The Mining Road, by Leanne O'Sullivan
href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">
The Mining Road by Leanne O'Sullivan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My first book read in 2020, a book of poems by an Irish poet, given to me some years ago by a Irish professor visiting UMW to talk about the possibilities of a new exchange program--with Cork, I believe. And I forgot I had it, until today, cleaning up.
Her poems are beautiful. Some, as the title suggests, " finds inspiration in the disused copper mines that haunt the rugged terrain around Allihies, near Leanne's home at Beara, in West Cork. Like remnants of a lost world, the mines' ruined towers, shafts, man-engines and dressing floors, evoke an elemental landscape in which men and women laboured above as well as underground, and even mined in caverns below sea level" (back cover). Some are love poems, to her husband, a child, and some elegies, a lost pet, an older relative.
One heartbreaking one, "Safe House," is set in the time of the Irish War for Independence, Irish soldiers took refuge from the British in a safe house "where there was a family, and a child upstairs/listening. They told him what to say if anyone/Ever asked. Say they were not there." During the night, the boy wakes and goes to the room where the soldiers' things are, and he finds a gun, and "Then he felt nothing. His blood crept slowly/and dark along the floorboards ..." It is the boy who was never there. To protect the soldiers and how the boy died, his death becomes a secret: "Tell them there was never a child./Say they were never there./There was never a home ..."
This poem haunts me.
Recommended.
View all my reviews
The Mining Road by Leanne O'SullivanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
My first book read in 2020, a book of poems by an Irish poet, given to me some years ago by a Irish professor visiting UMW to talk about the possibilities of a new exchange program--with Cork, I believe. And I forgot I had it, until today, cleaning up.
Her poems are beautiful. Some, as the title suggests, " finds inspiration in the disused copper mines that haunt the rugged terrain around Allihies, near Leanne's home at Beara, in West Cork. Like remnants of a lost world, the mines' ruined towers, shafts, man-engines and dressing floors, evoke an elemental landscape in which men and women laboured above as well as underground, and even mined in caverns below sea level" (back cover). Some are love poems, to her husband, a child, and some elegies, a lost pet, an older relative.
One heartbreaking one, "Safe House," is set in the time of the Irish War for Independence, Irish soldiers took refuge from the British in a safe house "where there was a family, and a child upstairs/listening. They told him what to say if anyone/Ever asked. Say they were not there." During the night, the boy wakes and goes to the room where the soldiers' things are, and he finds a gun, and "Then he felt nothing. His blood crept slowly/and dark along the floorboards ..." It is the boy who was never there. To protect the soldiers and how the boy died, his death becomes a secret: "Tell them there was never a child./Say they were never there./There was never a home ..."
This poem haunts me.
Recommended.
View all my reviews
No comments have been added yet.
