I first began to know Bernie Crawford’s poetry around or about 2006 when she started attending the poetry workshops I facilitate. It was, in important ways, a different world. Pre financial crash, pre the fantastically interesting political craziness of the past several years, and long before the social and economic cataclysm that has been 2020 and 2021.
Back then, the part of the world we live in retained the illusion of stability. From the off it was obvious that Bernie is someone who knows about things beyond poetry, and this is one of the fundamental strengths of this collection. Her poems are rich with moving history, and have written into their DNA the fact that how things are now is just one version of how they could be.
When she writes poems set in the West Bank or Lesotho or Zambia she seems to me to speak from inside those cultures rather than as tourist or coloniser. In common with Mahatma Gandhi, Bernie’s poems appear to me to think that Western civilisation would be a very good idea. It’s just a shame we haven’t tried it yet.
In a time when even guys on Twitter with beards, and other assorted charlatans, rush to claim the label, Bernie’s poetry is authentically feminist. And her poems demolish the prejudice that feminists are humourless. Her poem Women Like Me memorably ends with her mother warning her: “Never join a women’s group, she said, / especially one where hand-held mirrors are used.”
The collection is laced with such wit. Even in a poem of grief, such as The Last Word, it shines warmly out: “Coffins can be bought flat-pack these days. / I picture you tossing your head / in a loud chuckle as you Google this.”
Most gloriously of all, in her poem Stealing – a revelation to me – the narrator admits to an impressive charge sheet indeed, which leads Sister Perpeptua to say, though it appears she didn’t know the half of it: “the devil was on my back”.
There is a humanity to Bernie’s poems which lead one to have some small amount of sympathy for Sister Perpeptua’s and her own mother’s futile attempts to keep her the proper side of decorum, and away from those women’s groups with their hand-held mirrors.
Bernie Crawford’s debut collection has been obviously on its way for a while now. In truth, if there were any justice in the poetry world, which there absolutely isn’t, it would have been already out there and up for all the prizes. Bernie is beyond serious about the art of poetry; every poem has the shine of perfect editing. And yet the authentic voice of the first draft remains. Like me, I know that Bernie believes in such a thing as a poetry community. We as a community must not allow the ongoing profound discrimination faced by women poets, who lived lives before they had the chance to pause and sit down to write, to marginalise this fine collection. For Living Water will certainly be one of the most achieved Irish poetry debuts of 2021.
Living Water can be bought from Chaffinch Press here.
