Poetry in Pavements - Honor Molloy

I grew up in a house filled with music and jokes and song. A robust language rang off the walls as the family freely quoted Synge, O’Casey, Shakespeare, or Bubbles, one of the Dublin characters my father, John Molloy, collected. Both of my parents were theatre artists dedicated to preserving a Dublin vernacular that split a two-syllable word into ten, giving it a hundred new meanings. Back in the 60s, there was lively poetry to be heard on the streets and in the markets that was rapidly fading. So, the two of them took material straight from the mouths of the Moore Street dealers, buskers, down-and-outers with extraordinary language and stories.

My mother, Yvonne Voigt Molloy, listened in while propped up in bed in the Rotunda after the latest baby, over coffee in Bewley’s on Grafton Street, or she wandered through the market stalls pretending to check off items when she was really scribbling on the back of her shopping list. Earwigging, she called it. She typed these notes into short scripts which aired on Radio Éireann. These pieces focused on women’s lives, domestic scenes, and are a fascinating glimpse into common-day Irish experience.

On the other hand, my father drank with, lived with, mucked about with his characters. He wholly absorbed these eccentrics and mimicked them perfectly—performing them onstage and on RTÉ.

I spent the past thirteen years writing a novel about this vanished Dublin—drawing from my mother’s journals and radio scripts, as well as John Molloy’s recordings and his memoir Alive, Alive O. While I was compiling my thoughts for this blog post, I discovered RTÉ TV50, a year-long celebration of 50 years of Irish life across RTÉ Television, Radio and rte.ie. It is thrilling to discover that a collection of these portraits John Molloy’s Dublin, which was first broadcast on July 16, 1976, will air as part of RTÉ TV50 early in the New Year.

In the meantime, here is a holiday story from Moore Street – Christmas Eve – 1966.

© Honor Molloy, December 2011

Sixpence the Stars is culled from All the Stars for Sixpence, one of Yvonne Molloy’s radio pieces.

Honor Molloy’s autobiographical novel Smarty Girl – Dublin Savage will publish on St. Patrick’s day 2012 (Paperback Original GemmaMedia / Simon & Schuster Audiobooks)

John Molloy¹s Dublin, which was, will be re- transmitted on Thursday January 5, 2012 on RTÉ 1 at 8.30pm.

Honor Molloy was born in Dublin. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and has held residencies at Hedgebrook, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She lives in Brooklyn. You like her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter

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