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Tenant
is
a narrative sequence, following the fictional O'Sullivan family
through the traumatic famine years, 1845 to 1849. The main character
is Rena, whose personal journey through the period represents the
shock, struggle, devastation and dubious resolution through death
that marked the time. Her father, Peadar, is also central to the
story and his inability to blossom in his life is another kind of
hunger. From the first, these poems were an attempted retrospective
incarnation, a transporting backwards of characters who are also
recognisable now. It involved opening the ear to their voices and
to the voices of the terrain, inner and outer. Change in style as
the story progresses marks in its own way the passage from innocence
to knowledge and the two-faced redemption of historical time.
 Maighread
Medbh was born in Newcastle West, Co. Limerick. Following
the birth of her other poetry collection, The Making of a Pagan
(Blackstaff Press 1990), she has worked mainly in performance
poetry with several TV appearances and gigs nationwide and in
Great Britain. Her poems have been published in several anthologies
including The Virago Book of Wicked Verse; Ireland's Women: Writings
Past and Present; I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine (Viking);
and several others. In 1998, she came second in the Nora Fahy
Literary Awards and won Dublin's first Poetry Slam, to gain the
title 'Bard of Temple Bar'. 'Mor' was one of the poems she recited
for that contest.
A
Poem from
Tenant
by MAIGHREAD MEDBH
Threshold
no
matter how broken
the ground will transport me
through lashings of colour to light that consumes me
holes in my body and all of them gaping
to haul in the bleeding / to heave out the blocking
the rocking is starting / i'm shaking and spitting
my head is split sideways too rough for my sleeping
a roar from my chest and the singing removes me
eyes thinning out and my soul staring down me
the prince of my bed-foot is streaming around me
he's waited through days for the chance to embrace me
we're rushing through spirals of picture and sounding
and feelings too free for a flesh understanding
through flurries / through battles
through love-making / haggles / hassles
hauling / bleeding / screaming / smoking thatch
the withering / cloud / crowds
thinning eyes
i rise
©
Copyright Maighread Medbh, 1999
PRAISE
FOR "TENANT"
"Known as a fierce and vital slam poet ('The Bard of Temple Bar'),
this generous and carefully structured volume is less a collection
than a series of monologues. Increasingly vivid and metaphorical,
it interconnects the experience of the blight itself and subsequent
familial destruction through the eyes of Rena O'Sullivan from
1845 to 1849. Medbh avoids sentiment and portentousness. Balancing
form and idiom, she uses poetry for what poetry does best - invention,
discursiveness, the many voices - while side-stepping cacophony.
The highlight is 'Mor', the uncompromising god of "small things
that think themselves Big". " Poetry Ireland Review No. 64,
2000
"It
(Tenant) is incredibly enthralling and moving. It brings to light
the cold facts of the years 1845-1849, the injustices, the hopes
that were dashed as year after year passed, the weak half-hearted
efforts of the British Government to alleviate the famine, and
the futile attempts at retaliation by the "boys". When I read
these poems, I was "living" through the famine, and it became
so personal at one stage that it brought tears to my eyes. The
language is beautiful and sometimes reminiscent of Seamus Heaney
or Patrick Kavanagh." Cathy Breen, Women's News, February 2000,
Issue 111
'In
her second collection, Medbh offers a linked series of dramatic
monologues that casts us into the historic cauldron of Irish pain
-- the Hunger, the famine of the 1840s. Unlike other such collections,
which seem only accidentally to be poetry rather than prose fiction,
Tenant is less novellike than dreamlike. Sharp, intense scenes
and incantatory inner dialogue emanate an aura of despair and
dizzy need. Not all the poems toughly depict deprivation. Even
during the Hunger, families like Medbh's O'Sullivans enjoyed moments
of beauty and pleasure, of singing and holding one another; but
Medbh's sensuous poems about such events serve to highlight the
harshness of ultimate loss. Her clean, tensile lines shock us
awake: 'I'm important,' says her heroine Rena as she dies, 'I'm
the centre too... I slice myself in several parts / and constitute
a flower.' Medbh doesn't spare us or herself in this fierce, strong
book. -- Patricia Monaghan, BOOKLIST, USA
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