There has been an opera festival in Wexford town every October since 1951. It’s renowned for reviving rarely-seen operas. At 16, as a local schoolgirl, I had the opportunity to get my hands on a ticket to attend an opening-night performance at the old Theatre Royal. Much to the envy of my parents, who fought for tickets for the dress rehearsals each year, off I went in a little black dress of my mother’s to see Elisa e Claudio, a comedy with a complicated web of lovers who, in the end, all marry the ones they love to great rejoicing – an encouraging (and perhaps misleading) start to my interest in the art form.

Jump to 1994 and the red-and-gilt jewellery box of the Gaiety Theatre, in Dublin. I could now afford my own ticket to La Traviata, the story of Camille (Violetta, in Verdi’s adaptation), the vivacious young courtesan who is pressured by the father of her lover to break it off to save his family from scandal. At the end of the opera the heroine with blue-black hair and the voice of an angel dies of consumption. As I was leaving I overheard a patron mutter, “That was bloody marvellous. Not a dry eye in the house.”

Carmen followed, and other classics, but it was not until I saw Puccini’s Madama Butterfly that I thought the storyline was rigged. I still recall the effect of dark red liquid spreading across the stage at Cio-Cio San’s death by hara-kiri. Clearly, I had been wrong-footed by Elisa e Claudio. The message to women was now clear: sin – deviate from the rules, love outside the boundaries – and you must die suffering. But I also detected a far more dangerous subtext: this falling in love must be something truly extraordinary if it was worth dying for.

The poems in Fallen, my new collection, explore in part how the early programming of “feminine ideals”, through art and literature, can perp