Poetry review: A debut that urges us to care

Care is Jennifer Horgan’s debut collection from the ever-excellent Doire Press. 

Horgan’s poems have been described by William Wall as “at once tender and profoundly alienated, elegiac, and acerbic”. Her voice, he says, is “raw… uncompromising” and it’s hard to disagree.

Divided into five sections, this is a collection that very deliberately speaks to Ireland in the 2020s. Every line, every image is arresting and carefully delivered. 

These poems challenge us to reconcile with our past, they shine a light on our attitudes and behaviours towards women, and they ask us to imagine a different future.

The book begins with the poem It’s Just a Dream I Had. Like much of Horgan’s work, it presents a world that sits somewhere at the meeting point of dream and reality.

In the opening stanza we meet a mother figure who is “slumped in a bath” before being told that the speaker is “drawn to the grey hair inside/her thighs, the dough-layered stomach”. 

There’s also a son “high up on a bunk, as if on a ship that forgot to sink” and a father who “sits like a Buddha in a trance of desireless retreat”. 

The speaker, seemingly the new owner of this haunted dwelling, informs us that they are seeking “an exorcism” on the place. 

The possibility of this being a metaphor for a society, a nation, or an individual coming to terms with a dark past is obvious.

In the final stanza, we’re told that “even the tea we drink holds her water,/refusing to turn a healthy colour, years after the rooms were gutted”. Some things, it seems, cannot be expunged.

Horgan is always unflinching, but she strikes a gentler, more wistful note in the excellent Last Summer’s Dresses; a standout piece amongst the whole collection.

We meet the speaker as she carries out the mundane task of handwashing two dresses. 

The poem gains in intensity as the dresses, and the chore, prompt memories: “Last summer…the dry terrain of an Italian villa.”

We learn that the second dress was last worn on a trip to Naples: 

“We ended up running down that train platform. I felt the blood drip dripping down my thighs as I tried to keep pace.”

Then the killer line: “I cried for you to stop and you didn’t.”

The poem closes with an extraordinarily evocative image, brilliant in its simplicity as the dresses hang together on the line “both restored/two soldiers, two uniforms, drying”.

There are no romantic illusions here about Ireland’s past or present but those left behind by rapid change are portrayed with empathy.

Letter from an Old Man Standing at the New Cork Docks is a longer poem that gives voice to a man coming to terms with the realisation that the world has moved on without him. 

Things, however, are never hopeless and these characters show resilience: “A strange, strange quiet is happening here. And the quiet for me has never been louder… I’m glad of it really”.

Horgan’s voice is striking in its bluntness but this is a book that, as the title suggests, wants us to care — for ourselves and each other. 

The speaker in almost every poem is driven by an impulse to seek and give love. 

That said, good intentions don’t always have good outcomes, as the darkly comic Home Visit after Bereavement illustrates: “I leave so drunk I start talking to the dog… Out of my mind”.

More than anything, this is a book filled with outstanding poems. Horgan gives voice to a range of characters and concerns not often seen in Irish literature. 

Debut collections don’t normally come this strong.