Turned in just months before her death last year, All Souls (Corsair, £10.99) is the fourth collection by American poet, Saskia Hamilton.
Made up of four poems each comprised of short sections that sometimes seem to reach for each other, picking up images and phrases many pages on, the book is beautifully orchestrated. Covering much historical ground, the poems apply a wakeful attention to the project of understanding how we feel and how we express that feeling in art, literature and human relationships. The poems range through time spans, art forms and personalities, making for those closest to her, (the child mentioned frequently here), a kind of future company to set against the loneliness of being left behind.
In these last poems illness frames, spurs and synthesises. In Exits and Entrances to the Auditorium, the words “breath” or “breathing” pulse throughout the sequence. It’s delicately done so when one section concludes with the injunction, “Take a deep breath. They will run out”, the starkness of the statement comes as a shock.
Time is tricky in these poems, constantly upending and revising itself. “Late in the season, eating a pear / that is the memory of a pear,” begins one section; “Light before you call it light graying the sky”, (Faring) begins the book. The description throughout is precise and minute, and the collection fashions the sum of its sections and preoccupations into a whole that is unflinchingly gutsy as well as wrenchingly tender. The poem that concludes the title sequence, for example, expands on a previous image with a final line that is as breathtakingly poignant in its wish to protect who must be left:
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. . . the driver swung the doors shut
and I waved at the children pressing their faces
to the windows as it drove towards the river.
May they all be covered by feathers.
The story of Bridget Cleary is, as Angela Bourke has so incisively shown, a locus where lines of language, power, gender, history and religion (and/or superstition) could be said to cross. Milena Williamson’s first collection, Into the Night that Flies So Fast (Dedalus, €12.50), probes the story of Bridget’s life and murder by her husband, allowing its cast of characters – Bridget’s relatives, neighbours, animals, priest – to speak first-hand, just as the collection also catalogues the poet’s own journey of discovery of the story’s location and personae.
That second story is told in prose as a kind of journalistic account of the mechanics and circumstances of a trail that takes the poet to Tipperary graveyards, churches, B&Bs and wells, in order to experience the places and any discernible afterlives of a story that retains its capacity to shock and disturb, and to chime with more contemporary records of domestic violence and abuse.
What isn’t accessed by the Philadelphia-born author is the Irish language of the original storyline in its domestic iteration, and its chafe with the official English of a judicial system charged with trying to untangle it. Instead, this contemporary version imagines the story as a dramatic reframing, with a rotating cast of implicated characters each speaking not to reliable truth, but to the idea of plausible voice; the telling more compelling than the tale itself.
After a variety of Bridget’s relatives and in-laws have their self-exculpatory say, Bridget’s own voice closes this probing and lyrical collection, underlining the tension between recorded fact and the experience of it. The final poem, The Engine of my Thoughts, in her voice as she dies, her dress already set alight, concludes:
Then I am for the air.
I return
to the corner of the moon
distilled by sleights
where no name fits my nature but my own.
“This subtle movement from inner to outer and back again is the stuff from which art is made”, begins Kerry Hardie’s prose poem On Trauma, Sickness, Loss, an early poem in her eighth collection, We Go On (Bloodaxe, £12.00). As she declares, so she enacts: the trajectory of many of these poems does indeed move from observed detail, often of gardens (“A garden is a lovesome thing” – Black Radishes), out into what that detail might signify or what capacity it might have to be probed in a more philosophically inquiring register.
This is a book much concerned with illness and death: Amelia Stein’s rather bleak cover photo of a potholed mountain road offers small promise of solace, and the book determinedly considers loss and a pervading sense of disappointment and exhaustion. “This is what happens”, she writes in Empires; “Once again, the refugees, the last plane leaving. The world goes on turning”.
Against such grey tones there are flashes of red hot anger and, occasionally, a momentary transcendence into the colour of energetic language and imagistic vigour. The short poem, Spring, for example opens:
Sometimes a dollop of blossom
slides from a thorn tee and lands
sop-slap in a puddle and floats
Pain, a short poem that closely attends to a sickroom print of a swineherd, manages, with a kind of delicate fearlessness, to dovetail what is seen and what is felt, ending:
Yet his pigs rootle, blacker and busier,
they grub through the flesh of my shoulder,
their hooves dig, cloven and sharp.
Quizzical, beguiling poems such as Where Do We Live and The Courage Coin defiantly challenge the collection’s prevailing pallor so that the overall effect is of language summoned and galvanised in a sensitive and searching book.
Baby Schema (Carcanet, £11.99) is a term describing a “set of infantile physical features that convey vulnerability and trigger caregiving behaviour”. As the title of Isabel Galleymore’s second collection promises, the poems set individual authority against the mix of fragility and stubbornness that ensures any species’ perseverance.
Any aspect of nature can adopt, or be made to, an anthropomorphic guise (“a rosebush self-congratulates”, in Good Natured; and the opening of No Word asks: “if I draw a mouth on an apple, does it / possess more or less opportunity / to speak?”). Humans, it seems, are dogged by sentimentality; our intelligence and imagination as likely to be hindrance as help in a bigger scheme beyond our designing or control.
Sometimes, the poems offer the slight alternative of an unbuckling from human limitations, as in Uninvited, which ends:
. . . Should I
put myself away from earth,
stem and bud, like one who
(with her hands cupped) relocates
a spider from the house.
To be human is to be see partially; to be buffeted by problems both of and not of our own making – a proposition that, in any other hands, might prove weighty and burdensome. But these are poems of dazzling invention and linguistic energy that might be said to put the play into the bi-play of human and non-human. Though inherently serious, the language also has great fun: timelines are blurred; narrative propositions unpicked, and images immediately scuffed, as in Animal Product, which finishes:
... instinctively again
my daughter nuzzles for my breast,
which I muzzle by my not
having had her yet..
In language both thrilling and droll, and without a drip of ennui, Baby Schema plays with us as if we were toys, “like a child and not at all”, as the title poem concludes.
