Caitriona O'Reilly, Geis (Bloodaxe)Itztlacoliuhqui-Ixquimilli,
is not a line of poetry I was expecting to read any time soon but here it is, in a poem called Comparative Mythology. Readers of the poem will also be well-advised to come with a knowledge of Chalchiuhtecolotl, too, and elsewhere in this book, one is at an advantage if words like integument, oedemic and exuviae are ones you don't need to look up.
There is some rare erudition, sometimes on a level well beyond my own humdrum capacity, but it isn't as off-putting as you might think. If I were one of those who likes to have prescriptive rules about what poetry should be and what it shouldn't, Caitriona O'Reilly would break several of them but, happily, my only rule is to have none. And so it's fine.
Yes, this has been a long awaited book, by me certainly. I was a big fan of the first two volumes and had wondered from time to time when another was due. But I'd much rather wait for a good one than take quick delivery of anything less. However, I did have to look over the book to make sure this was the author of The Sea Cabinet and The Nowhere Birds because the picture of the poet is hardly recognizable from the picture used on those first two books. The previous haunted, raw Caitriona has been replaced by one with an executive consultant's makeover. That doesn't matter at all, it's the poems that are of interest, but perhaps that difference is a corollary of these poems being slightly less other-worldly, savage and uncomfortable than the earlier work.
Ovum is a beginning, a calm, deliberate exploration of phonetics and associations. It perhaps suggests an approach to semantics through sound, the pure word and abstraction but it is nothing if not sensual and concentrated on the real. The division between signifier and signified doesn't seem quite so final when put in these terms.
Whereas, in the three poems in Island, the meagre detritus of self, the awareness of the other, is a real division, as,
I saw
her in the shards of your face,
as though she'd shattered her mirror
and left the pieces there to glitter.
I only suggested these poems might bit a bit less savage, I didn't say they were cosy.
Snow generates its own hush, quite possibly by its predominant use of monosyllabic words somewhat at odds with some of the more adventurous lexicographical adventures in other places. The pace quickens by a beat when three-syllable words are allowed in but it is a powerfully gentle piece that shows without telling, becomes its meaning and achieves all it seems to want to by doing so.
The Servant Question could be a period-piece costume drama, a familiar enough story of a life in service (my work all about me) and thoughts of release from it. It is, inevitably political, being about class, gender, self, identity, religion and any number of such social issues but it goes far beyond those things in its expert drawing of them, and I don't want to quote just a few lines for fear of diminishing how they fit with the others. It is immediately a great favourite in a book that will be read and re-read and not be consigned to the shelves for a long time yet.
For all the claustrophobia of life's constraints, An Idea of Iowa isn't necessarily offered as a dream of escape. Vast, open landscapes and limitless prairie, are a dream but a fearfully beautiful one, where nothing is,
even its hills are so much dust: loess, the millennial
accumulation of cracked flood-plains; winds.
And that is not the only time we are left to consider 'nothing' because Comparative Mythology left us with
the vacuum in a globe that takes the strength of sixteen horses to part, somehow paradoxically
thus proving that nothing exists.
And sex destroys everything that desire has built up in Potlatch, where
all that we hoarded we burn.
But perhaps marginal, overall preference among many fine poems in a massively impressive book is for The Airship Era, its flirtation with a new perspective and understanding leading only to catastrophe and a spectacular end in flames. But, in the meantime,
up there everything looked different:
the borders absurd, the people in their witch-fearing villages as out-of-date
as peasants in a medieval breviary.
One can admire poems or one can like them but the best are those where there is no question that you immediately do both. That happened with many of the poems in this book. It was well worth waiting for, I'll be glad if I see another one anywhere near as good this year and I won't mind waiting another nine years for the next one because the waiting will all seem worthwhile.