Keats scholar Anahid Nersessian says she is drawn to writers who ‘capture real joy without turning away from the extraordinarily cruel reality we live in and to which all of us have varying degrees of exposure’. ‘What is joy?’ Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah asks in […], published last March (and if you’re after one poetry book to read from 2024, choose Joudah’s unpronounceable […].) It feels glib to begin by talking about joy so soon after Christmas when, to my ears, the word begins to sound meaningless from overuse. It feels especially glib in the context of the year just gone. Joudah’s poem, written in the last months of 2023 on the occasion of the still ongoing genocide in Gaza, continues, ‘I was told it can be a family / that held onto their father’s corpse against the flood / so it wouldn’t wash away’. Fran Lock, in a book I’m reviewing here, writes that ‘joy is not an expression of survival, but its necessary method’. Recently I heard a friend read Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Elegy in Joy’, talking about ‘new techniques for the healing of the wound, / and the unknown world.’ Inspired by all of these words, I suppose I’m taking the ‘joy’ that I looked for in poetry last year to be something like little pockets of lightness or beginning. Not a turning away from the world as we know it (nor, as Rukeyser suggests, from the parts of the worlds we don’t know or understand), but a way to be in it.
I found this kind of joy in several Irish poetry collections in 2024. Although I focus on four excellent books in this review, there are lots of others I’d like to talk about, including Simon Costello’s Saturn Devouring (The Lifeboat Press); Ciara Maguire’s Impossible Heat (Bad Betty Press); Scott McKendry’s Gub (Corsair); and Rachel Warriner’s [Is that all there is to] LOVE (Wild Honey Press). Some of the year’s releases were devastating, like Matches (Verve), Catherine Gander’s extraordinary exploration of domestic abuse, and Devotion, Mícheál McCann’s retelling of ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’ in contemporary Belfast (The Gallery Press). It was a big year in Ireland for sports-related poetry, too. While not a big sports guy myself, I loved Gustav Parker Hibbett’s High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press), and The Perfect Season (Wild Honey Press), Sean Pierson’s paean to the 1972-1973 Miami Dolphins baseball team. And I was saddened by the death of GAA commentator Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, author of fabled ad hoc lines like ‘well folks it’s ten to four / and that’s the time and not the score’.
My four picks for this review are Fran Lock’s Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects, Jo Burns and Emily Cooper’s The Conversation, Francis Jones’ STORM DRAIN, and Randolph Healy’s The Electron-Ghost Casino. Looking at these books together, I see that they all think about which bodies are assigned to which categories, the roles we play for ourselves and other people, mischief, rooms, and letter-writing. But I suppose this says more about my taste than about 2024.
Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects
Fran Lock
Out-Spoken Press, £12.99
Sometimes it feels good to make a mess. Reading Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects was as if someone had rattled through the neat categories in the kitchen of my brain: presses rummaged through, bin bags chewed open, detritus spilled haphazardly across the tiles. Fran Lock’s latest book explores the ethical, political, and aesthetic significances of the ‘feral’, a concept that, for Lock, offers a means of disrupting the categories forced upon queers, working-class people, Travellers, the feminised, the racialised, the colonised, the disabled, the freaks, monsters, bog creatures, foxes, chickens, slugs—and everyone else. It was written mostly while Lock was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow for Poetry at the University of Cambridge, and it bristles with the frustration of existing within that institution as a working-class woman. The book rails against:
the final
and binding authority of certain forms and structures – poetic,
architectural, social – how they advance and replicate each other. i
can’t stop thinking about that which form forecloses and renders
impossible.
Strictly speaking, the genre is not ‘poetry’, but ‘lyric essay’. I could just call them prose poems and be done with it, but this ‘dubious chimera’ of a book is on my list in part because it asks who I’m speaking for when I’m strictly speaking, and what I’m protecting by speaking so strictly. A self-described ‘Poundland academic’, Lock combines analyses of medieval bestiaries, horror films, and poetry with zoology and reflections from her own experience to produce a rant that is whip smart, playful, and furious.
There’s a distinctly oral quality to this writing: it’s chatty and breathless, for one thing, and it feels like being pulled along by a lurching train of thought. More than this, it is full of blocks of short, snappy sentences that all start in the same way. The repetition-with-a-difference of these passages brings to mind the mnemonic conventions of oral storytelling, a form of communication that was long dismissed as illegitimate by institutional powers, but that brings with it its own kind of knowledge. Take the following example:
feral is a pest.
feral is a weed. feral eats through your mock-tudor timbers, will
quake your foundations with its supple, strengthy roots. feral is
fear of the site, the estate, the ‘hood’, the ghetto, the slum, the
street, the edge. it is fear of the riot. it is fear of the crowd. it is
fear of those raw places where feral territories impinge upon tame.
it is fear of contagion and invasion. it is fear that the slum itself
will spread, and fear that these others will overrun their slums.
In lists like this one, there is no sense of narrowing down to reach an archetypal definition (of ‘feral’ in this case). Instead, the category opens outward, including more and more distinct examples. Lock’s poetic voice races from one aspect of its shapeshifting subject to another—it is, it is, it is—so that we come to an understanding that is more diffuse, hard to paraphrase. This is not to say the collection is not well-argued or researched (Lock draws voraciously on a wonderfully wide range of texts), just that its argument lies in the refusal to zoom out or synthesise in favour of a more capacious accumulation of slightly varying examples.
Lock herself has described writing poetry as a means of expanding English to make it make room for her and her Irish Traveller heritage. Without access to Shelta or Irish, she must make do with a language that does not feel homely to her. In its ‘proper’ form, she recalls, English was used to ‘administer’ her community, to tell them what they were entitled to and what possibilities were available to them (spoiler: not many). By allowing Lock to invest the words with ‘feral vigour’, writing poetry becomes a means of squatting in her imperious, ambivalent first language.
Lock’s writing lends itself to this kind of figurative description, but to be clear, the feral is not simply a metaphor. She denounces the human tendency to ‘use’ the animal world and animal suffering, a process she likens to Norman Bates taxidermising birds in Psycho, ‘nature frozen inside its cultural representations, as some kind of stuck, stuffed, material receptacle’. In ‘On “Renardie” (Fox Problems, Fox Pivots)’ she recounts an anecdote by Ted Hughes about the inspiration for ‘The Thought Fox’, one of his most famous poems. As an undergraduate in Cambridge, he recalls being visited by a fox-like apparition that told him to give up writing academic essays (‘stop this – you are destroying us’) and focus instead on writing poems. Given that Hughes was a former fox-hunter himself, ‘it’s weird to me’, writes Lock, ‘that the fox asked Hughes to “stop” writing essays, not killing foxes’. For Lock, the feral joins marginalised humans with other marginalised animals in much more material ways, in that they experience different edges of the same violent forces: ‘they name our estates after the trees our mildewed houses have replaced.’ As this last quotation suggests, the act of making room isn’t purely metaphorical. It’s about tearing away at the neat boundaries that organise our bodies and our surroundings. It’s about who gets put where and how much of the world they are allowed.
This is what I meant about making a mess. After all, dirt—as Mary Douglas put it, and as Lock knows well—is simply matter out of place. At the end of not one but two (!) essays about slime, blobs, goo, bogs, and other amorphous, slippery substances that squeeze into crevices and eschew definition, Lock gives us a sentence that I’d be tempted to say summed things up, if the act of summing up wasn’t anathema to the book:
i
want, i want, i want something wet but incendiary, like jellied
gasoline.
The Conversation
Jo Burns and Emily Cooper
Doire Press, €16
I don’t like it to admit it, but I often find myself irritated by art about extraordinary women who have been neglected by the historical record. It is, I realise, a somewhat irrational response. Surely it’s a good thing that books about historically overlooked women are currently palatable to a mainstream audience, and that these women get the credit in posterity that was warranted in life. Still, something in me winces at the proliferation of books about rescuing exceptional women from obscurity. I’ll spare you a rant about liberal feminism and the book market, but I want to know: what about all the women who weren’t brilliant inglorious Miltons but whose lives were nonetheless constricted by the misogyny that is structural and deeply engrained in the collective psyche?
Whatever the reason, I was initially cautious when approaching The Conversation, which is centred around three remarkable women: Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar (whose painting of herself and Walter is the book’s eponymous starting point), and Françoise Gilot. Maar and Gilot were successful artists in their own right, but the posthumous reputations of all three women have been defined, to varying degrees, by their having had relationships with Pablo Picasso, for whom there were two kinds of women: ‘goddesses and doormats’. This book is an imagined correspondence in verse between the three women, each poem attributed to one of them by initials at the top corner of the page (none are spoken by Picasso, although plenty of his statements, like the one about goddesses and doormats, make it into the text). They are interrupted at several points by another exchange between ‘JB’ and ‘EC’, versions of the book’s joint authors Jo Burns and Emily Cooper. Their interjections reflect on the complexities of representation and relay other experiences with men, often artists, often dickheads. The result (which I loved, after all that) is a captivating study of the ways other people (artists, historical figures, but also lovers, ex-lovers, lovers’ ex-lovers, and ex-lovers’ lovers) emerge as characters or symbols in our heads.
One of the mad things about being a social being is that other people, often people we barely know, occupy huge parts of our inner lives without our consent or theirs. This happens all the time; it’s a part of psychic life and, therefore, of creative expression. It becomes particularly fraught, perhaps, in the context of gendered models of creativity that have been around for millennia, in which the Artist, a man, draws inspiration from the Muse, a woman (or, in Picasso’s case, often a girl), to create the artwork. ‘We were collected’, explains ‘DM’ in one poem:
You and I
Projected onto white emulsion walls
It is a job in itself shaking loose
Of course, the three women also act as muses for The Conversation, a fact that leads to a familiar ethical dilemma. Several poems in the collection detail misgivings and frustrations with the project of representation:
Emily, you can probably tell
I’m finding it hard to grasp Marie-Thérèse
right now. Something about her disturbs me,
like a projection or mirror I don’t want to see.
‘EC’ has similar difficulties with Dora Maar, especially with regards to Maar’s turn to religion: ‘What I want her to be and what she was / Are two unconnected places’.
As a result, the portraits that emerge in these poems are, in the best way, patchy and incomplete. Instead of coming across as exceptional individuals, the women kind of blur into each other. This curious effect is accentuated by the formal consistency between the poems, all written in couplets (except for EC’s and JB’s interjections, which are also italicised to distinguish them), and the abbreviated names, which begin to seem like arbitrary ciphers. What does stand out, instead, is the strange repeatability of these love affairs and the common experiences to be found in them. The book felt like lots of conversations I’ve had, some admittedly only in my head, with imagined versions of exes’ exes; others with friends to whom I’ve sent Julia Jacklin’s ‘Body’ or Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, comparing notes about unnervingly formulaic romantic entanglements. Because here’s another mad thing about being a social being. While my experience of the world (in love, sex, and life more generally) is untranslatable and entirely my own, at the same time it is possible, often to a bizarre and uncanny extent, to recognise it in the experiences of others. This replicability can be a comfort: yes, that happened to me, too, yes, nearly the exact same. It is a kind of intimacy—what Lauren Berlant called ‘the misrecognition you can bear’.
The familiarity in The Conversation occurs because of, rather than in spite of, the inevitable projections of others—the roles that are slipped into in order to communicate. This is what I like most about the book: the way it explores the negotiation between individual experience and the structures that organise how we relate to other people. It works so well, I think, because lyric poetry already involves a negotiation between our singular bodyminds and the forms that precede us. Lyric allows us to inhabit, or bristle against, the cookie-cutter personas of ‘I’ and ‘you’ through which experience is channelled into recognisable shapes. Reading these poems, I kept thinking of Fiona Apple singing about leaving a dress in her ex’s apartment as a gift to his new girlfriend: ‘it was never mine/ It belonged to the ex wife of another ex of mine / She left it behind with a note / One line, it said: / “I don’t know if I’m coming across but I’m really trying”.’
At times there’s a deliciously creepy intimacy in this book’s attempts to ‘come across’. ‘I’ve tried on your face’ we read in ‘Ménage’, ‘as my own skin, not unlike yearning for the already taken.’ Elsewhere the sense of closeness falls away so that it feels as if the speaker is left talking to themselves. ‘Please try on this dream I had last night’, ‘MTW’ asks ‘DM’ in ‘Speculating’, a palindrome poem in which we end up, at the end of the poem, back at the line where we started. In this poem Maar is portrayed as distant, having extracted herself from the social sphere (‘I heard you don’t leave your house anymore, / in Provence, since he met Françoise’). All the same, while they don’t reach the individual they are purportedly addressed to, the poem hints that forms of trying (and trying on) can lead to more collective, and strangely comforting, ways of relating to other people.
like these letters which burn yet help
so much it reaches far beyond us.
STORM DRAIN
Francis Jones
Veer 2, £8
The first section of ‘CHURN’, a poem in Francis Jones’ STORM DRAIN, includes a block of Irish words that stands out visually from the surrounding lines, which are choppy, irregularly spaced, and much shorter. The words are a devolution of a proverb (one that many readers will have learned in school) about no home being quite like your own. The rhymes accentuate the shmaltz introduced by the proverb:
Nil tinteán mar do thinteán mar do thinteán féin
agus chuir mé a chluais i do ghluais i do bhféin
marbhíonn mé anuas agus chuaigh mé go dtí
gur a bhfaca ar an aice ar an tioctar i do bhféim
In fact, the lines don’t make much semantic sense—they are mostly real words, but they are strung together in ways that don’t mean much. In a note at the end of the book, Jones describes the Irish in this poem as ‘a kind of nonsense motor, which helps the poem to explain itself in English later’. ‘English people’, they write, ‘tend now to think that Irish is sacred and beautiful— but in this instance it is just that the language is taking the piss out of you’. I don’t think Jones’ deflective note should be understood as a key to everything these lines are doing, though. They aren’t just taking the piss—or, if they are, this is serious piss-taking, and serious deflection. I might be falling into Jones’ trap here, but I read a kind of incantatory rhythm, almost like a prayer, in the sing-song repetition of the first line. The stress of housing insecurity is one of the collection’s central concerns. The fake Irish words in the poem, too, have resonances that bring a hard edge to the joke: ‘marbhíonn mé’ brings to mind maríonn mé, ‘I kill’, except that it’s got the word marbh, ‘dead’, in it, so that it sounds as if the person doing the action is already dead. Creepy.
Nonsense—or ‘trivialalia’ to quote the title poem—can say a lot. ‘When speech continues without communicating anything’, writes Craig Dworkin, ‘when speech intransitively reaches the limit at which its communication becomes silent, we can hear the body speak’. Of course we don’t actually hear a body speak, we’re reading words on page in a (by the way, gorgeously printed and pocket-sized) book. But there are lots of bodies in this book, and they are precariously housed, tired, overworked, leaky, vulnerable, ill, horny, or heartbroken; bodies at work, bodies in bed. Perhaps we could think of the passage as a kind of textual lilting. Nathaniel Mackey, another poet who writes a lot about precarity, sex, and non-lexical utterances, says that ‘music, like speech, is made of breath’; that musical instruments are ‘prosthetic lungs’; and that by hearing them as such we can hear in music the intrinsic vulnerability of the body. I read a similar idea in ‘TAP’, later in the book:
your music is really
breathing
you knowit’s really
very fine ,time
passes
you knowtime
passesyou know
I’ll come back to the passage of time (oldest of chestnuts) but first, to return to the nonsense motor and its barbed mischief. ‘chluais i do ghluais’, in the second line, is an almost exact translation of the first part of a phrase that appeared a page previously: ear to the gloss, near to my mouth + tá me glic
As well as situating speech in the body once again, the Irish words at the end of the sentence (‘I am cunning’ in English) seem like a central part of the trickster logic of these poems, a farcical performance that feels important to what Jones is doing. It’s a common tactic in colonial and postcolonial contexts: those deemed irrational, childlike, or foolish by the ‘common sense’ of colonial systems sometimes find power in inhabiting these caricatures in an exaggerated, mimicking way. In drag, too, the exaggerated performance makes gender identities seem flimsy, with less of a hold on reality.
But it’s not all a carnival here. Or, more precisely, many of the poems make clear that the impish persona is a protective measure against and stems from a system that demands too much of the bodies forced to live according to its rhythms (the serious deflection I mentioned earlier). These bodies can’t always resort to gliceas as a defence, they don’t always have the slick, impenetrable luxury of taking the piss. There are also a lot of organs in this book, a lot of bodies pierced or breached in ways that expose a visceral inner substance. It is, more often than not, the violence of waged labour that makes these incisions—specifically the physically demanding and strictly timed work of hospitality. In one scene in ‘THROES’, ‘rabbit offal’ and ‘little liver little kidneys little disembodied and sticky / heart’ are on the menu:
someone yells service . the heat makes
glances at the body’s centre , scores , pushes too deep .
The poems themselves feel a bit like scores, in the sense of musical or performance notation—like directions for, or perhaps a log of, the grimly regimented and absurd regularity through which value is extracted from the body: the ‘15 hour shift’, the monthly rent payments. Some of the titles (‘Dublin 2018’, ‘London 2023’) date the poems, marking specific moments in time and space. ‘what are you writing ?’ the voice in ‘TAP’ asks and answers:
I am not writing
I am just counting and watching a circling ,
Commas and full stops float slightly apart from the words they punctuate, reminding us of their function as instructions for parsing the flow of things (and making me think now of the connection between punctuate and puncture).
There’s a lot more I could say about the absurd performance of precarity that these poems record, but I want to stress that the book also, I think, makes time for things untouched by the machine of waged labour. There’s curiosity in here, and laziness, and other, less violent kinds of touch. In the opening poem, ‘THROES’, there are more images of puncturing below surfaces, piercing skin, but these are not so mechanical. They have an intimate, probing quality:
the sky
is appalled now so I raise my fingernail as a boxcutter , to slice along it and see what
falls out . the sky doesn’t leak a thing , come on how about a little rain ,
Here’s another example, one of my favourite passages:
how can I roll over and face you in bed , shadow of a bird circles
like an instance of shadow puppetry , over us , around the room ,
growing and growing and then growing tiny . the shadow slips into a corner ,
the corner I keep my little shrine , the shadow enters a perfume decanter
with no lid , pressed into my hand
once , time
to listen to music
The memory of something pressed into the hand makes no lasting mark, it is a fleeting shadow gesture. (And to think back to the Craig Dworkin quote above, gesture is another and more obvious way that the body speaks). The second-to-last line quoted here is another moment that regulates temporality, the memory of ‘once’ punctuated with that little slash of a comma to bring us back to the present, where it’s ‘time / to listen to music’.
The Electron-Ghost Casino
Randolph Healy
Miami University Press, $17
If Jones’ poem was set in motion by a ‘nonsense motor’, Randolph Healy’s The Electron-Ghost Casino might be described as a full-on Rube Goldberg machine. In the preface, Healy extends his thanks to ‘the first hominids who proto-linguistically gargled to achieve ecstasy or to instruct and delight their peers’. This collection, the most unequivocally joyful book I read this year, is propelled forward by the sheer glee of babbling language. The poems aren’t nonsensical, but they court nonsense: while reading them, the dawning of the words’ sense often feels like an incidental or surprising opening, arrived at sideways while you were busy enjoying their sounds and the weird warps and associations they set off in the brain. (Not that this is unique to Healy’s work. In fact I think I could probably live with it as a general definition of poetry.) The linguistic experiments in this book (pangrams; stanzas ‘constructed using apical phonemes’; ‘Russian doll’ word columns, where each word can fit inside the previous) are playful and welcoming to the reader, notes at the end of the book offering helpful routes into some of the poems, should we want them. (Last year I wrote something similar about Ellen Dillon’s work being generous to the reader. As it happens, Healy, like Dillon, is a secondary school teacher, although he teaches maths and science. For what it’s worth, they’re also both associated with Cork’s SoundEye poetry festival.)
The Electron-Ghost Casino is enthralled by the absurdly unlikely scenario of having a body and an intellect, or ‘Neck, heart, tongue, soul, arse’, to quote ‘PAPER CUTS’. The resulting poems are hilarious without ignoring the pressing issues the book is burdened by, like climate collapse and wealth inequality. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry, etc. ‘DUET’ involves a woman who hangs things from a ‘sexually mature alder’ once a week and then goes home to write love letters. The poem ends with an image of her
as she walked in the cool of the day
male catkins relaying their restless drifts.
In ‘WILLY’ the poem on the opposite page, the speaker tells us that their philandering father ‘was a writer too’, sending love letters to several women at once without the others’ knowledge. He also, we are told, wrote ballads,
one in the person of a mother grieving for her son
cut short by means of capital punishment
the refrain being
They hung my Willy on a tree.
I aspire
to leave as worthy a legacy
to my children.
I love the weird refraction in the song lyric of the catkins flopping from the alder on the previous page. The earnest contribution to the ballad tradition becomes a surreal tale of dismemberment—not so much gruesome as pathetic and silly, gently mocking the speaker’s concern with posterity. But it’s hard to write about what’s funny without pulling the whole contraption apart so that the joke disappears, and you’re left with a broken toy in your hands. It might be easier to say that after reading some of the poems in the library, I found myself laughing my head off cycling through traffic on my way home.
Many of these poems are preoccupied with reproduction, both social and biological. ‘Generations rattle past’, we read in the opening poem, ‘like notes / on a robin’s call’. The transition between generations is sometimes familial, as in ‘WILLY’; elsewhere it’s much broader, encompassing the whole species. There’s often a cruelty to the apparently inescapable movement from one generation to the next, as in a scene in a nursing home, in which the doting elderly have been siloed, a little batty: ‘“I built myself”’, one resident ‘chirps’,
“from a tiny little starter kit.
Well, Mom helped a bit.”
‘Futures burn rubber’, we read, ‘as histories nurse their hutch burn.’ At other moments, it’s the young getting fucked over, such as in ‘GRAND GESTURES OF THE IRRELEVANT HAND’, a condemnation of the rich whose greed has left later generations precarious in a precarious planet, ground into a system not of their making. ‘O children, and your children’s children’, the poem apostrophises,
indentured spare parts in these fixers’ boneyards,
here are your millstones, the water’s fine.
The ‘casino’ in the book’s title is, Healy explains in the preface, ‘a gloss on evolutionary process, where most trial ends in failure’. ‘We have come so far,’ he writes later, ‘from caves to the precipice’. Naturally enough, the engagement with evolution opens up questions about the interplay of chance and determinism (‘DESTINY ETC’, to quote one poem’s title). The poems marvel at the arbitrariness of how we got here, and how strange it is that meaning can emerge from a seemingly random series of evolutionary accidents, or ‘a process fuelled by emptiness’:
smoke under a microscope
jittering silver spheres
tracing invisible indivisibles.
I understand this amazement at the absurdity of existence as a key part of the book’s serious business of courting the nonsensical. The poems revel in language as a means of not reproducing the relentless rotation of generational time, from young to old to gone and round again. They rejoice, it seems to me, in the pleasure of words and the pleasure of the body (the former arguably a subcategory of the latter anyway), as a means of
unplotting
two sides of a spiral
to make tremble our bodies
with chants no code can cage
The only use of the word ‘joy’ in the book comes at the end of a truly wonderful little poem, ‘VATICAN ROULADE’ (a play on ‘Vatican roulette’, or the method of contraception sanctioned by the Catholic church). In it, a couple resolve their differences about housework and have sex on the floor instead
enrolling
on the linoleum
as they slippily slip
When they’re interrupted by the sudden appearance of a priest, however,
She spins away
leaving him adrift
his enrouged, if not huge, joy
drizzled with jizz.
Sorry to pull the joke apart again, but: joy here is an erection that does not reproduce, that lists ‘adrift’, echoing the ‘restless drifts’ of the catkins earlier. Sex is an integral part of the reproduction of generations, sure, but pleasure can be its own thing. The Electron-Ghost Casino makes profoundly evident that the same can be said of language. Healy’s contraptions go nowhere, or they go in unplottable directions.