A review of The Poison Glen by Annemarie Ní Churreáin. Gallery Press (Oldcastle, Ireland 2021) Pbk. 72 pages. £10.95.
The ‘Magdalen Laundries’ scandal has thrown up a fair amount of literature. Sometimes this is totally convincing, as in the case of Claire Keegan’s novella, Small Things Like These; sometimes, no matter how powerful the imaginative empathy of the writer, there is a whiff of misery appropriation, of horror approached from the outside. In contrast, Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s collection, The Poison Glen, comes unquestionably from the inside. The poet writes from personal experience; for her, the personal is political, although she does not see herself as an activist. The personal experience, most obviously, is the fact that the poet’s father was brought up in a mother and baby home, while her parents fostered all through her childhood. She claims over 30 foster siblings. At the same time, these poems are written from the point of view of women, whether the forgotten and nameless women of the Irish underclasses or the woman of myth, Balor’s daughter Eithne, whose story is woven through these poems. In Ní Churreáin’s version, Balor, the ultimate patriarch-dictator kills two sons of his daughter, Eithne and imprisons her in a tower in the glen. The surviving son, Lugh, the god of light, shoots Balor through the eye, so that poison spills out blighting the glen in County Donegal, where the poet grew up. Bringing light to the dark history of suffering and secrecy experienced by unmarried mothers and their babies is important, but more dramatic is the conflict between the feisty daughter, Eithne, and her controlling father, Balor:
Eithne was the name we chose, and as she grew tall she had this way about her that boiled my blood.
Like a secondary school teenager, Eithne loosened her hair and rolled her skirts. In her opposition to her father, ‘the odd tooth was knocked / out of her head’ but in his view this was ‘purely horse play’, a devastating snapshot of casual male violence. The poem concludes, after Balor has drowned her babies, with the timeworn excuse, ‘was the girl not asking for it?’
These poems also expose a culture blighted by silence and secrecy, where a whole village can ignore the plight of an unmarried, pregnant girl: ‘If I were to tell you that a vigil was held – / candles lit, prayers said – // or that long beams of silver torchlight / scanned / the village in search // … I would be lying.’ In another poem, the family refuse to take back the body of a girl who dies in childbirth in the Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home: ‘The body was a symbol they would not concede.’ Ní Churreáin eschews direct political statement, but politics are implicit everywhere. There is the contrast between Christian faith and practice, as in ‘Baptism’ where the poem retells the story of a woman who was found frozen with her newborn child in the snow, who was:
every woman who kneeled alone less than two miles from the hospital, to scoop water upon the forehead of her dying child…
There are the references to institutions founded by well-meaning Anglo Irish benefactors, whether aristocrats or Quakers where the effect of colonial oppression is only implied:
Who [the Quakers] raised this house out of speckled stone as a house of refuge? And in the deep silence of failures since, what can love do?
There is the poem about Éamon de Valera, often seen as the father of the nation, himself the child of an unmarried mother, the mystery of whose origins, often romanticised, Ní Churreáin attributes firmly to the culture of secrecy and shame. Here the grandmother who reared him says: ‘The yarn his mother spun concerned a marriage / to a Spaniard who died soon after. / It was the first I heard tell of it.’
Nevertheless, this is not a book of misery and gloom. It celebrates the power of love, especially in the longer poem, ‘The Foundling Crib’, which has at its heart the story of Bridget Kearney who as a destitute mother placed her ‘newborn girl into the foundling crib’. As the poem relates, the fate of these foundling babies was rarely fortunate, ‘the best sent out to nurse, the others bound / for the infirmary // to suckle on a bottle so heavy with lily few woke…’. Yet, despite everything ‘Bridget Kearney came back, / a foundling price in her pocket, a demand on her lips’. The poem ends as Bridget sets out ‘along the bog-road home, / the child’s low breath at her collar-bone. // Together again. / Together again.’
Annemarie Ní Churreáin has integrated fragments of grief and loss, both from her own experience and what she has found through her research, as well as myth and buried histories to create a work which is beautiful and powerful.