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.
