Martina Evans reviewed What Remains the Same by Alvy Carragher in the weekend’s Irish Times Magazine.
Fairy-tale tropes prove to be valuable tools for examining the bruised family in Alvy Carragher’s What Remains the Same (Gallery €12.95). “Flip a coin,” exhorts the title poem. “Let’s say six or seven brothers,/ give them any old feathers, eyes that glint.// Count the years since their mother passed … What remains is a sister, alone,/ trying to break her brothers’ curse,//stitching garments from thick nettles”.
The sister is condemned to “swallow pain, remain silent” but the poems are about breaking that silence. Words are terrifying weapons but only if you believe them; Carragher illustrates that power. In Mallacht, the grandmother’s repetition of the family curse – “a son haunted by water” – gives it credence: “Every burst pipe and wet day/ came back to a stranger laying his words/ at my grandmother’s feet, how she chose/ to pick them up, pass them on, give them power.”
The bricks and mortar of folktales – concrete domestic details – carry energy and feeling, “we stand on cold bathroom tiles where Mammy makes/ crab apple jelly by straining gloop through old tights./ in the bathtub.” The best poems are informed and energised by doubling – “Suddenly there were two words for everything – //window and fuinneog, door and doras, Alvy and Ailbhe.” (In Other Words) – words represent the shifting, unsafe ground of the poet’s childhood – “We hid ourselves in cupboards, trees, the eaves of attics,/ backs pressed against walls … moving watchfully …, instincts finely tuned to the way/ air moved through our parents”. Or in the way the painful past informs the present through the dynamics between poet and the girl “scrubbing her wounds from my knees … One of us held on, one of us faltered … One of us spoke/ and, speaking, found she could not say,/ Is this your river flooding my throat?/Is this your thunder cracking my chest?”.
