Martina Evans reviewed Harmony (Unfinished) by Grace Wilentz in the weekend’s Irish Times Magazine.
“Here, on the inside, you don’t look out,/don’t have time, the way looking in you do”, observes Grace Wilentz in Home House, the opening poem of Harmony Unfinished (Gallery, €12.99). Themes of identity and belonging dominate these poems.
In The Forty Foot a swim in sea runs alongside poignant scenes from an Irish citizenship ceremony, “And though I’d cried as a guest at my friend’s ceremony,/ knowing what it meant to her to have her status not tied//to a husband who tried to run her over twice,/when we got to the part where we all sing/’Amhrán na bhFiann’ I couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel a thing,/ though the eyes of the man from Sierra Leone to my left/ and the eyes of the man from the Philippines to my right/were glassy and wet”. Yet in the “cold opaque” sea, “somehow I started/ treading water and, hand on heart, I never felt so Irish”.
Water is a signal for change again in the hot springs of Terma di Saturnia, after which “I’ll wake with the rough skin … lifted from me//imperceptibly as I slept. What was I /before? What am I becoming?”. Conflict of identities powers Willentz’s poems like a torc: “Is it consciousness or craving/that I long for, an unreal thing/ hidden beneath my shadow?” (Shadowboxing). The title poem – about Dina Vierney, a French artists’ model who worked as a guide, smuggling refugees of out of occupied France during the second World War– turns on the same energy, the sculptor calling Vierney “not by her name … nor student nor guide, not model //but ‘The Mountain’ and, later, ‘Seated Bather’, /’Air’, ‘The River’. Then, finally, ‘Harmony’/ (unfinished) armless, unburdened, a divinity like mutual benevolence existing outside time”.
