Nine Decades in the Making: The Collected Poems of Moira Bailis

It took nearly 90 years, but a longtime Fort Lee resident who has been writing poetry in notebooks, diaries and on scraps of paper since before the age of 20 in her native Ireland is now a published poet with two volumes of her own collected works having just come out.

90-year-old Moira Bailis, who moved to Fort Lee from Ireland with a brief stop in Manhattan with her family in 1966, is the author of the 450 poems that comprise The Antidote to Prejudice and It Has To Do With Seeing, both of which bear the subtitle The Collected Poems of Moira Bailis.

For Bailis, who now suffers from late-stage dementia, having her poems published is nothing new. She has over 200 poetry publication credits, both in the United States and Ireland, according to her publisher. Her son, Peter Bailis of Fort Lee, explains that his mother’s work has appeared in literary magazines and newspapers and that she even had a live radio show about poetry out of Farleigh Dickinson years ago. But the two volumes published by The Poet’s Press of Providence, Rhode Island represent the first books dedicated exclusively to his mother’s work.

Moira Bailis has also taken part in poetry readings over the years, but she’s never had a reading dedicated solely to her work. That too is about to change, when the Fort Lee Public Library hosts a reading of Bailis’s new books on March 6.

“What makes this nice is it’s the first where everything is all about her,” Peter Bailis said. “It really is incredible to hold these books in my hands.”

He said that while it’s unlikely his mother will be able to attend the reading, though she lives just blocks away, she does have her “good days, like anyone with dementia,” and he’s not ruling out the possibility of a “cameo” appearance.

“We’d love to get my mother there, but unfortunately at the age of 90, she’s in the latter stages of dementia,” Bailis said. “She’s aware of the books, but I have to keep showing them to her to spark her memory that they’re there.”

Bailis remembers his mother in her younger days as being “on the dreaming side, which I guess would be par for the course for a good poet.” But he said that while he was aware that his mother wrote, he didn’t know the extent of her poetic acumen.

“It was kind of strange growing up at home, the writing kind of slipped by me,” he said. “I’d hear the typewriter clacking away in the room, and I knew not to bother her. [But] I never really realized she did all this. I guess she did it in the private little study that she set up in our modest home on Beverly Hills Rd. in Fort Lee.”

Bailis gives much of the credit for getting the two books published to David Messineo, Moira Bailis’s friend and longtime publisher of a literary magazine called Sensations. In cooperation with the poet and her family, Messineo assembled 450 of Bailis’s collected poems and organized them into the two volumes, which ultimately became The Antidote to Prejudice and It Has To Do With Seeing.

 “As my mother’s age progressed, David thought it would be a great idea to see how many of these poems he could get together,” Bailis said. “Literally some of them were stuffed in books, some were in memoirs some were in the form of diaries, some were just written on pieces of paper. David did a fantastic job with the books. It was very difficult to put the books together in a chronological order. My mother never really would write the date when she wrote a poem. Like a lot of writers, the thought would come into her head and she’d just bang it down on paper before it would leave. The idea of putting a date and a time down there just never entered her mind.”

After assembling the poems into two volumes, Messineo reached out to a friend at The Poet’s Press, and the two volumes are now available for sale on the publisher’s website.

Bailis’s online bio describes the two volumes in part as follows:

“This first volume, The Antidote to Prejudice, is arranged geographically, reflecting the places Bailis lived in or visited (or imagined, in the case of South America, Africa and Antarctica). Ireland and New Jersey bookend this varied collection of 190 poems.”

“The second volume, It Has To Do With Seeing, has 260 poems, including some variant texts (edited by Melanie A. Pimont), and more than 80 poems concerning the poet's Irish childhood, family and friends.”

Peter Bailis puts his mother’s writing into simpler terms.

“The poetry ranges greatly,” he said. “My mother spent time living in Europe. She speaks six different languages. Sometimes a very insignificant event could spark her [like a trip to a grocery store to buy a particularly large Portobello mushroom Bailis recognizes himself in]. [But] she also writes poems about very large events. There’s poems about the Vietnam War. There’s poems about World War II. There’s poems about old friends of hers.”

He believes his mother’s most recently written poem was one she wrote about the Titanic last year.

“There’s an Irish reference there,” he explained. “[The Titanic] was built in Northern Ireland, and the last landmass that the Titanic left before that fateful night was Queenstown, Ireland.”

But even at 90 and in Moira Bailis’s current condition, her proud son isn’t quite ready to say his mother is done writing just yet.

“I’m sure if she were having a day when she was on task she might be able to bang out another one,” he said. “It might be small, but then again, some of the ones in the books are as small as haikus.”

The poetry reading dedicated to Fort Lee’s own poet Moira Bailis is March 6 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the . Peter Bailis, David Messineo and perhaps a few friends and Peter’s brother will read excerpts from Bailis’s newly published collected poems.