A Grey Gardens for Galway
Fleece-thick dust on the windowsills.
A cobweb, big as a sail, wafts in the breath of my passing. Ivy lattices the
windowpanes and one long, ambitious tendril has found its way in and slinks along
the wall. I stand and look and breathe. This is the house I want to die in. I kneel
down to rub ten, twenty years of grime from the floor tiles. They are mustard
and terracotta with cuts of blue; they speak of maids-of-all-work and
susurrating hemlines. My heart bulges into my mouth in a push of goy, a
bittersweet, home-found palpation, though I’ve never been in this house before.
The ceiling and walls reach to me, they bend close and caress my hair, they
pour their mildewed breath along my neck. Welcome, they say. You are
welcome.
Galway, Ireland poet and fiction writer Nuala O’Connor’s latest poetry collection, her
fifth, is
Menagerie (Dublin Ireland; Arlen House, 2025), a curious
assemblage of prose poem narratives and short scenes that hold a thickness of
detail and a lush sense of the lyric. “Now that the cage is open,” the title poem
begins, “the wild animals are gone; now that the wild animals are gone, the
garden is silent; now that the garden is silent, the trees take up their
whisper [.]” Across a suite of seventy-eight poems, O’Connor offers a prose menagerie
of uncertainties, searching; she offers attempts at clarity, seeking; of
stories and storytelling, floating across fable and fairytale and a science of
hard facts, all told in a lyric lilt. “The geraniums are scarlet pansies,” the
single-sentence of “Matisse in Massachusetts” begins, “their leaves, succulent
shamrocks, the wallpaper, a sky lassoed by pink ribbons, the table is a saffron
desert, the plate, holding the pot, somewhy sheds blue ceramic petals, the
signature is an exuberant upcurve, each S a joyless snake, sizzing high to snare
the viewer, as adroitly
as innocent Eve,
sizing up the seductive beauty of an apple.” There is such song in her descriptions,
one that understands myth and beauty, the wealth of the garden and a detailed
description. Her narratives might be composed in straight lines but they are nothing
of the kind, offering a kind of detailed and direct meandering into and through
struggle, complexity and ease. These poems are quite magical, honestly.
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