In her second collection of poems, egg/shell, Victoria Kennefick showcases a capacity to navigate the near-impossible while maintaining her writerly composureis an outlier in modern poetry is to understate the case. This generous selection of his work does several things, but perhaps chief among them is to highlight his obsessions, his touchstones and totems, by gathering work from across his many books that demonstrates a striking coherence.
This can lapse into “a dry stillness” on occasion; one is reminded of Allen Tate’s criticism of Robert Lowell’s early religious poetry, that its lack of “concrete experience” could make it feel “angelic”. Deane’s faithfulness is felt most in irrefutably concrete moments, a “long-limbed bobby hairpin hanging loose” on his mother, or a memory of his grandmother: “In pages of the Irish Press/she wrapped away green Bramley apples for the winter”.
Kennefick leans on a few central tropes – swans become a sort of spirit guide or alternative persona for the narrator, while the eggs of the title become an – at times somewhat on the nose – surrogate for other types of frailty, or creation, sometimes seeing her give into a punning instinct which acts as a pressure release but can feel a tad throwaway: “can’t you see I’m already walking on eggshells?”.
Mícheál McCann’s debut collection, Devotion, is a stately book – courtly, even. At its centre is a sequence, Keen for A -, which takes as its basis the 18th-century poem Lament for Art O’Leary to construct an elegy for a dead lover that is at once stiff-backed but also deeply feelingful. It’s also imbued with a thwarted belief in words themselves, as shoddy but irresistible tools: “Were it that they/could save us, and were no momentary crossing to safety”.
Ireland Latest News, Ireland Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: businessposthq - 🏆 8. / 71 Read more »
Source: IrishTimes - 🏆 3. / 98 Read more »
Source: JOEdotie - 🏆 31. / 51 Read more »
Source: JOEdotie - 🏆 31. / 51 Read more »
Source: IrishMirror - 🏆 4. / 98 Read more »
Source: IrishMirror - 🏆 4. / 98 Read more »