FALLING IN Love With Broken Things, Alvy Carragher's debut collection, is exceptional in one crucial respect; first collections are typically a gathering together of a poet's best work over the previous five or six years, so tend toward thematic looseness.
However, from the “sliced oranges/so bitter/they made us cry” of its opener, to the film “credits [that] always come too soon,/leave me questioning everything”, of the collection’s closing poem, Falling In Love With Broken Things, is a coming of age narrative.
It is also a book which literary grumps - of the late middle aged male persuasion - should probably avoid as it is full of that thing: youth, which, like most things, is not what it was in his day when he used to hang around with a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot poking out of his back pocket in the hope someone might punch him - so then at least he could be sure he existed.
Falling In Love With Broken Things should at all times be kept safely out of reach of such gentlemen as reading it may, in certain cases, prove fatal and euthanasia (voluntary or otherwise ) is still technically illegal.
Carragher is a witty poet with an at times refreshingly light almost pop-art style. ‘Confession’, which opens “he gave me three Hail Marys,/even though I couldn’t remember/any sins to tell him and relied solely/on things I’d read in Dennis the Menace”, reminded me of my own first confession when, like most seven-year-olds, I had a similar lack of actual sins. There are some exquisite moments in the long poem ‘In memory of Granny in Galway’: "The young woman she became at the dance hall,/flitting through the hands of young men,/finding granddad in his red plait suit/and teaching him to smile/one strong cup of tea at a time."
When our grandparents die it somehow hits home that they were once young. The grief in Carragher’s poem, beautifully expressed in excruciating, but necessary detail, is a younger person’s grief - death the unfamiliar. She is, as she should be, more concerned with life, as in the fine poem ‘I imagine you saying’: "She is more than the red dress,/even though it broke up an evening/like nothing mattered but removing it."
In the title poem, the narrator admits to being in love with imperfection: “ripped jeans or old toys or cakes baked a little sideways”. A love of imperfection will surely serve Carragher well as she works on the always difficult second collection, for it is something of which the world never runs out.
‘Numb’, narrated from the point of view of a survivor of date rape, is a striking piece of work. Reading it, one cannot avoid the conclusion that while the so-called millennials are free of much of the sexual repression we grew up with, they have other very real problems which we did not.
