Littoral Press (Lavenham 2022). Pbk 92 pages £9.
Back Country is Kathleen McPhilemy’s fourth collection of poetry, a distillation of twelve years of writing. Born and brought up in Belfast the author has also lived in London and Oxford where, retired from teaching, she now runs online poetry readings and produces a poetry blog and podcasts, a recent example featuring Sofia’s own editor as poet and translator.
In a recent review McPhilemy explored the suggestion that young Northern Irish poets might be regressive, if not exploitative, in continuing to write about the Troubles. On the contrary, she concludes that the province is so steeped in the experience, so conscious of being ‘not safe’, that for poets to turn their backs on the subject would constitute ‘bad faith’. Certainly this book does not shrink from that sense of darkness and vulnerability where questions of perceived identity become matters of life and death. ‘How long does it take’, she asks in the opening poem, ’till history settles/like old tombstones in a grey landscape’? There is little romanticism here: hills have their secrets but, she says, starkly, ‘so do the abattoirs’. The ‘bright abstractions of ancient tales’ says the poem ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ ‘occlude the festering histories inside’ and the title poem, ‘Back Country’ calls out the hard men of ‘the later darkness’, their few words and ‘what they leave behind/under the tarpaulin’.
For McPhilemy identity is problematic and not abstract but personal: she has been ‘gone too long’, ‘never from here’ in the minds of some who ‘know who you are (even if you don’t)’. She identifies with those who are displaced, although for her such a lost identity might be only the loss of vowel sounds rather than trying to survive ‘reduced/to the status of a slowwitted child’ in a foreign-speaking country. ‘Coming or going’ explores the sense of otherness, of those ‘not like us’ from images of exhausted mothers on the beach to girls plotting to join Isis (‘why not heroic?’ in their epic journey of misplaced idealism). We cannot penetrate their inner lives, will never fully understand. ‘Half way’ treats the refugee experience in the language of the perennial travelling child’s question ‘When will we get there?’ With reference, presumably, to refugees stranded in places like the Calais camps, the poet asks with compassion, ‘What kind of answer is “Half Way”?’
Those who are victims of injustice and suffering are damaged by their experiences: anyone who ‘learns the language of darkness/becomes a creature of darkness’. ‘Orestes’ takes this further: ‘a day of light and trust’ becomes ‘just sentimental’. Dread, including the dread of complete loss of language, is never far away. Will language fail us, or we fail language ‘like some terrible exam/that passes us as human’? We look after such people ‘with careful terror’ for our own potential futures. Living in existential dread of dementia and of other lurking terrors, like rogue viruses or catastrophic climate change, security is only ‘uncomfortably/perched on the moment’.
Nevertheless, life, vivacity and kindness make their way through. In ‘Catching our Breath’ the poet rails against the lies of government and ‘engines of capitalism’ during the pandemic but also sees the goodness of people and acts of kindness everywhere, including the opportunity to bring social justice for the carers, packers, drivers and cleaners who saw us through. Will recognition for these people happen? ‘Probably not’, is the conclusion.
In the natural world, too, creatures are threatened by human development but find ways to survive, occasionally with human assistance to these ‘blameless collaterals’, be it tunnels for toads or safety corridors for hedgehogs. The right to survive, to belong somewhere, extends to non-native species like the green parakeet. In ‘Noisy Squawkers’, a delightful parallel with the more serious exploration of what it is to be a refugee, the poet yearns for rarer native species like the corncrake or kingfisher. However, despite her sense that they are out of place with their ‘raucous blather’, she wishes for these birds, too, the right to remain and belong:
Let them stay like the rabbit and grey squirrel configure our landscape become unremarkable.
Such wise and sympathetic empathy exemplifies this accessible and accomplished collection.
Kathryn Southworth is a former vice-principal of Newman University College in Birmingham. Recent publications are her poetry collection Someone was Here (Indigo Dreams, Beaworthy, 2018) and her pamphlet, A Pure Bead, a sequence on Virginia Woolf (Paekakariki Press, London 2021).