“a blackbird knaps/ the flint of my heart,/sparks fly” – Geraldine Mitchell opens Naming Love (Arlen House, €15) with a haiku – a succinct herald to her theme of frozen grief alleviated and uplifted by nature, “ ... stark news I was in no way prepared for.//With what force then the foam of hawthorn/ smothered fields and hills in its white blooming ... shouted ... rinse your skulls,/ be drunk on whin, on the sour smell of past, dog daisy ...” (Leaving the Festival).
These restless grieving poems are haunted by childhood, the “fractious child” in Sky Writing Summer’s End flinging her letters into the sky speaking for the haunted poet, “Will we? Won’t we? //Who’s in charge? Shall we go now?/Is it time?” This restlessness expresses itself in many forms although Mitchell consistently favours shorter forms such as the eerie quatrain Spindleshanks: “how perfectly positioned/a sheep’s legs are: distaffs in fine balance, ready/for the long night’s spinning”.
Charting an insomniac night, Oh begins, “the past is too much”. The refrain is used sparingly, mimicking the circular nature of such nights, “oh the past is a sack stuffed ...” Nature doesn’t come to the rescue here nor in the finest poem, Need to Know, a lean sonnet composed of circling child-like questions, “where did you go in the night was it/dark was it cold where you were out/there on the sea in the night ...” Long after the poem is read these questions stay in the mind, their elemental terror reminiscent of a ballad, “ ... did you/meet your mother did you see yourself /coming back going under ... was it cold were you afraid of the dark the salt water going under ...”
The past drives like a train through Kelly Michels’s powerful debut American Anthem (Gallery, €12.95). Image-rich with impeccable timing, the first sequence of narrative poems charts an American childhood lived in the shadows.
Just Say No is a fine example of Michels’s sense of narrative. Parental drug abuse is happening offstage while “the officer” visits the poet’s fifth-grade classroom and this abuse is all the more powerful in its implication, “we didn’t dare /colour outside the lines of worry-eyed/ cartoon characters buying weed/from a teenage bully or the gang/of stick figures shouting/in the margins. We pretended/not to see each other, not to know/the smell of bong smoke late at night,/ how it would drift through the air vents /with laughter ...”
The enemy is within – at home – as so often happens but the officer is looking in the wrong direction, at the teens snorting a line on the video. “the result is death”, he says pointing to a casket. The moment of dramatic irony is skilfully driven home by Michels, “We pretended not/ to know how the dead ... rose each morning to put away/our cereal boxes and make our beds,/…they were waiting for us now/in their long white robes smeared/with peanut butter and hair dye, their tired bodies floating/across the pearly linoleum floors ...”
This daylight possession is at the heart of American Anthem, a haunted house where one cannot tell the dead from the living in a grim landscape, devastated by the opioid epidemic, gun crime and violence. “It does not matter who you are,/only what you can be/in the land of the free,/this country that does not grieve, lining the dead, neat as teeth/ until no one knows one ghost from the next ...” (Cat and Mouse Act of the New Millennium).
Like American Anthem, David McLoghlin’s Crash Centre (Salmon, €12) is driven to recount a traumatic personal past and, in so doing, speaks for a traumatised society. The cover photo showing the rugby player JPR Williams, on the field during the British and Irish Lions tour to South Africa in 1974, is an apt reflection of McLoghlin’s style, “You’re what they call a crash centre,”/my father said. It was JPR Williams/counter attacking against the All Blacks/ with no gum shield, bizarre Boer War/sideburns, his socks around his ankle ... it was Trevor Ringland ... taking the ball into contact, and through, it was/ the one direct thing I knew how to do.”
These poems face down harrowing memories of abuse at a privileged Catholic boarding school using Hermann Hesse’s fictional Mariabronn monastery in Narcissus and Goldmund to show the real and terrifying school landscape where McLoghlin was entrapped and abused in his teenage years by “Father Narziss”. The confessional narratives ground themselves in a fairy-tale expression, skilfully evoking the poet still enthralled as a young man, long after he left school.
“What are you doing back here, again? McLoghlin?” Father Simon mocks in Trapped by Trees (2000) as the physical world mimes back a powerful objective correlative: “Wild rain, monks in the rear-view gather/skirts and run for the castle. Halfway along/the Front Avenue: a big oak’s down, circumference/ to my windscreen top.” McLoghlin’s abusive Narziss is spellbinding, wielding his absolute power: “He wiped me/with a damp lukewarm facecloth /face the sheet, as if/ before a procedure.” (The Room). In Stockholm Syndrome, which aptly references Niall & the Nine Hostages, McLoghlin’s memory is as painfully personal: “... you were never careless with me – a gel Novocained the hook./No one could smell your sweat on me ...” as it is aware of all the unknowable suffering others who can read this book and know they’re not alone, “You controlled the postern gate./How many of us there were/is a stair into darkness.”
The title of John Mee’s collection – The Blue in the Blue Marble (Templar, €14) – reflects the human eye that is the heartbreaking, funny centre of My Father, Your Father, a long poem about ageing and how “the light” eventually runs out. “The ophthalmologist had the look of my father ... behind glasses/the hint of challenge in his eyes./You’re getting old, he laughed. /People fool themselves, keeping words at a distance,/trying for better light.”//With my chin on the strap, looking into the light, I thought of my father ... a shorter distance/from the TV, holding one of those old magnifying glasses”.
When Mee’s mother laughs, his father’s “eyes /flashed at her, You’re using up all the light!” Mee, in the Long Valley “for a couple of glasses” waiting for drops to dilate his pupils, remembers “Finished with glasses, seeing into the distance, my dying father laughed, huge black eyes taking in the last of the light.” Towards the end, Mee’s touch is as lightly precise as an ophthalmic instrument – “There was nowhere /in Kuala Lumpur airport to cry.” – pinning down exactly the difficulty of finding space to grieve in this modern world.
The Law of Bees is a witty, exacting response to the Brehon Laws, “in law’s strict speech/they graze like cows, goats, sheep/their trespass can’t be a stampede./ nor a leaping nor a fording.” Experiments & Observations on the Singing of Birds, which is adapted from an 18th-century manuscript of that name, shows a deep identification with the animal world. This empathy reaches its irreverent zenith in the ludic Zoonoses. Zoonoses “are what we catch /from the animals/when we lean too close/breathe in”, Mee declares before exchanging places with his cat in a delightful anthropological move reminiscent of the great Cork poet Seán Ó Riordáin, although the voice is all Mee. “As Pooka powers up//my laptop/to check the Guardian,//I’m out in the garden, pissing on a tree.”
Martina Evans is a poet and a critic
