Martina Dalton

In a bedpan

underneath my bed

a red wet thread of blood . . .

                      — ‘The Fine Line’

 

Martina Dalton’s patiently assembled first collection opens with a poem that recounts a story laden with mystery. Other poems swerve between the record of experience — there’s a ‘woman / wearing make-up // on only one side of her face’, a poem recording the shock of new birth (‘The Cord’) and another the last day outing with her father, the day she hoped ‘the sun could do without its sunset’.

The title poem invokes the wisdom of Rilke. Economical lines display finely observed details: a kingfisher ‘igniting / twig on twig’, a walking stick (her father’s?) whose ‘shadow casts its question mark’ and a kestrel ‘hanging from the sky by a thread’.

The book culminates in a series of poems set in The Black Valley of County Kerry in which the author confronts her isolation. In poems of loss and healing Midnight at the Saltmarsh bravely reveals a woman’s lived life, her needs, longings and satisfactions.