I felt honoured that Michael Coady’s wife Martina invited me to attend the burial of his ashes on January 2 at St Mary’s Cemetery, Carrickbeg and was doubly blessed that it fell to me to lead the prayers.
Unlike so many, I didn’t know Michael as either a relative, neighbour, teacher, choirmaster or band leader.
It was as a writer on television almost 40 years ago, that I first heard of and saw Michael Coady. I think it was Nationwide, with camera footage of Carrick including Oven Lane, the presenter astonished that one poem was literally a litany of local nicknames.
Faugheen’s Fr Paddy Fitzgerald was so touched by Sally Edmonds 1744 – 1747 which opens, ‘All of human anguish is told upon this stone…’ that he learned the poem by heart, later telling Michael and reciting it for him, feeling slightly self-conscious afterwards.
But what an affirmation: that a writer’s words would find a permanent home in another’s head and heart.
Michael, a member of Aosdána, is out of my literary league, but still he deserves even my feeble attempt to appraise his writing.
A little like the quip that housework is only seen when not done, it is sometimes when you feel the pain, boredom and frustration of reading a bad, banal book that Michael’s depth of wisdom and delicacy of wordcraft become truly obvious.
He was a thinker, feeler and observer, as well as fount of knowledge, new and old; he knew the universal was always local, finding the eternal in the present.
His was not a simple faith, but he lived day and night with mystery in both the minutiae and great happenings.
His written words sparkled with a multi-dimensional outlook and insight.
He worshipped the Great God at once above and beyond, as well as pulsating within all here and now.
Never a reclusive writer, Michael inhabited a public space, penning a weekly newspaper column for The Nationalist and was commonly called upon to speak at events.
“He never repeats himself,” Dick Meaney once enthused. At a Christian Brothers School commemoration, he alone named church child abuse, the evil elephant in the room, while praising the great good done.
In the wake of repeated flooding, he led the charge against the hideously high defensive walls first proposed for Carrick, which would have prevented even the tallest person standing on the quays from seeing the town’s twice daily tidal ebb and flow.
To me, Michael Coady seemed a slightly shy, quiet man, or maybe it was I who felt shy and quiet in his presence, deeply admiring of his literary art and craft, and keenly aware of my own scribal shortcomings.
Fr Michael Cullinan, who ministered in Carrick, said Michael knew the power of words, and chose them carefully. He seemed rooted, grounded on the bank of the River Suir, sheltered between hills north and south.
Spellbound by the intellectual vastness of his writing while he read at one of his book launches, I innocently gushed out loud “he’s a genius” to the man on my right, Tom Nealon, his lifelong Greenschool teaching colleague and friend, now sadly also recently deceased. Tom made no reply but his eyes glistened, and broad face beamed with pride and admiration.
Michael’s reply to my question if he found writing hard, ‘I do, but I wouldn’t be without it.’
Awful as his physical absence may be, thanks to Michael Coady’s published work we will never fully be without him.
Perhaps a parting shot, from Ambush, Michael’s poem about being waylaid by a drunk beggar squatting on Carrick’s Main Street.
“ Hey poet, hey poet,
Come here till I tell you
Something you never heard...”
An example of Michael’s openness to learn from and being taught by others. And, the last line, an echo of our deep reluctance to let him go.
“ What hurry is on you, mister poet?”
