Nuala O’Connor, Menagerie
A Grey Gardens for Galway
Fleece-thick dust on the windowsills.A cobweb, big as a sail, wafts in the breath of my passing. Ivy lattices thewindowpanes and one long, ambitious tendril has found its way in and slinks alongthe wall. I stand and look and breathe. This is the house I want to die in. I kneeldown to rub ten, twenty years of grime from the floor tiles. They are mustardand terracotta with cuts of blue; they speak of maids-of-all-work andsusurrating hemlines. My heart bulges into my mouth in a push of goy, abittersweet, home-found palpation, though I’ve never been in this house before.The ceiling and walls reach to me, they bend close and caress my hair, theypour their mildewed breath along my neck. Welcome, they say. You arewelcome.
Galway, Ireland poet and fiction writer Nuala O’Connor’s latest poetry collection, herfifth, is Menagerie (Dublin Ireland; Arlen House, 2025), a curiousassemblage of prose poem narratives and short scenes that hold a thickness ofdetail and a lush sense of the lyric. “Now that the cage is open,” the title poembegins, “the wild animals are gone; now that the wild animals are gone, thegarden is silent; now that the garden is silent, the trees take up theirwhisper [.]” Across a suite of seventy-eight poems, O’Connor offers a prose menagerieof uncertainties, searching; she offers attempts at clarity, seeking; ofstories and storytelling, floating across fable and fairytale and a science ofhard facts, all told in a lyric lilt. “The geraniums are scarlet pansies,” thesingle-sentence of “Matisse in Massachusetts” begins, “their leaves, succulentshamrocks, the wallpaper, a sky lassoed by pink ribbons, the table is a saffrondesert, the plate, holding the pot, somewhy sheds blue ceramic petals, thesignature is an exuberant upcurve, each S a joyless snake, sizzing high to snarethe viewer, as adroitly as innocent Eve,sizing up the seductive beauty of an apple.” There is such song in her descriptions,one that understands myth and beauty, the wealth of the garden and a detaileddescription. Her narratives might be composed in straight lines but they are nothingof the kind, offering a kind of detailed and direct meandering into and throughstruggle, complexity and ease. These poems are quite magical, honestly.
