A dose of mysticism

Rootling: New and Selected Poems

The confidence with which she depicts dreams and fantasies is probably due to the security of her imaginative control. She can flick what might to others seem a fleeting encounter into a sequence of reaction, grounding her metaphors with an accuracy which makes so much of her work come flaring into life and relevance. It’s a weighty gift, this immediacy, and Donovan uses it to prise open the thoughts left behind by decisions and the thoughts that define decisions as well. A contemporary artist who is not at all afraid to use the contradictions of her time as material, her command of rhyme especially gives much of the work gathered here a powerful rhythmic force: work such as Back on Smack, for example, is a straightforward account of living with a drug-addict, but its undertone of anger, loss and desperation is compelling:

‘Your dog bares her teeth

willing you to keep out

the night thieves’

A selection from three previous publications — Watermelon Man (1993), Entering the Mare (1997) and Day of the Dead (2002) — along with a series of new poems which give the book its title. Rootling itself is a suite of pieces reflecting Donovan’s embrace of pregnancy and childbirth. Someway related are the poems of intense and charming sexuality, as free and candid as those in Rootling and as ardent too.

By not shirking from the inexplicable, the dubious or the dark but by dealing with them as issues in themselves she offers a kind of pale rationality.

This distance suggests a lack of fear which is consoling in itself, but it comes close to disintegration when she writes of the illnesses and deaths of those closest to her heart. The pain and misery with which she encapsulates her partner’s illness (as in The Darkness Between Us) has something of a crack in it. The words, the lines, the pattern are all under control but as one reads one wonders — for how long? Even for her small children there is an instinct, not so much perhaps of fear, but of what there is to be afraid of.

That is a valuable tension in a poet’s work. There are times when the poems seem to flow too easily, when the final line has no sharpness although it is properly pointed. These easy pieces are no less delightful in their tenderness as they relive the memories of motherhood.

But there are tougher poems here, hard-worked dispatches from Irish townlands, from villages in Hungary and from dream-landscapes in South America. Donovan is a writer of considerable skill and even the short clipped sentences take a strong shape under her hand.

She is also able to draw episodes into elegant relationships, as in making Day of the Dead, New Orleans a little elegy for Lar Cassidy, formerly the Literature Officer of the Irish Arts Council who died in 1999. It is a reminder that although Katie Donovan is so much a poet of the here and now, she is also a wanderer in the there and then.