some chalked up by Christina herself, others left by the visitors who come and go.
For Christina, the work of making over this former shoe shop was a result of the inspiration poetry has provided in her own life, the kind of intervention it provided at a time of great need.
"I know that writing it saved my life," she says candidly as we sit on a sturdy low box near the door. "It gave me purpose. I just wrote to pull myself out of a despairing place, and discovered over 10 or 15 years that it was the rope to sobriety and personal freedom, my way of making meaning of the hideous journey."
It was a long slog through the early stages of recovery, towards the discovery that the highs of addiction can, with effort, be replaced with something more elemental. Dante was her specific moment of revelation -- the way in which her own story spoke to her through his three great canticles of the Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso -- provided the energy for change; his vision of personal freedom inspired her own.
"I know that it is a dead sure way out, without religion, without being enslaved to anything outside ourselves. It's exactly as Rilke says, 'All the soarings in my mind begin in my blood.' I believe very strongly in that. But how do I communicate it in a world that is resistant to poetry, largely?"
First, she wrote poetry -- Soul Burgers, a moving, charming, almost jazzy recovery story told through verse is her latest (grab a copy in the pop-up shop and contribute €10 to the honesty box) -- but then gravitated towards engaging even more of the senses by staging it as a work of theatre in order to press home the impact of the words. And then the store became available. Deryn Mackay from Khan Boutique, next door, is Christina's landlady, and friend. She suggested that, while waiting to incorporate the space into a renovated boutique later this year, Christina might like to make use of it (Deryn also sprang to the rescue in style matters when the photoshoot was mooted, providing Christina with the Roisin Linnane to wear).
"Poetry is beyond cognitive understanding," Christina explains. "It's meant to move you. You're meant to feel, smell, taste, reflect -- if a poem does that, touches all the senses, it's doing something. When I saw this space, I just went, 'I think I could do it here.' Once you come in here, you're stepping into a poem."
So how are the public responding? From my morning's visit I can see distinct types. There are those who walk in confidently, aware from the outset that they want to engage with what's on offer, even before they understand what that is. They read eagerly, then grab a piece of chalk and contribute. Others approach with caution, full of questions -- 'what is it?', 'what are you doing?'; they are slow to connect, and some don't manage it at all, sidling out after just a cursory glance. And then there are those who simply walk past. "They demonstrate the people who walk around so unaware of their existence," Christina believes; "There are a lot of people who do not want to know their own story at any deeper level than the surface."
Perhaps that lack of knowing is a luxury of sorts, one not open to everyone. The years of addiction followed by painful recovery have left Christina unable to not know, unable to not ask the questions and seek the answers she needs. And now some of her answers are here, in Blackrock, ready for the rest of us to contemplate.
Whatever path our own journeys have taken, "we're all coming from hell", as Christina says, and so there is a gleam of enlightenment here for any who care to look. And Christina, like Pooh Bear, has discovered, that sometimes "a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it".
Pop-up Poetry, 13 Rock Hill, Main Street, Blackrock 'Soul Burgers', by Christina Reihill, is published by Original Writing
- Emily Hourican
