POETRY: Rootling: New and Selected PoemsBy Katie Donovan Bloodaxe, 192pp. £10.95
THIS BOOK SHOWS how much Katie Donovan's poetry has developed, especially over the past eight years. The new millennium has prompted in her a singular deepening of content and refinement of craft. The arrangement of her New and Selected Poemsenables this perception. It opens with her new, fourth collection, Rootling, brings the reader back then to her first ( Watermelon Man, 1993), then on to the second ( Entering the Mare, 1997), then finally to the third ( Day of the Dead, 2002). At that point we circle back in our minds to the title volume and appreciate the distance she has come.
And from this distance the first three books, while subtly different from each other, seem largely of a piece. There is much to admire in them. Indeed, Donovan's voice throughout is charming, not just for the ordinary reader but also for the close reader of poetry. The voice off these poems is unpretentious, funny, earthy, honest and bursting with energy. It's hard to resist the person in Watermelon Man, who confesses: "You meet yourself / tripping on your own umbilical cord."
It's her craft, however, that creates the illusion of high-spirited spontaneity and buoyancy. From the first, Donovan has written in free verse and displayed a reliable sense of the integrity of the poetic line. Take the very early poem Achill: "and the inscrutable mountain / lights to green clarity / when the sun / puts a finger / on Achill". You really get with that last line break the thrill of sudden illumination. And with a light (in two senses) touch the poet suggests a personal epiphany. The art of figuration seems to arise naturally for Donovan from describing the actual, a transformation as unforced as the sun coming out. Likewise, her images seem generated by the body and register the way the senses really work, sometimes by synaesthesia, one sense operating by means of another, the theme and method of Blind Colours.
A signature Donovan poem is quite frequently a spate, a tear, a rant, a howl. Her typically short and jagged lines seem made for such torrents. Some of her most memorable early poems, such as
Strike, which uses the history of hunger striking to express the pain of a lover's rejection, have this unchecked momentum. This style works, however, only when a nerve has been touched, when the poems are grounded in acute, visceral sensation. Donovan is always at her best working from the ground up.
Her forays into politics, for example a poem such as Display, seem wooden and forced. In Entering the Mareshe also attempts a series of mythological poems, such as Macha's Curse, which takes her corporeality to a feminist and nationalist level. While more successful than her head-on political confrontations, there is still a lack of vitality in these engagements with mythology, which read more like experiment than necessity. Myth seems to work, as it does for Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, only when it's serving some overpowering, overspilling emotion that could not be conveyed without the firm, impersonal boundaries of an age-old communal story. Donovan simply doesn't seem to be tapping into such a major vein – until, that is, Rootling, which changes the story of her career.
In this new book, Donovan’s remarkable fertility with imagery serves a profound exploration of the first and last mysteries of the flesh.
She celebrates the births of her two children and laments both the death of her father and the life-threatening illness of her husband.
The thing that saves her motherhood poems from sentimentality is once again her frankness about the body, plus her unfailing humour.
Pregnant, she is "mushroom bellied". Her nursing baby is a milk addict – "Once attached / you drag on me like a cigarette", a simile that captures the physical sensation of nursing. Similarly, those pre-birth flutters in her belly prompt "my jumping bean, my inner acrobat". And what Rootlingpossesses, which the previous three books (especially in their abridged form here) lack, is coherence as a collection. When Donovan focuses on death and, with exquisite paradox, renders her feelings with linguistic vitality, the reader registers the presence of poetic and personal maturity. Donovan's emotional velocity, her long training for poems that are sustained sprints, meets its ideal challenge in grief. The Plan, a poem about her father, begins, "I had a plan for when / I was going to get a hold of him / the contrary mercurial old bull"; and this volatile mixture of intense emotions fuels her ever-faster journey to the end, his end, "like an unstoppable salmon / that barely falters even / as it falls". As in her beginning, the lines are managed adeptly; the image is searingly right.
Rootling,the individual collection, spans the two great poles of human experience, and Donovan's grasp is big enough now to hold them both together, as it is to hold multiple, forceful, often conflicting emotions in the moment. Rootling: New and Selected Poemscelebrates the birth of this maturity and lets us view its genesis.
Peggy O'Brien is a member of the English department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Sudden Thawand Frog Spotting,and the prose work Writing Lough Derg
