Emer Martin wrote: I am sitting here on a Monday morning reading poetry. Usually I read poetry at night, before I sleep. But this book arrived in the post today, and I am aware of how privileged I am to be spending an hour alone with this beautiful edition of Philip Caseys selected poems. I had known his work as a novelist. He has an international and historical mind that always attracted me to his writing. This sensibility, a voice for all the world and all time is present in these poems. They are short but searing and utterly graceful. There is something clean and precise in his language that never shows off but yet dazzles. I don’t know how he does that. I can only enjoy it. They come from a burning core that understands pain but is not defeated by it, I love his poem Walking to the Plain, about his obsession with the Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, only to discover he was writing about himself. I have taught this poem in many classes, and my students always responded to it. “It took me awhile to see humour/where previously I’d recognized only suffering.” My favourite one, as of this morning, is one I heard him read in Bewley’s Café, as part of the Cáca Milis Cabaret . Philip did not take the stage. But sat among us in the audience at his table, his glasses on the tip of his nose, a small red lamp to light his words and read this poem, which in all its brevity, has the complexity of a novel. In fact it is the best kind of poetry when a few lines can take you further into an unknown world and past and humanscape than you thought you’d ever go. It’s called Hamburg Woman’s Song. I have never forgotten the girl in this poem and am happy now to have this collection on my bedside table so I can return to her again and again. I was born in a time and place to a woman I look like now but fear grew like mould on bread in my mother’s love for her slow girl
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 08:41:13 +0000