From a Welsh poet well used to crossing borders comes a sixth collection of ardour and courage. Gwyneth Lewis’s First Rain in Paradise (Bloodaxe, £12) confronts past trauma and debility through the language of invasion and bodily takeover.
In the first sequence of eight poems, a spider lays eggs in the speaker’s brain: as the sequence develops, the subject of maternal child abuse comes sharp and clear. These are poems of darkness and danger – probing, unsettling, appalling. Snare, for example, seems to ask how one is to live in a mind damaged by abuse:
‘It’s easy to leave, what stops you?‘,
others ask, baffled.
It’s the snare in the brain, spring-loaded
for suicide ...
“Don’t you love a good fact, how it saves you / from feeling”, asks Relic, but this collection is spared nothing, not the trauma of abuse, rendered in imagery as powerful as it is fearsome; not the descent into aftermath (… and I’m coming / undone/ at the / seams – Any Eight Legs Will Do); and, ultimately, not the process of recovery, that climb back up towards a capacity to endure (“don’t ask me how, I’m still feeling, pulling” – Spidering) or to resist, as at the conclusion of Expulsion: “An owl / descends – clutching stars and dismay / in her talons. Stubborn as ever, I choose to stay.”
That survival impulse is facilitated by an insistence on hard-won joy. Three Ways into Water describes:
I’ve thrust my head
through sky’s skin, can see how my brain
is dazzled
by stars’ wheels and zigzags,
spelling delight,
which is the opposite of pain.
Difficult material rendered in unflinchingly challenging imagery, but these poems are also delightful, finding humour and pleasure where they can, as in Late Blackberries, where the final sugar-rush is relished, even if the crop’s first sweetness has been sacrificed.
In the tradition of Faber’s Poetry Introduction or Carcanet’s New Poetries series, Beginnings Over and Over (Dedalus, €12.50), edited by Leeanne Quinn, features a selection of emerging Irish poets whose work has been published in poetry journals or performed in other ways, but who have yet to publish a first collection. In this case, four poets – Mai Ishikawa, Róisín Leggett Bohan, Emer Lyons and Cal O’Reilly – are represented by a generous selection of about a dozen poems each, enough for a taster but not so many as to compromise any collections likely to follow.
Such introductory anthologies are usually a good way to sample the poetry zeitgeist (if there is one), and this volume indicates that perennial themes of grief, bodies, dreams and cats still abide, while room is made for more contemporary concerns of gender transition, Kintsugi and films such as Top Gun and God’s Own Country.
A capacious volume with a range of sparky, beguiling poem titles (And I had bought new underwear from Penneys; The Migration of Theta Waves; I Photocopy Vaginas), the four highlighted poets demonstrate energy and engagement, although the “stylistic innovation” promised by the brief introduction seems an overclaim.
Standout moments include Leggett Bohan’s The Cryptographer, which opens: “We carried the summer / in our mouths”); Ishikawa’s wonderful Faceless, and Lyons’s Mouse/Mice. Perhaps the most assured poet is O’Reilly, whose poems declare a formal maturity and confidence in strikingly bold but graceful imagery. A couple of list poems here nicely handle momentum and detail, and metaphor (that trickiest of poetic strategies) is managed elegantly, as in the final phrases of Naming:
… the first time you
say my name / a feeling / fills my chest / like a room I can stand
in /so bright / I don’t need to look past it
The first lines of the opening poem of Jennifer Horgan’s Care (Doire Press, €16), declare its uncompromising approach. It’s Just a Dream I Had begins: “She’s slumped in a bath. I’m drawn to the grey hair inside / her thighs, the dough-layered stomach, belonging to mothers”. The theme of Women’s Bodies, often constrained and compromised by social context, though always observed with care and fidelity, is to the forefront.
From the small boxes to which people (especially women and the marginalised) are confined, these poems declare their resistance, rebuke and avowal. “Don’t see the faces of those / who suffered hope” may refer specifically to a lorry of dead, trafficked migrants in the poem For the 39, but this is work that does see, and sees hard.
Poems of urgent intention, driven by moral imperative, sometimes brush a little too closely against Keats’s warning about readers hating poems with “palpable designs” on them. If, in this collection, poems for the Tuam Babies and the Magdalene Laundries might seem somewhat familiar (if no less sincere) in their response to contemporary Ireland, other poems probing more personal experience are vivid and arresting.
There seems little need for the somewhat workshop-ish poems that lean into the authority of established figures – those poems written “after” Heaney, Plath, Atwood and Joyce. The book’s strongest poems amply declare their own credentials: a curious eye, a kind heart and an eye-catching turn of phrase, as in the lovely Sound of Cars Beyond Our Garden, or Your House Fell to Pieces, a poem written in middle age about a childhood home, which finishes:
Knowing all the effort you made,
makes life majestic and terrifying.
Like the Cliffs of Moher are outside
my front door, waiting for it to open.
With both the title and the Gwen John cover painting seeming to promise a kind of gauzy, dusky domesticity, the language of Peter McDonald’s One Litte Room (Carcanet, £11.99) comes as a surprise. This collection’s various backward glances are elegiac but also deceptively down-to-earth. In the end of Travels, for example, the heartbreaking pathos of dementia is rendered with gentle restraint, as a son visits his mother:
… Did I ever have a house?
Her questions were scared and delirious:
Was I good? And did I have a husband?
I looked at her with his face, and I said Yes.
A theme of containment runs throughout, with matchboxes, storage boxes, coffins and even Harry Houdini featuring. Seventeen four-line poems punctuate the collection, the best of which are small boxes of concision and elusiveness, as what’s described opens and closes on the past, as in The Pillow:
I turn and talk to you before I sleep,
talk to you in my head, for you’re not here;
but you listen, and you smile, until you slip
from the pillow into all that came before.
A poem is also a kind of intricately carved box, and the poems here seem to relish the play of confinement and release. McDonald is a loyal formalist: in Incident, the poem’s exploded sonnet form, with disrupted rhyme scheme and disguised 14 lines, is scarcely noticeable but is there nonetheless, subtly supporting and amplifying subject matter.
If this, McDonald’s eighth collection, shows a vulnerability in mining the past and registering losses, his familiar, public-facing side is also in evidence. Centenary 1921-2021 draws one man’s life against a backdrop of political and social change in Northern Ireland, (“you and the new country are of an age”), climbing out of strident partisan allegiance to observe: “ ... everything comes and goes / where people live; and that is history”.
