10 Questions with Sean Lynch, Author of Halo Nest

Sean Lynch is a writer and editor who has published five books of poetry, including his newest collection, Halo Nest: Poems on Grief. The book is a reflection on his journey with grief before, during, and after his mother's dying of cancer in 2017.

When did you start writing the poems featured in this collection, and throughout how long of a time period? What is the first poem you completed in the collection and the most recent? Emotionally how do these poems compare to one another?

Some of these poems, such as the poems about Ireland, were written long before my mom was even diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2016. I included them because I have long had a sort of obsession with death. I started writing poetry as a teenager in order to deal with existential angst. When I traveled to Ireland in 2013 and explored the rural  western countryside, I felt this profound, bittersweet sadness at the beauty of the landscape and its desolation due to the legacy of an Gorta Mór. My mother was extremely proud of her Irish heritage, and taught me Irish songs and poetry growing up, so I had this connection between her and Ireland. There was an intergenerational conduit of grief that generated my interest in poetry and led me to write poems in order to deal with my mother's death.
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That being said, these poems span about a decade of writing, rewriting, and editing. It's hard to tell which poem was the first completed because I spent years going back to them and making both major and minor changes to them. "Of Famine Roads" was probably the earliest started as it was based off of notes I took while I was in Ireland and inspired by the poem "The Famine Road" by Eavan Boland. The last one I completed was "South Philly Casualty," which is about the murder of my great grandmother in 1980 and inspired by the Seamus Heaney poem about the Troubles called "Casualty."

In regards to the sequencing of the poems, what was the intention behind their order?

Way back in 2013 the editor of my first poetry collection, Alex Marshall, suggested that I sequence the book to follow what he called an “Orphic structure,” after the journey that the mythical Greek poet Orpheus took down to the underworld to bring his wife back from the dead. We all know that he ultimately failed because he looked back. I tried this technique again with Halo Nest and it seems to work, especially because I wanted to
experiment with having a non-linear sequence due to grief’s tremendous impact on your psychological state of being. There’s moments where you can feel so disassociated from reality while grieving that time does not feel like it’s chronological.

Which of the poems do you feel is the emotional center of this collection?

I tried to make it so that not too many of the poems were overly emotional. The one where I really let loose and didn’t edit it to the point where it was from a detached perspective was “Etymology of a Nightmare.” I barely edited the poem. It’s just an unloading of emotion, although in the end there’s an acceptance, so I think that it could be seen as “the emotional center,” even if it isn’t actually the central poem (nor is it a well-crafted one in my opinion).

Etymology of a Nightmare
In my dream you were dying.
I didn’t know yet that you are dead.
In my dream you rested.
I sat by you in an unfamiliar room
in my dreams I watch you die again
and again, I experience the worst pain
I have ever experienced which wasn’t my pain
but bearing witness to the pain my mother felt
as she died and I dream again and again
every night again and again her death
in a different way all slow quiet nightmares.
In my dream you were dying
and I woke to google
the etymology
of nightmare
and stared at the results which say
“Middle English (denoting a female
evil spirit thought to lie upon
and suffocate sleepers):
from night + Old English
mære, incubus.”
And I think of the words
god and death
and again
I experience
the worst pain
then try to shut it out
and my body rests
and your body rests
and my sleep’s suffocated
by your absence
and I think of my ancestors
and how I speak their conqueror’s language
and how many mothers of my ancestors
​have died
in my dream
all of my ancestors are dying.
I have betrayed their languages
by speaking the imperialist language
but from modern to middle to old English
I cannot express how much pain
there was in your breath.
I cannot express the starvation
in your stomach.
I cannot express the thirst
in your throat.
I can only convey your death
through stating the inability to do so
in my dream you die, in my dream
you are dying
in my dream you died, in my dream
you have died
in my dream you were dying.
You are dead and it’s not a nightmare.

How did the process of putting together this collection affect you?

It was cathartic in certain ways. I began putting it together as a chapbook not long after my mom died, but didn’t seriously start working on it as a full length collection until the height of quarantine in the beginning of the pandemic. We were all undergoing a collective sort of grief back then as the world came to a halt and people were dying. At one point the manuscript was much bigger and included pandemic poems that I wrote at
the time, but I cut those out later to make the book more focused. I find that when I’m going through my most difficult periods of my life, I turn to reading and writing poetry. I sincerely believe it has a healing effect.

 I find that when I’m going through my most difficult periods of my life, I turn to reading and writing poetry. I sincerely believe it has a healing effect.

Where did the title come from?

The title of the book came from my poem “Halo Nest” where I describe the hospital that my mother stayed at, Our Lady of Lourdes, in Camden, New Jersey. On top of the hospital there’s a statue of the Virgin Mary and I imagined that there was a hawk’s nest in her halo. When looking out of my mother’s 6th floor hospital room window I would often see a hawk flying up to the statue. I thought it would be a good metaphor and ran with it. I’ll leave it up to the reader to interpret the metaphor.

What are the most prominent recurring images and themes (outside of grief) in the poems?

Well birds, of course. There’s a sparrow on the front cover, which is referring to the poem, “Letter to a Bird Trapped in a Subway Tunnel.” In folktales birds are supposed to be messengers from the afterlife, or even the actual spirits of those you love who have passed away.

Water is another big component of the book. The Delaware River, Cooper River, and the Atlantic Ocean all play major roles. Besides the obvious metaphors for movement in grief, these bodies of water reflect the importance of place and displacement. Flowers also appear throughout, including lavender, lilies, and roses, with different meanings. 

Baseball is an important theme throughout several poems. The sport spans the breadth of time and holds so much more meaning and gravity than any other sport, in my opinion. It’s a poetic game, with no clock involved (although there is a pitch clock now). People think it’s boring, but it’s the moments of tranquility in the game that can ironically hit hard, as well as the connections between generations. So many moments of sitting
with a loved one who is terminally ill, watching a baseball game on a small television. So many moments of being at the ballpark and being lost in memories while watching the game. Poets shy away from nostalgia and sentimentality nowadays, and there are good reasons to do so technique-wise, but baseball has that mystique. Maybe I am too sentimental, and this book is too sentimental, but maybe not.

Collections pertaining to grief can often become overwhelming when read in one sitting. Do you feel like there are moments of levity and lightheartedness within these poems?

There are a couple of moments of levity, like when my grandfather called my teenage mother’s boyfriend Jesus because he was a dirty hippy, or when my grandmother called my cousin a bitch while we were sitting around my mom’s dead body in the living room. I also think the book ends on a happy and hopeful note with the last poem, “Infinite Meridians.”

In the creation of the poems, how did you separate the emotional background of the work and the surgical aspect of editing poetry?

I separated them through time. As I said before, these poems were edited over several years, so time itself helped detach the voice. I cut out so much from these poems, but I also expanded on them a lot. It just took years of coming back to them.

If you could pick a song that represents this collection what would it be?

Waltz #2 by Elliott Smith. It’s a heartbreaking song about Smith’s complicated relationship with his mother. The verses of the song do not apply to my complicated relationship with my mom, but the chorus, “I’m never gonna know you now but I’m gonna love you anyhow,” was how I felt when I missed her most. My mom and I argued a lot, and I do have many regrets about things I said and did to her, but we were also really close. The guilt I felt about some of things I said and did made grief much more difficult. Everyone says, oh you can’t think about that sort of thing, but that’s all I could think about for a long time, no matter what I tried. When someone dies, people often look at them or the past through rose colored glasses. I had the opposite problem. Eventually my guilt faded and I do think about the good times now. It just took awhile.

 Eventually my guilt faded and I do think about the good times now. It just took awhile.

How are you hoping this collection is received? What do you want readers to take away from the collection?

To put it simply, I’m genuinely hoping that it helps other people deal with their grief. I’m nervous about my family reading it though.

Sean Lynch is a writer and editor who lives in Philadelphia. His new
poetry collection, Halo Nest: Poems on Grief  (Alien Buddha Press) is now available for purchase on Amazon. Previous books are, the city of your mind (Whirlwind Press, 2013), Broad Street Line (Moonstone Press, 2016), 100 Haiku (Moonstone Press, 2017), and On Violence (Radical Paper Press, 2019). He has been the editor of various magazines, journals, anthologies, and books, including Rocky Wilson's The Last Bus to Camden, Chidi Ezeobi's Remind the World: Poems from Prison, and Beyond the White Stone Lions by Lamont Steptoe. He's worked for non-profit organizations such as Moonstone Arts Center and the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association, and is now working as the archivist at the Nick Virgilio Writers House.