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Anthology I - Six Women Poets
Eds. Deborah Evers & Kevin Higgins, Ainnir Publishing, [email protected]
ISBN 1901109054, A5 perfect bound 71 pp 12.00 Euros

"Anthology I" links six women poets from Galway to a new publishing cooperative to assist in raising funds for future publications and, conveniently, each poet links her situation with the broader world. Pat Jourdan ends "Anti-Nazi Demo" with, "Demo is a cheap way of spending an evening,/ but to have stayed indoors/ on this cold night/ would have cost so much more." which is prose. Caolinn Hughes’s "The Sound of War" includes, "...The world powders,/ As I pause and pursue/ The surreal.// The rat-a-tat-tat,/ Like the rhyme we learned/ In Primary School..." which loses the alliteration and has a distancing, so what? effect on the reader. In "Three Minute Silence" Betsy Careyette ends with a broad brush-stroke, "As intoxicated on the smell of birth -/ as the Afghan mother beneath her burqa/ the Cherokee mother in her reserve/ or the mothers in New York City/ who lay crushed beneath the debris/ as we crouch here/ on this toy strewn floor..." and whilst the "mother / burqa" sound link is interesting, the poem seems to have got lost somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. Maureen Gallagher’s "The Smell of April" starts domestically and expands to "a suspicion of cat’s pee/ from basil planted on sills// from satellite to small screen/ the choking charred buildings/ the infectious fetor of fear/ rummaging through rubble in Jenin" which likes its alliteration. Susan Millar du Mars’s unassuming title, "Winter, Eggs", contains, "... ‘something to tell you. Denice -’/ Call her. Eggs. Got them./ ‘was on that plane. That we saw/ on the news.’/ Explosion." which does engage with poetics and appreciates how rhythm interacts with words. Performance-poet Trish Casey, as you’d expect, shows good control of rhythmic emphasis in "Lipstick Resistance" (complete poem), "Afghanistan, reign of the Taliban 2001:/ Palette of eyeshadow on a dresser,/ Eyeliner, blusher,/ Lipstick -/ The arsenal of anarchists./ They move through the streets -/ Mute/ Lip-loud anarchists,/ Shrouded in baby-blue burqas.// Bergen-Belsen liberation 1945:/ Survivor supplies arrive -/ Food, clothes, medicine,/ And mysteriously,/ Lipstick./ Branded with a serial number,/ Brutalised, demonised, subjugated,/ They paint cracked lips/ And seal their claim -/ First precious piece of self/ Regained." particularly in those one word lines. So rummaging through "Anthology I" I found two names to look out for. But I’m also left wondering, what now? Are the publishers going to follow up this anthology with individual collections or was it merely a sampler?