Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2024.
Eamonn Lynskey reviews River Songs by Eileen Casey.
Published by Fiery Arrow Press.
River Songs is available directly from Fiery Arrow Press
at numberninebirr@gmail.com (€12, incl. p.&p.).
River Songs is a truly elegant production. The illustrations – in full colour – are quite simply stunning. As well as deepening the reader’s experience of the poems, they often bring new life back to the illustrations themselves.
Millais’ painting Ophelia for instance, depicts a moving, distressing subject, which is further underscored in its pathos by the accompanying eponymous poem. Details one might not have noticed before now claim attention and also, the echo form proves striking.
‘Millais paints her shrouded in green. Seen
as rebirth. Healing. Fertility. Spring. Brings
envy (and) Greed, (not of her making). Guiding
her under a bridge, a fallen tree. You see
willow means ‘false love’. Like hand in glove.
The poem charts Ophelia’s tragedies and in a line such as ‘Elegant hands cup empty air,’ indicates how much she has lost in life – her former lover, her sanity. Monet’s famous paintings of lilies feature too. Monet never grew tired of lilies and depicted several versions of their form/colour. In ‘Water Lilies at Birr Gardens’, the poet might have thieved a canvas from the gallery walls and brought it to the location where Monet’s favourite subject matter comes into her mind with each visit; ‘Under a bridge, by weeping willow shaded/June to September, water lilies bloom’. Monet’s work is the inspiration for two poems, both poems serving as an example how two forms, the visual and the written, complement and contrast. The illustrations don’t just ‘add’ to the meaning of the poems, and the poems don’t just ‘fill out’ the subject of the illustration. They work together to strengthen experience: fine examples of ekphrastic writing.
However, most of the poems in this book stand on their own. It is difficult to see where a painting might be found to mirror the power of a poem like Mannanán Mac Lír’s Curse with its thunderous, sinewy lines that will send a reader scurrying to a dictionary of Celtic Myth, in order to pin down this sea god who ‘spreads the mist of invisibility / (féth Fíada) to cloak the croneen.’ As mentioned above, the illustrations in River Songs are truly beautiful, thanks to accomplished artists and photographers (Annabel Langrish,Tina Claffey, Emma Barone, Jackie Lynch among others). Camcor on Ice imagines a winter, iced-over world where the Camcor ‘Creates a universe in shards. Splinters/glimmer ice-gold droplets/reflected in eye, felt in fragmented/heart-lands. A polar bear might emerge/beyond cavern’s iced over layers.’
River Songs is a fine collection of fine poems from an accomplished poet, mostly of a touching, observant and reflective nature – Kingfisher, Alder (Tree of Offaly), Heron (grey) – serve nature themed poems with dramatic energy (the aforementioned Mannanán, and the powerful poem River Gods) for example. Overall, such is the wealth of striking phrases/lines, images, that’s it’s difficult to single each one for comment, but a mention must be made of poems like Villanelle for a Kingfisher.
This is a fitting tribute to a wonderful bird so rare that, if one is lucky to catch a glimpse of it; its image, and the location of sighting, stays in the mind forever. And for those who like delicate, structured writing, this poem is also an object lesson in how to write a successful villanelle, one of several in this book. Kingfisher Sighting is also concerned with this rare and beautiful avian; ‘We crave kingfisher’s glossy flits,/rustling leaves. Red legs and feet bright./Long black bill striped crimson darts/deep down river waters,/fat minnow speared sunlight glistened.
This collection is ‘a series of river poems, based on the rivers of County Offaly’ (Eileen’s home county). It is this, but more than this. It is a worthy collection of poems, celebrating not just the rivers of County Offaly, but rivers everywhere.
© Eamonn Lynskey
Eamonn Lynskey’s work is published extensively in leading literary magazines and journals at home and abroad. His fourth collection Material Support was published by Salmon, 2023.
Eileen Casey writes poetry, prose, short fiction and journalism. Her work is widely published. She received many awards, including The Oliver Goldsmith International Poetry Prize, A Hennessy Award (Emerging Fiction) and a Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Fellowship.
River Songs is available directly from Fiery Arrow at numberninebirr@gmail.com (€12, incl. p.&p.).