*****
Moya Cannon: Bunting’s Honey • Erica McAlpine: Small Pointed Things • Tracey Rhys: Bathing on the Roof • Christina Thatcher: Breaking a Mare • Rae Howells: The Common Uncommon • Doireann Ní Ghríofa: To Star The Dark • Rosie Johnston: Safe Ground • Daniel Hinds: New Famous Phrases
*****
Bunting’s Honey by Moya Cannon. £11.99. Carcanet. ISBN: 9781800174894. Reviewed by Kathleen McPhilemy
This is Moya Cannon’s seventh collection and, like much of her work, has its foundations in Ireland.I have read Bunting’s Honey with great pleasure, mixed with a degree of envy of the poet’s ability to write so well of her native place, displaying a knowledge that ranges from recent events to prehistory, to the geography and flora and fauna of the landscape right down to the geological bedrock. Moya Cannon comes from Donegal but her Irish poems have settings as far apart as Tyrone and Wicklow and she moves outside Ireland to France, Italy and even China.
The book is divided into five sections but the rationale for the division is not immediately obvious. The title poem, ‘Bunting’s Honey’ comes in section ii and is placed among other poems which explore the past. The poem celebrates the work of Edward Bunting, a young musicologist who busied himself with collecting Irish oral music. Bunting was closely connected to the Northern United Irishmen who, as well as aspiring to political independence from England, sought to revalidate Irish culture, including the traditional music of the harpists, remembered in this poem. Cannon uses the figure of Bunting to recall an extraordinary time:
Decades before young Edward Bunting dies
a great French empire will rise and fall;
Wolfe Tone’s revolution will have failed
yet Bunting’s life will still be held in thrall
by this treasure he garners in the Exchange Hall.
This stanza and the next rhyme on three of their lines and are haunted by the ghost of iambic pentameter, which perhaps contributes to the elegiac quality. The implication may be that the music survives the politics and that it has a greater value, but the poem ends on a question
for what do a musician’s hands ever hold
but the hammered treasure of the human soul?
There is a change in register here, with a recourse to aureate metaphor which has a Yeatsian ring and, for me, weakens the poem. Cannon has a tendency to end on questions: ‘The Glance’, ‘A Technology’, ‘Planting roses in Baicheng’, ‘The Highest House’, ‘The News from Tramore’, ‘Amor’. One of the attractive features of her poetry is her unwillingness to be dogmatic, what the blurb describes as her ‘wonderings’, but there can be more subtle ways of suggesting uncertainty or keeping the poem open than using a question mark.
The poet has strong environmental concerns which develop out of the love of landscape evident at the beginning of the book. Perhaps the beautiful summer meadow, ‘whites of tall daisy and yarrow, / purples of scabious and cranesbill,’ in ‘Monet in Árann’ is only given permanence as it is transformed into a work of art. Certainly the fear of species loss and environmental damage emerges in the last two poems of this section. ‘For the Birds’ has some wonderful evocations of birds such as the blackbird ‘who has sung this April week for love or lust’ and the eagle described in a series of kennings, ‘feather-trousered’ … vice-gripper, soarer on thermals, / sky lord’, but the whole poem which pivots on the loss of the corn crake has a slightly lecturing, worthy feel. On the other hand, ‘Die-back’ has some wonderful descriptions of trees on the motorway and a magnificent last stanza which succeeds because it doesn’t explain:
Yet, as we drive west,
all across this greening country
they are surrendering –
they are coming out
of the hedgerow
with their thin hands up.
‘The News from Tramore’ , a poem which attacks the pollution and littering of the coast, is also on the heavy-handed side, but I am in two minds about this criticism. There is an abundance of eco-poetry being written at the present, but much of it is obscure and narrow in its appeal. Moya Cannon’s poetry could be described as more generalist and, since targeting a wider audience, more overt in its message.
Cannon is always open to the present so that Covid, Lockdown and the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war make their way into the book. She has two admirable Italian ekphrastic poems, one on a Bellini Madonna and the other on the Doom in Torcello, where I particularly like how she shows the angel ‘rolling up the starry firmament / with all its fixed stars and wandering stars, / its hero stars and storied constellations.’ However, it is the Irish poems which resonate most strongly with me. Although she writes in English, the poet honours the Irish language and often enters into dialogue with it, as in ‘Quarrel with the Lexicographers’ or ‘And Again the Mountains…’. where she gives, first the Irish names, ‘the three great buttresses of Doire an Chláir, / Binn Chorr and Binn an Choire Beag’, and, in the next stanza, the English:
The mountains are indifferent
to us who love them
and don’t answer to their names:
Peak by the Oak Grove Plain,
Sharp Peak,
Peak of the Small Corrie.
This seems a powerful but subtle recognition that the language of nationalism is in the heads of humans not in the fields and rocks they lay claim to. Similarly, in ‘Dúchas’, a word which she tells us means ‘what is native, natural, heritage’. (Notes), the poet explores the derivations of place names, their links to history and the way in which heritage and the sense of place are violently exploited, asking but not finding an answer to the puzzle of separating the love of place and culture from the destructive forces of nationalism. The poem ends with what I take to be a nod to Seamus Heaney:
What does omphalos mean?
Or dúchas?
What does dúchas mean
And why has such violence
been wreaked in its gentle name?
Alongside the love of place that pervades this volume is the care for the communities who live in it which gives rise to two poems which commemorate disasters, one a train crash at Creeslough, the other the sinking of a ferry carrying migrant workers between Achill and Scotland. The latter, ‘Eight Marys, Four Bridgets, Three Kates’ draws a pointed comparison with the arrival of today’s small boats, ‘poor people still put out in small boats / and young bodies wash in with the tide.’ This and the poem on Creeslough, ‘Friday’, might seem almost mawkish if we did not recognise the tradition of elegiac ballad which they follow. ‘Friday’ with its description of tragedy exploding into everyday normality strongly reminded me of the ballad of ‘Claudy’ by the late James Simmons.
The foundation of Moya Cannon’s book is undoubtedly Ireland, but that is only the bedrock from which her poetry ventures out to engage with the world and with a world of readers.
Kathleen McPhilemy grew up in Belfast but now lives in Oxford. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being Back Country, Littoral Press, 2022. She also hosts a poetry podcast magazine, Poetry Worth Hearing https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy.
*****
*****
Small Pointed Things by Erica McAlpine. £11.99. Carcanet Press. ISBN: 9781001777. Reviewed by Colin Carberry
Erica McAlpine offers us elegant, expertly crafted poems written mainly in rhyming stanzas that often reveal a quirky wisdom gleaned from reflections on marriage and motherhood—and the resultant transformation of both her body and her outlook on the world. As a poet who writes in traditional forms, I confess to having a marked fondness for rhyming verse—and cannot therefore claim to be entirely neutral in this instance—but few do it so well and as (seemingly) effortlessly as McAlpine. Her end rhymes are deployed skillfully and imaginatively, yet hardly noticeably—no easy feat—while her internal rhymes also add much to the overall, supremely musical effect.
The book is divided into four sections, with twelve poems in each. In a promotional video posted to YouTube, McAlpine explains how she went about ordering her themes in each section: I) ‘…poems about marriage, relationships, and the complications that come with living together, with someone, over a long period of time…’; II) ‘…poems about poetry, poems about ideas, poems that have points, or pointed thoughts…’ III) ‘…poems about motherhood and the various complexities with putting poetry and motherhood together…’; and IV) ‘…partly about poetry, partly about the bigger themes of life and death—growing older and more mature…’ And in a rather charming short essay published on Carcanet’s website, she expounds on how she structured and arranged her latest collection: ‘I allowed myself to ignore my ‘subjects’ and look for patterns. There were three poems containing orange balls: the clementines should go with the pumpkins should go with the peaches. Here were two fountains, and here were three trees. Here were all the poems without any things, the poems of theories and ideas. Here were the poems under the moon. Flank the whole with birds—swallows at the beginning, blackbirds at the end.’
Indeed, the book teems with animals, birds, insects and sea creatures (bats, blackbirds, carpenter bees, doves, kingfishers, ladybirds, manatees, moths, needlefish, scorpions, spiders, squirrels, swallows, swans, warthogs); and flowers, fruits and vegetables (clementines, love-lies-bleeding, potatoes, pumpkins, tulips, snow-drops, sungold tomatoes). This is not simply because McAlpine loves nature: through close, astute observations of the analogous existences of plants and animals she distils her private and existential concerns into a series of sardonic epiphanies that offer her a dram of wisdom and temporal inner peace. For instance, the book’s opening poem, ‘Bats and Swallows’, has its root in an ‘important’ marital row (it also provides the book’s title): ‘…The lack / of sound suggested / bats to me; / you strained to see if they nested / somewhere below the / terrace, having rested / your case on swallows. / We couldn’t be sure / either way – and so it follows / that neither of us knows.’ Indeed, not knowing anything for certain is another of McAlpine’s signature themes, and the row ends with a compromise—a nil-all draw: ‘But since it is in your nature / always to side one way / or the other, you hold that they were swallows. / I say the question never gets old, / that either, or both, hold sway.’ The concluding poem, ‘Blackbirds’, also analyzes the theme of unknowingness. The two speakers bicker about whether the blackbird is brown or black, and again the poem’s ending, rooted in the knowledge that nothing can be truly known, asserts the validity of varying viewpoints: ‘We grew quiet / when we heard the blackbirds / sharing words / between them. / Whose song / it was we would / never know, not having seen them / sing. But it would be wrong / to say, even if we could.’
There are a number of other poems in this vein, but one of the most endearing and accomplished of them is ‘Wishbone,’ found in the middle of Section IV, which I quote in full:
Falling asleep tonight,
I remember your tree –
mature now, standing at a great height,
but years before you met me
a chestnut held tight
in your palm.
Was it your pride this evening over some
small thing that made me think
of it, here at the brink,
when the world turns briefly calm
and the children are asleep
in their rooms?
Once, in order to keep
it growing straight as a broom,
you had to replant it deep,
removing a limb where it split
near the base,
digging it
up at the roots, rejigging it
into place
like an arrow,
not a wishbone.
You love the straight and narrow.
I’m the one
of the two of us more prone
to changes in direction
and bending about,
a trait you regard mostly with affection,
or beyond correction,
since some things can’t be straightened out.
I love those opening lines, ‘Falling asleep tonight / I remember your tree’: how quickly McAlpine lures us into that reflective liminal state between waking consciousness and sleep, when the certainties that sustain us during our waking hours no longer seem so sure. The poem is a parable—based around a biblical one (Matthew 7:13:14)—that further explores marriage and the complexities of living with someone, anyone, over a long period of time. ‘You love the straight and narrow’ the speaker says of her significant other, indicating a certain frustration with his apparently rigid, moralistic outlook on life, while describing herself, somewhat more favourably, perhaps, as ‘…more prone / to changes in direction / and bending about…’ Again, the poem ends on a note of compromise, with both parties realizing that they can’t change each other, and therefore must take the rough with the smooth.
McAlpine has her own unique style, but all writers have influences. Hers include the Romantics, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost; and Stuart Kelly, writing in The Scotsman, compared her to Stephie Smith and Louis MacNeice. (To this list I might add vintage Paul Muldoon). But the literary figure who casts the longest shadow over this collection is Ovid. The book contains two translations (or versions) of sections of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (‘Arethusa’ and ‘Baucis and Philemon’)—so well rendered it took me a while to figure out that they were in fact translations—and the opening poem of Section III, ‘The Fountain’ (in which the poet references Acteon and Diana) is both an exploration of the speaker’s ‘transformation of self’ (becoming a mother) and an entrance into Ovid’s shape-shifting mythical realm. Further along in her essay posted on her publisher’s website, McAlpine writes: ‘There were a few stories from his Metamorphoses I had always wanted to transpose—the myth of Arethusa (also about a fountain), and Baucis and Philemon (about, among other things, a marriage)—and so it seemed wise to pursue these leads simultaneously. Around that time, I also started writing poems to, and about, my children; I think I was testing out whether motherhood and poetry could comfortably co-exist.’ One of these poems about becoming a mother is ‘Spider,’ in which she makes reference to ‘her spooling abdomen’, while another, ‘Needlefish’, addresses fears concerning her daughter’s future: ‘that through no fault / of yours but / beauty, fresh / as it is fierce, / you should become / as bait / to any fish / whose point would pierce, / as if from / nowhere, while I wait.’
‘Digging the Well’, one of the biggest poems in the book, also features a descent, or rather a series of multiple small descents, into the underworld of Greek mythology. The setting is non-specific (it is referred to as a ‘plot’), and there is a couple, and a small boy—presumably their son. Verse two conjures the image of Persephone preparing for the advent of summer: ‘Was the earth calling, / like something long asleep, / to be heaved up / from the deep / where her stolen daughter / sets a table of water / for filling buttercups?’ On the surface, everything appears bucolic, with the speaker ‘ignoring the risk of falling / in…’ But visits to wells, symbols of the unconscious and depths and spirits unknown, are always fraught with some danger, even if this descent is tentative, limited: ‘we dug as far as we could go / with our digging hoe.’ In verse three, the small boy is lowered into the well, ‘oblivious as a canary in the shaft’. The word choice here suggests a sense of pending danger, but ‘Up he looked at us and laughed,’ and his parents are reassured: ‘he couldn’t drown; / it was mid-July / and the well was dry’. However, in verse four there’s another descent—and a discovery. The ‘short space’ between the child’s ‘little face’ and the watching adults reveals ‘the length of life’s string’—that is, how much time we are alloted on earth—while the corresponding rhyme-word ‘sting’ echoes ‘death’s sting’: ‘But there we saw / in that short space / between us and his little face / the length of life’s string – / and felt the sting / of knowing we draw / from our own grave / to water what we have.’ The poem concludes with a half-rhyme, contrasting the grim certainty of ‘our own grave’ with the more tentative ‘what we have’.
McAlpine’s chief concerns in this collection centre around marriage, motherhood, and myth. Poets write out of what they know, their upbringing, experience and milieu, but I look forward to seeing what direction McAlpine takes in her next book. (It would also be interesting to read a longer selection of Ovid’s verse in translation.) Small Pointed Things is an artistic triumph.
Colin Carberry was born in Toronto, raised in the Irish Midlands, and is now living in Linares, Mexico. His articles, essays, poems, reviews and translations have featured in Cyphers, Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times, The High Window, Reforma, Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, The Fiddlehead and Život, among numerous other anthologies, journals and newspapers worldwide. He is the author of three poetry collections and five books of translations, and his poems have been translated into more than ten languages. His Selected Poems, Ghost Homeland (Scotus Press), was translated into Bangla and published in Kolkata, India, in June 2024.
*****
Bathing on the Roof by Tracey Rhys. £10, Parthian Poetry, ISBN: 9781917140485. Reviewed by Emma Lee
Bathing on the Roof is split into two parts, Bathsheba and Flood, both characters in their own right. Bathsheba the Biblical woman whose husband was purposely killed by King David so he could take her for his wife. She became mother of Solomon. However, and fairly typically for Biblical women, she never has a voice, what she felt about her husbands is unknown. Tracey Rhys poems mix myth and contemporary expression, underlining the timelessness feel of a woman defined by the men in her life with a lack of curiosity about who she was. In ‘It will take more than water to clean this’ where the Biblical situation is moved to the Cardiff docks, ‘Uriah was only doing his job’:
He was a mug, of course.
Did your bidding. Waited too long
while you buried your conscience.
You have the nod and the crane’s jib fell,
its sharp hook still pointing to the sky –
clipping his temple.
You dropped too – of course you did
– rolled him over, tilted his chin,
let his throat grow open.
By morning, you were in my bed and he
was gone. Blue lights on the water.
A tar-like bloom on the concrete wharf.
David is the addressee, the site manager able to instruct the crane operator to drop the jib at the right moment. As in the original, Uriah, reliant on David’s favour, can’t leave the job that is about to prove fatal. Previously it was a command to face an enemy in war with David knowing the chances of Uriah coming back alive were zero. Either way, there’s a cowardice in David’s inability to carry out the fatal deed himself. In the poem he even goes through the motions of CPR, knowing it’s hopeless but a good way of deflecting suspicion. David can’t get his hands dirty. Like the original though, he’s soon by Bathsheba’s side. Her widowhood reduced to ‘a tar-like bloom’, but never investigated. The implication is that she is not entirely enthusiastic about swapping David for Uriah, but has kicked those problems to some point in the future. Meanwhile they fester and Bathsheba adjusts. In Bathsheba at the Chapel:
The vicar preaches from Samuel. Wars again.
He won’t get off them. Prophets. Kings.
A tune from Vivaldi. Amen, they say.
Amen, she mouths.
She can’t look at the women,
knows their watery eyes,
the marble of their smiles:
mirrors her own.
The set-up is familiar, a male vicar preaching to a largely female congregation or perhaps Bathsheba is deliberately not noticing the men if they present. As the vicar talks about war and kings, hardly tailoring his material to his audience, she notices the women’s teary eyes and their fixed smiles. She identifies with them. They too are stuck with a public pretence, burying their private personalities.
The second part, ‘Flood’ personifies the water, giving her a playful persona, in New Clothes, Flood loves:
When the backs burst off wardrobes, bringing pleats
to her double hems, a percussion of tinnitus to her orchestra.
Look how she dresses in the latest detritus! Backs of phones,
roof tiles, empty crisp packets, photographs washed clean
of faces – as if they were old friends:
Ah, paper weren’t you a tree I once knew?
Oh! but plastic, remember the oil fields in my beds.
This flood is optimistic, repurposing clothing, hearing tinnitus as a melody and recycling rubbish as fabric, remembering paper as trees, plastic as oil. She has an energy, but it glosses over her destructiveness as if that’s an accidental side effect or might not be important at all if those pesky humans stopped building homes in her way. She even generous gives advice to have effect in one of the two interviews where an interviewer asks Flood what we (i.e. humans) can do to avoid it in Interview with an Act of God:
Stand on the roofs of your houses. Learn to walk on stilts. Climb uphill. Enjoy the island life. Drink often (boil first). Swim in good saltwater. Build homes like the early share-dwellers of Scottish lochs – wooden shacks raised on platforms sunk in sub-soil, traps suspended early in the mornings, baskets women with some trees I used to know.
Note how it’s about humans changing their behaviour and practices to accommodate her. This theme is picked up again In Sea Change:
In autumns that come earlier
every year, leaves flaming
to a standstill. I can take
the slow form of droplets
on your glass, peering
through a lens without a cornea.
I can see your dry sofa interiors, dust
floating in the light shards of your lungs.
I can see you don’t need me
but I can see you. I’ll be there soon.
Flood arrives gently, sends warning in raindrops but these go unheeded as humans carry on in their anti-nature ways.
Rhys has created a lively, vibrant collection that seeks to give voices to people or personifications of natural events whose voices are not normally considered. Humans try to impose on nature without expecting nature to rebel and laugh off men’s concerns. We’ll never know if Bathsheba accepted David because she wanted him or because she had no choice (or at least knew defying the king would put her life in danger), but the first sequence raises the possibility that her viewpoint is considered. Readers get to see a more nuanced story that doesn’t focus on wars and victories. The colloquial voices Rhys uses perform two jobs, firstly making the stories welcoming to a contemporary audience and secondly to draw attention to the timelessness of the themes explored.
Emma Lee’s publications include The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020) and Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, 2015). She co-edited Over Land, Over Sea, (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs at https://emmalee1.wordpress.com.
*****
Breaking a Mare by Christina Thatcher. £10 Parthian Poetry, ISBN 97819171404249. Reviewed by Emma Lee
Christina Thatcher grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania before settling in Cardiff. This collection highlights her familiarity with horses and riding while looking at mother/daughter relationships and how a mother can break and tame or support her daughter’s wildness. In Get Back on the Horse:
and your mom is shouting: get up!
You know the rule – never show
you’re willing to stay down, never
whimper – just dust yourself off
and jump back in the saddle,
no matter how much your softness
has been bruised, you must get back on
and by you, you mean
your mother returning to the trailer,
night after night, where your father waits
in the dark. You don’t know which
one of them is the horse, which one
is the saddle. All you know is your duty
to get back on and so to you.
Part of it is about not showing fear to the horse and demonstrating the thrown rider is in charge. It’s also about taking charge in life. Parents shape their children’s early experiences and life lessons. The mother controls the daughter because she has power. Over the father, her husband, less so. The daughter, speaking in the poem, might not know where the balance of power lies, whether the mother rides the father or the other way round, but their duty is to stay together and show the daughter what a marriage looks like. Getting on in life means facing fears and giving the impression of being in charge even when you don’t feel like it. But it’s also about taming the obstacles and guiding your ride over them. To do that the speaker needs to break in her horse, to tame it to her will. This is explored in Breaking a Mare:
You whistle as you wrap
the saddle around her back,
xxxxher eyes remain tame
even as you walk together
to the stream-side paddock where
you guide her body to the wall –
nothing to see here – then slip
your foot in the stirrup, make
the leap,
xxxxxxxxher eyes shift
what happens next
is a poem.
The whistling is either a distraction or means of reassuring the horse as she is saddled. The horse complies as she is led to the paddock, placed ready to mount. Teasingly, readers only get to see the rider climb into the saddle, not what happens next. Does the horse remain compliant or bolt off. How successful is the rider in breaking the mare’s natural tendencies?
The Race considers slowing a truck down as the occupants drive past some wild horses, the theory being to give them chance to win in case they feel inferior, so the drive pulls the truck over:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxWatch the mares zoom away
xxxxxxxxxxxxso much faster than we imagined, so much
xxxxxxxxxfaster than our own legs can run And yes,
xxxxxxwe see it now as they top the ridge, tails flying.
xxxWe see how wrong we have been.
Nature here is untamed and wonderous. The humans have misread it. But at least they acknowledge the power and speed of the horses and how feeble humans seem in comparison. The horses weren’t afraid of the truck beating them. The humans’ mistake was to try to apply human characteristics to an animal.
The Rodeo Tragedy has a subtitle ‘for Bonnie McCarroll’ who was a champion bronc rider:
xxxxxxBlack Cat turned a sudden somersault. We know the rest.
We know the rest: Death was too slow for comfort.
The crowd saw too much of trampled, pretty Bonnie.
xxxxxxSome believe Bonnie was a bronc in another life.
xxxxxxWhat a relief it would be for her prettiness to mean nothing.
Cowboys still believe that cowgirls are breakable.
The crowd was not ready for her immodest pain.
The rider’s biggest mistake was a failure to be a decorative rider who left the rodeos to cowboys. The likening of Bonnie to an untamed beast in a previous life to lessen the empathy in the tragedy of a rider trampled by her ride is a deliberate dehumanising. This is emphasised in blaming Bonnie for the crowd’s reaction instead of focusing on why her ride behaved in that way. Bonnie’s fatal accident was used to ban women from competing in bronc riding, making it clear where the organisers felt the blame should lie.
All the poems feature mares, female horses. Mares are capable of being mothers. The word can also be short for nightmare or used derogatorily when calling someone a stupid mare. With that choice comes the implication that mares/women are there to serve, to carry riders and perform tasks. An expectation that, here anyway, isn’t for stallions. Women find themselves punished for not following the rules allotted to them and are kept in line by the threat of punishment to others who were not culpable, for example in the case of Bonnie McCarroll who suffered fatalities when her ride was spooked which led to the exclusion of women from rodeo. Men would not accept this, women just have to put up with it. Christina Thatcher’s “Breaking a Mare” is more than about taming horses. It also explores how women are tamed and kept in line, using the treatment of horses as metaphor.
Emma Lee’s publications include The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020) and Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, 2015). She co-edited Over Land, Over Sea, (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs at https://emmalee1.wordpress.com.
*****
The Common Uncommon by Rae Howells. £10.00.Parthian Books. ISBN: 978-1914595905. Reviewed by Paul Brookes
This is Howells’ second full poetry collection after her astonishing debut, The Language Of Bees. The new collection continues to explore the relationship between the human world and nature. It is a campaigning work written in response to a planning application to build houses on nearby West Cross Common.
The book neatly divides into four sections, all titled with phrases from John Clare’s poem “Helpston Green”, apart from “Sweet it was to mark the flower” which is from his poem Reccolections (sic) after a Ramble: a portrait of the common as mother, woman and old woman, as clockwork toad machine…: the value of the peat in the ground: the characters who are helping save the place: the species that will be lost if the common is built over.
Rae says in her introduction “Clare is credited with being a poet of record as much as he was a nature or eco-poet – and so in the same tradition I hope to capture what is so special about West Cross Common for future generations, placing it in a poetry jar of brine in case it is lost in the future, whether to housing, climate change or anything else.” And in my reading it does exactly that. John Clare and his campaign against the Enclosure Act becomes an historical precedent, and muse.
The first few poems are a powerful reinvention of the cliché “Mother Earth” as an abused woman. No longer all powerful Gaia, but a woman “stretched too thin”:
In her dark clubs,
The patchwork quilt of star moss
And heathland are laid out on her waterbed:
Wet buttonholes where craneflies & mosquito larvae rave.
From “Common Nights”
He reduces her to oil,
simmers her.
No more the cloth
of bracken and gorse
she had snatched up to cover herself
From “Already he is a roar into her face”
In the second section of the book titled ‘The uplifted ax no mercy yields’ there is even a reference to Seamus Heaney’s bog poems in her poem ‘Bog body’ in which the bog invades a woman’s home, her akin so she becomes amphibian.
In the third section titled ‘As are the changes of the green/So is the life of man’ we are given portraits of those trying to save the common, the old who knew what was there before the new estates, the childhood memories imbuing the landscape with memories and history. Poems with names like ‘Drovers’, ‘Acre’s last gypsy’, ‘A warlord of ecology’,
The book’s last section ‘Sweet it was to mark the flower’ features the animals and plants that will be lost if development goes ahead, such as ‘Tormentil,’ ‘Devil-bit scabious’, Black Cap, ‘Wild angelica’, and ‘Golden-ringed butterfly’. Each imagistically made vital and alive and at one with its environment.
The last poem, ‘Jays in love’ is a song:
They murmured of their love, and in their murmured cries
Was their love of the green wilds, and the everlasting skies
The diversity of nature is matched by the diversity of poetic devices: sonnet, riddle, free verse, concrete, prose poetry, persona, speculative, spell, list, and so on. Every poem is a surprise and holds surprises within it.
There is vitality here, and wit, and a thrill at being in nature. A profound sense of grief at its possible absence. These are poems to treasure and reread to find ever deeper meanings.
Paul Brookes is a shop asst, writer and reviewer. His chapbooks include Ever Striding Edge, (Dark Winter Press, 2024). The Dude Work,(Sherwood Handcrafted Press). Forthcoming: Ganders: New And Selected Poems 1993-2025. He edits The Wombwell Rainbow interviews and challenges and The Starbeck Orion. https://thewombwellrainbow.wordpress.com
https://substack.com/The Starbeck Orion | Substack
*****
Doireann Ní Ghríofa: To Star The Dark. €12.50. Dedalus Press. ISBN: 9781910251867. Reviewed by Patrick Lodge
In 2019, Eric Farwell, writing in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Arts, described the work of Lucie Brock-Broido, the American poet who died in 2018, as seeking “to inhabit a spiritual space that she would call ‘magical’ ”. Eulogies which followed her premature death described her poems as “spooky” or “haunted” though Brock-Broido preferred the word ‘quirky” and, though often flirting with the mystical, the occult, the poems are always rooted firmly in the concerns of ordinary, everyday life. The Irish multi-award winning, poet and novelist, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, has identified Brock-Broido as an influence – along with the Modernist American poet, Lorine Niedecker. In an interview for The Paris Review in 2021, Ní Ghríofa explains that “there’s something about the way both of these poets use language that feels like an actual spell is being cast”. Certainly this collection tips a nod to these poets in its promiscuous impulse to make poetry out of anything (a GIF of Nosferatu, a self-educated female pioneer of marine biology, a girl who drops a mobile and someone staring at her in a pub to give some examples), its ability to explore deeper and deeper beneath the surface of the ordinary and the sheer dancing musicality of, and joy in, manipulating the language.
Ní Ghríofa’s poems do have an incantatory, lilting quality as if they too are spells offered into the world to propitiate, encourage or repay. The collection itself opens with ‘A Spell in a Shed’ – a chant which almost invites the reader to dance and cackle. ‘Dancing in the Demesne’ forms literally a circle dance of words, where ‘six sisters in frocks of gossamer and chiffon moss’ dance in the autumn dawn – demesne and the description of the dancers ‘their golden grins, their ringlet curls’ seeming to place them as ghosts of the departed Ascendancy gentry. The use of the repeated ‘O’ in ‘Brightening’, which focuses on the burning of gentry houses in 1920s Ireland, turns the striking poem into a kind of mantra. She seems to inhabit a thin place where the living and the dead called forth can occupy the same space. It is not that Ní Ghríofa is obsessed with the world beyond but simply that her perspective allows for constant interweaving of time slips and histories. In ‘Two Daydreams’ a young girl sits an examination about the famine but daydreams and becomes the daydreaming young girl in the famine who finds an egg and starts the genealogy that leads on to the poet: ‘…a cluster / of silver cells flicker within, tiny particles that will bring her daughters and granddaughters / from this egg’. For Ní Ghríofa the recorded and lived experiences are co-terminus and speak often to each other.
Additionally, there are the spirits. In an interview with Molly Hennigan in 2021 she recalls that she has always “felt a gathering…of presences about me” and has gone so far as to admit to feeling sometimes that she is “little more than a conduit” for poems sent, as gifts, from the dead – “poems feel like haunted things”. Of course her stunning debut novel, A Ghost in the Throat – which she wrote in parallel to this collection – is also incantatory as if she is not merely writing about the 18thC poet, Eibhlín Dubh, but is possessing her and being possessed by her. Dubh appears in the poem ‘At Derrynane, I think of Eibhlín Dubh Again’ and, should Ní Ghríofa find her gravestone she would offer ‘only a fistful of myrtle stems / tied in twine…’ – a plant associated with the Bealtaine festival when the paths of mortals and spirits are open to cross over. The phrase closely associated with Ní Ghríofa and the novel – “This is a female text’ – she has suggested, in the interview with Molly Hennigan, appeared in her mind when leaving Kilcrea Abbey: “It came from Elsewhere; it wasn’t really mine”.
Ní Ghríofa came late to writing – she was a medical student in Cork and began to write in her late 20s – but confesses to being obsessed with it. Poetry in particular she sees as simply flooding through her, “so I can no longer control it, put manners on it”. Ní Ghríofa does not seem one for a regular, organised allocation of writing time – “I scavenge every single moment I can to write” – and inspiration comes when it comes. The sentiment is, though, rooted in a strong sense of ancestry and continuity; and a perspective which sees what she does as a form of active storytelling where she is, at once, the storyteller, the listener and a co-producer with ancestors and family. Revealingly she has spoken of inspiration arriving when she is involved in a mundane domestic task such as scrubbing a path when “there’s a line repeating itself over and over and over”. In a sense this is central to the power of her poetry which is often rooted in the ordinary– as she said to Tristan Rosenstock, author and RTE broadcaster, domestic chores “encourage a sense of sudden insight”.
More broadly Ní Ghríofa has the skill to go deeper, to see under the surface, to wield the pen as a scalpel to reveal essence. Thus the clever ‘Triolet in an Inherited Plastic Laundry Basket’ is full of verbal plays, delight in the sounds of words but the act of folding laundry in the inherited basket allows her to lament time passing – ‘and your days, ah, your days, all carried away / in the armfuls of laundry you wash, peg, fold away’ – as well as recognising her mother in herself. Laundry figures in the next poem too – Ní Ghríofa seems to like linking consecutive poems – where a bleak Nick Cave tape provides a musical background to a lament about identity and becoming. A 22-year-old in a laundrette reflects – ‘when I lived in the distance’ – on ‘hip-hefting the same old basket / filled with the same old clothes” that occasionally offer a deeper insight: ‘Through that thin window, it all churned, / wet and muddled, but sometimes, I’d glimpse / a garment becoming itself, if only for a moment’(‘Hearing The Boatman’s Call in a Boston Laundromat’).
Emily Dickinson wrote that ‘The past is such a curious creature / To look her in the face’. Ní Ghríofa certainly looks the past in the face, especially the past in its manifestation as history – unsurprisingly Irish History (Ní Ghríofa has spoken of the inability to escape history in Ireland) and also family history. “History is the throbbing pulse of my work” as she put it in an interview, but this is less a narrative approach than one, again, which recognises the constant interplay between now and then. Well-expressed by the epigram from Mina Loy, the American poet and painter in the forefront of introducing Modernism into the USA, that Ní Ghríofa chooses to start the book: ‘The past has come apart / events are vagueing’. History becomes a living thing that bleeds into the present and co-exists with it.
It also produces some of her most powerful poems with a sense of time slipping, of past and present, story and myth, history and family interweaving seamlessly. ‘While Bleeding’ brings much together in its narrative of trying on a 1915 coat in a vintage shop. The maker and the wearer are brought to mind and the poem riffs around the colour red – very significant for Ní Ghríofa who writes of the womb as a ‘red room’ in her novel The Ghost in the Throat’ – blood, menstruation: ‘all the red / that fell into pads and rags – / the weight of red, the wait for red / that we share’. The poem is rhythmically powerful in its movement and betrays Ní Ghríofa’s delight in making words dance and sing. She is also always in total control of a poem however much events are ‘vagueing’ and twisting. The stunning ‘Another Orgasm Against a Wall’ ostensibly focuses on the first IRA action in the War of Independence but segues from what seems to be an unknown woman having sex up against a wall – ‘Hold my throat and I will sing / to belt buckle click, to fingers and spit, to skin and brick…’ – to the death of an English soldier in Fermoy and the subsequent riot of his unit and destruction of shops. In the midst of this violence and threat Ní Ghríofa exquisitely describes the looted objects thrown into the Blackwater river that float for a moment before they ‘slipped through the river’s skin’ and into ‘the river’s tumbling suck’. The poem is magisterially brought around full circle when, tellingly and sensually expressed, the hands, faces, ‘the slender apertures / that once moved to the phases of the moon.’ are forgotten except by the woman who, when pressed against the wall again, thinks of them and sings ‘nocturnes / of moon and skin. – striking writing describing things, external and personal, of intricate beauty, lost.
Ní Ghríofa has admitted to another influence on her work – Dr Seuss. She has identified ‘Oh, The Places You’ll Go’ as one of the best things she has read. Maybe she shares the insight of Elisha Goldstein who, in the Sofia University Alumni magazine, sees ‘the triumphs, the doubts, the confusions, the depression, the fearful moments…’ as marking out the book in providing major life lessons. Funny and creepy and weird as Ní Ghríofa has put it, which is a fine description of the exceptional ‘To Star The Dark’ except it limits slightly her broad emotional range in this collection. There are poignant poems about her motherhood as well as mildly erotic poems hinting at strong desire. ‘Seven Postcards from a Hospital’, dedicated to novelist Sara Baume who has stated a desire not to have children owing to the loss of control they represent, is a moving sequence about the birth of a child taken straight to intensive care which cleverly interweaves forest imagery and an allusion to the mother as Demeter descending into a basement hell to see her baby. Children are demanding and this one pulls through but, in a powerful image of a mother’s loss of autonomy, ‘Her eye, when it opens, seeks me out like a mouth’. A theme possibly continued in ‘Escape: A Chorus in Capes’ where babies and kitchens are left behind as ‘we are stumbling in nightdresses / through doors left unlocked’ towards water where the darkness is ‘so sharp’, in an image which brought to mind Virginia Woolf, ‘it fills our pockets with rocks’. ‘Prayer’ is classic Ní Ghríofa with its time slipping between a child recalled kneeling to say prayers – ‘lips trembling with inherited words / and inherited fears’ – and a visit from a naked ‘you’, haloed by lamplight: ‘From my lips, / the old words leap: / Oh god, oh god, oh please.’. Again, ‘How the Crocus Climbs, How the Roses Rise’ neatly parallels a contemporary, visceral love story in the Jardin du Luxembourg with an episode from the relationship of Akhmatova and Modigliani where the former throws red roses into the latter’s studio following a mix-up over a meeting. The poem plays with sexual tension and suggests of the roses that Akhmatova ‘knew what they would do / in the shadows of that locked room’.
In the collection’s closing poem, archly entitled ‘A Letter to the Stranger Who Will Dissect My Brain’ – in her novel ‘A Ghost in the Throat’ she had written that leaving her body to an anatomy department would allow her to “orchestrate a moment of my future in which my body will echo a moment from my past’ – Ní Ghríofa warns that stranger that in unlocking the poet’s brain, ‘Your brain will blaze bright, // alive and wild, and I, / I will be the light.” On the basis of this stunning collection Ní Ghríofa is most certainly that light.
Patrick Lodge is an Irish citizen with roots in Wales. His work has been published in several countries and he has read at poetry festivals across Europe and has been successful in several international poetry competitions. His fourth collection, There You Are, is due for publication in late 2025 by Valley Press UK.
*****
Safe Ground by Rosie Johnston. £10 Mica Press. ISBN 9781869848408. Reviewed by Colin Pink
Safe ground is increasingly hard to find in the current state of the world. Rosie Johnston’s collection of 27 poems and one short story delves into the elusive possibilities of finding safe ground in the wake of growing up in Belfast during the euphemistically termed ‘Troubles’ in a fractured family with a dysfunctional mother and a charming but unreliable father. The volatile relationship of the father and mother reminded me strongly of Caitlin and Dylan Thomas. In the poem ‘In Good Hands’ the mother is characterised like this:
She’s a stove you look after
day and night
or her tolerance blows out.
Both eyes drip, her come-with-me fist
grips
your arm: ‘When I leave him, you’re mine.’
Johnston is a masterly story-teller. There’s a strong filmic quality to the poem ‘She’s Staying’ where the tensions within the family, the infidelity of the parents, is subtly conveyed as a storm rages outside, echoing the stormy relationship of the parents:
A wail above it all – my mother’s curled on the carpet
round the whiskey bottle, new black dress rucked up. ‘Your father’s
gone’, she wails, she wants to die, ‘where is he, Rosie, find him’
Gales screech off Donegal, tangle my hair over my face.
My teacher’s car, lamplit outside our house, spindrift on the roof,
two heads inside, in silhouette against the moon gleam road.
Sleet cuts the breath from me. I judder. Coward, I go back inside.
The adjacent poem, ‘Abercorn, 4 March 1972: Six O’Clock’ is about one of the worst atrocities during the Northern Ireland troubles when a bomb was planted in a crowded tea room full of local women and children. The poem describes a TV reporter on the six O’Clock news struggling to control his emotions as he reports on the dead and maimed until, unable to control himself any more, he stumbles out of shot. This poem resonated for me with what is currently happening in Gaza with so many women and children being blown to pieces. The poem reflects on the monstrous violence that has been let loose:
Over his shoulder we’d all seen it: the beast was out of its cage.
Chill control, red-eyed in our homes, ready to clot our lives.
The lowest we can be was loose. Nothing mattered now but blood.
Most had no choice but to stay – even when they’d
lost all – to hirple on, patch up, work for peace
in the throat of that stinking scorch-breath.
There is humour too in the poetry especially ‘Cleopatra on Port Stewart Strand’, where the reckless mother drives her car straight onto the beach and leaps into the sea ‘to lose her usual scent of chip fat and onions in the surf’. The car is stuck in the sand so the mother enlists the children to push the car who are soon helped by nearby men, urged by the mother to push harder ‘and high above the racket / seagulls cackled / and all the men /adored her’.
Growing up amidst domestic and societal violence inevitably leaves psychological scars. In ‘Bloodstains on the Stones’ recurrent traumatic memories are represented as wolves:
Wolf-memories weave around my legs.
Docile now.
I tiptoe. Whisper.
Wolf-memories startle. Leap up, snap,
shove me over,
rip at my throat.
A gardening metaphor is employed in ‘Breathe in the View’ where ‘I pull up my past by the thickest stems. / A tough pull, both arms. My back into it.’
An apt sub-title for this book might be families and how to survive them, both the ones we by necessity are born into and the ones we create ourselves. The title poem traces in four sections the relationship of love and anxiety between parent and child from first steps: ‘A gleam. Breath held I watch / my baby / reach – two steps, one step, three – and walk.’ to teenage rebellion: ‘Minefield child, I never knew when / my tread / or yours could slaughter us both.’ to wary détente and the persistence of love: ‘Our eyes see our children grown. / Our hearts / still cradle our swaddled newborns.’ I feel sure parents struggling with rebellious teenagers will relate strongly to this poem.
Other poems, such as ‘Off the Map’ (about her father climbing Slieve Lamagan in 1949) and a series of poems set by the sea such as ‘Seasalter’, ‘Away in a Beach Hut’ and ‘Oyster Seventeens’ where the sea and sky ‘aligns the mind’s horizon’ all celebrate the healing power of being immersed in nature:
This fresh day. Let’s shuck it
open, feel
gusto pour between our fingers.
There’s a strong lyrical momentum in Johnston’s verse which is brought to the fore in rhyming poems such as ‘Happy the Woman’ (after one of Horace’s Odes) and ‘Just the Ticket (a villanelle after Dylan Thomas) which cautions young girls to ‘not go reckless into love’.
The book concludes with ‘Laughing and Grief: Paris 2020’ a perfectly paced short story about a trip to Paris to visit the grave of Samuel Beckett in Montparnasse Cemetery. It is also a story about grief over the death of the narrator’s father. The narrator struggles to find Beckett’s gravestone. I can vouch for this, having made the same pilgrimage myself and finding it hard to locate; in true Beckett style the gravestone is horizontal rather the vertical and very plain, making it easy to overlook. A local old gentleman offers her assistance and they commune among the graves of the famous, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Seberg for whom the old man has an enduring love. It is a very tender and understated story and all the more powerful for it. The past and present are interweaved in a subtle dance of reconciliation and healing.
At the end of the day perhaps the only ‘safe ground’ in an age of trauma is the refuge of being able to write about it. There is tenderness, trauma and wisdom in these pages (‘Reflection’):
Veiled dreams. That need to please,
appease, make good, make safe.
Make it out of there.
Colin Pink is a poet and art historian. His books of poems are: Acrobats of Sound (2016), The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament (2019), Typicity (2021) and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy (2021).
*****
New Famous Phrases by Daniel Hinds. £12.99.Broken Sleep Books, ISBN: 9781916938810. Reviewed by Rona Fitzgerald
The title of Daniel Hinds’ debut volume, New Famous Phrases, sets the tone for the collection with its resonances of ancient and more contemporary authors as well as alerting us to innovative approaches to words and phrases. The title comes from a tribute poem to W.S.Graham.
Dear Sydney Graham.
‘Under your blue hat.’
– W. S. Graham, Dear Bryan Wynter
I
My feet wear odd socks today, one of yours,
One of mine, see how well they go together.
Apologies, I’ve come to your funeral late,
Dressed oddly and for a night on the town.
II
A pint of foaming seawater with Malcolm Mooney,
Lent out, for a short while, to fast from death and form
A lasting impression. Together
We can moon over whatever midnight moonlit furry
Queens and meropian mermaidens have set aside their fish
Tails and crowns to land in this dive and prop up the bar.
Chat them up with old jokes and new famous phrases;
A dead man makes a fine wingman.
The poem is interlaced with sea references and resonances from W.S.Graham’s work. It situates Hinds as a poet of scale, imagination and verve in terms of risk- taking and cultural references. For example, the second line in stanza II, illustrates wordplay as Lent out, is followed by fast.
Later, in the poem ‘Ode to Appollo II’, Keat’s classical Appollo is referenced with the space craft of the moon landings. The poem ends with the line ‘Appollo, god of poetry, prophecy and moonboots.’
Aquatic myths are also interwoven throughout the collection with mermaidens, sirens and many references to water.
Other originations include a prose poem review that manages to combine critical analysis with poetic responses. Throughout the collection, there is dialogue with poets, writers and time. The poems always coming back to the scope and power of words.
The collection provides rich reading and references as well as matter of fact experiences. I found the framing by Hinds of his own poems with lines from classical and contemporary poems set up my imagination, enhancing my reading and appreciation. They encouraged me to reread Keats and Eliot and Hughes and Graham, bringing out commonalities and differences.
There is playfulness as well. Ode to a Magpie references Keats Ode to a Nightingale. The poem touches on mythology and folklore as well as music. The magpie is symbolic in many cultures both as a positive force and as a negative harbinger of sorrow:
ODE TO A MAGPIE/ ONE FOR SORROW
O for a beaker full of the warm South
John Keats: ‘ Ode to a Nightingale’
Keats can keep
his numb-tongued nightingale;
I’ll save my stolen silver speech
for my pale and black
kleptomaniac.
Magpie, your bad luck beak is slick
with Satan’s serpent blood
and was
silent,
when all the others bayed for Christ
on his wet-blooded bough.
When Noah took to his Ark,
you alone stayed,
and strayed
to see the world drown,
to hear the secret knowledge of its last words,
and drink down its last
best
breath;
and like Noah,
swallowed your sorrows, and became Bacchus’s bird,
with wine-dark wings.
When all the other blackbirds were put in a pie,
you stole the silverware,
and carved out a bad name for yourself.
The world gives good mornings
to the one who heard its last good nights,
who would not shelter,
or sing
for a god on his beam.
Bad luck bird – be trod upon.
Bridge
the starry silver stream.
Link us
to the weaver of worlds
and words.
Daniel Hinds gives us many delights in this collection; every poem yields riches. The poems are taut, rhythmic, playful, and yet, accessible. They touch on mythology, the rich legacy of poetry throughout time. Hinds has a strong voice; his words echo back as he engages with many poets from different eras. On the page, the capitalisation enhances the canonical feel, inviting the reader to take their time. A book to read at a stately pace to savour the skill, exuberance and joy.
Rona Fitzgerald was born in Dublin. She now lives in Glasgow. Rona writes poetry, stories and non-fiction. She is published in a range of online and print magazines including; The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, the Blue Nib, Dreich, Littoral, Marble Broadsheet, The Storms, Fixator press, Culture Matters and The High Window. In September 2023, she published a book of poetry called Aftermath: Poems of Repair and Renewal, on Amazon.
*****
The High Window 