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The January Flower
Here is a debut novel of skilled poetic prose. Our narrator Mary has been cast as a Universal Mother with the weight of the world on her shoulders. She is any mother struggling with domesticity, the current economic climate and self-worth. She seeks love unaware that love is already a constant force in her life. Through the beauty of her island home she learns to grow in Nature. She learns that no matter what we endure love will always remain. No matter how hard our winters may seem, the humble flower, the snowdrop will bloom in January. Love is always inside us. We just have to find it.
230 pages, Paperback
First published November 12, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 16, 2012
An evocative and deeply moving story of a mother's quest for self. Leaves the reader with a strong sense of Scottish landscapes.
November 18, 2012
‘And Christ comes with a January Flower.” This is the last line of the poem Advent by Patrick Kavanagh.
The January Flower by Orla Broderick gained its title, in part, from this poem.
Kavanagh often referred to the hardships of life. In this poem he reminds us of children and of Love. He refers to the power of Nature and the cycles of life.
Here is a debut novel of skilled poetic prose. Our narrator Mary has been cast as a Universal Mother with the weight of the world on her shoulders. She is any mother struggling with domesticity, the current economic climate and self-worth. She seeks love unaware that love is already a constant force in her life. Through the beauty of her island home she learns to grow in Nature. She learns that no matter what we endure love will always remain. No matter how hard our winters may seem, the humble flower, the snowdrop will bloom in January. Love is always inside us. We just have to find it.
The January Flower by Orla Broderick gained its title, in part, from this poem.
Kavanagh often referred to the hardships of life. In this poem he reminds us of children and of Love. He refers to the power of Nature and the cycles of life.
Here is a debut novel of skilled poetic prose. Our narrator Mary has been cast as a Universal Mother with the weight of the world on her shoulders. She is any mother struggling with domesticity, the current economic climate and self-worth. She seeks love unaware that love is already a constant force in her life. Through the beauty of her island home she learns to grow in Nature. She learns that no matter what we endure love will always remain. No matter how hard our winters may seem, the humble flower, the snowdrop will bloom in January. Love is always inside us. We just have to find it.
January 2, 2013
Where to begin to review The January Flower by Orla Broderick? Broderick has written a hymn to the life of her "little snowdrop," her daughter, and a hymn to a sort of traveller life on the Isle of Skye.
It is full of the most lyrical and beautiful prose - Irish prose - not Scottish. The Hi-Arts Council embraces her and she did study at Moniack Mhór, but I claim her for the Irish. One friend has compared her to Dylan Thomas. I said to that friend after hearing Broderick's recording of "The Lost Chapter" that a tick will never again be just a tick.
The protagonist, Mary, desires with a fierce single-mindedness to escape her dreary council house (subsidized housing for her U.S. readers), and neighborhood, populated by snarling tenants and drug abusers. She wants a better life for her snow drop, her Angel. To that end, she seduces a kilt-wearing Dutch man (the antagonist) one afternoon and the long journey back to her own mother and her roots begins. Along the way, she got far more (or less) than she bargained for: lost her daughter, lost herself. She meets Gertrude (mother of Walter and Winne) and Elsie who "had husbands and children but discarded them, left all that life for the sake of a dream. Kith and kin were forsaken for boggy tracts of land and sweet solitude. Their devotion to Mother Earth is their vocation. They know the old ways and yet they see far into the future." Mary lives in a caravan and sips dew from spider webs and dances in the moonlight. You will hear Woof, their dog. You will smell the kelp. You will see the sea birds soar high and far. You will sense the fairies and learn of the giants that once peopled the Isles. You will meet the fairies who live in the rocks.
The Ancestors are ever-present. Broderick has done something unusual in modern literature. She has created the duality of the deities and humans, akin to those in the Odyssey in a strange way. She has written of the same xenia, a Greek concept encompassing the generosity and courtesy shown to those who are far from home. She evokes the Tuatha Dé Danann who came from heaven, landing in a dense cloud upon the coast of Ireland. She sees Danú not Cassiopeia in the stars. Her Mary lives in a dual world somewhere between the bright light of heaven and the prosaic gritty sands of earth.
She tells her Angel:
"Irky and Oompi were lovers. They sat in the sky and shone for each other. Centuries of smiling light, night after night. Side by side they glittered. One night a fast comet came and knocked them apart. They fell out of their orbit and away from each other. Down down down they fell to Earth. Their lights were shattered. Scattered a hundred million times all over this planet. Tiny shards of the brightest sparks fell into the people and the animals. Each one of us has a tiny piece of a star inside, to help us glow. We come from Light, my Angel. We Love and we love forever and ever. I will love you for centuries and even when we are apart I will love you. Moon, stars and fire bounce off ancient rock."
So this is an Odyssey, a woman's odyssey, and like Odysseus, Mary ends up where she started: in the arms of her own mammy, scarred but wiser for her journey. One woman faces the goddesses and finds her way home.
You can hear her read via SoundCloud [...]
in a voice as low and resonant as the sea and her story of Drumlie Dub will wash over you.
Advent - Patrick Kavanagh
We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.
And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.
O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-
We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we'll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won't we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason's payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.
Patrick Kavanagh died in Dublin on 30th November 1967.
It is full of the most lyrical and beautiful prose - Irish prose - not Scottish. The Hi-Arts Council embraces her and she did study at Moniack Mhór, but I claim her for the Irish. One friend has compared her to Dylan Thomas. I said to that friend after hearing Broderick's recording of "The Lost Chapter" that a tick will never again be just a tick.
The protagonist, Mary, desires with a fierce single-mindedness to escape her dreary council house (subsidized housing for her U.S. readers), and neighborhood, populated by snarling tenants and drug abusers. She wants a better life for her snow drop, her Angel. To that end, she seduces a kilt-wearing Dutch man (the antagonist) one afternoon and the long journey back to her own mother and her roots begins. Along the way, she got far more (or less) than she bargained for: lost her daughter, lost herself. She meets Gertrude (mother of Walter and Winne) and Elsie who "had husbands and children but discarded them, left all that life for the sake of a dream. Kith and kin were forsaken for boggy tracts of land and sweet solitude. Their devotion to Mother Earth is their vocation. They know the old ways and yet they see far into the future." Mary lives in a caravan and sips dew from spider webs and dances in the moonlight. You will hear Woof, their dog. You will smell the kelp. You will see the sea birds soar high and far. You will sense the fairies and learn of the giants that once peopled the Isles. You will meet the fairies who live in the rocks.
The Ancestors are ever-present. Broderick has done something unusual in modern literature. She has created the duality of the deities and humans, akin to those in the Odyssey in a strange way. She has written of the same xenia, a Greek concept encompassing the generosity and courtesy shown to those who are far from home. She evokes the Tuatha Dé Danann who came from heaven, landing in a dense cloud upon the coast of Ireland. She sees Danú not Cassiopeia in the stars. Her Mary lives in a dual world somewhere between the bright light of heaven and the prosaic gritty sands of earth.
She tells her Angel:
"Irky and Oompi were lovers. They sat in the sky and shone for each other. Centuries of smiling light, night after night. Side by side they glittered. One night a fast comet came and knocked them apart. They fell out of their orbit and away from each other. Down down down they fell to Earth. Their lights were shattered. Scattered a hundred million times all over this planet. Tiny shards of the brightest sparks fell into the people and the animals. Each one of us has a tiny piece of a star inside, to help us glow. We come from Light, my Angel. We Love and we love forever and ever. I will love you for centuries and even when we are apart I will love you. Moon, stars and fire bounce off ancient rock."
So this is an Odyssey, a woman's odyssey, and like Odysseus, Mary ends up where she started: in the arms of her own mammy, scarred but wiser for her journey. One woman faces the goddesses and finds her way home.
You can hear her read via SoundCloud [...]
in a voice as low and resonant as the sea and her story of Drumlie Dub will wash over you.
Advent - Patrick Kavanagh
We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.
And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.
O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-
We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we'll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won't we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason's payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.
Patrick Kavanagh died in Dublin on 30th November 1967.
December 7, 2013
Unique writing, very different to anything else I have read in a long time if ever. The story did not flow for me, but felt disjointed and at times was disorientating. It felt more like trying to follow a dream, than a plot. But that being said, I enjoyed it in small sections. Rather than wolfing it down over a couple of evenings, instead I read it over weeks. I enjoyed the last quarter of the book the very most, the ending was almost perfect. It wrapped up beautifully.
If you buy it and then wane somewhat in the middle, don't give up it all becomes much clearer and more optimistic by the end.
If you buy it and then wane somewhat in the middle, don't give up it all becomes much clearer and more optimistic by the end.
July 12, 2015
I finished reading this novel a while ago and it’s stayed with me, vividly. Broderick tells the gritty story of some seriously dysfunctional and yet likeable people and she does it with such wonderful language that somehow it leaves a beauty behind. I recommend this to anyone who likes language, likes earthy edgy characters and who is fascinated by the variety of relationships we’re all capable of given a particular set of circumstances.
October 11, 2016
Lyrical, absorbing, passionate, funny and candid. Dare you to be able to put it down. I couldn't!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews