Polina Cosgrave’s Cargo pins its colours to the mast with a Hannah Arendt epigraph “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and … perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political forces.” In Apologies, the unworldliness of Cosgrove’s love for her daughter is disarming, fresh and lyrical, “my daughter, enemy of all order – / not everything locked is worth opening. /… this is not for them to decide / how you use your key”.
Yet the paradox that drives all poetry is here too as the political raises its head in lines such as, “Trust me, once upon a time there was freedom / of speech, freedom of travel, freedom of thought. // Before our straitjackets got too cosy you could / leave everything open: your door, your mind, / your future, even your ripe blackberries of eyes.”
Politics and the domestic spark against each other in Future Faking as Cosgrave imagines the quotidian messy morning of an autocrat’s death in powerful prescriptive lines, “watch that heavy ball of black light leave your body … Cry along with the child at the playschool entrance, call the mechanic to fix the engine … take a bite of that burned baguette: nothing will ever taste this good again”.
The stakes of love are scarily high for Cosgrave, “I would put this evening / where I’ve always kept / the most important items. / My baby’s hospital tag …”, yet, “It can’t contain more than an eyeful of you.” Lists and repetition add up to many incantations, especially in Cargo, her strongest poem, where the stakes are raised high over the head of her sleeping child, “Every night I hear planes / flying over our house / I asked around, no one else is bothered / Every night I hear planes / flying over our house / Not once did they wake up my child / smiling in her sleep.”
— Martina Evans, The Irish Times
