Domestic Violence: Poems

Atlantis – A Lost Sonnet

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city–arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals–had all
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city–

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

Incredible, no? One of the best poems I have ever read. It would be near impossible to have another poem that show more great in a collection, but there were still some very good poems collected here. Most of which deal with national identity, Irish national identity to be precise, and which would have turned me away as I tend to stay away from whatever has a whiff of nationalism. But national identity here isn't rooted in tales of past glories and victories and superiority, instead it's that of survival focusing on ordinary lives and deaths, not shying away from moments of great pain as famine and defeat for instance. Also collected here are poems on grief, death, and change. A good introduction to this writer. show less

The book seemed to fall off somewhat as it progressed, as the early poems seem particularly fresh and distant from contrivance and sentimentality, while later poems seemed to edge in that direction just enough for the movement to be palpable.