Memory and Its Workings
Kevin Graham‘s contemplative and accomplished debut collection The Lookout Post uses nature—broadly conceived— to great effect, yet it is especially preoccupied with bodies of water. Braiding together life and death, many of these poems represent thought, memory, and experience in relation to the aquatic, which is element, symbol, and metaphor all at once. The metapoetical opener, “How to Use This Poem,” traces “a river without a name” to the sea, where “you’ll be able to take this page, hold it level // with the horizon and examine it for mistakes.” In the beautiful seven-part sea poem “Exeunt,” the water is personified as confidant: “The black-winged water listens, little waves / sewn with broken light tha tbuild / before dissolving under night’s victory.” Elsewhere, the very notion of time is construed, sensorily, in maritime terms “Concentrate then on the salty taste / of here and now, how it shores // up the past and makes the future / blush” (“Meanwhile”).
In multiple poems, Graham shows himself a consummate elegist. The poignant “Science Fiction” typifies dying as a process that can engender an unusual sense of intimacy: caring for a loved one in extremis, the speaker comes to “know[ ] him / like a mother.” Straining to express the peculiar tension between the visceral materiality of the dying body and the ethereal nature of memory, the speaker (inevitably?) turns to aquatic imagery:
There is only the trace
of memory and the nervous river
bubbling over with anxiety.
I lean over and kiss his forehead
clammy as the morning we woke
to swim the breakers.
There are other striking elegies, such as “The Knack,” which characterizes its subject, an unnamed former classmate, with a splendid simile: “quiet as a horseless / field.” Particularly fine also is the gothic “There, There” with its universalizing grief for “the innumerable loved ones / you cherish like rain,” articulated through beautifully fierce images: “the sun rising like a fist.”
Such acts of memory are interspersed with more joyous poems about themes such as family life and love – and even a nicely observed poem about footballer Zinedine Zidane’s preternatural talent (“Zizou”). The winsome “Poem for Oscar with Stars in It” channels the delight of a young child discovering the splendors of the world around him and trialing his emergent lexicon: “all the wonder // the world hopes you never lose, and say again— / in a voice that leaves before you know it— star.” Presenting as a nature poem, “Pace” is a love letter that recounts a canoe trip in the Rockies, imagining how the speaker and his wife, still “swimming in the glow of wedding / each other,” will soon become parents – a theme picked up in “Sons and Daughters,” which explores young fatherhood: “When you cry my blood / stops, everything points true north / and I’m working on love and love // alone.”
Thematically resonant, this poem also exhibits the poet’s knack for effective line breaks, and indeed one of the main attractions of The Lookout Post are its formal features. One traditional form that particularly appeals to Graham is the sonnet, sometimes adhered to quite strictly, as in “Drunk” or the title poem, but also used more loosely, as in the sequence “Sketches: After Van Gogh” (drawing on the painter’s letters), which eschews end rhyme, instead using other forms of sound patterning, including assonance and alliteration, to structure its meditations on emotion, art, memory, and time. Offering well-crafted examinations of lived experience as well as death, and sifting through the sediments both leave in memory, The Lookout Post is an assured debut displaying a considerable sense of poetic maturity.
Like Graham’s The Lookout Post, Sydney- based poet Audrey Molloy’s powerful second collection The Blue Cocktail is a briny affair. Here, too, water figures, among other things, as the elemental double of memory. In a sense, Molloy’s collection is that most Irish of things, an exile’s lament. Ferrying between Ireland and Australia, the collection asks how you can know who you are when you “find you can never explain the idea of home, / meaning so much and so little” (“Ideas of Home”). Though this is of course a familiar theme, Molloy’s well-judged aquatic metaphors gives it an original spin: “the water is brackish, / not one thing nor another—the emigrant’s curse” (“At Bottle and Glass Point”). Transitioning between land and water, “Learning to Swim” is ostensibly a paean to North Sydney Olympic Pool—yet though “everyone is here to swim, / […] this is not a poem about swimming.” The speaker is “unsure / of my element,” but finally emerges “amphibious”—an apt metaphor for the emigrant’s condition.
Many of these poems are attempts at becoming rooted and fixating a sense of self. The metaphor of rootedness is literalized in the sensuous poem “That Spring, You Plant a Lemon Tree”: “After all this time, nothing fits / properly”, except “the gloves of sunwarmed soil / your hands sliding into them to ground your body.” Removing them from the nourishing earth, they are “newborn.” In turn, something of the speaker is implanted in the lemon tree, “so that no-one / can say you died when you shine on / in the yellow fruit, a nascent star.”
The collection offers many such lovely images, phrases, and ideas. In the powerful “Mackerel Panic,” a kiss is described as “that smallest of retaliations.” “The Rule of Twelfths” observes that “life, or poetry, or love, can catch you / unprepared, expecting things to happen / linearly, not clumped, like dates or buses”—moreover showing that though the self-explorations in The Blue Cocktail are serious, they are not invariably solemn. There is a ready wit on display here,particularly in a number of poems about being a young woman in twentieth-century Ireland. In “Rare Bird,” the speaker shares her memory of a failed hook-up. Afterwards, “you saw him, // from time to time, always from afar […] // He was a twin, so you couldn’t swear to his name / though you could certainly narrow it down.”
Like Graham, Molloy writes beautifully about family and love. She is invested in the physicality of romance, as in the slightly risqué “What I Love,” but the way she expresses the emotional properties of love is particularly compelling. In the final stanza of “A Legacy to Seven Men I’ve Loved,” the speaker bequeaths to her “Great Love” “a radio—a crystal set / of galena and copper — atuned to eternity,” the sonic mirroring in the final phrase enhancing its message. “Notes on Naming” offers a tender articulation of maternal love through the symbolism of naming. The speaker tells her daughter how her own mother decided to break the “line of eldest daughters / all named Hannah”: “Grace eats her orange, slice by slice. She asks / what does Hannah mean? I tell her // Hannah means favour. It means grace.”
Here then is where home can be found: in family and love. In the similarly anecdotal penultimate poem, motherhood literally domesticates the speaker, who realizes that her life is now fully shaped by both the needs of her children and the joys they provide: “She takes my charcoal and loose paper, / draws a stick woman and three stick children. // […] I’m no longer lush. I am a stick, a twig, / kindling for their fire” (“Stick Woman”). This is home, even if the price is full surrender. Yet this too, as The Blue Cocktail illustrates, can be transmuted into graceful art.
In his third collection, Swans We Cannot See, Andrew Jamison is also drawn to the literary potentialities of parenthood. These are clever and frequently humorous poems, often combining memory and anecdote with a more reflective mood, as in the pram-in-the-hall poem “The Muse to the Poet after the Poet Becomes a Father.” Here, Jamison imagines his muse’s peevishness at being unceremoniously substituted with a baby: “What must I do, / what will it take to tear you away / from this new life of yours?”
There is an operative sense of irony, of course, in lamenting so eloquently the inability to write. Similar forms of gentle selfmockery inform a number of poems that grapple with the condition of being middle class. The effective “Mortgage” uses powerful imagery and a consciously labored rhyme scheme to convey the terrifying mundanity of the titular long-term financial commitment: “When I stand at the end of the garden / and the stars are out, mind clear, alone, / there’s only so long / before it rears between each constellation.” The witty but slightly less successful “To Abingdon” apostrophizes this “[q]uintessence of suburbia” in Oxfordshire, beseeching this “paradigm of the perfectly fine” to “[g]rant us nothing spectacular, console us, / in our cries for attention, with anonymity.”
The collection’s emotional heart are its poems about parenthood and family, which are full of tenderness. In some of these, the figure of the swan features centrally, for instance referencing Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Le cygne” from Le Carnival des Animaux. In the first poem, “Listening to ‘The Swan’,” this composition becomes a complex symbol of fatherhood: “in the car on the way home you say / daddy play the swan but I can’t because / I’m driving so you doo-doo the opening notes.” Later, the child put to bed, “I’m talking about swans we have seen / and swans we cannot see, playing the music again.” In “Badminton Water Fight in the Garden, January,” the speaker considers how fatherhood has changed him: “who says you can’t play badminton / in the garden with your son in January.” Elsewhere, the speaker observes how the child embodies his parents’ relationship, “all of the time / correcting us with insouciance”: “He resembles me at times; at times, you” (“Portrait of Our Son Running Amok at Blenheim Palace”).
The collection features a number of longer poems that broadcast a strong sense of literary ambition. In “J M Synge in Crossgar, 2022,” the titular writer is transported to a twenty-first-century village in Co. Down where he encounters strange signs of modernity, such as a “shop entitled ‘SPAR’, illuminated with innumerable electric lights,” vaping teens, and smart phones. Yet while the poem contains some enjoyable observations and images, its Martian conceit and conception of Synge’s voice did not quite work for me.
The collection’s centerpiece, “A Short History of the Potato,” is strong for the way it conveys familial memory through its discussion of the tuber’s culinary uses. A central anecdote relates the speaker’s trip to Dublin with his father to watch the rugby, “eating chips and waiting / […] early because they were afraid of being late, / the son oblivious to the memory happening to him.” Such recollections, however, are intertwined with a rather formulaic summary of the potato’s role in (Ireland’s) colonial history (though perhaps as a scholar of the Famine I’m simply too jaded regarding for this poem). The conclusion, though, deftly intertwines the two strands, offering a persuasive aperçu regarding Irish history: “this family who’ve taken their place / at the stretch or starve table of history, / the table of history where it must follow / that history is a history of the potato.”
By contrast, the sequence that concludes the collection, “Death of an Artisan,” is highly successful throughout. A paean to good bread and artisanal creation, it relates the speaker’s “teenage summer job” at an oldschool French bakery governed by “timelessness over trendiness.” The speaker’s boulangerial Bildung culminates in an explicitly metapoetic gesture: “these words left like semolina on the tray / when the loaf’s ready, been lifted away.” Such reflections on the process of creation underscore Jamison’s dedication to his craft. Indeed, while Swans We Cannot See is somewhat uneven, many of these poems are striking explorations of parenthood, love, and the poetic uses of language.
All three of these collections have noteworthy things to say about memory and its workings—or, in Molloy’s words, “the way some things are more defined in fading light” (“An Old Man Then Is an Old Man Now”). Their representations of parenthood and love are similarly accomplished, and all three collections skilfully transform anecdote into art—though Graham, Molloy, and Jamison each render the poetry inherent in the everyday in their own appealing ways.
— Christopher Cusack, Radboud University, Irish Literary Supplement, Spring 2025
