à la belle étoile is a blazing narrative of female self-empowerment and survival in late 1700s France – the Age of Exploration. This book-length poem sequence gives voice to a woman almost lost to history, who, through a chance encounter with a botanist, dared to carve her own space in a man’s world. Through a non-linear collage of water and land narratives, we hear the voice of Jeanne Baré as she undergoes the destabilising experience of hiding her sex, taking on tasks that require physical stamina, strength and courage, enduring exposure and assault, and collecting plants never before seen in Europe. Slipping the limited moorings of her native field and village, she voyages to exotic lands, until finally, after seven years, she returns home, becoming the first woman to have circumnavigated the world.
Praise for Afric’s earlier work
These poems are shot through with light and energy. Remarkable for the clarity of their focus, their colour and inventive language, they speak about loss and love and human predicaments with open and hopeful insight; they swoop to conclusions that surprise and satisfy.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Afric McGlinchey is an exciting and innovative poet. Her often exotic narratives and structures are distinctive in their imagery and symbol, with a deeply evocative sensitivity to landscape.
Leanne O’Sullivan
This is McGlinchey's most refined gift: meticulously applying herself to the chemistry of life, and making it evident in its minimal constituents.
Dr. Maria Luisa Vezzali
Introduction to Italian translation of Ghost of the Fisher Cat
These are charged poems...Afric McGlinchey’s words mine the pain of grief and love with an acute and affecting music.
Paul Perry
Intimate, embodied, propulsive poetry with a crisp and quick nature. I connected with it immediately. Brilliant.
Sarah Byrne
Editor, The Well Review
During the skelt
Toulon-sur-Arrox, July 1763
A twiggy-legged thing with a mouse-brown mop,
and a trowelful of freckles flung over the nose,
no one, not even a father, could have thought me beautiful
But the botanist came looking for me again, said he found me
magnetic, my eyes expressing a frank resolution
and O, my heart vaulted, face pounded with blood!
When he strayed his fingers over my fingers, splayed open
against the slender bark of a birch, for days after, my hands stayed
unwashed, to keep the scent of that moment
To nature, all living plants and creatures are valued the same,
and so I found myself saying I felt nothing
but equal to him, and he laughed that wonderful laugh again
One lie makes for a multiplication
Pacific Ocean, 1767
The crew have long been noticing that I never piss at the head
and even with the heat become hellish again,
I keep on my kersey jacket
To disguise monthly blood, I volunteer to muck out the privy,
dispose of the slops, suffer an ocean of the foulest smells,
holding my tongue so tense, its muscle quivers
At night, even with the relief of unbinding,
I draw knees to my chest, mouth dry as feathers
Though keening with fatigue, to gulp down sleep feels a weakness, a danger
Over the breaking of fast, as the gentlemen lean like fetched-up clouds
around dawn’s horizon, Philibert leaks a rumour of Ottoman Turks and a capture,
which trickles down from the Admiral’s table
By mid-morning, the secret has flown ’round the ship:
The botanist’s boy is a eunuch! An excuse for my oddities –
and for now, I’m released from suspicion
Cherry sunrise
Île de France, January 1769
The sun flows over the table
and every day, a fresh loaf and ladles of soup
I am not hounded by hunger, I do not have syphilis,
nor will I be locked up for deceit
I have done with dishonesty and plain lies
and if circumnavigation of the world has been paused,
on this island, no one’s glances turn me inside out,
and I will no more speculate about the future
than whales who rocket into the air for pleasure
or birds who wander slow across green
Temperamental entities
Madagascar, October 1770-January 1771
The heat is wet
and the light is green,
and comet moths fly up,
like a lemon sun
And we forage below the throaty calls
and high whoops of cuckoo rollers
And the wet leaves twitch
and branches glint
with creatures
that could flip and trample you
or wrap their trunks about your wrist
and dangle you in the air
And we splice our watermelons
with machetes,
coaxing
pips from our mouths
and wonder where the tiger-
striped lemurs are
And the monarchs throng
and the white sun starts its drowse
and we look up, up
to the towering trees
as they wait to receive
the darkness
