Poetry reviews: Stephanie Conn, Jean O’Brien, Molly Twomey and Hannah Hodgson

Stephanie Conn’s Off-Kilter (Doire, €13) examines chronic fibromyalgia from the cage of a hospital bed before widening out to embrace the world. Conn sees both the body and the environment under pressure, “I creep with all the forest animals…” (An African Forest Elephant Approaches). This precise identification with fauna is visualised in cinematic close-ups, rising from the page like mini-documentaries:

The rich nature poems contrast with powerful plain lines from the arid confines of her hospital bed, “When he appears between the curtain folds/of my designated square, in his starched coat,/I try to lift my head.//He lowers the bed, bolsters me/on regulation pillows, does not smile,/keeps commands simple.//Follow my pen with your eyes.//I pass the test.// The right fails.//Try harder. My throat dries…” Yet the hospital ward does not stay dull – “A frog hops into the ward, approaches me in a tiny white coat,/springs onto the bed, says he’s the consultant…” (Toxicology Report). Frogs feature throughout, internalised powerfully in Breath Work, “You breathe deeply to keep the frog calm. Distressed, it will sweat/a concoction of alkaloids into your fattiest organ…” returning in a dazzling sequence set in Frida Kahlo’s Mexico. The painful guilt suffered by many patients is powerfully expressed. Can the roots of illness lie in childhood? What I Learned in Winter, describing Conn’s mother’s cancer, illustrates the past tracking the future, the limpet voice childlike, the lineation astute and surprising:

Like Conn’s Off-Kilter, Jean O’Brien’s Stars Burn Regardless is as deeply concerned with life and death but her poems move further away from earth as O’Brien literally reaches for the stars to find her metaphors:

But if Conn favours the close-up, O’Brien uses the long shot, a telescopic view to come to her hard-won terms with grief, “Death is the only cure for life…Infinity is just a long, long, long line forever/lusting after shine.” (Hotter Stars Burn Blue). The dead are very close, barely off-stage, “We feel the urgent pull of/our disembodied dead wind us/with their need…” (At the Edge of Water). Sometimes they are reborn— as in several poems about the Tuam babies, “The children being found in the tanks/are rising like disturbed sediment, gulping at air…The children are leaving the tanks/pushing through…They are leaving, leaving, they are found.” But the stars are never far away, “The unforgiving sky is full of stars the dome of dank earth/ is full of missing children.” (For a Lost Child). Another planetary influence, the Wolf Moon governs O’Brien’s response to The Lament of the Hag of Beare but this is an intense close-up:

Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+: 10 of the best new shows to watch in June

---

We no longer try to understand why Real Madrid win the Champions League final - we just accept

---

The Irish philosopher who was father of ‘cathedral thinking’

---

100 great restaurants and places to eat around Ireland this summer

---

O’Brien ends the poem fiercely as befits a cailleach, “…my hammer big as Thor’s, clatters across the skies.”

The title poem of Hannah Hodgson’s 163 Days (Seren £ 9.99) records the time Hodgson spent on a children’s hospital ward. Lyrics provide a highly original call and response:

Hodgson, a palliative care patient (with probable mitochrondrial encephalopathy), lets the hierarchy speak for itself as her losses multiply. She shows “The Consultant” the “tumbleweed” of her lost hair— he “says ‘it’s to be expected’ and leaves...” When she asks him if there is a “vegetarian version” of “the feed pumped into my bowels”, he “rolls his eyes, ‘Why is it always the girls?’”

Yet Hodgson maintains her extraordinary agency by the wit and intelligence of her voice. In Wouldn’t Be The Strangest Thing hotel staff need to be convinced that Hodgson “knows blood/”. Metaphysical insight –”Hep C from a towel wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen to us./And by us I mean the personal and physical as separate selves./One is always covering for the other.” – combines with high octane story-telling, leavened with deadpan humour: “…I’ve stared at enough/hospital ceilings…blood…spurted two metres up…must have been an artery./…unlikely the patient is alive any more.//The hotel offers me a refund. I take it and head back to my room,/peel back the duvet and find a thong.”

Molly Twomey’s Raised Among Vultures (Gallery €12.95) begins in another hospital ward, the imprisoned Twomey longing to be “shot” into the air. Her fellow patient says, “I get it…interrupting my list of amusement parks/ I’ll visit when I’m discharged.” Dragging “her scarlet nail along her sternum… I love the thrill/that a belt might loosen, a spring could snap… Can you feel it? she asks, placing my palm//on her chest, hers on mine./The bumper cars of our hearts stutter and jolt.” (Risk) Twomey’s high-wire couplet and triplet stanzas are pared down to the essentials, Heirlooms beginning like an Emily Dickinson echo, “My dietician says if I don’t eat/my oestrogen won’t restore./My body will always be a door// locked on its hinges,/safe-guarding its room/of dust and secrets.//” but the wicked twist is Twomey’s own, as she wonders if the dietician’s child is “heavy enough that she could use him./as a kettlebell for Russian twists?” Like Hodgson, Twomey has a strong sense of two selves— “but isn’t starving yourself/the most brutal thing? The slow collapse/of bones, sprained ankles to sunken cheeks,/the last segment of voice/burrowing into muffled quiet.” (The Most Brutal Thing). This sense of two selves is mirrored in relationships and Twomey’s frequent use of the second person point of view. Twomey is a gifted storyteller, her recovery narrative spiked with keen insight and dark humour as she cautiously observes her ambushing self: