Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Michael Longley is right to call this a “stunning debut collection”. On a first reading though, I found myself put off to a certain extent by its intensity and by some of the things in the book - the surfaces of statuary, a cold kind of sealed off quality in the subject matter.

     The themes are widespread and deep like O’Reilly’s waterscapes that appear throughout the book, and they seem to reflect her interest in coming to terms with necessary pain. She writes about growing-up and self-realisation; about absence and loss; places, the arts and the elements - all with an excruciating sensitivity. The more resistant a surface, the more intense is O’Reilly’s imaginative response to it. So dried, pressed bats are “like tiny black flowers” and statues of eagles imagine “a wind that wasn’t there”.

     Creatures and plants are often presented as startling and violent: daffodils bring the “dreadful earliness of their petals/ against dead earth, the extremity of their faces”; a spider “looks sudden but is still// for hours, eyes on stalks,/ awaiting news from hair-triggers”. O’Reilly’s tone varies interestingly though: sometimes she exercises a kind of fine hysteria that remains controlled but threatens to overflow, and at other times she exudes a warm empathy and humour towards her strange subjects, as here in ‘Octopus’: “Mostly they are sessile and shy/ as monsters...” “The tenderness of their huge heads/ makes them tremble at the shameful/ intimacy of the killing...”.

     Forms throughout the collection also vary. There’s a sestina that successfully diverts attention from its repetitions, using enjambment and a natural-sounding dramatic monologue to suck the reader right into the heart of its drama (the story of an anorexic teenager). Poems with difficult restricted rhyme patterns are also handled with ease. As you’d expect from the material, O’Reilly uses dissonant and half-rhymes more than full ones, but even when there is full rhyme, the rhythm will usually disturb any comfort we might derive from it. This, from ‘After a Death’:

For a whole week
a large emptiness shrieks
endlessly around the hills, made bleak

and salt-striated
under its unabated
sea-stung blast. On my window the desiccated

caked salt
it leaves behind melts,
shatters like sheet ice, and lets the cold bald

February light in.

Superb, but definitely not one to read without
the central heating turned up a notch or two.