Jim Maguire reviews
by Geraldine Mitchell
The opening poem in Geraldine Mitchell's
first collection, which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2008, begins with the
breezy reporting of a fact heard on the radio: 'For three million euro/ – give
or take --/you can see the sun rise/eighteen times a day.' The poem ends, 'If you travel fast enough/you
can live in darkness/all your life,/or in too much light.' The need for fortification against a world geared
towards keeping its inhabitants in the dark is one of the unstated themes
running through the collection. Whether it
comes as willful blindness to ecological devastation, as adults treating children as dolls, or even
as a 'black pool of silence' between a mother and son – the dark in these poems
is often invisible and therefore all the more dangerous.
World
Without Maps, however, isn't a dark book, nor is it
self-consciously preoccupied with its themes.
From early on, we hear an earthed voice whose composure suggests it has
already fulfilled its aspiration of
'[coming] to know/ the nature of winter and [welcoming] it.' A range of experience and interests is encompassed
– childhood, death, loss, uprootedness, travel, illness, science, art,
discovery of the natural world – and
explored with a calm control and sureness of touch which often seems to
heighten the intense emotional engagement that is never far from the surface.
Silence can fill
a room like an elephant.
Its crosshatched
bulk up against the wall,
sulking and
seedy. Or it sits like a bird
in the breast of
a child, ruffled and panting, afraid.
-
'UNSAID'
Frequently, the poet's eye is drawn to the
solitary, overlooked (and often powerless) figure in the corner of the frame,
whether it's the night-train driver, the invisible child, the homeless man who
'unpeels/a nest of plastic bags/hatches a book'… Rather than being dramatised or even given a
voice, these subjects are briefly presented at an angle in close-up before the
camera pulls back and moves on – less subject-matter in themselves as key points
of connection in a consciousness that is always quietly alert to the whiff of
injustice or of humanity being untrue to itself. There is a clear political undercurrent
through much of the collection – political in the sense of a mind trusting and
protecting its own intuitions and apprehensions about the world –– and much of the skill of the poems is in
their slantwise and inspired use of image and metaphor to convey their point. In the poem 'Deportee', the experience of
deportation is embodied in 'the airport's midnight silence/ [screaming] from
neon walls; dead/ corridors reverberate; tungsten glares and kodachrome
stares…'
Themes and poetic vision aside, what gives
the book its force is the line-by-line quality
of the writing. Wildlife and landscape
feature with a sense of surprise and freshness, as if the natural world and its
possibilities as a resting place for the chaotic mind were only being
discovered – and as if the act of poetry were somehow a part of this. Instead of the 'deep image', the bane of so much 'nature
poetry', here we are treated to the
moon, seen from an aeroplane, as 'a lost eyelash, brittle and new/ snagged on
the pre-dawn's lurid/lightshow, orange, green/and deepest blue.' Or to a heron landing on a fence post
'single-minded and absorbed/in the precision of the moment.'
The flair for metaphor moves centre-stage
in a number of sharp, stylish poems which push out with bold surreal sweeps into quiet truths. These include 'The Trees In Her Head', 'The
Suitcase Of Bees' and a memorable curse poem, 'The Gift', which begins, 'I send
it straight into your head/to burrow there and to lay eggs//that, in time, will
hatch and grow/and beat with angry wings for me.'
The tonal range of the book is wide, with
cool and succinct meditations on time and memory standing alongside pieces where more is at stake. 'Mirror,
Mirror', near the beginning of the book, reveals a mind in uncertain motion as
it leads the speaker to a place 'where nothing will come back' – a poem that
later finds an extraordinary answering echo in 'The Weight Of Water' which
traces the progress of water as it accumulates from a droplet at the top of a
wall to a torrent which threatens, but fails, to overwhelm the speaker.
While the writing is constantly probing inwards,
one of the pleasures of the collection is that, under a generous, clear-eyed
imagination like this, the process involves as much light and joy as it does danger
and darkness:
ULTRASOUND
Deep
in the pockets of my memory
are
coins rubbed smooth from fingering
stories
I have hoarded, guarded
from
the corruption of sharing.
The
night we spent in the one-room house
in
Kabylia, after broad beans and buttermilk
from
a single dish. You in the big bed with
him.
The
honour.
Me and his wife on the floor.
How
in the night she wrapped his arms around me,
and
from behind the fortress of her belly
her
child tapped messages on my back.
Jim
Maguire's poems have been widely published and won a number of prizes,
including the Brendan Kennelly Award. He recently received a bursary in literature
from the Arts Council of Ireland.
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