Review: Anchored by Lorna Shaughnessy reviewed by Kevin Higgins for The Galway Advertiser, Thurs 7th January, 2016
Anchored is the third collection Shaughnessy has published with Salmon. It is, to be polite about it, an absurdity that her work has not received more widespread critical attention and the audience which would come with that. In particular, it is incredible her work was not considered for inclusion in the somewhat notorious, Cork dominated, by invitation only, recent special Irish issue of US based magazine Poetry. But it is their loss, and a symptom of that magazine’s decline. A major theme she interrogates here, in poems such as ‘The Dark Topography’, is the undercurrent of loss running not very far beneath the surface of Northern Ireland’s patched together peace: “There is a country known only to the bereaved of that time,/a place not seen through the car windows of passers-by…”
Formal and structural experiments mark out the latest work of two Belfast poets
Most poets learn their trade by using “forms”: to write a sonnet, or a poem written in regular stanzas, is a sign of having studied the art and the ways in which line breaks and rhythms can generate interesting sounds and tones. Poets soon develop characteristic ways of turning a line, or stopping a poem, or reaching for image and metaphor. Then, formal choices act less like a vessel the poet fills and more like a divining rod or prospecting tool that poets use to bring them to the places they will find their material. But the material – historical, autobiographical, philosophical – will be altered and, the poet hopes, brought to poetic life by the way it has been mined. Sometimes, though, the formal choice, the sonnet or the stanza, is so insistently present that the reader may see hardly anything else in the poem.
... Belfast native, Lorna Shaughnessy, lives and works in Galway, and her third collection, Anchored (Salmon, €12), is comprised of five sequences. The book’s long central section, ‘The Injured Past’, recounts a series of well-known incidents and places from the Troubles as it attempts to tell its story of murder and bereavement and remembering. The material has been the subject of so much writing and film-making that Shaughnessy’s poems call to mind her poet predecessors as much as the events, as when The Chosen (January 1976) begins:
He thought he’d breathed his last
when they asked his religion
And told him to step forward.
A workmate’s hand urged caution
but they hadn’t come for him.
But Shaughnessy’s poems do fresh imaginative work as well; they do not set out just to record what happened, and this sequence’s closing poem sets up intriguing images: “Behind us, / the words we have left on the shore / like ownerless clothes. // Before the heave to the other side, / terra firma, the hope of a new tongue, / the anchored tug and its cargo.” (The Crossing)
Anchored is a disparate book: other sections retell the story of Iphigenia, or focus on music and musicians, while illness is the subject of the section ‘The Dual Citizen’. Taxol, for example, turns illness into a striking story, ending “I am yew-burnt, / yew-red, new”.
And the book’s first poem, Crystal, begins with an image which thinks carefully about the difficulties of finding the right form for a poem: “The blower adds breath to heat, / turns and blows within the mould / until he finds precise form.” Fourteen lines long, the poem’s closing lines discover that “Mistakes pile up / waiting for the furnace, / a second chance, / instability anchored / by the weight of lead.”
John McAuliffe’s fourth book is The Way In, published by Gallery Press. He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester
