Seang (Hungering) by Anne Casey, Salmon Poetry 2025
This beautiful collection is both a joy to read and a challenge. Each poem stands as part of a carefully curated section. The sections combine to form a collection which demands to be read as a whole, though definitely not in one sitting. All this is supported by an author introduction, a statement of poetics, a short history, comprehensive and illuminating notes, photographs including some of the source material, all forming part of, indeed the core of, a lauded doctoral thesis. Like an expanding Russian Doll.
Access to this thesis is pending. The thesis won first prize in the Distinguished Creative Arts Doctoral Student Award by the Deans and Directors of Australian Universities. For future reference Casey’s doctoral thesis is The second-wave impact in Australia of the Great Irish Famine: Reviving lost histories through poetics of resistance: (http://hdl.handle.net/10453/182352)
The poetics of resistance is a multi-faceted concept best understood by two strands:
- Giving voice to the silent and oppressed
- Using the language of the oppressor against themselves
Casey uses her native Irish language (Gaeilge) to great effect. This is a form of protest. Keeping that language alive is important for Casey as a writer.
The collection opens with the quote of an Irish saying meaning “A well fed person doesn’t understand a hungering one”. To understand “seang”, and to make us understand the concept, is the challenge Casey takes on.
Apart from one poem written in Gaeilge (and printed here with a parallel English translation) the language of this collection is English. Furthermore, source material of the colonial masters is used as text to expose the paternalism which kept the oppressed oppressed, even after they had escaped the famine. Casey is making a deliberate, and obvious point, by using their own words to expose the Sassanach.
Since the women and girls, the subject of this collection, were silent, Casey must invent a series of voices through which these women speak. The diversity of these voices speaks to the success of the author, because, although there is an experience shared by all, each is given a voice, a life, in the poems. This is achieved in part by the use of a variety of poetic forms, including nursery rhymes, correspondence and structured Irish poetic forms (such as the Aisling poems), and also the creation of different sections in the collection, with each section having its own voice and preoccupation.
The need for this work is that otherwise the “Elizas” of this world would be, not just forgotten, but extinguished and erased. Our history remembers Ned Kelly through his Jerilderie Letter. Yet what he articulates, in his own self-serving way, is the common Irish experience in Australia of those displaced by the Great Irish Famine and washed up on Australian shores. The “Elizas” of this collection are almost exact contemporaries of Ned Kelly and although they share some of that common experience, without a voice, their stories would remain untold.
In the Jerilderie Letter Kelly laments of the police who “deserted the Shamrock, the emblem of true wit and beauty to serve under the flag and nation that has destroyed, massacred, and murdered their forefathers”. He calls for Erin’s Isle to “once more (rise) from the pressure and tyrannism of the English yoke which has kept (them) in poverty and starvation.” This led Ned Kelly to become an outlaw, with a claimed nobility of never interfering with any person, “unless they deserved it”
So too, the “Elizas” embark on small forms of protest against the oppression they received in various institutions often with little effect:
The same girl again
attempted to abscond
from Newcastle Schoolby leaping from the dormitory window,
but hurt herself so severely
that, from necessity,
she has been quiet since.”………………… – From Othering.
The same cycles of oppression are often duplicated from one generation to the next. Girls forced into prostitution and petty crime by starvation and institutional oppression at an early age.
At the centre of this collection is the Great Irish Famine. Casey also acknowledges the huge number of women and girls who suffer starvation and privations today. It is hard to ignore the use, by the English, of the famine as a political weapon to subdue and disperse the Irish rural poor; their crofts broken up and the land turned over to more industrial-scale pasture. The number of Irish killed and displaced in the time of famine runs to the millions. Even today governments are not immune from using famine as a political weapon.
This book opens with the poem A history of rain which bookends the poems; with parts i -iv opening , and part v closing the collection. This poem sets up the mythical and political world these poems inhabit. This poem is epic in form and ironic in tone. It almost mocks itself on the journey from big bang dust to the present day, with rain as the great Irish unifier. Casey is not without a sense of humour. Over its numerous parts the country suffers a series of betrayals including potato blight and the subsequent famine. The “nullius” of the opening resolves itself into a present day tour of Dublin’s statues.
The body of the collection starts with Part II Perverse Creatures. The first poem is Aisling, which Casey tells us echoes an old Irish form of protest poetry. This poem and others in this section deal with the famine and its consequences (the inception).
…., your arm still
extended around your infant son,
bundled with a hundred twig-like others –
today’s bitter harvestto be planted with the rest.
………………… – From Aisling
This understated event, tragically repeated across the country, operates on both the level of the mother of the child but also the mother embodied in the feminine manifestation of Ireland.
The section then moves through a number of poems, ‘Trade Balance’, ‘Convoy’ which are comprised of text fragments from various official sources, exposing, by their own words the indifference and ignorance of the officials observing the unfolding catastrophe. ‘Othering’, another text-based poem, begins with a searing quote from Edmund Burke. In its subtitled sections ‘ii A Matter of Commerce, iii Live exports to Sydney‘ and ‘iv Bill of Lading‘ this poem exposes the mercantilist view that this famine, and the displacement of the Irish, is a market problem which would resolve itself without direct intervention.
Three hundred Irish orphan girls
unhired – many doubtless preferred food
and lodging as the hackney coach-horseprefers his stand
and nose-bag to hard work….………………… – From Othering
The collection moves on to ‘Section III Thimble-riggers, Poachers and Prostitutes’ (the reception phase).
Nor does this colony desire to have
Its moral atmosphere ‘Tipperaryfied’
by disaffected Irish”.………………… – From Our Antipodes
The stand out poem in this section is ‘A City Girl’, winner of the 2022 Henry Lawson Poetry Prize. This poem acknowledges its source and is a homage to Lawson’s bush poetry especially ‘A Bush Girl’.
Lawson’s poem begins
She’s milking in the rain and dark
as did her mother in the past
the wretched shed of poles and bark
rent by the wind, is leaking fast…….
She has her dreams.
Casey’s poem begins
She’s walking in the dark and rain,
as her mother had before,
her skirts are dragging in the drain
her feet are tired and sore.
In ruined shoes with broken dreams….
Here the poems diverge as the tales of the milk maid and the prostitute diverge. Casey’s rhymes are, if anything, more assured than Lawson’s and she can get away with deliberately breaking the rhyme in lines 9 and 11. Casey is also very much writing in the 21st Century and is able to escape the slightly maudlin and sentimental posturing of the late 19th early 20th Century. I read this poem without reference to the poet’s notes. The mention of Starvinghurst Goal, where Mary’s baby dies, immediately brought to mind Darlinghurst Goal. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was this reference was Casey’s further nod to Lawson, by referring to his 1908 poem ‘One Hundred and Three‘.
This section closes out with ‘Speciation’, another text-based poem consisting of fragments of legislation dealing with child removal from the mid 19th century to the present day. The poem demonstrates a shift in the language of the legislation, but raises the question, whether there has been any meaningful change to the way the law operates.
‘Section IV Precocious Viragos’ is really the core of this collection. Here the women and girls are given voice to tell their stories: collectively and individually. The unrelenting nature of these stories, their commonality of pain, could diminish the effect by repetition. Casey avoids this by mixing up the forms and narratives. She moves from the searingly awful ‘Examination’, to a listing of events in ‘Any old iron’, to tell the narrative of the surprisingly long life of Jane Davis. Mixed in is ‘Cross-stitched and Running Stitches‘, with their mechanical rhythms echoing the sound of sewing machines and word play on the numbers nine and ten in the plaint “A stitch in time saves nine” and on to various nursery rhymes in ‘Mother of Mary’ (“Ding dong dell”) and ‘Mary Mary’ (”…life’s contrary”). Such diversity speaks to Casey’s skill and imagination and elevates each telling. It should not be ignored that most of these “Elizas” were very young, in need of care and love, and destined to live short lives even by the standards of that time. They may have been robbed of their childhood, but Casey does try to give a small part back to them.
The section ‘Eliza’s Story’ is in fact a fabricated letter not sent back to Ireland. This clever invention allows Casey to articulate, in a polished version of the vernacular, a comprehensive commentary of her life. It serves as the Jerilerie Letter for these girls.
The collection closes out with ‘Section VI Chasing Ghosts,’ which brings us back to the present day. Here Casey exercises her own voice by providing this coda. In ‘Mise Aisling‘ she states:
I lost my tongue
long ago in exile
refound it in a ghost child
calling for her mother.
Based on the fact this is another Aisling poem, this statement must be read politically. However, I suspect, it operates just as accurately on a personal level.
For those who know Casey’s work, most will recognise her trademark lyricism and the inherent beauty of her work. ‘Season of Samhain’ is vintage Casey. Working with a pagan Celtic myth she weaves a thing of simple beauty around the colour blue. So clearly, early spring in the present in the Southern Hemisphere.
…. A bitter breeze,
the seething hiss and whisper passing under
a hundred bluish lips, amongst
the jacaranda’s first cautious offering
There is a song-like quality to the writing. Even as she acknowledges her use of English as the medium of expression – ‘The coloniser’s tongue’. This dilemma is recognised, and somewhat ameliorated, by the use of her native Gaeilge throughout the collection. The use of these words and phrases operate to allow Casey to reclaim her own voice.
In ‘On the Eve of All Hallows Eve ‘and ‘Warrung Gathering’ Casey confronts another dimension of our colonial history. We are all migrants to this land. We came not to a Terra Nullius, but to a land which had been inhabited for millennia by the indigenous population. This population was silenced and dispossessed by this legal fiction. These poems open up the possibility of the dispossessed walking and speaking in solidarity.
The collection ends with ‘Section VII Epilogue‘. This is the final section of the opening poem which prefaces this collection. So the circle within the circle closes.
This is a highly structured collection. I chose to read it as I would any other collection; as a collection of poems with various linkages. It is no less satisfying to read in this way, but I acknowledge the ambitions for this work, go way beyond such a reading, as various layers are revealed.
– Michael Witts
Michael Witts is a Welsh born Australian poet. He has published five collections: Sirens, South, Dumb Music, 28 Sonnets and Some Dualities. He won 2nd prize in the 2023 Proverse International Poetry Prize (single poem ) and won the 2023 Proverse Prize for manuscripts for Some Dualities.
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Seang (Hungering) by Anne Casey is available from https://www.salmon poetry.com/ details.php?ID=635&a=307. It should also be available through major independent bookshops in Australia
Sydney launch of Seang (Hungering) 
Rochford Street Review 