Winter Dark

Evening leaches light, parcels it up,
holds it tight. Night reverberates.
Winter’s hide grows thick
lit by the blaze of dogwood,
the silver bark of birches.
Birds fly on shortened days,
they finish early and start out late
from scarecrow trees whose leaves
have long since fallen.

The wind soughs, branches brush
dusk onto the sky. Flowers
have retreated, shed their seeds
and gone, like a magicians’ trick,
back to ground. A late rose clings on,
Erica heather turns from pink to red
in this almost night. Watery sun
cannot outshine the pale lemon slice
of moon that beacons the sky.

The hand on the sundial throws no shadow
in this low light. Colour is eclipsed
by shade. The winter beast bides its time,
it takes the air, spreads its net like tentacles,
a claw of spite. Days crawl forward
heading away from the equinox. 
A cradle song hummed in the dark
will move the season on
and spring will break —
a trove of bright.

Lovely Legs reviewed by Paul Perry, The Irish Times, Saturday May 23rd 2009

IN JEAN O’BRIEN’S third collection of poetry Lovely Legs there’s a very telling line in the poem Photographing Air . “Things are not what they seem,” O’Brien writes. And in a book with such a breezy title, bright cover and light tone throughout there’s a much more serious and complex undercurrent at work. O’Brien’s father appears in more than half a dozen poems. He is the one waking O’Brien’s “younger me” to the news of her mother’s death in When Childhood Broke . She passes his parish when lamenting her departure from Dublin, and he is the one who populates her memories and dreams. “The dead visit me in dreams”, she writes in Scandinavian Dream . The wonder and strangeness of finding oneself in “foreign fields” has created a new imaginative space for O’Brien’s moving lyrics. Her imagery can be memorable, as in Masks , where “a man stands in a field wearing a mantle / of bees”, but darkness hovers throughout. Her mother’s gold band tightens “its golden grip” on her and a poem to the poet’s daughter suggests “the kernel of death / sits under her skin”. “Thinking of lost summers”, the past is a central theme of the collection and culminates in the moving piece Before .

This is her on that green day

skirt askew, hair streaming out,

holding the ropes of the swing taut

rushing to meet her future

The poems in Lovely Legs are like “the flickering scenes we scrutinise / in the darkened room” of the final poem. O’Brien has managed to make an effecting collage of images and memories with a tone of both pathos and resilience as she tells us, “I touch the wound and walk”.

Paul Perry’s most recent book is The Orchid Keeper. He is currently writer in residence for Dún Laoghaire Rathdown public library service

Lovely Legs reviewed by James McAuley, The Irish Examiner, Monday June 22, 2009

Jean O’Brien’s accomplishments extend from this third collection of her poems to her role as writer-in-residence for Co Laois and as facilitator for creative writing classes in prisons and elsewhere.

The intensity of feeling, even while restrained by the poet’s attention to significant imagery, gives these poems strength, whether reflecting on the loss of her mother and father or recalling events which reveal how observant she was in childhood, a gift that serves her well as a poet.

Many poems describe natural events, ranging from a beekeeper with his swarm (and the queen-bee "snared in a cage under his chin") to

"Once I saw a cow nudging an inert lump of brown; moaning low she fussed the fretted circling the still calf until it stirred, moving its nut-brown just born head..."

Many more poems carry ironic undercurrents, generated by everything from social inequalities to bad weather. These witty, compassionate poems are rewarding...

This review appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, June 22, 2009

Lovely Legs reviewed by Val Nolan, Poetry Ireland Review
Issue 98, July 2009
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