Fairy-tale tropes prove to be valuable tools for examining the bruised family in Alvy Carragher’s What Remains the Same (Gallery €12.99). “Flip a coin,” exhorts the title poem. “Let’s say six or seven brothers,/ give them any old feathers, eyes that glint.// Count the years since their mother passed ... What remains is a sister, alone,/ trying to break her brothers’ curse,//stitching garments from thick nettles”.
The sister is condemned to “swallow pain, remain silent” but the poems are about breaking that silence. Words are terrifying weapons but only if you believe them; Carragher illustrates that power. In Mallacht, the grandmother’s repetition of the family curse – “a son haunted by water” – gives it credence: “Every burst pipe and wet day/ came back to a stranger laying his words/ at my grandmother’s feet, how she chose/ to pick them up, pass them on, give them power.”
The bricks and mortar of folktales – concrete domestic details – carry energy and feeling, “we stand on cold bathroom tiles where Mammy makes/ crab apple jelly by straining gloop through old tights./ in the bathtub.” The best poems are informed and energised by doubling – “Suddenly there were two words for everything – //window and fuinneog, door and doras, Alvy and Ailbhe.” (In Other Words) – words represent the shifting, unsafe ground of the poet’s childhood – “We hid ourselves in cupboards, trees, the eaves of attics,/ backs pressed against walls ... moving watchfully ..., instincts finely tuned to the way/ air moved through our parents”. Or in the way the painful past informs the present through the dynamics between poet and the girl “scrubbing her wounds from my knees ... One of us held on, one of us faltered ... One of us spoke/ and, speaking, found she could not say,/ Is this your river flooding my throat?/Is this your thunder cracking my chest?”.
Ian Duhig’s An Arbitrary Light Bulb (Picador £10.99) could be proof of John Keats’s belief that a feeling for light and shade are all that is necessary for a poem. It is a big theme of Duhig’s, a reminder of his 2016 collection The Blind Road-Maker, whose subject was born in darkness and “stumbled about in the light”. Here the title poem uses the name for a common light bulb as a metaphor for the random nature of inspiration.
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New poetry: What Remains the Same; An Arbitrary Light Bulb; Harmony Unfinished; Adam
So many ideas just disappear into the “unplumbable nothing where so many of my brainwaves go”. Duhig, ever the etymologist, inventively links the homonyms. In Pheasant’s Eye “the white sheet” of the page is seen as “a picnic cloth over bulbs of Narcissus poeticus” or the footprints of a pheasant, everything can be seen as a matter of light and shade, like ink on a page, “‘A poem is a pheasant’, Wallace Stevens wrote:/ it makes footprints/ like time’s arrows pointing backwards”. Duhig stares at the blank page “where bulbs stirred,/ preparing to happen or not, unmade by poetry”. This is vintage Duhig, pulling poetry from contrasting poles powered by the idea that everything is connected.
Leeds looms large as always, its textile-making history expressed in the recurring teasing of the word “threads”. His signature birds flock throughout the pages, not just the pheasant but the bittern and the auk, “This auk is black and white,/a little red – like my poetry”. The music of Bitterning is eerily brittle, “how, at a threat sensed, a spooked bird twists,/ breaking its silhouette”, echoing the earlier Deathwatch poem where Duhig’s “joints swell and twist/ at knee and ankle”. But it’s the magpie, “its motley reflects/ this page’s palette,/poetry’s yin-yang” who might best represent the poet: “In lore, its tongue/ hid Devil’s blood,/ just a drop. Poetry.” (Magpied)
“Here, on the inside, you don’t look out,/don’t have time, the way looking in you do”, observes Grace Wilentz in Home House, the opening poem of Harmony Unfinished (Gallery, €12.99). Themes of identity and belonging dominate these poems.
In The Forty Foot a swim in sea runs alongside poignant scenes from an Irish citizenship ceremony, “And though I’d cried as a guest at my friend’s ceremony,/ knowing what it meant to her to have her status not tied//to a husband who tried to run her over twice,/when we got to the part where we all sing/’Amhrán na bhFiann’ I couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel a thing,/ though the eyes of the man from Sierra Leone to my left/ and the eyes of the man from the Philippines to my right/were glassy and wet”. Yet in the “cold opaque” sea, “somehow I started/ treading water and, hand on heart, I never felt so Irish”.
Water is a signal for change again in the hot springs of Terma di Saturnia, after which “I’ll wake with the rough skin ... lifted from me//imperceptibly as I slept. What was I /before? What am I becoming?”. Conflict of identities powers Willentz’s poems like a torc: “Is it consciousness or craving/that I long for, an unreal thing/ hidden beneath my shadow?” (Shadowboxing). The title poem – about Dina Vierney, a French artists’ model who worked as a guide, smuggling refugees of out of occupied France during the second World War– turns on the same energy, the sculptor calling Vierney “not by her name ... nor student nor guide, not model //but ‘The Mountain’ and, later, ‘Seated Bather’, /’Air’, ‘The River’. Then, finally, ‘Harmony’/ (unfinished) armless, unburdened, a divinity like mutual benevolence existing outside time”.
Adam (Faber £12.99) is Gboyega Odunbanjo’s unforgettable, haunted exploration of the incomplete story of “Adam”– the name given by the police to the unidentified headless child’s torso found in the Thames in 2001. Believed to have been trafficked from Nigeria for a muti ritual sacrifice, Adam’s true name was never discovered.
Odunbanjo’s deft exploration of multiple identities also plays as an original, musical expression of east London life, “in the beginning./it was a gush of us and we came from all over ... kept the cardamom in the cupboard above the bagels.” (A Potted History of the East). Merging Yoruba mythology – which sees water as a life force and a source of destruction – with Genesis, Odunbanjo opens with Adam, a powerful echoing of the oríkì, (Yoruba praise poem) “... thank you to the coast because without the coast how would we move from here to there ...”.
Imagining the ritual sacrifice, “how does a boy land in Germany ...” he takes us so deep into this troubled territory. We are almost co-conspirators while being reminded that the oríkì is also a eulogy “ ... thank you Joyce who he was handed over to ... maybe ... you heard the boy coughing and gave him medicine ... maybe telling them to make it quick telling them to start with his neck”.
Obunbanjo releases boundless energy, merging opposites; so did William Blake, another London poet, who centred Adam repeatedly in his poems and paintings. But Obunbanjo’s razor-sharp demotic is his own, “man like light and man like dark ... give man sea and sky and trees/and zones one to six on the oyster ... now man said rah swear down man”.
It is too easy to see the foreknowledge of Odunbanjo’s own tragic young death by water here but this truly London book couldn’t be more alive, more joyous in its intense physicality, “behind the knee where hand fits so. fingered gum. flab of ear. damp/ crease. damn sure it’s music there.” (Shorts Weather)
