What Remains the Same

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.