OF LATE, it has been in vogue for male publishers to publish young women poets. Some people think this has something to do with feminism. However, male publishers tend to be less interested in emerging woman poets over 40 – an age when many women, having raised families, begin seriously writing poems.
Both Attracta Fahy and Mary Madec are poets who lived full lives before they began publishing poems. Fahy’s debut, Dinner In The Fields, is published by innovative UK small press Fly On The Wall, while Madec’s third collection, The Egret Lands With News From Other Parts, was brought into the world by Jessie Lendennie’s Salmon Poetry - a press which puts the rest of Irish poetry publishing to collective shame when it comes to platforming alternative voices.
Attracta Fahy is the poet Sylvia Plath might have been, if Plath had grown up in the rural west of Ireland, and not had the huge educational advantages she did. One thing Fahy shares with Plath is an ability to come up with opening lines which take the reader hostage and don’t let you go until you’ve read the whole poem.
‘The Woman in Waterside House’ starts with “I have no reason to trust sympathy”. ‘Red’ kicks off memorably with “After her father’s death she needed/a new bag”. Another Plath-like trait at work in Fahy’s poetry is the way she presents the reader with the world as it is, rather than as they might wish it. ‘Enduring Utopia’ brings us inside the mind of someone with an eating disorder in a way that is as frightening as it is impressive: “I cannot tell you, as you come/towards me with your large/platter of nourishment, I am/terrified it will eat me”.
What I most admire about Fahy’s poetry is its gothic mercilessness. In ‘The Priest Said’ she writes: “There was nothing dignified/about my father’s death./He drowned in a slurry pit. It was a cold wet Saturday/evening in March...”
The egret in the title of Mary Madec’s collection represents newness and hope. The bird only began nesting in Ireland in 1997. The narrator in Madec’s poem feels the egret has been sent to make her face an unnamed existential crisis: “What I didn’t know then/hops out like a harlequin from behind the hedges,/mocks me on these lonely walks”.
Like Fahy, Madec makes her poetry out of the messy stuff that happens. ‘Fragile’ is a beautiful in memoriam for a broken marriage. ‘This is the Place We Enter the River’ looks at the possibilities of new love: “where the pearl of great price/glistens like a salmon’s eye/waiting for us to find that love is deeper still/like a bedrock we might never reach/in this life time.” In this book Mary Madecproves herself to be a poet of exquisite honesty at the peak of her powers.
