Struggling to be alone

It both is and is not poetry; it both does and does not stand on its own legs. By rights a work like this should become more meaningful the more that it is read, whereas the opposite is true in this case.

It is a book of aphorisms and observations rather than verses proper — prose rather than prose-poetry — with much of the work here lacking any appreciable lyric quality.

Moreover, Savage Solitudes not only invites comparisons with stronger writing, it makes such comparisons inevitable by incorporating a large selection of quotations into its very fabric. Each piece here includes a paragraph from another writer, everyone from Thoreau to Huxley, da Vinci, MacNeice, and Michael Hartnett. By contrast, the Medbh-authored sections of each poem come off, at best, thematically and linguistically underdeveloped. At worst they feel indulgent.

Yes there is value in the author’s attempt to place the figure of Poet on the same spectrum as those of Philosopher and Scientist, but this sense of connectivity jars with the volume’s stated purpose of dissecting loneliness. If anything, the intellectual echo-chamber of the book makes it nigh-on impossible to discern Medbh’s true conclusions on the matter. The quotations draw the reader’s interest, while their attributions strike the eye as an uncanny presence in the body of this highly schematic verse.

Each poem consists of dialogue between “One”, “I”, and “The Other” (the latter being the quotation). While it is clear that Medbh is probing for some profundity in the space between the three, her effort stalls due to the hackneyed nature of the observations. Consider the entirety of the “I” verse from Disassociated: “People who veer towards Asperger’s Syndrome often value efficiency more than ideology. Obsession with detail reduces the capacity for flow that social intercourse requires.”

Even paired with a quote from George Santyana, along with the remark from “One” that “it is easiest to be with people when there is a task to be done”, there is little to rescue this from its prosaic, awkwardly subjective nature.

Indeed, the work succumbs to the Achilles’ heel of performance poetry: Its inability to successfully transition to the printed page.

Presented live, and with the requisite theatrical energy, the multiple voices of Savage Solitude might achieve some element of the “living experience” promised by the cover. In its present form, however, it fails as an encounter between reader and text, never managing, for all its fascinating reference, to answer its core question, “if one is to live, how?”.

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