Sara Berkeley
This is what I chose —
the airport departure halls, the agonized farewells,
and now these hills, my northern moon,
my pre-dawn birds.
Sara Berkeley Tolchin’s new collection begins: ‘I’d like my heart /to be without conditions, / to crack each day a little more open’, an ambition these vibrant, airy poems explore in the book’s copious reach. It reflects on themes of loss and losing: ‘My mother is missing. The stars too, / the stars are not where I left them, / they are not in their constellations.’
As Wes Davis observed, in his Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, ‘her rich poems — and her sharp eye for details of the natural world — are given a resonant tension by the stretched ties to her native country’. What Just Happened includes poems set on the west coasts of Ireland and the United States. But ‘the rumble beneath her poetic language’ (Davis continues) ‘is most often the noise made by the tectonic plates of personality as they shift beneath the surface terrain of relationships’.
Flights — actual and imaginary — embrace a search for ‘true north, / the secret heart of all things’. Though they address places where ‘much hurt comes to rest’ they sing ‘O holy life’ and frame a time that was ‘a good day . . . full of miracles’.
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