New poetry: Woman of Winter is as relevant to 21st-century women as it is true to spirit of original

“My interest in the story is partly topographical,” says John Fitzgerald in his introduction to his new translation of The Lament for Art O’Leary (Gallery, €11.95). Fitzgerald grew up near Macroom, his feet familiar with the ground covered by the main players, his ear attuned to subtleties of the local accent.

Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s great keen for her murdered husband has been widely translated yet every version of the Lament “tells a different story”. Fitzgerald’s “desire to transfer the grief at the heart of the Caoineadh through the three-stressed line” was sparked by Seamus Heaney’s observation of how the Lament’s “three-stressed line” inspired his translation of Sophocles’ Burial at Thebes.

Primary school was where Fitzgerald first heard the Caoineadh read in the “captivating west-Muskerry baritone” of his teacher, John Brown. His palpable excitement drives this fresh, powerful version, evoking those local accents. According to Angela Bourke, the keen is similar to a rap and Fitzgerald’s version feels exactly like that, physically on its feet, the speaker rocking back and forth on the three-stressed line, gathering momentum as the poem builds from the insistent “you” at the end of every line in the first stanza, echoing the original “thú”.

As the sense of grief and loss builds, the assonance and alliteration so vital to the original Irish is released in exhilarating waves, “your sword ennobled you, your gold-roped hat, /fine leather boots/and double-fold coat,/all fashioned abroad for you.” Short prescriptive lines express urgency, strong verbs piled high add to the sense of mobility, “rise up at this moment, /put on your fine suit of the clearest white bolt,/fix your black beaver,/pull up your gauntlets/and straighten your whip”. Fitzgerald’s unmistakable, strong Cork accent works here like a charm beside Jack B Yeats’s original watercolours which first appeared in Frank O’Connor’s translation almost a century ago.

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Vona Groarke, whose acclaimed version of The Lament for Art O’Leary was published by Gallery in 2007, gives her idiosyncratic voice to another “dramatic, articulate, wounded and resistant female protagonist” in Woman of Winter (Gallery, €15), her new version of The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare. Responding to the poem’s deep engagement “with how the world is to be experienced through the body … specifically, through the body of a woman whose social standing has been compromised as she has aged”, Groarke extends this “forensic examination” of the ageing body, “now I’m worn thin as threadbare cloth my bare-bone life pokes through”.

The “bony arms” of Kuno Meyer’s original translation are likened to “whins in winter”, a tactile image that falls beautifully alliterative on the ear, setting up the rich sense of texture which characterises Groarke’s translation, “The green coat over Drummain /looks better than my dun brown./ And the fine-spun over its early fields is more pleasing than my coarse grain.”

This vivid tactility is complemented by Isabel Nolan’s delightful black and white drawings, inspired by images from old handwritten manuscripts. “After food/another hunger; after light another dark./ And no point tussling with either, no, /when you’ve had joy of both.”

Woman of Winter is as relevant to the 21st-century woman as it is true to the spirit of the original lament, its pitiless, richly assonantal voice commanding trust with its honest dissection of a “cramped, parched room” and it brings its own bittersweet light to an unexpectedly consoling lyrical conclusion, “the day I loved and the day I didn’t;/ not long, either of them,/now I look back;/not long at all in the end//but lovely too, sweet as the sea/ on a May afternoon/when the tide,/coming in just as far as it comes,/ slips away off, quietly.”

Daragh Breen’s Birds of November (Shearsman, £10.95) begins with a sea bird asking “its own ghost/what death is like”, its “dead-self” enabled by “its disparate selves/to dis-remember which was/ life and which was death,/floating in this Purgatory of mud.” Breen’s haunting voice is at home in the autumnal, purgatorial landscape, his heady flights earthed by precise, concrete observations.

St Brendan’s memory “mottled like a trout” throws up an image of ‘a fatty pair of trotters/… laid out on the silver platter” of a market stall tray, one limply and slightly layered/over the other, like Christ’s feet, nailed and fastened to the Cross”. (Navagatio). Imagery reflects earth in the heavens, The Milky Way compared to a “tangled thorn tree” in The Lamb of God Enters a Handball Alley in Connemara where “Trailing a clogged-spittle of afterbirth…the ewe nudges the wet mess of her lamb”. Animal and human selves blur, masks are a key component, both startling and true:

Garlanded with rubber ventilators

the fog of their lung-snouts

echoing in their ears,

newly shod with trench foot

and just one more death away from madness

a sudden owl mistakes all those

staring back from their long open grave

for brethren. (Mustard Gas)

In the title poem “A black rose blooms/suddenly and briefly’ above a fir tree as crows appear to remove masks before disappearing. Highly visual, deeply metaphysical, Breen’s use of the mask is at its most piercing in Carved Turnip, evoking the strange dissolve at moment of death:

The female dog that we had to take

to be put to sleep

stumbled about the vet’s small room

looking for an exit

while wearing a mask of my face

as we crouched and watched

and I tried to hold my breath

so that it didn’t extinguish her candle.

The astonishingly beautiful poems in Maya Popa’s Wound is the Origin of Wonder (Picador, £10.99) stem from Popa’s mediation on “Wonder, from the Old English wundor…thought to be a cognate with the German wunde or wound.” Complex and precise, Popa’s lyrics circle around grief in all its manifestations, “Like August stars, we offer/temporary light, our lives measured//in latitudes of loss…

…the humble vase broken by Marcel Proust re-glued,

imbued with preciousness. He believed that grief develops the mind. What is

the mind if not that surface upon which the world can be endlessly rebroken?

(After A Vase Broken By Marcel Proust)

Popa writes on large public griefs such as the pandemic in Pestilence and They Are Building A Field Hospital or climate change in Letter To Noah’s Wife, “Lately, only lately, it is late, tucking/our families into the safeties of the past./ My children, will they exist by the time/it’s irreversible? Will they live/astonished at the thought of ice/ not pulled from the mouth of a machine?” In All Inner Life Runs At Some Delay, Popa references Rumi, “The wound is where the light enters us”, concluding “There shines the face of the beloved/ like a headlamp in the dark.”

Popa’s poems move easily from larger events to the deeply personal, illuminated by an original light like no other, her glowing gaze switched on from the tremendous opening poem, Dear Life, “I can’t undo all I have done to myself,/what I have let an appetite for love do to me.//I have wanted all the world, its beauties/ and its injuries; some days,/I think that is punishment enough.” Popa’s pin-sharp lyrics teach us how “wundor” might emerge from pain, “Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly// Would you loosen the line – I’ll listen//if I ask you,//if you are the sort of life I think you are.”