Kimberly Campanello's poetry publication MOTHERBABYHOME

Year funded: 2018–2019

Kimberly Campanello (Lecturer in Creative Writing, School of English)

My poetry publication MOTHERBABYHOME, is a 796-page collection of visual and conceptual poems, was published in April 2019 by zimZalla Avant Objects as a poetry-object and a reader’s edition book. An excavation of voices, the poems are composed entirely of text taken from historical archives and contemporary sources related to the St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Ireland, including files given to me by local historian Catherine Corless, who originally discovered the lack of burial records corresponding with 796 infant and child death certificates. The 796 poems are printed on transparent vellum, allowing the palimpsestic pages to interact with each other, and they are held in a handmade oak box. Each page includes the name, age and death date of a child. My work on MOTHERBABYHOME was driven by these questions: What does it mean to write poetry in the face of human brutality and destruction? What is poetry for in these contexts? Who is it for? What can it do? What form should it take? When the Tuam story broke, I felt that the children and women who had lived, worked, and died at St Mary’s had quite literally been submerged in the landscape and archive of the Home. The physicality of the language on the page felt vital to me, as bodily autonomy was what these women and children were denied. This led me to use visual and conceptual methods in this work, as well as develop a durational performance.

With the support of CePRA, on April 24, 2019, I gave a durational performance of the 796 poems in the Oonagh Young Gallery in Dublin city centre, and on April 25, I gave pop-up performances at the James Joyce Library at University College Dublin as part of the Text / Sound / Performance: Making in Canadian Space conference.

For more information on MOTHERBABYHOME, see here.

[UPDATE] Since these initial performances in 2019, MOTHERBABYHOME has been reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement and The Irish Times, among other venues. The complete performance of MOTHERBABYHOME was filmed in University College Dublin's Special Collections Reading Room as part of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive and is available here. Ailbhe Darcy’s extended essay on the performance appeared in Poetry Ireland Review.