Review: "Femininity, family, pilgrims and pagans" by Selina Guinness, The Irish Times, Saturday January 9th 2010
THE PUBLICATION of
Long-Distance Swimmer marks the completion of Dorothy Molloy's oeuvre , as announced by her widower, Prof Andrew Carpenter, in his preface to this third collection.
Reading Molloy can be a strangely anachronistic experience, not just because her three collections have been published posthumously. Her themes recall Plath's Ariel; women tend to swim against a gynecological under-tow in both poets' work. Where Plath's psychodrama negotiates the father, Molloy's negotiates the mother; where Plath has Lazarus, Christ and the Tarot, Molloy has saints, icons, and herbalism; Molloy's familiars are her cats and dogs, Plath's are crows and bees. These comparisons may appear crude, yet Molloy's vocabulary too springs from Plath's era: "tennis club hops", "fizz and pop" and "hocus-pocus" appear in poetry where the loss of innocence is usually sudden and brutal. With rhymes such as "commet / dammit", "neck / heck" and nursery-rhyme metres, Molloy's cautionary tales (often set in Spain and France where she spent much of her early adulthood) are rarely subtle but they can be intensely effective, particularly when her narrative has a contemplative focus as in this alliterative game:
We have lost our bearings
in this atrium of leaf, branch,
twig and trunk.
We cannot find the star-blaze
where the six paths meet. Behold,
I send you forth with your beloved
son. Blinded,
I wait till you disappear over the brink. (Tinderbox)
Several poems in this collection reprise others elsewhere but Molloy has been well-served by her editors; few read as drafts. A forthcoming study by Dr Gonzales Arias should shed light on the recurring stories in her work.
Review: Books Ireland No. 317, December 2009
Very sadly, Dorothy Molloy died a few years ago, ten days before the
publication of her first book. Since then another posthumous volume has
appeared and what we are no considering is a final assembly of her
poems. By the way, Molloy was also a painter of note as I can attest
from visiting her memorial exhibition. We are lucky to have her poems
preserved and Long-distance Swimmer
is a delight from start to finish. Above all Molloy is an elegant
writer, a term some may mistakenly equate with superficial as if truth
lies in crudeness. Her elegance is grace, her ability to be playful and
serious simultaneously, to recognise the profound in the casual. Keats
was not the only poet to be half in love with death, which has been
linked as a theme in a triad completed by love and the passage of
seasons as comprising the wellsprings of poetry. She is in fact nearer
to that other rightly renowned Romantic, Shelley, in that many of her
poems presage or imply the end of things. We cannot date the
composition of all these poems but whether they are from the time of
her illness (as a number must) or much earlier is not really the point;
what matters is how they evoke
timor mortis,
the gaping grave. The famous definition of courage as grace under
pressure is displayed to perfection here. Molloy lived for a while in
Spain and one of her poems here, more a celebration than an elegy,
evokes or rather unravels the life of Lorca, the clues being his first
name Federico and the death knell of his assassination. Other poems
capture the chilly stateliness of England's Gothic cathedrals or dwell
on early Irish saints. But Molloy's poems are never quite what they
seem, they reveal their secrets slowly while never seeking shelter in
gratuitous obscurity. They demand and warmly repay rereading. To echo
Auden, the Irish vessel is drained once more of poetry with the passing
of Dorothy Molloy.
Review: First Flush in Books Ireland No. 316, November 2009
The late Dorothy Molloy was born in Ballina, county Mayo, in 1942. After studying languages in UCD she went to Spain and spent some years there. As journalist and arts administrator, she won prizes for her painting. In 1979 she returned to live in Ireland where she also took up poetry. Her first collection, Hare Soup, was published posthumously in 2007 by Faber as she died of cancer before it went to print. Among her papers were found enough material for two other collections which have been collated by her husband, Andrew Carpenter. The second, Gethsemane Day, was published by Faber, while the third and final collection - Long-distance Swimmer - has been undertaken by Salmon. Like her other collections, the poems reflect her experiences in Spain and Ireland. This makes the poems personal but they deal with themes that we can all relate to as they are the stuff of everyones life from family, friends and love to death, loss and memory. She writes with passion but her poems have a light side too as in "Carlitos Gonzalez Martinez makes a desperate bid for freedom" about her attempts to give a pudgy teenager some exercise.
