MARY MULLEN was born in Anchorage, Alaska but has lived in Ballinderreen, Co Galway, for more than a decade. She has read her work at the Cúirt Over The Edge showcase and is a graduate of the MA in writing at NUIG.
I was familiar with Mary’s poetry before I opened her new collection Zephyr (Salmon Poetry ) and began to read. Her poems are full of everyday things. Her native Alaska features in the fine coming of age poem ‘Alaskan Summer Rite, 1969’.
There is a heartfelt poem about the birth of her daughter, Lily was born with Down Syndrome and who came into this world a few hours after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
The witty ‘Lilyisms, 2006’ is proof that poetry is not usually to be found up there in the clouds, where some go in search of it, but down here in the things people actually say: “We took a walk on the Green Road,/below us in a field I saw black cows./They looked like peppers waiting to be chopped.”
In ‘Lemon’ Mullen shows she is capable of a bit of poetic savagery when necessary: “We sped along in smothering rain; I talked of his wife.//As predicted, he whispered, “Can I ride you sometime?”/DON’T TALK TO ME LIKE THAT.//Insult crept over me like crude oil in salt water./His wife was happy to see him.”
Zephyr is smartly produced with a striking cover image by Aoife Casby.
Hands Moving at the Speed of Falling Snow (Salmon Poetry ) is the imaginative title of the debut collection by Galway native Aideen Henry.
Salmon has a reputation for producing stylish books but here, Salmon exceeds even its own usual high standards. The colour photographs by Carmel Cleary, arranged throughout the book’s 10 sections, have an intriguing beauty.
I first met Aideen Henry when she joined one of the poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre four years ago. Bad poets tend to mistake constructive criticism for personal attack; Aideen always knew that feedback from others is a poet’s best friend when it comes to making each poem the best it can be.
The result is a collection of poetry with hardly a superfluous word. Its pages are strewn with lines which are memorable because you’ve read nothing quite like them before; such as the first two lines of ‘Buttress’: “I wonder how the bed feels/about having me all to itself”, or the opening of ‘Parental Guidance (PG )’: “What happens if there is a bomb in your belly,/Mommy?”
Where others would inflate their language, and bluster; Henry is clinical. In ‘Kissing Cousins’ she zooms in on childhood with a rare lack of sentiment. ‘Over And Back’, ‘On The Couch’, ‘Hairshirt’, and ‘Femme Fatale Speaks’ are unsettling in the way the best poems always are.
They drip with menace and loss and intelligence and confirm that Aideen Henry has no more emerging to do as poet. She has arrived.
