The wheeling Maybirds

Tim Murphy reviews 'The Shark Nursery' by Mary O’Malley (Carcanet, 2024)

WOLF SONG
i.m. Eavan Boland

Sit still now. Take up your pen.
In this space before noise begins
tigers are visiting cities
and a white leopard sits

on a lawn in Suburbia.
A wolf is walking along
an empty beach in California.
A poet sings his traces.

Now she too is becoming history.
Already the first slow movement
of the strings is parting the silence.
This is the point in the story

when shadows thin as blades
quiver in the April air.
You can see the wolf through them.
Soon he too will be gone, forgotten,

this long free walk by the sea a detour.
The sea will remember him.
When he licked my hand at the hawthorn
his traces sharpened the salt air.

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'Wolf Song' is from The Shark Nursery (Carcanet, 2024) — thanks to Mary O'Malley and Carcanet Press for letting us publish it.

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This new collection from Irish poet Mary O’Malley is divided into three parts: an opening and closing part with twenty-five and twenty-four poems respectively, and a middle series of twelve poems focused on the COVID pandemic and lockdown. The book’s opening poem, ‘Wolf Song’, is a moving tribute to the late Irish poet, Eavan Boland, and specifically how her unique poetic voice will continue to be heard: “Now she too is becoming history. / Already the first slow movement / of the strings is parting the silence.” The poem also introduces the animal life found throughout this collection: "tigers are visiting cities / and a white leopard sits // on a lawn in Suburbia. / A wolf is walking along / an empty beach in California." The Shark Nursery teems with animal imagery of all kinds, including several other wolf references – there's an “iron wolf” in ‘Folk Tale’, for example, a “wolf’s touch” in ‘The Science of the Fairytale’, and in ‘Cherry Tree Carol’ there's a “wolf’s breath” in the shed where Mary, “pregnant and homeless”, gives birth. The title poem concerns mistaken fish identity: “I am a blackmouth catshark now / shown some respect. / That’s nice but inside / I’m still a dogfish, reviled.” In ‘Night’ a long-eared owl keeps vigil in its “cloak of feathers / with its headlamps dimmed” while it cries “like a hungry cat / in the trees”; and in ‘Lift’, the first swallow is a “dark mark on a block of colour / aerial, unmistakable”. The rhyme of “mark / dark” is extended appropriately with “block”, and the “aerial / unmistakable” rhyme condenses perfectly a sense of the bird’s conspicuous isolation. 

Alongside the ubiquitous animal imagery are indications of the poet’s connection with nature more generally. The pathetic fallacy in ‘In the Dark’, for example, transforms from the poet feeling “fearful” of the “chaos / [that] lunges from a ditch” under a moon that is “nacreous, a cold bright stalker”, to a sense that only the light offered by the moon is redemptive of darkness:

The friendly sky is full of night animals. 
They mean you no harm but only the moon 
can grant your wish and pull the tide
across the plain, up to your house on the hill. 

‘On Trá Mhór’ tells of how on the beach the poet can be content with her “share” and “be silent, read / what the wind writes on the sand”: “Let the lark rise like champagne, here / I meet myself in the wheeling Maybirds.” These lines celebrate the self-awareness of “meeting oneself”, but what it means to exist is scrutinized in ‘Erasure’, in which the poet is visited by Azrael, the Islamic angel of death. When asked if the time had come for him to “rub [her] out”, she sees her name in his book “faded like an x-ray”, while the angel avers that “[her] own kind are doing that.” 

The images of fading and being erased (or written out of others’ lives) presage death. Both also appear in ‘Distance’, a poem that refers to a song (‘My Dream’ by the Brazilian singer and composer, Dona Ivone Lara), as well as to Odysseus tied to the mast and hearing the Sirens’ sing:

I don’t know when I started to fade.
All that is left are a few outlines
and the prow of this ship they tied me to 
when I was still useful. Soon
even that will be erased and my bones 
will become stone. If you strike them 
they will sing ‘Sonho Meo’. 

This allusion to The Odyssey is one of many classical references. Other examples are found in ‘Medea’s Dreams’ and ‘Diana’s Regret’, the latter based on the myth of Diana and Actaeon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The description of “Trickster time” in ‘Circus Act’ refers to the cursed house of Atreus, and O’Malley offers the wonderfully apt rhyme of Atreus / sacrifice: “Like a god in the house of Atreus / he makes a play of our sacrifice, / as he reaches out for the dying heart.” 

The theme of time also features in several other poems. In ‘Lisbon Revisited’, for example, the poet alludes to the “seeds of time” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth as she imagines herself dancing on the Avenida da Liberdade with “the seeds of time in my hair, / the moon and stars in my arms”. In ‘A Morning Swim’, getting out of the swimming pool is described viscerally as “climbing out of time, liquid / as a swallow into gravity’s haul and drag”.

The imagery that O’Malley employs around the pandemic and lockdown is suitably starker. In ‘Asylum’, we crave company “but nobody calls to the door. / We are stuck inside with our fetters and bad dreams. / Somebody somewhere is pulling the strings.” In ‘April’, the dead are said to “come to feed / a while in our dimension, disguised as birds”, while ‘At Cré na Cille 2021’ refers to the great 1949 Irish-language novel by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Cré na Cille (literally, “church earth”), which portrays a conversation among the dead in a Connemara graveyard. “What becomes of the man not remade / piece by piece at funeral and wake,” O’Malley writes, “his woman unreconciled, or the child?” 

In ‘Holy’, the poet laments the constraint of lockdown when she receives a video clip of a three-year-old girl playing with a tennis ball, her face "a chalice brimming / with life", and promises "when all this is over // I will remember what is holy.” 

The politics of the post-pandemic world are brought skilfully into focus in poems like ‘Citizen’, ‘The Ballad of Googletown’, and ‘Maleficium’. ‘Citizen’ recalls the nationalist character in the Cyclops episode of Joyce’s Ulysses and addresses anti-immigration ideology and its dissemination via social media. The first stanza tells of a “small man” taking “the careful steps of a robot” to avoid falling “into the gutter / to rust”; he fears “invasion” and the “taking over” of his “once proud nation”. The second (concluding) stanza reads:

All the dark matter of the universe
will fly to his tweet and coalesce.
The people march and light bonfires.
Driving through, faces scan for non-believers, 
small eyes glint in the headlights. 
The river threatens to overflow.
It teems with sleek brown bodies, 
squeaking hate. 

The correlation of the gutter and the river is effective, and although the form limits the language and style of ‘The Ballad of Googletown’, it is also insightful: the kids are “safe inside” while their online shopping includes “handbags by the ton / Or the latest shoes or guns”. ‘Maleficium’ may refer to a specific individual (Hypatia, mentioned in ‘At Céibh’, comes to mind) but serves at any rate as an attack on the ignorant mob malice that is intrinsic to so-called “cancel culture”:  

They ban her books because she put a spell 
on a lover, on a critic, on an editor. 
Deprived of oxygen she will drown or float. 
Both are proof of the evil within her. 

She refuses to recant. Something, 
the mob chants should be done.
The rest is easy. Tweet tweet tweet. 
The wildfire spreads. The wind shifts. 

There are many other memorable poems in The Shark Nursery, a book that speaks eloquently to our place in the natural world as well as to the challenges posed by the current political landscape. Overall, it is a rich and stimulating collection that cements O’Malley’s reputation as one of Ireland’s most important contemporary poets. 

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Tim Murphy is an Irish writer based in Spain. He is the author of four pamphlets, including There Are Twelve Sides to Every Circle (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2021) and Young in the Night Grass (Beir Bua Press, 2022). His first full-length collection is Mouth of Shadows (SurVision Books, 2022), reviewed by Richie McCaffery here.

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Mary O'Malley was born in Connemara in Ireland and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for eight years and taught at Universidade Nova. She served on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cúirt International Poetry Festival for eight years. She was the author of its educational programme. She taught on the MA programmes for Writing and Education in the Arts at NUI Galway for ten years, held the Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2013, and has held Residencies in Paris, Tarragona, New York, NUI Galway, as well as in Derry, Belfast. She is deeply committed to education and the preservation of marine life and culture and is active in environmental education. She is a member of Aosdána and has won a number of awards for her poetry, including the 2016 Arts Council University of Limerick Writer's Fellowship and the 2018 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award for Playing the Octopus (2016). She was the Trinity Writer Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre for 2019. She writes and broadcasts for RTÉ Radio regularly. She spends time in Paris and Spain and lives in the West of Ireland.

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