What Remains the Same was Shortlisted for the 2025 Farmgate National Poetry Award
In Alvy Carragher’s compelling new collection, What Remains the Same, journeys are strivings to escape. Rooms hold ‘the shadow / of an old home, another country’ while, in the book’s title poem, a young woman ‘must swallow pain, remain silent. / This is the shape of her life.’ History hounds the writer’s heels and ancient hurts return as she searches for a voice and for forgiveness.
These poems contain a gamut of emotions — from the kindness of a stranger on an aeroplane to ‘Aftermath’ in which a character ‘wanted to hurt him’. In work that tells ‘the whole house deaf / to what it was that went on / in the rooms of its daughters’ What Remains the Same is a distressing book. But through the illumination of dark passages in her own and in our country’s woes Alvy Carragher, in poems touched by something like love, presents a tale of survival and a guiding light.
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?”.
— Martina Evans, The Irish Times
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Prizes
Shortlisted for the 2025 Farmgate Café Poetry Prize.
Alvy Carragher is a recipient of Poetry Ireland’s 2025 Eavan Boland Award.
Reviews
Fairy-tale tropes prove to be valuable tools for examining the bruised family in Alvy Carragher’s What Remains the Same (Gallery €12.99). “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?”.
— Martina Evans, The Irish Times
Alvy Carragher’ s third collection, What Remains the Same, starts with a rupture. ‘Split’ reads like a gut punch, opening brazenly·
I dreamt of the girl day after day
of scrubbing her wounds from my knees,
of walking her to the astounded mouth of the sea,
a ghost in my clenched fist, the river thundering
as she slipped from my body so cleanly
. . . This is a book about familial relationships told through ‘the rooms of its daughters’, interested in how domestic tensions are reflective of the country outside them. The Irish language, for example, is also framed as a question of split personality, as demonstrated in ‘In Other Words’· ‘Suddenly there were two words for everything- window and fuinneog, door and doras, Alvy and Ailbhe. Time and time again, Carragher reminds readers of all the circumstances that split us in two.
. . . The poems are not so much about fixing what’s broken, as providing a refuge-of temporary relief, a space to make sense of that which is not so easily repaired.
. . . Attentive to the intensity of the domestic, What Remains the Same is an important, if disquieting, read. At times, the speaker surprises even herself with her capacity to move through difficult things, as in Aftermath’· ‘Nobody prepares you for your own strength, it sits on your shoulders, muttering accusations. Ultimately, this is a hopeful collection, even if what it offers is a kind of tempered hope.
— Ellen Orchard, Poetry Ireland Review
Book Information
Publication date: 18 April 2024
Details: 88pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91133 876 5
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91133 877 2
Cover: ‘Orange Blossom’ (2019) by Michael Kane
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