Andrew Oldham reviews
Nuala
Ni Chonchuir
The Juno Charm
Many
authors and poets have dealt with dissolution of a marriage; it is territory
that asks one to tread carefully and honestly. However, couple this with
pregnancy loss – ‘I will visit the rag tree at Clonfert,/pin a baby’s soother
to its trunk,’ (taken from ‘An Unlucky Woman’) and fertility struggles – ‘then,
after three months,/the heartsick, two-letter slip,/from foetal to fatal’
(taken from ‘Foetal’) and you have something born from pain and loss that is
both honest, beautiful and with a sense of gestation. This is how The Juno Charm reads, it is not an
exploration of the cerebral, it is demise and growth of one woman’s body,
emotions and marriages. It would be deplorable to say that any marriage is
purely based on thought, there is a distinct lack of thought in many marriages,
‘You say I am more/canal than river’ (taken from ‘Airwaves’). That the truth of
how many relationships collapse can come from the most mundane moments in life,
‘Then I remember/my last red car, and wonder if too much pride in its
spanky/redness left it a rusted heap in a Donegal scrap-yard; whether/crashing
it started the slow wreckage of our marriage’ (taken from ‘Portrait of the
Artist with a Red Car’). This is what makes this collection not just thought
provoking, with a depth that shakes the readers’ views on marriage, it makes it
a catalogue of lost moments that are honest. Nuala Ni Chonchuir is confessing, a
brutal realisation in the poet’s life that there is nothing to hide, nothing
that can be hidden from the pen, from the poet’s voice inside and finally, from
the reader. Each poem demands a re-reading, time after time, as layers are
peeled back and more truths spill out onto the floor before the poet and before
the reader.
There is a sense early on in the
collection that Chonchuir knows that marriage can be folly. That the poet
inside her, knew that beyond all the romantic flushes and rush of first love
that her marriage was doomed, ‘Nobody will help us/on our bridal run:/not my
sisters,/not his ganger from/the tartan mill’ (taken from ‘To Gretna Green’).
Nuala Ni Chonchuir explores the doomed relationship in The Juno Charm by drawing on images from Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo,
Belle Bilton and Max Ernst. The poet pays penance and in a series of wonderful
images, tableaus, motifs and borrowed lines charts the idea of marriage, of
pregnancy, of fertility, of being a woman. In the collection there is a fall
and rise through images as contrasting as Leda to a simple shop mannequin.
There is an intimacy here that does echo Plath and Kahlo but there is more here
than either of these women could have contemplated:
I
dream of other people’s babies,
ones
who refuse to suckle,
so
I hand them back to be
cauled
in their mother’s love,
but
still my baby labours in me,
adding
lanugo and vernix
to
her cornucopia of miracles,
positing
layers of fat
that
will insulate her
when
she delivers herself to us
in
the cool-aired birthing suite,
borne
down by my body’s rhythms,
because
and in spite of me.
(taken
from ‘A Sort of Couvade’)
It
is in this poem, and such others as ‘Dancing with Paul Durcan’, ‘La Reine’,
‘Die Schwangere’ and the title poem that the idea of the body comes to the fore
but it is more than the ripe flesh, more than brooding or hatching, or
ritualistic platitudes males bestow on the idea of birth, of couvades, of the faire
la couvade. This is the body in fear, a body unknown, a rippling sense that
mother’s suffocate their children, keep them safe, cosset them and rob them of
fear, despite how much they attempt to stop this. That this is the ultimate lie
we tell ourselves, we do not brood, we sit upon.
Nuala Ni Chonchuir comes to terms
with the waning of one marriage, the waxing of another, of pregnancy loss and the
uphill struggle of fertility but there is no sense that this is a battle won,
no grandeur, only the small losses, the small reflections of the world around
the poetry. It is a poet coming to terms not just with how her own body fights
against her desires but how her own lies, her own desire to remain ignorant of
a marriage in dissolution blinds her to the truth she must face. This is what
sets Nuala Ni Chonchuir apart from many of her contemporaries, were some poets
fear to tread, Chonchuir has already been there and admitted her faults on
page. It is more a peeling away of layers and of the realisation that in the
end, when we lie, when we deny our bodies what they crave, we do nothing but
destroy ourselves and those around us, ‘Monsieur says if I move,/he will pulp
me’ (taken from ‘A Cezanne Nude’). That is the beauty of what is a truthful,
intimate and mesmerising collection, its search for honesty.
ANDREW OLDHAM IS A BOLTON-BORN YOUNG BRITISH POET.
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