ORBIS #161 REVIEWS MOTHER AMERICA

I was delighted to hear this morning that Orbis has reviewed Mother America. It's a good review (full text below) - it is always interesting to see what readers tune in to and this reviewer - Dave Troman - zoned in on things that others haven't. And he enjoyed things that directly contradict criticisms by other reviewers. Which just shows to go ya, reading is and always will be subjective, and personal taste is all.

Big thanks to Dave Troman and Orbis. And note to self - write some sympathetic male characters...(Mind you, I love my male characters. They are flawed, sure, but aren't we all?)

To celebrate this lovely review - and Christmas too - I am giving away a copy of the book on my Facebook page. Go here to enter.

UNCOMPRISING TRUTHS: REVIEW BY DAVE TROMAN - ORBIS #161

Mother America by Nuala Ní Chonchúir, 163 pp, €12.99, New Island Fiction, 2 Brookside, Dundrum Road, Dublin 14, www.newisland.ie

This fourth collection of short stories contains 19 compelling tales: honest, uncompromising, thought-provoking and at times uncomfortable, particularly for the male reader: they may strike close to home. Each has a point, and makes it. The focus is on mothers but what each reader takes away will vary.

The tales have an uncanny knack of reading the reader and relating to whichever position/positions in the family is occupied. Every facet comes under scrutiny, with no attempt made to gloss over the fact that family is hard work. Ní Chonchúir’s prose captures the mood of her native Ireland with evocative phrases: ‘The potato pit was covered with flour sacks’ and ‘I landed at Shannon Airport and within minutes was driving alongside green fields dotted with cows and sheep their muzzles fixed to the grass in an eternity of grazing.’

Paris too is superbly captured in the details of place names, street names and turns of phrase: ‘The Eiffel Tower pokes like the folly that it is from the quai’. The strength of the pieces comes from their acuity of observation, eg. ‘Everyone in the cafe stared while pretending not to.’ That clarity applies equally to the characters. All are finely drawn, empathetic in their strengths and weaknesses.

Picking favourites from such high quality work is not easy but two live in the memory. Firstly, ‘The Egg Pyramid’, for its opening: ‘There are things you can do when your husband sleeps with your sister.’ This draws me in completely and the rest fulfils the promise with some magical turns of phrases: ‘You can fly to New York then hurry home again because Diego pulls on you like mother moon pulls on the sea.’ And ‘Cri de Coeur’ presents an oft neglected viewpoint on a story of Ted Hughes and his mistress, previously unknown to me.

Having finished, I put the book down on my bedside table, contemplated it, then started again from the beginning. I challenge you not to do the same.

ORBIS 138 - REVIEW OF THE JUNO CHARM

The latest issue of UK literary magazine, Orbis (Issue 138) has a review of The Juno Charm from David Harmer. They have kindly allowed me to reproduce the review here in full:

ROOTED IN LOVE AND EARTH: REVIEW BY DAVID HARMER

The Juno Charm by Nuala Ní Chonchúir, 84pp, €12.00, Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare, Ireland www.salmonpoetry.com

There is much to admire in this collection of poems that can swing their mood from the nuances of ‘Menses’ - ‘Before the butterfly days / are the fly days / and before those / the days of the spider’ - to the earthy and often rural basics of poems like ‘Sofa’: ‘I squat by a farm-gate like a sneaky pisser/hunched low, arms bent, wearing ruin heavily.’

   The poet is herself the centre of the work and the work is centred on her experience. The cover notes make a reference to Blake and it is not without foundation. There are in this collection many examples of poems describing with a disarming simplicity the poet’s worldview, one which has often been hard earned, but of course that simplicity masks a richness of poetic sensibility at work beneath the surface. Here there are moments of profound love, of bitter betrayal, of childbirth and joy, of disquiet and of peace and all resting in a deep sense of the writer as a woman. It is no surprise to find a poem entitled ‘Poem Beginning with a Line by Plath’.

   Equally important, is the sense of the poet and the work being rooted firmly in a place. Sometimes she is in America, where a poem like ‘Chinatown, New York’ rings out a list of specific evidence line by chiming line glorying in the esoteric, the newly revealed ; or in ‘Valentine’s Day’ where the poet is in a Lexington Avenue hotel, with the sounds and smells of the city rising up to surround the lovers nestled in bed. ‘We steal heat through our skins / safe from the wind that hurtles up the island.’ These urgent, urban moments are often contrasted with calmer more reflective rhythms and with a sense of Irishness and the land itself. A good example is the poem ‘Galway’ where ‘Skirling origami swans decorate / the Claddagh basin while Galway / settles her night-shawl down, / boats and birds safe at her breast.’ One of the best poems ‘Dancing With Paul Durcan’ seems so deeply Irish and funny and mad that really I should quote it all. Two lines will have to do.

‘Paul,’ I said, ‘your poetry is filthy with longing.’

He said, ‘Would you like to dance?’

   At times there is a clunk or two, perhaps because the poet seems too knowing, too aware of her craft, giving us writing too arch for its own good. In ‘Airwaves’ for example we find a ‘newly-minted marriage’ which is scarcely original, in ‘Gull’ I wish the bridges didn’t ‘bracelet the river’ and the wedding breakfast in ‘This Is No Cana’ didn’t agree with me. However, these are rare moments. In the magnificent, enriching and boldly coloured ‘Frida Kahlo Visits Ballinasloe’, any such carpings are knocked away by a poet who sings out the belief in art, in the creative life, in the need for the mustering of perceptions, energies and strengths to fight against whatever painful, grey version of reality the artist and writer finds herself in:

‘Viva la vida,’ says unflinching Frida, painter of pain.