Ballast by Jamie O’Halloran, Drunk Muse Press, 2025

I first met the Irish American poet Jamie O’Halloran during Covid at an online writers group meeting, and I have been an admirer of her work ever since. This is her first full collection of poetry and was launched by poet Rachel Coventry in Charlie Byrnes Bookshop in Galway in October 2025.

This is a collection that begins and ends by remembering and grieving the dead; the poet’s parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, a beloved stepdaughter, and expands to include the unknown dead in the war in Ukraine, for example in ‘The Gone’:

The dead are like our parents, or everyone who’s been there first,
surrendering the desire to give warning.

The poems are rooted in nature, myth, personal spiritual beliefs, and everyday life. In ‘Visitation’ we read:

We looked up from our garden supper
………..and there she was,
moth-quiet above our heads, a barn owl,

In this poem, the poet and her friend see an owl. Her friend calls the owl an omen; her husband’s sister is dying. It is only in retrospect that the poet realises the owl is a ghost. For it is the death of the unnamed friend that is portended in the owl’s visitation.

Int the final stanzas the poet wonders if her friend had

Glimpsed Minerva in the bird,
might she have stepped over the threshold of wisdom
rather than through death’s wide door?

Thresholds repeat as metaphor throughout the collection, as do images from Christianity and the Bible. But there are also images of female genitlia and female body processes.

In ‘Workers at the Morgue’, for example, a dead soldier’s bare chest

is the bluish grey seen
in pictures of Christ’s deposition from the cross.

But the bag that holds him

could be a vulva, a bursting pod of peas.

creating a vivid juxtapositioning of images and a subversion of patriarchal norms.

In ‘Natural History’ the personal grief and eternal nature of death is considered.  

The gestures of death —
Snowdrop’s bowed head, guard of honour
From church to graveside — create
A passage tomb of reckoning,
The corridor where I will walk my grief.

 Death and ritual have constants in the human psyche, from the time of the passage tombs until the present. Death is a public event, but grief is a personal journey.

In ‘Look Away’, the poet writes movingly of the death of her stepdaughter, how she sees her in photos before she knew her,

In the flat glossy print. The horizon at her
shoulder of the river, it’s mossy bank, and some
wanting: look away, look away, look away.

Death and grief are hard to look at, hard to accept and difficult to deal with. In Ballast Jamie O’Halloran looks at death and grief with both an unflinching gaze and a soothing compassion. Yet there is a subtle warning running that runs through the collection; the inevitable that we must all confront at some point in our lives.

O’Halloran explores the personal grief of her own losses and widens the lens to encompass loss as part of the human condition. She is generous in her compassion for the unnamed and the unknown dead. She uses her personal experience of loss to grieve the pointless deaths in Ukraine. She makes them seen in ways that are rooted in the Connemara landscape, the natural world and the ordinary experiences of living.

 – Barbara Dunne

---

Barbara Dunne is a writer, poet and artist living in the West of Ireland. Her poetry appears in Crannóg, Drawn to the Light Press, New Word Order, HOWL and The Storms. She has received bursaries from Poetry Ireland, The Irish Writers Centre and the Munster Litreture Centre. She is currently working on her first collection of poetry. 

.

 

Ballast can be purchased online from the Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop website https://charliebyrne.ie/ or from https://www.drunkmusepress.com/shop.

---

Support Rochford Street Review and small press publishing