The Wearing of the Black by Padraic Fiacc

Poets: Padraic Fiacc with John Heath-Stubbs in Oxford, 1995. Padraic told me he would see the camera crews on the streets daily. Film directors Jules Dassin set the film noir classic The Naked City there in 1948 and William Friedkin shot The French Connection there in 1971, based on a true story about an Irish cop called Eddie Egan. His family emigrated to the United States in 1929, settling in New York city’s west side, known as Hell’s Kitchen, an area populated mainly by the Irish, where violence and poverty were part of daily life. Over the years that Padraic visited me in London and Oxford, I got to know about the man born Patrick Joseph O’Connor in Belfast in 1924.

Padraic loved being in London and was happy to support all we were doing for Brian, who had done his thesis on Fiacc at university. One of those memorable Fiacc images that I have lived with and can never forget is from his poem More Terrorists: “The prayer book is putting on fat with in memoriam cards”, published in his collection Missa Terribilis (Blackstaff, 1986). Poets and photographers are image makers, great poets leave us great lines, as photographers leave us great pictures. Unlike Bacon, Fiacc spent most of his writing life in the literary wilderness. Padraic, who died in January 2019, aged 94, was to poetry what the artist Francis Bacon was to painting. That meeting would become eventful for the three of us. He would arrange the meeting for the following day at the Crown Bar across from the Europa. I can’t remember what I was doing there, but it would have certainly something to do with what’s become known as the Troubles.īrian had seen my photographs of Samuel Beckett and suggested I meet and photograph his friend the poet Padraic Fiacc. Sometime in the summer of 1984 while working in Belfast, I was introduced to the writer Brian Keenan at the bar of the Europa Hotel. The prayer book is putting on fat with in memoriam cards – (More Terrorists, by Padraic Fiacc)

The Wearing of the Black by Padraic Fiacc