Tag Archives: Irish poetry

A Personal Sense of Place and History: Mark Roberts reviews ‘Bloodroot’ by Annemarie Ni Churreain

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Bloodroot by Annemarie Ni Churreain, Doire Press 2017

I was in Dublin in the week leading up to Christmas 2017 and went shopping for some contemporary Irish Poetry only to find there had been a “Christmas rush” and a number of titles were in very limited supply. Coming from Australia the notion of a pre-Christmas rush on poetry came as a bit of shock, but I eventually managed to track down most of the items on my list (as well as a few extra). One of the titles I eventually had to mail back to Sydney in order to avoid excess baggage charges was Annemarie Ni Churreain’s debut collection Bloodroot.

It took me some time to get around to reading Bloodroot, but the experience was well worth the wait. This is an extraordinary connection, finely crafted and rooted in place, politics and history. While obviously written from an Irish perspective there is much here which also has an immediacy for an Australian reader. The poems about institutional child abuse, the forced separation of mothers from their children and reflections on the same sex marriage debate will all appear familiar.

The simple dedication “for my Foremothers’ hints at the power of some of the poems to come and, indeed the opening poem ‘Untitled’ is unexpectedly complex and compelling. The title of the poem takes on added significance in the context of the rest of the collection – it is not just the poem that is untitled but also the speaker/poet. The unnamed poem searches for an identity as did the children separated from their mothers by the church controlled state:

The first time
a tree called me by name,
I was thirteen and only spoke a weave of ordinary tongues.

 – Untitled

The poem ends with a hint of discovery:

Come Underground, they said.
See what you are made of.

– Untitled

The poem ‘Penance’ which is dedicated “for a girl in trouble 1951” is one of the most direct poems in the collection. There is an anger here woven into the finally crafted words which has only been made stronger by the passage of time:

‘Shame’.
……..Use this word when you speak of love.

A man of cloth will come,
Your new home is among brides.

Deny
the child inside you is the child you dream at night

and when they cut short your hair,
watch the cuts fall

like the soft fur of an animal
held still by threat.

 – Penance

This them is continued most powerfully in the title poem of the collection ‘Bloodroot – at the Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home:

Behind the gates, a black awakening of trees.
Were you made to kneel here too, Mary Josephine, Bernadette?
…………………..If I call you by your house-names will you speak?

Torn avenue and pillars either side,……….I am here for the girl
who had birds in her eyes.
…………………..If I render a wing may she speak?

 – Bloodroot

I did a little research on the Castlepollard Mother and baby Home and discovered that it was run by the Order of The Sacred Heart for 35 years from 1934. During this time the Order never employed a doctor or nurse, only a single mid-wife as required by law. During this time 3,763 babies had their births registered. It is estimated that over 500 babies died and were buried in shoe boxes in a small piece of land down a lane way. After reading this I reread the poem and felt the anger and sadness rise in me as I remembered our own Royal Commission into institutionalised child abuse, a court case I cannot comment on and the Lost Generation of Aboriginal Children.

The power of these poems comes not just from the subject matter but from the fact that these are finely crafted and realised poems. They are driven by the strength of the imagery, the internal rhythm of the poems and even how they appear on the page.

Central to the success of this collection is the sense of place and history Ni Churreain conveys. Some of this history, is of course the history of the abuse of women and children at the hands of the Church/State, but there is also an older history here vitally connected with space:

………

This hill is pagan
This hill is Hill.

It will answer in bog-tongue
and occasional fire,
burning back the earth
along the heather-stream

despite bald heels of rock,
despite the kissy mink,
despite a saintly air

until the stream runs dark
with what needs
to blacken out of you.

 – Bog Medicine

And again in ‘Doire Chonaire’, which is dedicated “for a grandfather unknown”, we once again get this break in history and a striving to make connections:

To you I owe my thirst………For a name
gets passed down through the spear side
in the underland streams that pulse with clear meaning
and thrive towards the lips
……………………………………………..A name is how we match
our tongues to the source and taste our own sediment.

 – Doire Chonaire

There is much to enjoy in this poem, the long lines that break just when you think you might be reading a prose poem, the gaps and spaces in the poem which suggests the break across generations and the use of words such as “spear side” and underland” all add to the depth of the poem.

Place returns in poems about India and Florida. In ‘Where We Come From’ we learn:

This is the Florida I will remember,
a hooded place where the moss hangs

like a lamp-lit silk, peeled from the body
and discarded among the boughs.

– Where We Come From

This is a very different world to the “underland streams” but the strength of the imagery is just as strong.

The poetry in this collection is so finely crafted and alive with language and meaning that it hard to believe that Bloodroot is a debut collection. I am hoping that there was another run on it in the bookshops of Dublin leading up to Christmas 2018.

 – Mark Roberts

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Mark Roberts is a founding editor of Rochford Street Review and lives in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. His latest collection of poetry, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in 2016.

Bloodroot is available from   https://www.doirepress.com/writers/a_f/annemarie_ni_churreain/ 

Annemariw Ni Churreain appeared in poetry Irish Poetry feature:

 

 

 

Contemporary Irish Poetry Featured Writer: Mark Roberts

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Three Poems              Contemporary Irish Poetry Index

Mark Roberts is a Sydney based writer, critic and publisher. He is a founding editor of Rochford Street Review and is the curator of the current feature on Contemporary Irish Poetry which has run through issue 22 of the Review.

Most of Mark’s family on his mother side left Ireland in the second half of the 19th century, driven out by the famine and a dislike for English oppression. Over generations in Australia they maintained their sense of ‘Irishness’ and, at times, that Irishness has found its way into Mark’s work.

Mark founded Rochford Street Press in the early 1980s to publish a literary magazine called P76. Rochford Street Press has also published a number of books, pamphlets and chapbooks over the years and is recognised as one one of the smallest literary presses in the  world.

Mark’s own work has been widely published in magazines and journals in Australia and overseas. Concrete Flamingos, a collection of his recent work was published by Island Press in 2016 and he currently has a few new projects in flight.

Books

P76 Magazine

Website

Mark Roberts: Three Poems

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Biographical Note              Contemporary Irish Poetry Index

Leaving Roscommon – Strokestown Park
The Conscription Vote – 1916/17
Cities that are not Dublin

P .

Leaving Roscommon – Strokestown Park 
(Gorta Mór)

We drive out of the grounds of Strokestown Park,
the chill in our bones a reminder of a history
that follows us down these short country roads.

A land that tugs at memory. My grandfather’s
stories of why the English can’t be trusted:
grain exported while his grandparents starved,
his mother hung by her hair from a roof beam.

These things are hard to forget,
even across generations.

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P .

The Conscription Vote – 1916/17

History lies here, buried deep. Two bodies
laid neatly, face down. The male, head facing
the old road, the female on top of him, her head
resting on his feet – a better fit in the narrow grave.
A layer of stones to stop wild dogs searching for food.
Almost 100 years now, local victims of an imperial war.
Old Jack told everyone that his son had “eloped off” with that
“Paddy” girl. Better that way, he didn’t have to see their bastard
children or write his son out of his will. But there were rumours of
ghostly songs drifting down the hill above the farmhouse on moonless
nights. But life went on. Years later Jack went to his grave without a Catholic
………………………………………………………………………………in the family.

.

Australian voters were asked in October 1916, and again in December 1917, to vote on the issue of conscription. Irish Australians played a leading role in the defeat of both votes.

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P .

Cities that are not Dublin

I have a plan for reading Ulysses – actually more than reading it, finishing it. Today i am going to Neilsen Park alone with a picnic lunch. I will start reading next to the harbour, easing my way into the sections I have already read. Then tomorrow night I am travelling to Melbourne by train and plan to sit up all night and read.

I make good progress, sitting against an old Morton Bay Fig Tree, reading familiar pages, looking up occasionally at a city which is not Dublin.

**

This train is called the Spirit of Progress. It has dark brown leather seats, and the blue Vicrail carriages look out of place at Central Station. There is a little reading light above each seat that can stay on all night.

I read for hours and sleep briefly in the early morning. I am thick into Joyce when i sit up at the bench in the restaurant car and eat breakfast. My coffee splashes into the saucer as the train emerges into the morning.

**

Central …………………………Dublin Connolly

Strathfield ……………….. ……Tara Street

Moss Vale …………………. ….Dublin Pearse

Golburn……………………     .. Lansdowne Road

Yass Junction…………. . ….. ..Sandymount

Junee……………………..         Sydney Parade

Wagga Wagga………… ..  ….. Blackrock

The Rock………………. …….  Dun Laoghaire Mallin

Albury…………………… .        Sandycove & Glasthule

Wangaratta……………………  Bray Daly

Benella……………………   ..   Kilcoole

Spencer Street…………….    . Street Gorey

**

I am staying in Marie and Andy’s flat in Fitzroy Street, just above Leo’s Spaghetti Bar. They have gone away for the weekend and I have the flat to myself.

The flat has a curved balcony & large windows overlooking the street. Andy’s drum kit is in the corner and three of Marie’s paintings are hanging on the wall. The largest is of a crumbled tube of toothpaste.

You can’t see the bay but you can smell it when the wind blows in the right direction.

**

You can see the tram-stop from the balcony. It is twilight and I watch people getting on and off the trams. The sun has disappeared over the city and it feels like I’m watching a European film.

I see a man get off the tram. He is wearing a suit and a hat and looks very different to everyone else in the street. His suit seems to be cut from a heavy material and he is wearing heavy lace up boots. I watch him cross the street. He checks his watch and then enters the old Sportsman’s Bar.

I go into the kitchen and put the kettle on to make a cup of tea. Russian Caravan. I take it back to my vantage point just as he leaves the bar.

He is now with a another man, shorter and stockier and wearing a similar style of clothes. They walk down Fitzroy Street toward the bay. They stop and stand discussing something on the footpath outside the aqua coloured block of flats for almost five minutes. Then the second man hails a cab. The man in the hat walks back to the tram-stop and catches a tram back to the city.

I think of what has just taken place. I imagine a story. A meeting in the bar. A drug deal or organising a small scale robbery or perhaps just a drink with a friend and a discussion about football. I think of how that twenty minutes in the bar fits into the man’s schedule and begin to imagine what he has done today. Was he at work? Where in Melbourne he has travelled? Does he have a family? Who he has meet and what will he do now?

**

On my last night in Melbourne I go to a party. It is in High Street Armadale & Marie gives me a lift in her old Mazda. The party is in a flat at the back of a laundromat which is still open when we arrive.

A strobe light is is cutting the party to fragments and slinging them, three a second through cracks in the door. Hip Melbourne boys are wearing pointed black shoes & the girls all seem to be dressed in orange and green. I start talking to the only woman dressed in jeans. She works at the local community radio station and lives round the corner. When she learns that i am catching the train back to Sydney in the morning she gives me a crunched up ball of foil. Harsh crumbs for the trip she tells me.

As we leave the party, walking past the now closed laundromat, I see the streetlights reflected in pools of water along Commercial Road. A couple is having an argument at a tram-stop. He is yelling that he loves her. She is yelling at him to fuck off. They are holding hands.

**

O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

**

Sunset leaving Goulburn. Sydney just over an hour away. I swallow the last crumbs of the hash, & wash it down with a swig of vodka. I want to be ready for the lights of Sydney’s outer suburbs.

‘Cities that are not Dublin’ was runner up in the 2013 joanne burns Award for Prose Poems/Microfiction. It appeared in Writing to the Edge, Spineless Wonders 2014.

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Contemporary Irish Poetry Featured Writer: Michael J. Whelan

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Five poems                                                                   Contemporary Irish Poetry Index

photo MW

Michael J. Whelan. photograph by Emily Whelan.

Michael J. Whelan is a soldier-poet and historian. Michael joined the Irish Defence Forces in 1990 and served on tours of duty as a United Nations Peacekeeper during the conflicts in South Lebanon and with the Peace-Enforcement mission to Kosovo. He is curator of the Irish Air Corps Military Aviation Museum Collection at Baldonnel. He is author of two books, The Battle of Jadotville: Irish Soldiers in Combat in the Congo 1961 (2006) and Allegiances Compromised: Faith, Honour and Allegiance – Ex British Soldiers in the Irish Army 1913-24 (2011). Michael’s debut poetry collection, Peacekeeper (Doire Press, 2016), is the first of its kind in Ireland to examine the role of Irish citizens on international peace support missions. He was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series and his poetry has been published in Ireland, Mexico, Paris, Indonesia, the UK & USA and is included in The Hundred Years’ War –Anthology of Modern War Poems edited by Nick Astley (Bloodaxe UK, 2014). Awards for Michael’s writing include 2nd Place and two Commendations in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Awards, 3rd Place in the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Awards, a short listing in the Over the Edge –New Writer of the Year and the Red Line Book Festival Awards. He holds a Master of Arts Degree in Modern History from National University of Ireland, Maynooth

 

Peacekeeper (2016) is available from Doire Press: http://www.doirepress.com/writers/m_z/michael_whelan/

Michael J. Whelan’s Blog: https://michaeljwhelan.wordpress.com/

Michael J. Whelan: Five poems

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Biographical note                                                           Contemporary Irish Poetry Index

Days of Peace
Children of the War
Nectar of War
Old Man’s Tears
Deranged

P .

Days of Peace

There weren’t many birds
in the hills of South Lebanon
when I was a peacekeeper,
they were never a feature
of the historic landscape
that I can remember

except for the vultures
circling up high on summer thermals,
the smaller creatures had all been killed
by the time the spring had ended,
nothing to stir poetics in a future poet.
But there were times during days of peace
when villages came to life
with the call to prayers from ancient minarets
when the local people spoke
of a recent Barhah – a gift from God,

the moment when they personally encountered
a new born child and the Adhan was recited –
the first words a baby hears
(a call to prayers whispered into the left ear),
and I think now how abundant the skies must have been
before the crusades

and how many times since
a new born child
has encountered that same call to prayers.

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P .

Children of the War

Peacekeeping in Kosovo

Once, on the outskirts of a future memory,
we stopped our convoy
on a narrow road
near a fallen tree.
I was in the lead vehicle
bringing supplies to a forgotten village
the war had touched,
our first time on that ground.
The tree blocked the route
as if booby-trapped.

There was movement in the woods
as we pushed through,
we didn’t shoot.
It was good to see them,
we drove by and they came in to view
hands raised high- begging.
The ambush turned out
to be scared children
weary of uniforms,
we gave them chocolate
for their little victory.
There was nothing to fear
though they didn’t know it
when they saw us coming
and in the long run of things
their tactics worked –
their smiles keep me awake sometimes.

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P .

Nectar of War

The ground could feel them,
returning to nests with the arsenals
of their colonies,
rotors vibrating the air
on convoys of black silhouettes
zipping by,
dozens of helicopters
swarming overhead
like eager wasps,
tail-booms jutting out
like giant stings
with artillery pieces,
heavy mortars and vehicles
slung beneath their painted bodies
like sacs full of the nectar of war.

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P .

Old Man’s Tears

Kosovo

Wandering through ashes and misery
of memories daily desired,
landscapes of loving existence entwined
to a day of infamy fired.
Why graves in back garden we enquired
through interpreter we witnessed tragedy,
for old man’s tears trapped on beard
told a story of brutal savagery.
Burnt shell of home – on hurting ground,
daughters and wives ravaged within sight of sons.
All put to death by order of state
in front of old eyes,
no more to sire ungrateful children.

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P .

Deranged

Kosovo, Winter 2001

Cold day
Rain
Old woman
Damaged
Smelled
Ancient urine
Matted hair
Dirty clothes
Filthy skin
Living
In ruin
Burnt out shell
Hungry
Dying
Weeping
Gone mad
Charred remains
Her family
Inside home
Inside her
Murdered
Fearful
Of strangers
Would not be helped
Could not
Deranged

 

photo MW

Michael J. Whelan. photograph by Emily Whelan.

Contemporary Irish Poetry Featured Writer: Alice Kinsella

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Five Poems ....................Contemporary Irish Poetry Index


Alice Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1993, and raised in the west of Ireland. She holds a BA(hons) in English Literature and Philosophy from Trinity College Dublin.

Her poetry has been widely published at home and abroad, most recently in Banshee Lit, Boyne Berries, The Stony Thursday Book and The Irish Times. Her work has been listed for competitions such as Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition 2016, Jonathan Swift Awards 2016, and Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition 2017.

Her debut pamphlet Flower Press will be published in 2018.

Alice Kinsella can be found at aliceekinsella.com or at her Facebook author’s page https://www.facebook.com/AliceEKinsella

 

Alice Kinsella: Five Poems

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Biographical Note              Contemporary Irish Poetry Index

Tír na nÓg
Rose
Sweetheart, come
And what, what are we giving to our children?
When – A video Poem

 .

Tír na nÓg

In lieu of history classes we learned legends of warriors,
fierce fighting Fianna we were sure lived in our blood.

Neart ár ngéag

We waved ash branches for swords,
flew down hills on steeds with wheels,
foraged berries, scaring magpies with screams,
cleared the stream in one leap – this was our land.

My favourite was always the story
of Oisín, little deer bard boy,
bravest of band of brothers,
tempted by beauty and promises,
he left for the land of the young.

We watched the tape of Into the West
while eating beans on toast
we pretended we’d cooked in camp fires,
you laughing at my Dublin dialect
dissolving with Wild West warrior words.

Beart de réir ár mbriathar

Ears hanging on the telling of legends
round camp fires, the memories of
stories, the bravery of Oisín the poet
prince and his fairy love laying siege
to time with their eternal youth.

You’d run home in half-dark before bedtime,
I’d watch the film to the end,
read the whole story in the illustrated book

learning that no amount of love
could keep him in the land without death
that the call of age would always test.

Glaine ár gcroí

One snap of the rope, the saddle strap broke,
the fall of a warrior that could not keep fighting.

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 .

Rose

I.

Take these petals.
Let me lay this offering at your feet.

I bring you red roses
like a lover.

I will not leave you
with lilies,

and their deathly associations.
I’d imagine you’re tired of them.

Watch white hands drop red tears
one by one into the black.

II.

The rose bush is coming into bloom again.
It has decided to forgive the winter.

It’s going to give this another try.

The flourish of flowers is burying
the thorns loading its leafy limbs,

but you can still prick your finger
on the spindle that wants your sleep,

can still slit your skin
as you reach to pluck its offering.

Though,
then

your hurt hand will hold beauty
to see you through the pain.

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 .

Sweetheart, come
I.M. Emma Hauck.

I cannot claim to understand
how they locked you away
like a corpse in waiting,

how he turned his eyes from you
and your letters went unsent
as you pleaded for him to

Komm Komm Komm
Herzensschatzi komm.

I cannot ask you to understand
that terminal is not a word
you should have heard.
That they should have

come come come
to you.

How were you to know
you are not the only one
bleeding into words
breeding love in letters
scrawled ten thousand times.

Sweetheart,

I do not have your tongue
only your prayer
that someone may

come –

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 .

And what, what are we giving to our children?
For Aoibhe

She uses words new to her
and finds her way around the ones
she doesn’t know yet like a maze.
Tells me the marble looks like oil.
I know what she means:
its iridescent curve, blues, greens, purples
moving as it spins like the film of oil
on the surface of the sea riding the waves,
shining rainbows on lakes and streams
or every puddle she’s ever seen.

I think how our mothers
would not have known
that comparison at her age.

On Trá Mór we leave our footprints
in the peat-like drowned forest,
examine evacuated shells,
we find a Mermaid’s purse,
the leathery pocket shed by a shark
in its first moments.

Mum remembers what it said on the news:
They’ve found a superbug in the bay,
it has come in on currents from the city.
We drop the shells, wipe our shoes,
use anti-bac wipes on our hands
the whole way home.

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‘When’ – A video poem by Alice Kinsella released on International Women’s Day 2017.

‘When’ is a poem by Alice Kinsella based on the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘If’. ‘If’ is a poem famous for its inspiring advice on how to be a man. It is a beautiful and motivational poem but, as with much of the literary canon, ‘If-’ is written by a man for men. ‘When’ is written with the intention of being inspiring and appealing to women, while honouring the original poem. It is written for every woman.

The video features sixteen female poets: Anamaria Crowe Serrano, Kerrie O’Brien, Day Magee, Natasha Helen Crudden, Anne Tanam, Elliot Furlong Tigue, Deirdre Daly, Alvy Carragher, Fiona Bolger, Rosita Sweetman, Lynn Harding, Clara Rose Thornton, Jess Traynor, Amy Dwyer, Ingrid Casey and Alice Kinsella.

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Contemporary Irish Poetry Featured Writer: Karen J. McDonnell

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Four Poems                     This Little World Launch Speech 
Contemporary Irish Poetry Index

Karen J. McDonnell won the 2014 WOW Poetry Award and was runner up in the 2015 Wild Atlantic Words and the 2015 Baffle poetry competitions. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Poems for Patience and Robert Monteith awards, as well as being longlisted for the 2014 Over the Edge New Writing Prize. Her poetry and other writing has been published and anthologised in Ireland and abroad, including The Honest Ulsterman, Crannóg, poeticdiversity, The Irish Times, Poetry NI: Poems for Holocaust Memorial Day 2016, Wild Atlantic Words 2015 and Rubicon: Words and Art Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s ‘De Profundis’ (Sybaritic Press). An excerpt from Unsettled – A West Bank Journal was nominated in the 2014 Best of Net (non-fiction) in the U.S.

Karen’s Website and Author’s Blog

Books

This Little World, her debut poetry collection, was published by Doire Press in June 2017. For further detail see http://www.doirepress.com/writers/g_l/karen_mcdonnell/

‘This is a book infused with insight and mythic assurance; a book of intuitions made loud and voices marked by vision, the work of a poet who will be read for her adeptness in tracing the heartlines of human experience, and for the sake of imaginative enrichment.’ —Martin Dyar, author of Maiden Names (Arlen House)

Karen J. McDonnell: Four Poems

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Biographical Note                  This Little World Launch Speech                 
Contemporary Irish Poetry Index

Turlough
Lineage
New Quay
Shell Gathering

P .

Turlough

A benign pondling straight
from Constable’s studio:

Cattle graze calcific patches
on a summering canvas.

Then rains, in on the Atlantic.
Malevolent down the mountains.

Underground drowns and you
sinkhole in reverse, spewing.

Roads disappear, fields are
islanded. Senselines tangle.

Your water-mischief engulfs
us. We are lost.

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P .

Lineage

His line is in his face.
My fingers trace dark-eyed,
Norman origins.

I close my eyes. In the distance,
mist is drenching a wood.

See a man moving quietly,
neat in leather boots,
peating half-rotted leaves.

He steps off a path known only
to memory and the closed eye.

He tenses the string on the bow.
He leans, stretches, releases.
The arrow hits home.

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P .

New Quay
In 1969 nine children died in the ‘Red Bank’ disaster, New Quay, Co. Clare</sma;;>

Six strange beasts rose up,
still breathing, in the water
where you drowned.

They seemed to be walking;
heads held proud of the sea.
Then a flash of neon green

dispelled impressions
as flippers breached,
harrowing the surface.

Reddened faces, then hands
and wet-suited torsos sucking
up out of the shallows.

Squelching, chatty men
speaking of currents strong
enough to pull buoys under.

You never had a chance,
when adventure turned to disaster,
capsizing every summer.

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P .

Shell Gathering

Coming home from the funeral
we stop in the hot day
for ice-cream at Crusheen.

The sun hammers down.
A day for the beach and shell gathering.
No weather for heat-seeking black.

Out on the Mare Nostrum, an Israeli eye
scans a Gaza beach
where children play football.

A held breath.
A lining up of crosshairs.
Slight pressure on the fingerpad.

The air shivers, but the sea remains calm.
Shells whoosh in, shredding the children.
And their fathers run, to gather them in.

 

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Looking back through time and memory: Celeste Augé launches ‘This Little World’ by Karen J. McDonnell

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Karen J. McDonnell Biographical Note       Karen J. McDonnell Four Poems            
Contemporary Irish Poetry Index

This Little World by Karen J. McDonnell, Doire Press 2017, was launched by Celeste Augé on Saturday 17th June, 2017 at the Galway Arts Centre

Celeste Augé launching This Little World

There are books of poetry that jump out and hit you on the head with overwrought emotion, opinions or anxieties. This Little World is not one of those. It’s a book that demands a quiet space, for you to take the time to slowly read – or re-read – individual poems so that they sink in, the way a good conversation with a friend sinks in, follows you throughout the day; the way snippets of chat are later recollected and gain added meanings, maybe even a different perspective. These are poems that need time, the way a friendship needs time.

At the outset of her collection, in the poem ‘Rear View’, Karen J. McDonnell asserts: ‘I drown in other lives’. This Little World looks back through time and memory, through different perspectives, including those that flare beyond Ireland’s boundaries. From the hills of Clare to ‘Sleepless in Armagh’ to a soldier on the Somme to Limerick in 1918 to Nazi death camps through to present-day Middle East to Syria, McDonnell fashions poems out of the quiet unseen moments – the small incidents and insights – recognising that we are all human, together.

In ‘The Good Room’ – an evocative title for any Irish person of a certain age, a room we’ve been banished from or invited through depending on the circumstances – the poet looks at transgression, at spending time in spaces we’re not supposed to: ‘Tell me, child, why / do you still grasp this time-shard / when memories are lost as easily as a daisy hair clip / in a day’s rough and tumble?’ The poem asks the question within a memory, providing delicious irony. And isn’t this the role of the writer, to watch and remember and piece it together later, to illuminate context and meaning?

Another glimpse of Irish-ness is contained in the powerful poem ‘Shell Gathering’, which opens with an image that is very much located in Ireland: ‘Coming home from the funeral / we stop in the hot day / for ice-cream at Crusheen.’ This image sets the scene for shell gathering beyond these shores, creating a breathtaking twist. Well, you’ll have to read the collection to discover it.

Flashes of humour and whim combine to give us delicious lines like this one from ‘Super Moon’: ‘Optimism is no match for Burren / mists.’ That first line sucks me in, then the poem succinctly dives off into a perfect description of the life of the artist and more specifically the process of writing poetry: ‘Chasing a super moon / in cloud cover is fruitless.’ It speaks both of the challenges of life in the West of Ireland and the difficulty of writing poetry, of finding truth in the midst of our complicated world. In the playful ‘Sleepless in Armagh’, when ‘the boy racers of Armagh are at it’ – it being handbrake turns in the B&M car park – the speaker wryly speculates: ‘This was once the most militarised zone / in Europe. Where are the police? / Could we not have a bit of the tough stuff back?’ Then later in the poem, after at least one prayer, she confesses: ‘I’m an ecumenical non-believer.’ The poet’s fine sense of whimsy lights up another poem, ‘A Bad Dose’, which describes getting a writerly affliction while in A&E: ‘Worse still is the dose / I catch in there. Hospitals: / completely overrun by adverbs.’

This Little World does what good poetry should: transform the everyday and draw our attention to it. The poet takes the sense of powerlessness felt when faced with natural or man made disasters beyond our control, and from them casts images of beauty. The poem ‘In Zaraq’ features the lines: ‘On a high wire / a plastic bag hangs / like a hawk / treading stilled air.’ It brings to mind an earlier poem, ‘Swansong’, so that both images reverberate across my mind: ‘A discarded fertiliser bag. / I tried to fool myself, but the sea / slunk out, leaving behind a / desolate, soaked swan / that I couldn’t reach.’ What else can we do when faced with the impossibility of action but write, or failing that, read a poem? One of my favourite poems of the book, ‘Palmyra, 2016’ contains the striking observation: ‘Even ghosts can only bear so much suffering.’ So the collection ends, halfway across the world from County Clare, where it began.

Karen has taken the time to listen to the world, to write these poems, wrestle them together into a collection. Writing poetry is never easy in a world that rewards feeding the corporate giants. And although other people can help, ultimately the writer does it alone. In that way, writing resembles birth. To quote from one more poem: ‘Birthing. / Not always joyful. / Forceping dactyls. / Similes I’ll never like. / Elusive adjectives.’

But now comes the christening, the publication of Karen’s poems in the world, the celebration with friends and family as This Little World joins the extended family of books already published, as her new book – her first – joins the conversation between poems – and poets – across boundaries and through time, goes out to find its place in this world, independent of the poet who birthed it.

 – Celeste Augé

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Celeste Augé is the author of Skip Diving (Salmon Poetry, 2014), The Essential Guide to Flight (Salmon Poetry, 2009) and the collection of short stories Fireproof and Other Stories (Doire Press, 2012). Her poetry has been shortlisted for a Hennessy Award and in 2011 she won the Cúirt New Writing Prize for fiction. She lives in Connemara, in the West of Ireland, with her husband and son.