Toward

by Moira Linehan

In her new collection, Toward, poet Moira Linehan makes us believe that landscape is destiny. As the book unfolds, we come to inhabit the land- and sea-scapes of the wild southwest of Ireland, the islands of America's Pacific Northwest, the poet's home in Massachusetts; and then round again, back to the land north of Dublin. The poet's eye and imagination capture lyrical, sonic, imagistic details of these places. So, too, their embedded history: the Famine, the days of the whaling industry, the speaker's paternal genealogy, are all woven in. But beyond those stories and images, the heart of this collection is the poet's missing lover--a presence haunting both landscape and memory. By means of crafting language and pushing its possibilities, the speaker searches for the most elemental in whatever place--physical or emotional--she finds herself. As the literature of travel and especially pilgrimage shows, being on the move can become a journey to one's own interior. Here are poems of such witness, poems of reflection on how others on perpetual journeys have stayed the course. Here are poems about how this poet has come to places, as she says in her poem ""In This Habitable Desert,"" she could not even imagine. Toward brings the reader along with her to these places.

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Hardcover

Published June 3, 2020

Reviews

[Martha Silano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Toward is a sonically breathtaking book. Linehan uses to great advantage the weather that is all around her—sea foam and rain, mud and mist—putting these images to work in poems that force the reader to consider the contrast between “the eternally-seething sea” and breezes that “beat so wildly I can’t even think” and the lowly human who bears humble witness to their destructive yet life-giving power. With a painterly eye and exactitude, Linehan’s speaker walks the fine line between “isolation / no one survives” and the need to live in solitude (“no soul does / without some”), the line between the tangibles of language and “what has always been beyond words.” The speaker’s widowhood has been “one / long sentence of grief,” and “one storm passes through, another / always on the way,” yet “daffodils are in bloom / along every path” and “narrow bands of yellow / open [her] heart’s good eye.” Though the speaker has borne great loss, has “had to learn it will not get any better,” she is far from broken. The sun may not be visible but is “no doubt there.” In the closing poem the speaker asks, “beneath a sky so vast / I can do nothing but be emptied—or is it / filled?” reminding the reader that the answer is both. There’s no other poet I’d rather walk side-by-side with, bravely facing “Oh, so much rain” and “the harrowing possible.”

[pennyg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Landscape is destiny. " North, West, South, East---there's your inheritance"......