When Theo Dorgan repurposes Wordsworth’s famous line for his title, Once was a Boy Dedalus (€12.50), we know this collection is about the growth of a poet’s mind, and because every writer is a reader first, it’s not long before other writers are reflected in this rich well of memory.
“A light wind comes up, tang of roasting barley from Murphy’s Brewery. /Cut in with this, on a bad day, the sour copper of blood from Denny’s Cellar./I prefer slaughterhouse, relishing the word, its weight.” We can taste the young boy’s relish for words, their “weight” conjuring up Heaney’s “heft”. I had the thought before the words, detailing his anticipation of the “Alien. Other” world of school echoes Heaney’s Alphabets but its well is darker, foreseeing endings in beginnings, “I was outside home now, nothing would ever be the same.”
Inside and outside of the home, the sense of place is rich and evocative, the bells of Cork city, “boom of North Cathedral, the rippling tones of Shandon”. (Bells break on the morning air), its panoramic views cinematic, “If he lifted his head he’d see the great chimney of Murphy’s Brewery rising up out of the valley – how I imagine a lighthouse.”
Cork’s most famous literary son, Frank O’Connor, comes to mind in the charming relationship between mother and son, “She cuffs me softly on the back of the head, you’re a right rogue, what am I rearing at all?” Like O’Connor’s protagonist, Dorgan’s little boy is figuring it all out, bending those magical words to his own purpose. When commissioned to write about a Fire Down Town, which doesn’t ignite satisfactorily, he’s already creating, “ ... they are rolling away some hoses. From a match report, remembered, I pluck ‘thwarted’. And then I think, well, I can always make stuff up.”
Eight books by Irish authors for children and teenagers, all perfect for Christmas
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber: Intense flares of thought from a brilliant mind
Festive frights around a blazing fire: it’s time to revive the Christmas ghost story
John Montague: A Poet’s Life by Adrian Frazier: ‘ruthless intimacy’
‘We were called fakers then’ she says. I wonder how you’d fake our symptoms
Julie-Ann Rowell’s Inside Out (Turas Press, €13) looks down the terrifying tunnel of her functional neurological disorder. After her initial collapse, the long Inside begins when Rowell is doubly locked in. Locked into the ward, “The rest of us internees wear our problems/like shields and yet we’re defenceless ... Our spasms and jerks, our tics and faints.” – And locked into a non-functioning body “Lasagne/slides down my white T-shirt like lava./ At home I’d have a tea towel draped around/ my neck. Here I must manage, and don’t.”
This is a powerful, gripping narrative, detailing a horrifying loss of control: “The heating is on though it’s late-June./The windows won’t open ...” But Rowell is darkly funny, with a novelist’s sense for character – “Nurse Ambrose, “master” of the jigsaw puzzle, “she beckons me into the game/It’s either that or Connect, tricky/ – don’t think we’re not competitive/ because we’re on a ward.” When forced to watch Love Island, Rowell feels “about as sexy as a mollusc” and trapped, “My head shakes from side to side. /Neurologist calls it a No-No pattern ... ‘Will the No-No ever stop?’ He can’t be sure,/it’s well locked in.”
The most chilling moment, apart from when another patient mocks her tic, is when she meets Gina, “first admitted twenty years ago to this same hospital. ‘We were called fakers then’ she says. I wonder how you’d fake our symptoms.” Helped by her imminently faithful partner, Rowell escapes to tell her tale, her final poem imagining a safe retreat, taps out her hard lesson in rhyme, “No one comes or goes, as leaving can never/be made up for, and return is never the same./ In this charmed dimension, /there is no one to call out my name. ” (after When I’m Among a Blaze of Lights by Siegfried Sassoon )
‘And how does a corncrake go? You’ll only know this once it’s gone, but soundlessly’
“THIS ANIMAL IS AT YOUR /BECK AND CALL FOR SEED DISPERSAL” says David Nash in Pornography of Trees – almost a manifesto because seeds are the most important players in Nash’s ludic No Man’s Land (Dedalus €12.50). Nash’s intimate and imaginative exploration of flora and fauna sounds the alarm for global loss of language, knowledge and wilderness while expressing the miracle of each seed and the gamble of chance. Amhrán Na mBréag or The Glass is Blue is a litany of colour and excitement – “In Norway in winter, the navy given off by banks of snow often outdoes the lightboxes prescribed by doctors ... If a thing is naturally red, it is because it wants to kill you, or feed you, or/be fed ... You can tell teal apart from turquoise more easily if you speak Russian.” – before it upends the reader, “Some of the above is untrue/In my experience the world, indeed, is sometimes flat.”
Bog Butter celebrates the accidental when Nash’s uncle’s peat-spade discovers “bog butter /in a slab the imprint of muslin still on the tell-tale pale/ like sock elastic, ... lurking mute ... since the Bronze Age”. He fries some whiting “in a slick of it” sends the rest to the National Museum where they tell him, “The island ... is likely studded/with hundreds ... but actually to find one/is like catching a balloon launched upwards from history.”
Birds are vital for Nash, too especially in the fine meditative poem Flights: “And how does a corncrake go? You’ll only know this once it’s gone, but soundlessly.” Yet the final poem, Why You Should Really Think About Rewilding, directs us to ground level with a stirring exhortation to gamble, “Groundwork is a memory/ posting itself forward in time, / so you needn’t lift a finger –/it is its own device ... take a chance on it./The seed is reckless.”
‘True Crime does not encourage grief, it encourages fetishistic interest’
Susannah Dickey’s Isdal (Picador £10.99) investigates our obsession with true crime through the unidentified ‘Isdal Woman’ whose burnt remains were discovered in Norway in 1970. Isdal begins hilariously with Podcast, a long poem in rhyming couplets where two presenters, “He’s English! She’s Norwegian! ... ingratiate themselves with listeners through anecdotal/story telling and flirty repartee”.
The rhyming couplets act like forceps gripping the distasteful titillation, “Saucy, he says/Finally the jig’s/up on her feigning any sort of normal life: look at all these wigs!” Dickey’s tightly controlled rhyming anger lands bull’s-eye after bull’s-eye: “It’s been lovely to read your theories and your responses/in the Facebook group. Let’s take a moment to thank our/sponsors.”
Cooler and compassionate, the central essay, Narrative is a philosophical inquiry into why “We can’t get enough of dead bodies, women’s especially.” Dickey argues that “we need to think about True Crime within the context of the ‘grievable’ life as opposed to the ‘ungrievable’ one ... True Crime does not encourage grief, it encourages fetishistic interest ... enabling an obsession devoid of empathy ... the aberrant details of her personage ... allow True Crime to persist in its vaudeville approach to narrativising violence.”
Dickey questions George Bataille’s belief that the cure for each being’s isolation is death. “Maybe a new way towards continuity is not through sex, nor death, but through grief – through grieving those unknown….” Satire has given way to empathy as Dickey asks, “What did the girl who found her become? How could you become, following that?” The final suite of poems imagines how “A girl has to see something her sister doesn’t/ – a burnt body in a valley – and now only one of them sees the dark.” Dickey’s final poems brim with insight and intelligence, “Size is fallible as time. You know better than anyone that a thing made small by distance can nonetheless break you.”
