Poetry: The memory traces of childhood and the fresh hurt of adolescence are Leanne O'Sullivan's subjects in her first collection of poems; unsurprising given that, at 21, she can have known little else.
Here are poems of early days, inhabited by the people who surround a first mapping of the world - pervading these poems are a father and mother, a grandmother, a young sister, a twin brother, friends who come and go as a life takes shape. A forceful narrative of illness and healing, meanwhile, is drawn by the poems which form the core of this book; poems of self-loathing, of bulimia and suicide quests, of bathroom floors and hospital wards.
So far, so much like the notebook of every fledgling poet. And influences loom like icons over large elements of O'Sullivan's oeuvre; especially when the savagery of an eating disorder grips the pen, the shadows of Boland, and of Plath in particular, are apparent.
But the many points in this collection at which O'Sullivan's voice sounds with striking confidence and originality make clear that she does not need these poetic guides; that her territory can be very much her own. She is a poet with an instinct for the image, with a fluency in metaphor that lights her poetry like second sight. Her regard here is not for metre - and that regard must grow next - but for the deep connections between parts of life, the mirrorings that go unacknowledged but shine with thrilling clarity once illuminated.
From simple words, O'Sullivan calls up the moments that tell truths about a life, that bridge years to show that the adult is still an infant, and that infancy, once remembered, is never pure; the apple-rind of a baby's feed "curled/ like cigarette smoke", a child's unknowing stare on the world comes "blindly/ like a girl under a boy".
This startling language breaks, too, into some of the illness poems, drawing them back from the imitation of Plath towards which they seem so fiercely headed; bulimia is always "the eve of thinness", starvation the art of sculpture, a punishing exercise regime a run around the neighbourhood "like a rumour". And if that echo of the American poet grows wearying at times, yet the best poems in this collection bear positive comparison with the finest in Plath's Ariel. There, it was in the poems about pregnancy and motherhood that the poetic voice found its greatest freedom, its strongest pitch. Self- obsession had given way to a concern for others, an awareness of a wider responsibility; this was poetry of existence in the world rather than merely in the self. And so it is with those of O'Sullivan's poems that turn their gaze, with love and worry, to subjects other than the self: the innocent sister, the dying grandmother, the anxious mother.
These are poems not just of what it is to be young - in each case, with wonderful subtlety, the poem returns to the theme of the womb, as if unwilling just yet to shed the memory of it - but of what it is to be alive; vividly, vibrantly, vulnerably so.
Waiting For My Clothes By Leanne O'Sullivan. Bloodaxe Books, 64pp. £7.95
Belinda McKeon is a journalist and critic