In States, his fourth collection, Ciaran Berry offers poems that are attentive to the cinema of the moment and the film that becomes the life. They meditate on everything from the blockbuster to the B-movie, and there’s the footage from the author’s own life, offering an encounter with the increasingly dis-United States, where he has now lived for more than a quarter of a century, and with an Ireland he recognizes more and more only through memory. Often we find him in transit, looking down on clouds during a transatlantic flight or driving his newborn son home through the snows of Connecticut. What does it mean to be an alien of any kind?, he asks.
High-stepping between giddiness and gravity, in long lines that work to bridge the gap between now and then, and here and there, these poems also consider what it means to live on this fraught planet as it spins anti-clockwise at roughly a thousand miles per hour, and where it seems, now more than ever, as if the funfair has ended and the disaster movie has just begun.
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Ciaran Berry’s States is a more widely conflicted and dramatic creature, all the poems stitched tightly into a large Amish quilt of American anxieties – though Dublin-born with Galway and Donegal connections, Berry has made an American life of his adulthood, teaching at the exclusive Trinity College in Connecticut. He tries to make sense of being an ‘Alien’ in a land that always seemed like family territory to Irish people (after all, quarter of the officers in Washington’s Continental Army were born in Ireland, his officer list reads like the Army List of King James at the Battle of the Boyne).
In complex, meditative narratives and odysseys Berry outlines how he ended up in Queens, how he cinematically gets ‘lost in the spectacle and miss the allegory.’ He is where Marilyn Monroe’s white dress rises in a rush of air, where he’s watching French films in ‘our fifth-floor walk-up on Amsterdam and 106th, where he is immersed in ‘that horde of Darkseekers’ in more ways than one. His 100-page States is both photography and myth-breaking, a collection that will repay much re-reading; a full summer-long of reading.
— Thomas McCarthy, Poetry & Writing
Ciaran Berry’s new collection States operates “in the long shadow of the sarcophagus”, full of rollicking, end-of-days energy, “The funfair is over; now it’s the disaster movie”.
He tends towards a long line and heavy verbiage; these are poems full to the brim in all manner of ways. The writing is allusive and strip-lit – Berry mines his life, his shelves, his back pages and film collection, making cross-connections with pop culture and memory, “Once more I play charades/with Mnemosyne”.
He writes of living in the United States, the changes and erasures wrought by its endlessly changing skyline, its rupturing politics and slide towards chaos. He quotes Bernard Malamud, “In New York who/needs an atom bomb?/If you walked away from a place they tore it down”, but the threat of atomisation is never far from his own mind, either.
The apocalyptic atmosphere seems one that’s been willed on, or at least one in which the narrator of I Am Legend can feel retrospectively complicit – “yet isn’t this/what we really wanted all along, what with our weapons stockpiles/and our zombie flicks? We, who thought we were more than a blip//in the fourteen billion years of this universe?”
Berry revels in the B-movie trappings of urban detritus, a life as “low-budget affair/where the uncanny has us under siege” but isn’t entirely given over to accepting the unravelling spectacle, taking time out at still, small moments to state – as if from another book – “Turns out we loved our small lives after all”.
He can edge towards prosiness at times, due to pile-ups of thoughts and modern signifiers tumbling over each other, and occasionally strains to make his disparate strands cohere, “when/he says vagus I hear Vegas,/which sets me going like a slot machine”, but his verve usually compensates for the odd misfire in this firework display of a book.
— Declan Ryan, The Ticket, (The Irish Times)
Prizes
Winner of a Pushcart Prize for ‘Circus, Fire’ from States (2025)
Book Information
Publication date: 22 May 2025
Details: 104pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91133 896 3
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91133 897 0
Cover: ‘Reflection’ by Catherine Barron, acrylic ink on sheet metal
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