Poetry: Arriving soon after the publication of just a few arresting poems in magazines, and at the same moment as the shocking news of the poet's death, this book has the impact of an Atlantic wave, a sense of piled and travelled force behind it.
Or, to change the simile, finding the poems collected here is like opening a door behind which there is, suddenly, a carnival or a conflagration. There are garish colours, a strong reek of sex, a jarring rhythm, defiant opinions, all things that go with a strong talent, the presence of a willed voice.
The atmosphere is, like the brew conjured by the title, rank-tasting and alive to the scandalous osmosis and heat of the physical world. We are caught between the raw and the blended. Sometimes it is as if paint was being squeezed straight on to the canvas, as in 'Family Get-together':
. . . our hearts, come straight from the butcher's
hook. They hang on our chests
like rubies, wrapped in cellophane
and twine, with big red blobs
of sealing-wax to guarantee them
tamper-proof
The frightening energy of this vision goes with a firm control of the means of expression. Dorothy Molloy was a painter before she published poems, and this reader finds herself tending to respond as if to the physical presence of colour and the traces of the hand that manipulated it. A surprising direct statement surrounded by obliquities is like a broad brushstroke that wriggles down the centre of the canvas. There is in many of the poems ('Envelope of Skin', 'Ventriloquist's Dummy', 'Family Circus') a packed, mashed, profaning physicality, piling up "unleavened bread, goat's cheese, the flesh of swine" in 'Cast out', a poem strongly exotic with its medieval imagery and its leper-squint, but expressing a sense of horror that is local.
Deployed with sophistication and art, the frightening pressures are conjured and moulded into a wholeness. Under the surface pulsations of a sensibility that, in her poetry (I never knew her), is too crowded by other people to like more than a few of them, there are precise reasons for the use of a word which might seem chosen for its pushy sound only: "claptrap", "barmbrack". The narrator's voice is frisky, elated, sharply in charge.
Codes melt into each other, causing alarm. In 'Grandma's zoo' the animals Grandma takes out of her pocket are those on the old Irish coinage. Each is a charm and the word is reassuringly repeated, but the poem ends with an animal that does not belong to that sequence and which thus perhaps retrospectively illuminates a sinister coldness in the transaction:
A charm against the elephant man
who comes bellowing to my bed.
There is usually something out of kilter. The opening poem, 'Conversation Class', contains a tipsy schoolgirl who feels "a revolution/ In the red flare of my skirt"; another, 'Floating with Mr Swan', has the speaker declaring "I wuv ya, I wuv ya" under anaesthetic; always, the body lacks composure, it is disturbed and its array is fragmented:
. . . shocking-pink lipstick
that glowed in the dark, the ultra-fine
mesh of my first fish-net stockings,
the mess of my feet in my first high-heeled
shoes . . .
Poems set in Spain or France do not hang about describing landscape, they convey the way scenes buckle and reload when we see them in time, in erotically charged memory. She didn't need in fact to go abroad for the colours she gets as much from the gaudy backrooms of Irish provincialism as from the great Mediterranean outdoors. The gaudiness taps something that is there in the Irish psyche too, the sugarstick shades of the Corpus Christi procession, the sexually ambiguous sanctities she visits in 'Plaint'.
Dorothy Molloy wrote other good poems besides those included here, and in mourning her disappearance one must hope that enough of them can be found to make a second collection. Hare Soup offers a tantalising view of her ability and range as a poet, a splendid first collection, which should not be also her last.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a poet, translator and university teacher, and an editor of the literary magazine, Cyphers