Stephanie Conn’s Off-Kilter (Doire, €13) examines chronic fibromyalgia from the cage of a hospital bed before widening out to embrace the world. Conn sees both the body and the environment under pressure, “I creep with all the forest animals…” (An African Forest Elephant Approaches). This precise identification with fauna is visualised in cinematic close-ups, rising from the page like mini-documentaries:
He points to the black-edged foot
to indicate the name Blacklip but other
words stick in my throat: gastropod,
edible, mollusc — I fling it back in.
(Diving for Snails)
The rich nature poems contrast with powerful plain lines from the arid confines of her hospital bed, “When he appears between the curtain folds/of my designated square, in his starched coat,/I try to lift my head.//He lowers the bed, bolsters me/on regulation pillows, does not smile,/keeps commands simple.//Follow my pen with your eyes.//I pass the test.// The right fails.//Try harder. My throat dries…” Yet the hospital ward does not stay dull – “A frog hops into the ward, approaches me in a tiny white coat,/springs onto the bed, says he’s the consultant…” (Toxicology Report). Frogs feature throughout, internalised powerfully in Breath Work, “You breathe deeply to keep the frog calm. Distressed, it will sweat/a concoction of alkaloids into your fattiest organ…” returning in a dazzling sequence set in Frida Kahlo’s Mexico. The painful guilt suffered by many patients is powerfully expressed. Can the roots of illness lie in childhood? What I Learned in Winter, describing Conn’s mother’s cancer, illustrates the past tracking the future, the limpet voice childlike, the lineation astute and surprising:
When mummy comes back home
there is less of her…
…She shows us
where the doctor used a blue marker
on her skin…
I close my bedroom door, find a blue felt-tip
in the pencil case I got from Santa
and draw a thick circle round my nipple
Like Conn’s Off-Kilter, Jean O’Brien’s Stars Burn Regardless is as deeply concerned with life and death but her poems move further away from earth as O’Brien literally reaches for the stars to find her metaphors:
Whether you know it or not,
we are all eating stars/
one way or another.
every morning as we lift
the bedroom blind…
Stars are born and die,
like us they burn out.
Supernova shards get stuck in our gut,
we constantly eat their dust/
(Hotter Stars Burn Blue)
But if Conn favours the close-up, O’Brien uses the long shot, a telescopic view to come to her hard-won terms with grief, “Death is the only cure for life…Infinity is just a long, long, long line forever/lusting after shine.” (Hotter Stars Burn Blue). The dead are very close, barely off-stage, “We feel the urgent pull of/our disembodied dead wind us/with their need…” (At the Edge of Water). Sometimes they are reborn— as in several poems about the Tuam babies, “The children being found in the tanks/are rising like disturbed sediment, gulping at air…The children are leaving the tanks/pushing through…They are leaving, leaving, they are found.” But the stars are never far away, “The unforgiving sky is full of stars the dome of dank earth/ is full of missing children.” (For a Lost Child). Another planetary influence, the Wolf Moon governs O’Brien’s response to The Lament of the Hag of Beare but this is an intense close-up:
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in the shower steamed-mirror, my face a ghostly pall
as hooded features emerge from the mist, deep runnels
run from nose to chin, jaw slack with use, time spoils all.
(The Cailleach)
O’Brien ends the poem fiercely as befits a cailleach, “…my hammer big as Thor’s, clatters across the skies.”
The title poem of Hannah Hodgson’s 163 Days (Seren £ 9.99) records the time Hodgson spent on a children’s hospital ward. Lyrics provide a highly original call and response:
After four and a half hours I’m seen in A&E,
by a registrar who rolls her eyes when I cry
as she gives me my first cannula.
I feel as a tin must, when an opener
pries a portion of its lid.
16 y/o female with a history of gastroesophageal reflux…
she was ambulatory although fainted in waiting room. Parents
were also in attendance. Pregnancy test negative…
Hodgson, a palliative care patient (with probable mitochrondrial encephalopathy), lets the hierarchy speak for itself as her losses multiply. She shows “The Consultant” the “tumbleweed” of her lost hair— he “says ‘it’s to be expected’ and leaves...” When she asks him if there is a “vegetarian version” of “the feed pumped into my bowels”, he “rolls his eyes, ‘Why is it always the girls?’”
Sometimes it’s almost unbearable:
I tell a nurse that I’m hungry,
that tube feeding hurts
and I miss the experience of food. She says:
‘I’m a vegetarian,
I completely understand missing out.’
She has worsening oropharyngeal choking sensations and has been referred to
speech and language therapy.
Yet Hodgson maintains her extraordinary agency by the wit and intelligence of her voice. In Wouldn’t Be The Strangest Thing hotel staff need to be convinced that Hodgson “knows blood/”. Metaphysical insight –”Hep C from a towel wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen to us./And by us I mean the personal and physical as separate selves./One is always covering for the other.” – combines with high octane story-telling, leavened with deadpan humour: “…I’ve stared at enough/hospital ceilings…blood…spurted two metres up…must have been an artery./…unlikely the patient is alive any more.//The hotel offers me a refund. I take it and head back to my room,/peel back the duvet and find a thong.”
Molly Twomey’s Raised Among Vultures (Gallery €12.95) begins in another hospital ward, the imprisoned Twomey longing to be “shot” into the air. Her fellow patient says, “I get it…interrupting my list of amusement parks/ I’ll visit when I’m discharged.” Dragging “her scarlet nail along her sternum… I love the thrill/that a belt might loosen, a spring could snap… Can you feel it? she asks, placing my palm//on her chest, hers on mine./The bumper cars of our hearts stutter and jolt.” (Risk) Twomey’s high-wire couplet and triplet stanzas are pared down to the essentials, Heirlooms beginning like an Emily Dickinson echo, “My dietician says if I don’t eat/my oestrogen won’t restore./My body will always be a door// locked on its hinges,/safe-guarding its room/of dust and secrets.//” but the wicked twist is Twomey’s own, as she wonders if the dietician’s child is “heavy enough that she could use him./as a kettlebell for Russian twists?” Like Hodgson, Twomey has a strong sense of two selves— “but isn’t starving yourself/the most brutal thing? The slow collapse/of bones, sprained ankles to sunken cheeks,/the last segment of voice/burrowing into muffled quiet.” (The Most Brutal Thing). This sense of two selves is mirrored in relationships and Twomey’s frequent use of the second person point of view. Twomey is a gifted storyteller, her recovery narrative spiked with keen insight and dark humour as she cautiously observes her ambushing self:
Mo chuisle holds a pillow over my face
as a joke. This is how we love each other
knowing we can suffocate one another
but won’t…
It took so long to learn that I won’t die
if I sleep in or don’t weigh the strain…
…The terrifying part is lifting
the pillow, letting light back in.
(Hiding)
