The Light Café by Diane Fahey. Liquid Amber Press, 2023, was launched on-line by Ross Gillett on on June 15th 2023

If I were to commission the writing of a book of poems centred on what to me are the most important things in poetry, there’d be two priorities: that Emily Dickinson would loom large in it and that the poems would focus on weather, especially rain and clouds. And then I’d find that Diane Fahey has already written it! The Light Café is a book in four sections, each headed by a stunning Dickinson quote, and one of the sections is a rain sequence, while elsewhere in the book are cloud sequences together with marvellous imagery of atmospheric effects – all of this rendered, along with the sky, the moon and the sun and the movements of air, with transformative close attention. I say ‘transformative’ because I don’t want to sound as if I see the book as simply meteorological. It’s a collection that through imagery of the natural world creates and explores finely registered psychological and spiritual states of being.

In this context, I’ll take the liberty of quoting myself. On the back cover I have this to say: “The poems in this wonderful book trace the most subtle shifts of light, the lives of clouds and birds, with such delicacy and intensity as to make them sources of revelation.” Now that was written some time ago and I felt it to be generally true of the book, but when I read this again I wondered if I could demonstrate more precisely what I mean by this pretty big claim. I didn’t have to get further than the second poem, ‘Insomnia’, to find a strikingly clear and literally true example of the revelatory power of a Fahey poem. The poem starts like this:

Suddenly the full moon
winningly pallid
at the curtain’s edge.

I walk outside,
see it nested among
branches in flower…

 This is a pre-dawn poem about the moon (the whole first section of the book is moon poetry). Note the focus on minimal presence – a ‘winningly pallid’ full moon – and on effects at the borders of perception – ‘at the curtain’s edge’. The poem works its way through another seven stanzas of this sort of delicate registering of the effects of the emerging light of dawn, until it finishes with this:

Bird song. Alcoves of light
dress the highest boughs.
Soon, the perfumed tree

that had cradled the moon
will stand wholly revealed.
The one star an abiding glimmer.

 Beautifully, the final touch is that star still hanging on as “an abiding glimmer” as dawn arrives, but the expansive, almost annunciatory, moment before that concerns the tree, which at the start of the poem is “in flower” and is now become “the perfumed tree” which will soon “stand wholly revealed”. This is a poem which stays strenuously faithful to the facts of the natural world and in doing so enacts a process to which a term like “immanence” might apply, a process of something like spiritual or metaphysical revelation.

There isn’t time to go through other poems like this, so I’ll run more quickly through what for me are key elements of the collection. First, the theme and the imagery of rain – the second section of the book is titled ‘Rain is its Own Season.’ For example, Fahey describes Autumn rains:

the dreamscapes of rain
still half in love with mist –
an Irish rain fine enough
to go about your daily business in,
caught between belief and unbelief.

And this, a thunderstorm:
I open the slats,
watch a heavenly
nervous breakdown.

Next, timed always to startle,
sheet lightning’s tinsel
mixed with gunpowder.

The rain comes in
like an explanation,
an excuse of sorts…

I so love that imaging of rain as an explanation, even as an excuse for the storm, that “heavenly nervous breakdown”.

Or these lines about a flood after ‘Epic rain’:

Cars, fences and cows lift from earth,
cats grow on trees,
towns float past themselves.

Those towns floating past themselves provide another quietly mysterious image of a world transformed by rain.

And then clouds. I commend to you the sequence called ‘Clouds’ in the third section of the book, in which the theme is Light, but here in the first section, in ‘Moon Poem’ (the whole poem is terrific, by the way) are these lines about clouds in the pre-dawn sky:

near-transparent clouds, galaxy-long –
clouds like stretches of the imagination.

These clouds are interfused with both the enormous distances of the universe – they are “galaxy-long” – as well as with the imagining mind: “clouds like stretches of the imagination.” This suggests that the imagination doesn’t simply produce images of clouds, but rather that the imagination itself, is cloud-like – evoking a very cunning and wondrous thought.

The third part of the book consists mainly of ekphrastic poems about paintings by Vermeer, Constable and other artists, including Clarice Beckett. Again, I haven’t time to dwell on these marvellous poems, but just as a sample, here are some lines from the long and beautiful sequence about Beckett, in which the poem focuses on a painting of

  ……………fields
manifesting yellow,

sundry tree-crowns afloat,
and the sun, boldly gold,

on a scumble of whiteness
above hazy baby-blue.

In this artist’s hands
even the simplest viewpoint

on the simplest view,
serenely questionable.

Commonly things are more likely to be serenely unquestionable than serenely questionable, but this subtly paradoxical phrase is exactly right for Beckett’s work. It takes the poem beyond the realm of evocative descriptiveness, bringing it to a close on a truly exploratory note.

The final section of the book, ‘Lost Stories,’ is more varied in its preoccupations than the others – it’s full of very strong poems, some of which in fact build on earlier themes. Section Three, ‘An Answering Light,’ is in one sense all about manifestations of light. In this last section there is a wonderful poem, ‘Dreamer,’ about a creature of light, a sea cucumber in fact, which glows in the darkness of the sea’s depths and which, when attacked, sheds its illuminated skin to put its attacker on the wrong track. Here are some of the key lines from the poem:

It can create light:
under threat, broadcasts
a shimmering image,
so deceiving close predators
with a simulacrum
wrapped in an aura
through which it slips away.

For me this poem about a creature which is itself a light creator, stands as a culmination of, and a last word on, all the preceding poetry about light.

And then the final poem of the book, ‘The Moon Mourners,’ also functions as a literally darker culmination of the moon poetry throughout the collection. It is a fable about a band of moon watchers who witness the destruction of the moon’s brightness by a cataclysm on the lunar surface. The poem ends like this:

Next day, word of a shrouded, disabled moon
was out. Soon enough, many forgot moonlight

and made a cult of starlight, praised it to the skies.
We of the Company, though, still keep our watch,
hoping for a breach in that blackness –

the release of some buried, even older light.
To console, we share our archives of the moon –
the poems, the icons, the songs: O Silver Moon.

 How telling, how brave, how mischievous perhaps, that this beautiful collection finishes with the destruction of its dominant image. The moon, our source of light in the darkness, the best light there is, is obliterated in this final poem, and the only hope is for an older light, a buried light, to be revealed. It’s an amazing end to an amazing book.

 – Ross Gillett

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Ross Gillett lives on Dja Dja Wurrung country in Daylesford in the central highlands of
Victoria. He is a widely published poet and has won or been shortlisted for numerous awards,
and his books The Mirror Hurlers (2019) and Swimmer in the Dust (2022) are available from
Puncher and Wattmann. He is a poetry editor for Puncher and Wattmann and Liquid Amber
Press. See rossgillett.weebly.com.