The Mining Road

by Leanne O'Sullivan

The Mining Road, Leanne O'Sullivan's third poetry collection, finds inspiration in the disused copper mines that haunt the rugged terrain around Allihies, near her home at Beara, in West Cork. Like remnants of a lost world, the mines' ruined towers, shafts, man-engines and dressing floors, evoke an elemental landscape in which men and women laboured above as well as underground, and even mined in caverns below sea level. Mining promotes a sense of memory, and the riches embedded in the landscape are human as well as material. But things brought to the surface can have a startling ability to shine in the present, and O'Sullivan's poems move and provoke as they resonate with experiences at the heart of contemporary Ireland. 'O'Sullivan shifts away from the kind of "topographical" poetry of place that has become common in Irish writing, choosing instead to locate the place's meaning in "all of us listening". O'Sullivan repeatedly presents us with objects or places, which then act not as statements of arrival or recovery but as points of departure. Things we have seen before, often in other people's poems, come alive again in her hands… The Mining Road is a strong and varied book of poems… slow and concentrated pieces that register with great clarity the mystery of stories and images that exercise power over us, images and stories on which readers will dwell. At a time when historians, novelists and journalists are again revising our national narratives, these thoughtful, ambitious poems bring the past to life, but they also ask if any imagination of the past, no matter how rich and inevitable it feels, can ever be quite enough.' - John McAuliffe, The Irish Times.

Genres: Poetry

59 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 28, 2013

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered the poetry of Leanne O'Sullivan earlier this year while researching the legend of the Hag of Beara for the novel I was writing. I swooned over O'Sullivan's gorgeous verse -- Cailleach: The Hag of Beara and went in search of The Mining Road, feeling a divine connection between this writer's work and my own. My novel, set near the west Cork village of Allihies, also deals with mining. O'Sullivan found her inspiration for this collection from the neglected copper mines that mar the landscape of the region, and in the lives given and forgotten in their labor.

Published four years after Cailleach, the maturity of the poet is striking. The Mining Road is more angular, with lean, hard muscle. No less beautiful, but full of the sadness of experience. The poems are more rooted to the earth, as one would expect from verse borne of the scars and gouges of mines.

Tommyknockers
Small rappings
in the lode,
dark fluttering
across the beams.

It could be
a shiver in the earth
or a warning call raised,

their knuckles
panic white,
timbers rasping
in their hold.

Or a tap
on my shoulder
pelting
to a stream.

Listen the glut,
the first scree
howling down
the shaft.

Listen
the mouths
that lie foul
in the water.

But love, in all its sensual wonder, remains Leanne O'Sullivan's most treasured and prolific theme. She retains her delight, her elegant observations of the heart swelled by passion for a lover or the blind devotion of a mother:

Brigie
When you smile in your sleep
I think of the seal's tail
whispering above the wave,
slipping back again into the deep.

What a joy to partake of poetry so clean, so rooted in a sense of place, yet limitless in its imagination and romance. Brava.

[Warren Rochelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first book read in 2020, a book of poems by an Irish poet, given to me some years ago by a Irish professor visiting UMW to talk about the possibilities of a new exchange program--with Cork, I believe. And I forgot I had it, until today, cleaning up.

Her poems are beautiful. Some, as the title suggests, " finds inspiration in the disused copper mines that haunt the rugged terrain around Allihies, near Leanne's home at Beara, in West Cork. Like remnants of a lost world, the mines' ruined towers, shafts, man-engines and dressing floors, evoke an elemental landscape in which men and women laboured above as well as underground, and even mined in caverns below sea level" (back cover). Some are love poems, to her husband, a child, and some elegies, a lost pet, an older relative.

One heartbreaking one, "Safe House," is set in the time of the Irish War for Independence, Irish soldiers took refuge from the British in a safe house "where there was a family, and a child upstairs/listening. They told him what to say if anyone/Ever asked. Say they were not there." During the night, the boy wakes and goes to the room where the soldiers' things are, and he finds a gun, and "Then he felt nothing. His blood crept slowly/and dark along the floorboards ..." It is the boy who was never there. To protect the soldiers and how the boy died, his death becomes a secret: "Tell them there was never a child./Say they were never there./There was never a home ..."

This poem haunts me.

Recommended.

[John Sgammato · Rating 3 out of 5]

It brought me back to rural Ireland, but she's not Yeats. Too many references or relations are too close to the soil for those of us who are thousands of miles away.

[Tom Romig · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine young Irish poet. Works wonders with language and images against a backdrop of sadness.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars.