Rhian Gallagher grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand. She then lived in London for 18 years, returning to Aotearoa in 2006. Her first poetry collection Salt Water Creek (Enitharmon Press) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection, 2003. She received the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award in 2008. Her second collection Shift (Auckland University Press) won the New Zealand Post Book Award 2012. Gallagher was the Robert Burns Fellow in 2018. Her latest collection Far-Flung (Auckland University Press) was long-listed for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry (Ockham Book Awards) 2021.
Gallagher comments: 'On one of my house-sits I had access to a vegetable garden—going out to dig up potatoes for an evening meal was something I hadn’t done in years… clearing the top dried stalks and fossicking around with my hands in the earth.
'The experience had a slightly magical quality.
'Up with the potatoes came my father, my childhood and Donegal itself.
'The poem started in the garden, with a strong pulse, all I had to do was keep listening.
'Two-thirds of our garden, growing up, my dad devoted to potatoes; preparation of the beds, the architectural quality of laying out rows, the harvesting while above ground it seemed like there was nothing there: when I look through the eyes of a potato there’s much to see.
'My dad emigrated from Donegal age 24. He was loudly silent about his boyhood. The sense that something not good had happened back there infused my experience of him as a kid.
'"The past is never dead," William Faulkner famously wrote, "it’s not even past."
'It wasn’t till I went to Donegal that I understood more of what my dad had carried. The province was devasted during the famine: 40,000 people were lost through death and emigration. The aftermath rippled through the generations.
'While I was getting dirt under my fingernails the poem pushed its way into life. This reminds me of something Vincent (O’Sullivan) said: "poetry happens while you’re doing something else."'