Reviews
Dublin Review of Books
Against the Vanishing
Enda Wyley
Massacre of the Birds, by Mary O’Donnell, Salmon Poetry, 92 pp, €12.99, ISBN: 978-1912561285
The American poet Robert Frost once likened inspiration to a “lump in the throat”, which sets poets off on a journey of writing. The poem from which Mary O’Donnell’s new poetry collection takes its title has as an epigraph this fact published by Newsweek in 2015: “Of the five billion birds that fly through Europe each autumn to spend winter in Africa and the warmer countries north of the Mediterranean, up to one billion are killed by humans” What follows is “A Husband’s Lament for the Massacre of the Birds” – a poem memorable for its indictment of the damage that humans have inflicted on the natural world:
He welcomes too in his garden dream
the fan-tailed warbler, glued to death in Cyprus
in an agony of open beak ‑ chaffinch, blackcap
quail and thrush ‑ O loss, loss, as the songs die,
and little throats close against the final mutilation.
It’s a passionate poem – “Let us bellow in rage, / let us bellow in sorrow, let us plant these spaces / to make havens for the hunted’ – and one which places O’Donnell in the position of opposing the injustices that have fuelled it into existence. In another poem, “Against the Vanishing”, there’s a commitment to the ethical notion of what the poet calls the “lakeshore of conscience”:
See the white playboys
pose with rifles over zebra, elephant, or cape buffalo,
as if this action was radiant.
Here again O’Donnell deftly balances nature against its reckless destruction. But it is not the only subject addressed in this wide-ranging collection. She also brings a distinctive voice to bear on poems which move from the demise of the natural world to humanitarian issues. “The Little Waves, like Judgements” and “Message from Malmö” deal with the plight of Syrians arriving in Visby and Malmö: “Direct Provision and the Old Agricultural College Ghosts” considers Albanians, Moldovans, Nigerians housed in Ireland. “#MeToo, 12 Remembered Scenes and a Line”, which consists of a litany of violations against women, is one of the standout poems of this collection.
1968, County Wexford, the light flick
of the Colonel’s hand up my summer dress
as I dart from the hotel stairwell;
1970, Leeson St, the priest
with a November evening burning appetite
for PG Wodehouse, by my hospital bed;
Of course, the best of poems are always much more than their subject matter. “Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can’t choose. It writes itself,” Alice Oswald noted in Get Writing. Throughout her new collection, O’Donnell proves herself a smooth stylist, converting ideas, emotions, opinions into genuine poetry. It helps that her imagination is a sturdy one. In “Ghost”, for instance, she wishes to haunt her own home forever:
I want to be a ghost in my own house.
You may still live here, you can come
and go in the casual glide of daily tasks.
Just leave me be, happy in my haunting
of this room, which has never had a key.
Her often striking use of imagery also enables her poems to transcend subject matter. In this way, the collection permits that “invisible” subject Oswald writes of, to be present and to mature at its own pace, so that there’s a sense of wholeness to the work. Some of the more memorable images include the “fluted birch, nippled oak-buds”, the heron, with his, “grace / of wing-tilt and wind, /the dangling twig legs.” Or the river in “The Blackwater at Ballyalbany Bridge”, viewed as “a slim brown god, slow-soaking Drumlin silt, / it caresses trout, then flicks at dipping fern.”
The emotional world of this volume is also finely tuned, particularly in the touching poems about ageing and the intricacies of mother and daughter relationships, such as “My Mother Remembers her Irish” and “My Mother Says No on Bloomsday”. In “Mother, I am crying”, a daughter travels back to her family home and her father’s grave with her mother – the result, a frank appraisal of her parent’s life:
All your passion amounts
to this: the life you had together, in which children
never quite equalled the sum of two parts, a rule
of nature. Later, the car whizzes past the Hill of Tara,
crowned in full May bloom. I think of the long dead,
and all that sunken ground,
what shifts beneath us
even as we live.
It’s a candour which is also refreshingly apparent in “On Reading My Mother’s Sorrow Diary”, where humour and directness combine to reveal the strain of holidaying with a mother and husband. “Never again, to a car journey from Malaga to Jeréz (filthiest town I’ve ever seen), / and she’d scream if my husband attempted / Spanish one more time, his Gracias Senõrs …”
Mary O’Donnell has always been a diverse and talented writer. Since 1990, in addition to her numerous volumes of poetry, she has published essays, novels, short stories and it is no surprise that this new collection should offer us poems of such purpose. Ultimately, Massacre of the Birds is a wise collection which celebrates “the riotous world within and without” with great integrity of feeling, a lightness of touch, and a demand for action in these precarious times. These are poems that declare “we are not so alone after all”, convinced as they are that hope can be a beautiful and achieved thing. Fitting then, that this vital collection should conclude with “The Future Wears a Yellow Hat” ‑ a poem of optimism for the future:
It greets us effortlessly, waving its yellow hat
as we cross a high bridge from opposite directions, smiling ‑
The Irish Times
Mary O’Donnell’s 1992 debut retains its awesome word power 25 years on
Eamon Maher
In 1992, I remember reading Mary O’Donnell’s debut novel, The Light Makers, with a mixture of awe and excitement: awe that a novel could be this well-written, excitement at what I perceived to be the advent of a significant new voice in Irish fiction. Two other novels followed in the 1990s – Virgin and the Boy (1996) and The Elysium Testament (1999) – that failed to capture the public imagination in the same way. They are both good novels, but they are not nearly as compelling as The Light Makers. We had to wait 15 more years for O’Donnell’s early promise to be confirmed with Where They Lie (2014), a subtle treatment of a Protestant family’s grief in the wake of the disappearance of the bodies of two of their members, victims of sectarian violence.
The Light Makers opens with the photojournalist Hanna Troy visiting the Women’s Centre, where she is going to attend counselling. She is suffering meltdown in the wake of the break-up of her relationship with her husband Sam and the feeling of total isolation that this engenders. When the doctor asks Hanna if she wouldn’t mind postponing her appointment for a few hours, this provides the pretext for a review of the events in her life that have led to the current impasse.
Unstable stepsister
We learn about her first experience of sex as a teenager with a distant cousin, Bill, who turns out to be gay; about the strained relationship with her unstable stepsister Rose; about her parents Daniel and Kate. Then there is Sam, the talented architect to whom she feels immediately attracted and ends up marrying. Friction arises between them when Hanna has difficulties conceiving, in spite of there being no obvious medical impediments on her end. For some infuriating and inexplicable reason, Sam refuses to check out his own possible sterility. To Hannah’s credit, she does not vilify her husband, even when she discovers he has been having a torrid affair with a French work colleague, Sandrine, who, it is revealed at the end of the novel, is expecting his baby. In fact, she admits to liking Sam more than anybody else in the world.
But it reaches the point where they can no longer live together. Their rows are vividly rendered, the vicious comments aimed to cause as much hurt as possible, the incandescent rage, the foul language. In the beginning, the disputes sometimes ended in passionate lovemaking; later, there was just bitter emptiness as the couple grew further and further apart. O’Donnell is dextrous at conveying the despair of couples who are totally incapable of communicating because of pride, stubbornness, emotional immaturity or a complete lack of empathy. In addition, there are the social pressures that deem a woman who is not a mother to be worthless, something that weighs heavily on Hanna.
Literary virtues
The Light Makers has two main literary virtues that warrant mention: a taut, elegant style where words are never wasted, and a strong plot that is narrated in a manner that keeps us interested in the destiny of the characters right up until the end. It also supplies some rare, and sometimes amusing, insights into the human condition, such as: “Words aren’t everything; it’s what they mean and what you mean using them that counts”; “Life bears down no matter which way you turn. Like something giving birth to itself, over and over”; “Lovers are seldom as we imagine. You know at a glance that they eat, sleep and excrete just like everybody else, that they occasionally have bad breath and that they also fart.”
This attractive new version will hopefully remind people what a talented and shamefully neglected writer Mary O’Donnell is. The novel has aged extremely well and the issues it raises are as relevant today as they were 25 years ago.
Eamon Maher is general editor of the Reimagining Ireland book series with Peter Lang Oxford, which will publish a new book of critical essays on Mary O’Donnell’s entire oeuvre early in 2018
Dublin Review of Books
Against the Vanishing
Enda Wyley
Massacre of the Birds, by Mary O’Donnell, Salmon Poetry, 92 pp, €12.99, ISBN: 978-1912561285
The American poet Robert Frost once likened inspiration to a “lump in the throat”, which sets poets off on a journey of writing. The poem from which Mary O’Donnell’s new poetry collection takes its title has as an epigraph this fact published by Newsweek in 2015: “Of the five billion birds that fly through Europe each autumn to spend winter in Africa and the warmer countries north of the Mediterranean, up to one billion are killed by humans” What follows is “A Husband’s Lament for the Massacre of the Birds” – a poem memorable for its indictment of the damage that humans have inflicted on the natural world:
He welcomes too in his garden dream
the fan-tailed warbler, glued to death in Cyprus
in an agony of open beak ‑ chaffinch, blackcap
quail and thrush ‑ O loss, loss, as the songs die,
and little throats close against the final mutilation.
It’s a passionate poem – “Let us bellow in rage, / let us bellow in sorrow, let us plant these spaces / to make havens for the hunted’ – and one which places O’Donnell in the position of opposing the injustices that have fuelled it into existence. In another poem, “Against the Vanishing”, there’s a commitment to the ethical notion of what the poet calls the “lakeshore of conscience”:
See the white playboys
pose with rifles over zebra, elephant, or cape buffalo,
as if this action was radiant.
Here again O’Donnell deftly balances nature against its reckless destruction. But it is not the only subject addressed in this wide-ranging collection. She also brings a distinctive voice to bear on poems which move from the demise of the natural world to humanitarian issues. “The Little Waves, like Judgements” and “Message from Malmö” deal with the plight of Syrians arriving in Visby and Malmö: “Direct Provision and the Old Agricultural College Ghosts” considers Albanians, Moldovans, Nigerians housed in Ireland. “#MeToo, 12 Remembered Scenes and a Line”, which consists of a litany of violations against women, is one of the standout poems of this collection.
1968, County Wexford, the light flick
of the Colonel’s hand up my summer dress
as I dart from the hotel stairwell;
1970, Leeson St, the priest
with a November evening burning appetite
for PG Wodehouse, by my hospital bed;
Of course, the best of poems are always much more than their subject matter. “Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can’t choose. It writes itself,” Alice Oswald noted in Get Writing. Throughout her new collection, O’Donnell proves herself a smooth stylist, converting ideas, emotions, opinions into genuine poetry. It helps that her imagination is a sturdy one. In “Ghost”, for instance, she wishes to haunt her own home forever:
I want to be a ghost in my own house.
You may still live here, you can come
and go in the casual glide of daily tasks.
Just leave me be, happy in my haunting
of this room, which has never had a key.
Her often striking use of imagery also enables her poems to transcend subject matter. In this way, the collection permits that “invisible” subject Oswald writes of, to be present and to mature at its own pace, so that there’s a sense of wholeness to the work. Some of the more memorable images include the “fluted birch, nippled oak-buds”, the heron, with his, “grace / of wing-tilt and wind, /the dangling twig legs.” Or the river in “The Blackwater at Ballyalbany Bridge”, viewed as “a slim brown god, slow-soaking Drumlin silt, / it caresses trout, then flicks at dipping fern.”
The emotional world of this volume is also finely tuned, particularly in the touching poems about ageing and the intricacies of mother and daughter relationships, such as “My Mother Remembers her Irish” and “My Mother Says No on Bloomsday”. In “Mother, I am crying”, a daughter travels back to her family home and her father’s grave with her mother – the result, a frank appraisal of her parent’s life:
All your passion amounts
to this: the life you had together, in which children
never quite equalled the sum of two parts, a rule
of nature. Later, the car whizzes past the Hill of Tara,
crowned in full May bloom. I think of the long dead,
and all that sunken ground,
what shifts beneath us
even as we live.
It’s a candour which is also refreshingly apparent in “On Reading My Mother’s Sorrow Diary”, where humour and directness combine to reveal the strain of holidaying with a mother and husband. “Never again, to a car journey from Malaga to Jeréz (filthiest town I’ve ever seen), / and she’d scream if my husband attempted / Spanish one more time, his Gracias Senõrs …”
Mary O’Donnell has always been a diverse and talented writer. Since 1990, in addition to her numerous volumes of poetry, she has published essays, novels, short stories and it is no surprise that this new collection should offer us poems of such purpose. Ultimately, Massacre of the Birds is a wise collection which celebrates “the riotous world within and without” with great integrity of feeling, a lightness of touch, and a demand for action in these precarious times. These are poems that declare “we are not so alone after all”, convinced as they are that hope can be a beautiful and achieved thing. Fitting then, that this vital collection should conclude with “The Future Wears a Yellow Hat” ‑ a poem of optimism for the future:
It greets us effortlessly, waving its yellow hat
as we cross a high bridge from opposite directions, smiling ‑
The Irish Times
Mary O’Donnell’s 1992 debut retains its awesome word power 25 years on
Eamon Maher
In 1992, I remember reading Mary O’Donnell’s debut novel, The Light Makers, with a mixture of awe and excitement: awe that a novel could be this well-written, excitement at what I perceived to be the advent of a significant new voice in Irish fiction. Two other novels followed in the 1990s – Virgin and the Boy (1996) and The Elysium Testament (1999) – that failed to capture the public imagination in the same way. They are both good novels, but they are not nearly as compelling as The Light Makers. We had to wait 15 more years for O’Donnell’s early promise to be confirmed with Where They Lie (2014), a subtle treatment of a Protestant family’s grief in the wake of the disappearance of the bodies of two of their members, victims of sectarian violence.
The Light Makers opens with the photojournalist Hanna Troy visiting the Women’s Centre, where she is going to attend counselling. She is suffering meltdown in the wake of the break-up of her relationship with her husband Sam and the feeling of total isolation that this engenders. When the doctor asks Hanna if she wouldn’t mind postponing her appointment for a few hours, this provides the pretext for a review of the events in her life that have led to the current impasse.
Unstable stepsister
We learn about her first experience of sex as a teenager with a distant cousin, Bill, who turns out to be gay; about the strained relationship with her unstable stepsister Rose; about her parents Daniel and Kate. Then there is Sam, the talented architect to whom she feels immediately attracted and ends up marrying. Friction arises between them when Hanna has difficulties conceiving, in spite of there being no obvious medical impediments on her end. For some infuriating and inexplicable reason, Sam refuses to check out his own possible sterility. To Hannah’s credit, she does not vilify her husband, even when she discovers he has been having a torrid affair with a French work colleague, Sandrine, who, it is revealed at the end of the novel, is expecting his baby. In fact, she admits to liking Sam more than anybody else in the world.
But it reaches the point where they can no longer live together. Their rows are vividly rendered, the vicious comments aimed to cause as much hurt as possible, the incandescent rage, the foul language. In the beginning, the disputes sometimes ended in passionate lovemaking; later, there was just bitter emptiness as the couple grew further and further apart. O’Donnell is dextrous at conveying the despair of couples who are totally incapable of communicating because of pride, stubbornness, emotional immaturity or a complete lack of empathy. In addition, there are the social pressures that deem a woman who is not a mother to be worthless, something that weighs heavily on Hanna.
Literary virtues
The Light Makers has two main literary virtues that warrant mention: a taut, elegant style where words are never wasted, and a strong plot that is narrated in a manner that keeps us interested in the destiny of the characters right up until the end. It also supplies some rare, and sometimes amusing, insights into the human condition, such as: “Words aren’t everything; it’s what they mean and what you mean using them that counts”; “Life bears down no matter which way you turn. Like something giving birth to itself, over and over”; “Lovers are seldom as we imagine. You know at a glance that they eat, sleep and excrete just like everybody else, that they occasionally have bad breath and that they also fart.”
This attractive new version will hopefully remind people what a talented and shamefully neglected writer Mary O’Donnell is. The novel has aged extremely well and the issues it raises are as relevant today as they were 25 years ago.
Eamon Maher is general editor of the Reimagining Ireland book series with Peter Lang Oxford, which will publish a new book of critical essays on Mary O’Donnell’s entire oeuvre early in 2018