Father O'Malley and his stories were featured in the Summer 2004 release of the Crescent Moon Journal. We asked Chris to share some insight into the creation of this cycle of poems.

In Search of Father O

Let me say up front that I am not a Catholic or even a churchgoer, and that I was brought up in a household in Liverpool, England, that had a suspicion of Roman Catholics. So, you might ask, how did I ever come to compose a cycle of poems about a priest from Sligo, Ireland, who is on a mission to an unnamed Central American country?

Well, as John Lennon wrote in his 1964 volume of Lear nonsense pieces, In His Own Write, "you might well arsk." Or, if you will allow me another Beatles reference, it's "a long and winding road."

First, although I had been brought up in an English Protestant family, on my re-emigration to the United States in 1968, after spending some years living with my grandparents in Liverpool, having been homesick after my first stint in the U.S., January 1955 to January 1960, I attended Loyola College in Baltimore, where I studied with Jesuit instructors. I also took poetry classes with the Sisters of Notre Dame next door at the College of Notre Dame, where poet Sister Maura Eichner, a particular influence on me, encouraged me to become a writer. One of her poems concerns the tragedy of a murdered nun whose body was found in a garbage dump. I continue to admire Sister Maura's poetry, with its steely realism while the poet remains open to both the beauty and the horrors of the world.

On graduation from Loyola College, I was inducted into the Alpha Sigma Nu Honor Society, an organization for honor students who had attended Jesuit colleges. A number of articles in the society's magazine, Company, on Jesuit missions in Latin America, today and in past centuries, influenced me in conceiving of a cycle of poems to feature a Catholic priest in Central America that I began in March 2003 with the poem, "At the Bend of the Rio Chuckwalla" which says something about the long held superstitions of the land that Father O'Malley had to battle in bringing Christ to the native people, the Mestites.

I hope that helps to explain the Catholic and Latin American aspects of the O'Malley series. So what about the Irish element?

In September 1992, when I was researching a book on the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, I had to travel to Ireland for the first time. Several of the top British officers involved in the British assaults on Washington and Baltimore in 1814 were Anglo-Irish. During this time, I visited William Butler Yeats's grave at Drumcliff, County Sligo, and was impressed with the inscription on the poet's slate gray gravestone: "Cast a Cold Eye on Life, on Death, Horseman, Pass by!" The words resonated with an inscription on a monument back in Baltimore County: "How Beautiful Is Death When Earned by Virtue." As recorded on that small whitewashed obelisk one of the officers I was researching, Dublin-born Major General Robert Ross, was mortally wounded in a skirmish with the Baltimore militia on September 12, 1814. A couple of the photographs I took during my visit to Sligo feature in the O'Malley poems. A shot of poet's grave, which at the time had a beautiful spray of orange montbresia next to the gray gravestone, and an image of the swans rising from a marsh. Specifically, the swans appear before the funeral ceremony for O'Malley's father, in the next to last poem, "His Father's Funeral," and the grave with the montbresia are evoked in the final poem in the cycle, "The Word of God."

Parallel to my interest in Ireland, with all the lore and history that implies, is my interest in things ancient and primitive. A number of my poems have spoken to a totemic faith in ancient peoples. I have written about the ancient whorls on the Calder Stones of Liverpool, ancient carved boulders believed to be the remains of a chambered Neolithic tomb that stood not far from where Lennon lived on Menlove Avenue and to "Strawberry Fields" famous from the Beatles' 1966 song of that name. The whorls are similar to concentric designs in the chambered tomb in Newgrange, County Meath.

The ancient peoples of the Americas also have been of longstanding interest to me, and I have previously written about the pyramids of Central and South America in both nonfiction essays and in poetry. Although I have never been further south than Key West, Florida, I am drawn to the elements of the tropics, and the lush vegetation, the brightly colored animals and fish, have inspired me, and helped feed into my poetry.

Reading the prose of the British master Graham Greene, many of whose novels are set in the tropics, I began to conceive of a series of poems set in an impoverished land and featuring Father O'Malley, a priest from County Sligo, in the Republic of Ireland sent to work among the Mestite people of a certain Central American nation.

As with Greene's novels, although the characters and places are often fictional, the circumstances are real. Thus, O'Malley labors in an Indian village at a bend of the Rio Chuckwalla, and has to work along with the members of the oligarchy, headed by the president, General Madragal, a man reminiscent of Juan Peron, and with Archbishop Costa, a man who loves Elvis Presley along with Christ, and Mother Superior Rosario, who in her young days was Miss Los Petos, 1948. It is a poor land beset by civil war waged by the guerrillas of the September Moon insurgents led by Commissar Delgado. O'Malley himself is scarred by his experiences in his adopted land-scarred like the worn black Italian leather case of his mass kit as it bounces, "surface blotched with dampness from the jungle" in the funeral car on the way to his dad's funeral in Sligo.

I am proud to have been able to bring Father O'Malley and his world to life. I would like to think that readers of the O'Malley cycle will agree with the words of Crescent Moon Journal editor, Mustansir Dalvi, in introducing the series of poems in the Summer 2004 contest issue. Mustansir wrote: "We, at the Desert Moon were witnesses to their development, and now 'the imperfect martyr' Father O'Malley of Rio Chuckwalla, at the edge of the Mestite jungle, is flesh and blood, not mere words."

Christopher T. George