POETRY: LEANNE O'Sullivan's first collection, Waiting for my Clothes, was published when she was just 21 and was justifiably acclaimed for the extraordinary power of its language and the maturity of vision.
It was also an intensely confessional work; it is therefore not surprising that O’Sullivan should eschew further revelations in Cailleach. The Hag of Beara (Bloodaxe Books, 64pp. £7.95), her second collection, and plough, instead, the furrows of Irish mythology in her ongoing exploration of the eternal feminine.
The subtitle of Cailleach is The Hag of Bearaand this famous landmark off the west Cork coast provides the subject matter for the poems. The rocks of that region have proved treacherous ground for many poets, yet O'Sullivan treads the uneven surface sure-footedly, dividing her collection into five parts that chart the life and loves of the legendary wise woman of Beara.
O’Sullivan’s vision continues to be deeply romantic in its trust that nature is a panacea for human suffering; these poems catch one’s breath with their exquisite rendering of the Irish landscape.
In “The Meeting Place” she describes how “the mist rolls from the hills like an airy moss”, while in “The Stones Turning into Mountains” we are told how
Like shadows courted
between the rushes
they climb, one by one,
in the night-ebb
over the borders
of the rain-waxed fields
dropping their lichen loads,
their fossil-robes,
their darkly pitched breaths.
O’Sullivan’s imagery is always precise, yet utterly dazzling in its originality. This is a stately, sometimes solemn, book and one wishes, just occasionally, for a lighter note to vary the tone. But humour is not O’Sullivan’s purpose here; having grown up in west Cork, she is reclaiming her landscape, as all poets must, and she does so with the steadiness and gravity of a writer who has already found her way home.
A poetry collection whose avowed aim is to provide poems that could be read at a funeral might appear depressing, but To Keep the Light Burning, by Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, (Salmon Poetry, 96pp. €12.00) is anything but grim. Many of the poems collected here are drawn from Hartigan’s five previous collections or else have appeared in anthologies.
Each is accompanied by a prose essay that explains the poem’s background or meditates on its theme.
There are beautiful poems here that would certainly provide solace to the bereaved. In “Apples” we are shown the natural cycle of death and rebirth: Slowly trees present their bones
shed, are stark, gaunt and grim,
leaving is a dying art
necessary to begin.
But it is also a very brave book; Hartigan is facing down her own mortality while comforting others and concludes that there is nothing at all to fear.
In “Weighing Things Up”, the splendid last poem of the collection, she says: “We know but never expect we will come to this./ Dying is love. Very practical.”
A strand of grief also runs through Máighréad Medbh’s new collection, When the Air Inhales You(Arlen House, 96pp. €12). The second section, entitled Eitilt: Flight, contains poems written in the aftermath of the accidental death, in 2006, of her sister Máire. But the grief is self-contained, rendered all the more powerful for the almost clenched self-control exhibited in poems such as “In the Morgue” where the poet forces herself to look unblinkingly at her sister’s remains. “But the event that was you has gone already,/a stream eaten by a karstic landscape, /leaving nothing for the pilgrim but stone.”
Medbh’s language is frequently simple and unadorned; she is a poet who has come through the performance circuit and thus understands the primal power of the beat in poetry. Many poems are heavily cadenced and song-like, for example “Big Bong” where “our knowing is a no to knowing no//division between being and the void” or “The River Ward Steals My Eyes”, with its incantatory evocation of the Co Dublin river that “flowed past the castle and the ancient church,/ past the rowan tree, past hazel, /past the houses on the crest”.
Liz O’Donoghue’s debut collection, Train to Gorey (Arlen House, 64pp. €12), evokes another image of womanhood: that of the world-weary femme fatale, recounting her war stories of day-long drinking sprees and brief encounters.
The poems tend to be short and pithy, revolving around a sustained metaphor, for example in “Last Tango in Cork” where the speaker portrays herself as a resistance fighter fighting for romantic survival, or in “Albatross”, where the only way out of her dilemma is to “use your crossbow/and aim for the heart”. The final impression is of a Corkonian Piaf, singing her well-crafted songs of love and loss on the boulevards of the Real Capital.
Nessa O’Mahony is artist in residence at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies in University College Dublin. Her verse novel, In Sight of Home,will be published in May