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The Ballyconnell Colours
Hard to Find book
- GenresPoetry
Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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About the author
Dermot Healy
34 books41 followersDermot Healy (born 1947 in Finnea, County Westmeath, Ireland) was an Irish novelist, playwright and poet. He won the Hennessy Award (1974 and 1976), the Tom Gallon Award (1983), and the Encore Award (1995). In 2011, he was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award for his poetry collection, A Fool's Errand.
Healy was a member of Aosdána and of its governing body, the Toscaireacht, and lived in County Sligo, Ireland.
Healy was a member of Aosdána and of its governing body, the Toscaireacht, and lived in County Sligo, Ireland.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 6, 2011
Stark poems, cold form, fierce emotional heat.
The colours of life are often drained, washed-out, running into each other like waters - or storms or skies. Location is impermanent, unmoored (a favourite trope), identity tumbling; perhaps what coalesence there is rests, moves rather, in the acceptance of the flux, the world that will not be held down. This is hard:
Sometimes I am bewildered
By all this foolish energy
Battering away
Miles from people.
I envy those
Who live upriver
At the quiet source.
Here we are forever
Stepping between
The incoming roar
Of life and the tides
That carry death out
(Prayer)
Much of the domestic detail - expressed in this collection with precise images - is lost as soon as uttered: a man comes onto the high street, and is split into not only two minds but two people with two directions which will be taken without purpose (although the purpose will come later - the narrative proceeds the happening). It's not difficult to envisage, as in Rosses Point for instance, the equal claim to existence of the dead, "though you can't see a soul" among them any more than you can among the living, sense though in the "solitude they lack" the living sense which is a temporary surfeit to existence, the individual consciousness, apart from its practicalities and pleasures, a correlate of the living and dead as one, as vulnerable, open to wounds.
For children in Domestic Lives , section 6:
... you will distrust the tempers of parenthood.
All our arguments to preserve your faith
Mean nothing. You will be forever alone
Notwithstanding the evidence of art and laughter.
These are love poems, love of people and place, not in spite of pain and wounds, emptiness, loss and general suffering but through them, by them, in all their colours. A companion volume to A Goat's Song , this is largely as resonance of feeling, texture, and imagery but sometimes by direct narrative correlate as in The New Town - echoes of hospitalisation for alcohol recovery, the motif of writing itself being a temporary balm but ultimately leaving the void that all words and stories leave. Even in the intimacy of fulfilled relationship we see - in O Woman:
O woman for whom
I have withdrawn
From naming the brilliant things of the earth
Lest they might lose their vividness,
Can we now without myth
Sustain the emptiness?
It's the sentimentalities, the convenient phrases of social enjoyment, much as they are important, that are emptied out to an honest celebration, joy and not in the least contradictory melancholy that marks Healy here. It would be wrong to end without pointing out that there are myriad points to be made about each poem; Healy has many ways of writing. Just one point I'd make is that there's a sense of bordering on imagism of great compression(Li Po/has circles/under his eyes/from the drink....) and more extended imagery that fuses short breaths of expression into fluidity (and see the magnificent Rain is Coming as an example here).
Overall, a great collection. Storming, in fact.
The colours of life are often drained, washed-out, running into each other like waters - or storms or skies. Location is impermanent, unmoored (a favourite trope), identity tumbling; perhaps what coalesence there is rests, moves rather, in the acceptance of the flux, the world that will not be held down. This is hard:
Sometimes I am bewildered
By all this foolish energy
Battering away
Miles from people.
I envy those
Who live upriver
At the quiet source.
Here we are forever
Stepping between
The incoming roar
Of life and the tides
That carry death out
(Prayer)
Much of the domestic detail - expressed in this collection with precise images - is lost as soon as uttered: a man comes onto the high street, and is split into not only two minds but two people with two directions which will be taken without purpose (although the purpose will come later - the narrative proceeds the happening). It's not difficult to envisage, as in Rosses Point for instance, the equal claim to existence of the dead, "though you can't see a soul" among them any more than you can among the living, sense though in the "solitude they lack" the living sense which is a temporary surfeit to existence, the individual consciousness, apart from its practicalities and pleasures, a correlate of the living and dead as one, as vulnerable, open to wounds.
For children in Domestic Lives , section 6:
... you will distrust the tempers of parenthood.
All our arguments to preserve your faith
Mean nothing. You will be forever alone
Notwithstanding the evidence of art and laughter.
These are love poems, love of people and place, not in spite of pain and wounds, emptiness, loss and general suffering but through them, by them, in all their colours. A companion volume to A Goat's Song , this is largely as resonance of feeling, texture, and imagery but sometimes by direct narrative correlate as in The New Town - echoes of hospitalisation for alcohol recovery, the motif of writing itself being a temporary balm but ultimately leaving the void that all words and stories leave. Even in the intimacy of fulfilled relationship we see - in O Woman:
O woman for whom
I have withdrawn
From naming the brilliant things of the earth
Lest they might lose their vividness,
Can we now without myth
Sustain the emptiness?
It's the sentimentalities, the convenient phrases of social enjoyment, much as they are important, that are emptied out to an honest celebration, joy and not in the least contradictory melancholy that marks Healy here. It would be wrong to end without pointing out that there are myriad points to be made about each poem; Healy has many ways of writing. Just one point I'd make is that there's a sense of bordering on imagism of great compression(Li Po/has circles/under his eyes/from the drink....) and more extended imagery that fuses short breaths of expression into fluidity (and see the magnificent Rain is Coming as an example here).
Overall, a great collection. Storming, in fact.
December 26, 2024
Healy has become a paradigm shift for me. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that I've read hundreds and novels and poetry collections and somehow, when I read Healy, I still feel like his work exists in a space that isn't real. It's true; more true than any space ever, but it isn't real. There are many poems in here that I was awestruck by - if I had to pick a few to highlight, I'd go with "On Looking Up at the Night Sky above Lough Conn," "Neighbor's Lights," and "The Balleyconnell Colours." But the entire collection is worth many thoughts and many reads. Healy was a master.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews