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Rise
The fourth collection of poems from Irish poet Elaine Feeney. Feeney is considered part of a growing band of new young political Irish poets.
- GenresPoetry
110 pages, Paperback
Published December 1, 2017
About the author
Elaine Feeney
11 books202 followersElaine Feeney was born in the West of Ireland and lives in Athenry. She published her first chapbook, Indiscipline in 2007, and has since published three collections of poetry, Where’s Katie? (2010), The Radio Was Gospel (2014) and Rise (2017) with Salmon Publishing.
Feeney’s work has been widely published and anthologised in Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland, The Irish Times, The Manchester Review, Stonecutter Journal and Coppernickel.
Her debut novel, As You Were, was published by Harvill Secker/ VINTAGE in August 2020.
Feeney’s work has been widely published and anthologised in Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland, The Irish Times, The Manchester Review, Stonecutter Journal and Coppernickel.
Her debut novel, As You Were, was published by Harvill Secker/ VINTAGE in August 2020.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 20, 2024
This piece was first published on my Substack, which you can find here: https://substack.com/@spencerisapseud...
In my house, a poet is a borderline legitimate profession. My grandfather, who has popped up before on this here Substack, was a proud Limerick writer of moderate renown. Perhaps, his pen was the secret to his longevity; he passed away last October, just shy of his ninety-sixth birthday. I was offered his underused Spanish guitar and said No, I don’t want to be playing a dead guy’s instrument. One heirloom I did accept, though, was his copy of the selected poetry of Robert Frost.
That got the juices flowing, let me tell ya. Poetry was one area of creative writing that I had left untouched, but now that the Great Writer was gone, I felt I could express myself freely in that medium. In the year since, I’ve clocked up just over twenty poems. I don’t know if that is prolific or not. I write the kind of poetry my grandfather would hate, mostly meandering free verse. One of the reasons he liked Robert Frost was because of that famous line we all know about free verse and the tennis net. One of the first poems I wrote, in fact, in this period, was a free verse piece about grandad’s death, entitled “Indifference at a Funeral”. He is either looking down in fury or rolling around in his grave, depending on your belief system.
He would probably hate Elaine Feeney too. Put that on the blurb.
Wrong Title
Rise was published one year after the 100th anniversary of the 1916 rising. Presumably then, the bulk of these pieces were written in the middle of the centenary. In a way, this dates the collection slightly, if a seven-year-old book can be said to be “dated”. I had completely forgotten the Rising fever that gripped the country throughout 2016. We burned ourselves out on that celebration because we knew what was coming: the centenary of the 1921 War of Independence and the tragic Civil War that followed. The point I’m making is that Feeney may have meant this title as a pun, but nobody would get it anymore.
“Air” would have been a better choice. “Air” is everywhere in this book and it always mean something different. Before we begin the first poem, entitled “Before you begin”, we are given two contradictory air-centric quotes:
"walk on air against your better judgement" - Seamus Heaney
"Out of the ash I rise with my red hair.
And I eat men like air" - Sylvia Plath
Those are pretty straightforward, yeah? But how about this bit from “Moderato”, a poem inspired by Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto:
I am learning to row myself to air
In that case, I think air signifies artistic mastery. So now we have three different meanings for the word. Keep count. There’s these beauties from: “Antaeus”:
“get her down off the tree with a palm straight out and into the air”
“Air, the saving of all ills.”
“Keep your feet on the ground girl, settle your body in this air”
Sometimes, the word itself isn’t used, but we get images of women reduced to mere empty space, mere air. The narrator of “Whist” is:
miles shy of who I am, or once was
Air gives life and hope. We all know that. In Feeney’s world, however, it is also tantamount to a recession of the self.
Why Always West?
My favourite poem in this collection is entitled “Journey West” and it describes, believe it or not, a journey west, from Dublin through Tipperary, into Connaught, and back home again. The narrator takes an unsentimental trip to her Grandmother’s resting place:
And us, creeping in the
ditch-water towards town,
turn in at Cemetery Cross.
My grandmother's
warm body in the cold ground.
Why her grandmother’s body is still warm at this stage, I am not sure.
Past and present merge into one. Feeney imagines, almost lustfully, the men who built the small rural towns and villages:
I have their triangular shape
wide shoulders, wide chest,
narrowing at the waist,
On the way home, the poet is hit with an antiquated fear:
The fear of starvation is
always a constant
so easily resurrected,
to hell or to hunger.
“To hell or to hunger” of course being a reference to Oliver Cromwell’s infamous declaration “To hell or to Connaught”.
Now, if nothing else Feeney is an intertextual poet. Rise is dotted with references to artists (Bansky, Picasso, Degas, Roethke, Yeats) musicians (Tom Waits, Rachmaninoff, Vivaldi), writers (Bukowski, Heaney, Plath) and even the Beckhams pop in for a brief visit. On that theme, “Journey West” reminds me of two pop songs. Number one is John Grant’s “Sigourney Weaver”, an autobiographical tale about Grant’s childhood move from Michigan to Colorado:
So I was taken or I went towards what was west
To where the ground was dead
And struck out at the giant sky
The sky was black and filled with tiny silver holes
And it was there, with a frightened voice, that I began to cry out loud
Like Feeney, Grant makes heavy use of pop-culture references. Look at the second chorus:
I feel just like Winona Ryder
In that movie about vampires
And she couldn't get that accent right
Neither could that other guy
Here, Grant is attempting to put some distance from his pain, pretend that it is not all that serious. When you are talking with your buddies about something traumatizing, you talk like this. Feeney may be aiming for something similar (i.e. pop culture as emotional shield) in “Mother and Victoria Beckham”, in which a dying, elderly woman asks her daughter:
and poor Victoria Beckham,
poor poor Victoria,
did you even get the news?
The other song I want to mention is The Magnetic Field’s “Abigail, Belle of Kilronan” from their 1999 masterpiece 69 Love Songs. The parallels aren’t so deep here. I want to point out that in “Journey West”, the narrator’s family home is in Kilconieron. A Google search tells me that this in Galway, right? Another Google search reveals Kilronan, the setting of the Magnetic Field’s song, to be in Roscommon. Yet, we are informed by lead singer Stephen Merrit that:
Abigail 's gonna be the beauty of County Galway and she will live always
In a world of love
Maybe I am nit-picking here, but I am kind of curious. Did Merrit make a mistake? Did he mean to call the song, “Belle of Kilconieron”? Should the line have been “the beauty of County Roscommon”? Or is there something about Galway that excites the poets? I know many songs about Galway: “Galway Bay”, “I lost my heart to a Galway girl”, Ed Sheeran’s dreadful “Galway Girl”. Nobody ever writes about Roscommon. So there’s a creative writing lesson: if you have a love interest, make her from Galway.
Odds and Ends
I like my Substack to go out on Monday and it’s Monday now. Obviously the western world will collapse if I publish on Tuesday or Wednesday, so let’s hurry through some of the minor pieces:
“Muse” and “Amuse” are printed on the same page, like a diptych. They are inversions of each other. “Muse” goes:
A man I would
like to fuck.
A woman I would
like to fuck over.
“Amuse” goes:
A woman I would
like to fuck.
A man I would
like to fuck over.
I’m not sure what the point is here.
“The Banksy Girl” is one of several experiments with font. It would take me all day to browse through the Microsoft Word library and find out exactly what styles Feeney is using. Lots of bold, lots of italics, lines that look drawn on by a child. Is it too simplistic to say the poem is about the word “cunt”?:
when I was 8 I thought it was a pet word
when I called all my dolls cunts
“Cunt” is always in bold, every time.
“Today” feels modern, like a printed rap. Feeney rhymes “day” with “day” over and over again, creating great rhythmic pleasure:
teenage boy taking his money shot at my tits day, with a handful
of coins he owed me day, and said a fuck off or fucked me off
day, and the sky was a shy sky day letting nothing down only
rankle smog, it was ignoring my children day,
I wonder if Feeney is a Kanye West fan:
I miss the old Kanye, straight from the 'Go Kanye
Chop up the soul Kanye, set on his goals Kanye
I hate the new Kanye, the bad mood Kanye
The always rude Kanye, spaz in the news Kanye
The collection ends with the titular “Rise”, a hopeful plea to women everywhere to:
rise out of their history books and into your history
But the real climax is the second-to-last tour de-force “Wrongheaded”, where Feeney issues instructions of a different kind.
Handmaid Vibes
Okay, it’s Tuesday now. Elaine Feeney has thrown me off schedule. “Wrongheaded” is split into 17 sections, many of which are prose paragraphs. It can be difficult to see a throughline between each section, but a recurring motif is directions for women to fit themselves into society. Take section 2, “Liquescence”:
Use a primer. Wash on generously. Lather. Then begin by
painting forehead bone, next the temples, sides of nose, chin,
and hollows of cheeks with iridescent highlight.
So far, it’s like something out of a 50’s women’s magazine. Old-fashioned, that’s all. How’s this though for a creepy closer:
No need to curl the eyelashes. The eyes
will be closed.
Section 6, “St. Vitus’ Dance” parodies the quest structure:
First:
The narrow wooden knots in the door
Push them through, push. Push
Push down and they will fall out
Flicking through a collection of Auden, I happened to stumble on an untitled poem (58) that takes a less ironic but similarly didactic stab at a woman with a “false heart”:
Push on to the world's end, pay the
Dread guard with a kiss;
Cross the rotten bridge that totters
Over the abyss.
In Section 17, “Tom Tiddler’s Ground, who owns a Dead Woman?” the female race are given their “Last Lesson”. It feels like a graduation. The inculcation is complete. A mother dies and is spruced up in the morgue:
But oh what a darling what a darling what a darling she looks.
Her life doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she looks good. Synecdoche.
The Itch
Now, it’s Wednesday. Christ, this never happens. I’m tellin’ ya, this Feeney woman drives me crazy. The title of this piece is “Elaine Feeney Gives me the Itch”, and that itch is two-fold. One, there is the itch to write about Elaine Feeney’s work. Look at me go. And two, the itch to write my own poetry. Couple months ago, I sketched out a ditty about my elderly Jack-Russell terrier, who was clearly knocking on heaven’s door. The dog died around the time I picked up Rise and I was inspired to brush the poem up. Without further ado:
your dogs forget you.
no matter how you cuddle them
how tight the attachment
you carefully craft over years
of YouTube videos, online masterclasses, Cesar Milan re-runs,
they still forget you.
they won’t turn to you
at the end of their life
and thank you for all the hard graft you put in.
no, your dogs, they forget you.
they don’t know who you are
Or what you want from them
Or what kind of sound
that ball
(that they don’t even know is a ball)
Is making
Check out my Goodreads for pieces on Alice Munro, Michael Chabon, Edna O'Brien, David Foster Wallace and Thomas Hardy.
In my house, a poet is a borderline legitimate profession. My grandfather, who has popped up before on this here Substack, was a proud Limerick writer of moderate renown. Perhaps, his pen was the secret to his longevity; he passed away last October, just shy of his ninety-sixth birthday. I was offered his underused Spanish guitar and said No, I don’t want to be playing a dead guy’s instrument. One heirloom I did accept, though, was his copy of the selected poetry of Robert Frost.
That got the juices flowing, let me tell ya. Poetry was one area of creative writing that I had left untouched, but now that the Great Writer was gone, I felt I could express myself freely in that medium. In the year since, I’ve clocked up just over twenty poems. I don’t know if that is prolific or not. I write the kind of poetry my grandfather would hate, mostly meandering free verse. One of the reasons he liked Robert Frost was because of that famous line we all know about free verse and the tennis net. One of the first poems I wrote, in fact, in this period, was a free verse piece about grandad’s death, entitled “Indifference at a Funeral”. He is either looking down in fury or rolling around in his grave, depending on your belief system.
He would probably hate Elaine Feeney too. Put that on the blurb.
Wrong Title
Rise was published one year after the 100th anniversary of the 1916 rising. Presumably then, the bulk of these pieces were written in the middle of the centenary. In a way, this dates the collection slightly, if a seven-year-old book can be said to be “dated”. I had completely forgotten the Rising fever that gripped the country throughout 2016. We burned ourselves out on that celebration because we knew what was coming: the centenary of the 1921 War of Independence and the tragic Civil War that followed. The point I’m making is that Feeney may have meant this title as a pun, but nobody would get it anymore.
“Air” would have been a better choice. “Air” is everywhere in this book and it always mean something different. Before we begin the first poem, entitled “Before you begin”, we are given two contradictory air-centric quotes:
"walk on air against your better judgement" - Seamus Heaney
"Out of the ash I rise with my red hair.
And I eat men like air" - Sylvia Plath
Those are pretty straightforward, yeah? But how about this bit from “Moderato”, a poem inspired by Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto:
I am learning to row myself to air
In that case, I think air signifies artistic mastery. So now we have three different meanings for the word. Keep count. There’s these beauties from: “Antaeus”:
“get her down off the tree with a palm straight out and into the air”
“Air, the saving of all ills.”
“Keep your feet on the ground girl, settle your body in this air”
Sometimes, the word itself isn’t used, but we get images of women reduced to mere empty space, mere air. The narrator of “Whist” is:
miles shy of who I am, or once was
Air gives life and hope. We all know that. In Feeney’s world, however, it is also tantamount to a recession of the self.
Why Always West?
My favourite poem in this collection is entitled “Journey West” and it describes, believe it or not, a journey west, from Dublin through Tipperary, into Connaught, and back home again. The narrator takes an unsentimental trip to her Grandmother’s resting place:
And us, creeping in the
ditch-water towards town,
turn in at Cemetery Cross.
My grandmother's
warm body in the cold ground.
Why her grandmother’s body is still warm at this stage, I am not sure.
Past and present merge into one. Feeney imagines, almost lustfully, the men who built the small rural towns and villages:
I have their triangular shape
wide shoulders, wide chest,
narrowing at the waist,
On the way home, the poet is hit with an antiquated fear:
The fear of starvation is
always a constant
so easily resurrected,
to hell or to hunger.
“To hell or to hunger” of course being a reference to Oliver Cromwell’s infamous declaration “To hell or to Connaught”.
Now, if nothing else Feeney is an intertextual poet. Rise is dotted with references to artists (Bansky, Picasso, Degas, Roethke, Yeats) musicians (Tom Waits, Rachmaninoff, Vivaldi), writers (Bukowski, Heaney, Plath) and even the Beckhams pop in for a brief visit. On that theme, “Journey West” reminds me of two pop songs. Number one is John Grant’s “Sigourney Weaver”, an autobiographical tale about Grant’s childhood move from Michigan to Colorado:
So I was taken or I went towards what was west
To where the ground was dead
And struck out at the giant sky
The sky was black and filled with tiny silver holes
And it was there, with a frightened voice, that I began to cry out loud
Like Feeney, Grant makes heavy use of pop-culture references. Look at the second chorus:
I feel just like Winona Ryder
In that movie about vampires
And she couldn't get that accent right
Neither could that other guy
Here, Grant is attempting to put some distance from his pain, pretend that it is not all that serious. When you are talking with your buddies about something traumatizing, you talk like this. Feeney may be aiming for something similar (i.e. pop culture as emotional shield) in “Mother and Victoria Beckham”, in which a dying, elderly woman asks her daughter:
and poor Victoria Beckham,
poor poor Victoria,
did you even get the news?
The other song I want to mention is The Magnetic Field’s “Abigail, Belle of Kilronan” from their 1999 masterpiece 69 Love Songs. The parallels aren’t so deep here. I want to point out that in “Journey West”, the narrator’s family home is in Kilconieron. A Google search tells me that this in Galway, right? Another Google search reveals Kilronan, the setting of the Magnetic Field’s song, to be in Roscommon. Yet, we are informed by lead singer Stephen Merrit that:
Abigail 's gonna be the beauty of County Galway and she will live always
In a world of love
Maybe I am nit-picking here, but I am kind of curious. Did Merrit make a mistake? Did he mean to call the song, “Belle of Kilconieron”? Should the line have been “the beauty of County Roscommon”? Or is there something about Galway that excites the poets? I know many songs about Galway: “Galway Bay”, “I lost my heart to a Galway girl”, Ed Sheeran’s dreadful “Galway Girl”. Nobody ever writes about Roscommon. So there’s a creative writing lesson: if you have a love interest, make her from Galway.
Odds and Ends
I like my Substack to go out on Monday and it’s Monday now. Obviously the western world will collapse if I publish on Tuesday or Wednesday, so let’s hurry through some of the minor pieces:
“Muse” and “Amuse” are printed on the same page, like a diptych. They are inversions of each other. “Muse” goes:
A man I would
like to fuck.
A woman I would
like to fuck over.
“Amuse” goes:
A woman I would
like to fuck.
A man I would
like to fuck over.
I’m not sure what the point is here.
“The Banksy Girl” is one of several experiments with font. It would take me all day to browse through the Microsoft Word library and find out exactly what styles Feeney is using. Lots of bold, lots of italics, lines that look drawn on by a child. Is it too simplistic to say the poem is about the word “cunt”?:
when I was 8 I thought it was a pet word
when I called all my dolls cunts
“Cunt” is always in bold, every time.
“Today” feels modern, like a printed rap. Feeney rhymes “day” with “day” over and over again, creating great rhythmic pleasure:
teenage boy taking his money shot at my tits day, with a handful
of coins he owed me day, and said a fuck off or fucked me off
day, and the sky was a shy sky day letting nothing down only
rankle smog, it was ignoring my children day,
I wonder if Feeney is a Kanye West fan:
I miss the old Kanye, straight from the 'Go Kanye
Chop up the soul Kanye, set on his goals Kanye
I hate the new Kanye, the bad mood Kanye
The always rude Kanye, spaz in the news Kanye
The collection ends with the titular “Rise”, a hopeful plea to women everywhere to:
rise out of their history books and into your history
But the real climax is the second-to-last tour de-force “Wrongheaded”, where Feeney issues instructions of a different kind.
Handmaid Vibes
Okay, it’s Tuesday now. Elaine Feeney has thrown me off schedule. “Wrongheaded” is split into 17 sections, many of which are prose paragraphs. It can be difficult to see a throughline between each section, but a recurring motif is directions for women to fit themselves into society. Take section 2, “Liquescence”:
Use a primer. Wash on generously. Lather. Then begin by
painting forehead bone, next the temples, sides of nose, chin,
and hollows of cheeks with iridescent highlight.
So far, it’s like something out of a 50’s women’s magazine. Old-fashioned, that’s all. How’s this though for a creepy closer:
No need to curl the eyelashes. The eyes
will be closed.
Section 6, “St. Vitus’ Dance” parodies the quest structure:
First:
The narrow wooden knots in the door
Push them through, push. Push
Push down and they will fall out
Flicking through a collection of Auden, I happened to stumble on an untitled poem (58) that takes a less ironic but similarly didactic stab at a woman with a “false heart”:
Push on to the world's end, pay the
Dread guard with a kiss;
Cross the rotten bridge that totters
Over the abyss.
In Section 17, “Tom Tiddler’s Ground, who owns a Dead Woman?” the female race are given their “Last Lesson”. It feels like a graduation. The inculcation is complete. A mother dies and is spruced up in the morgue:
But oh what a darling what a darling what a darling she looks.
Her life doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she looks good. Synecdoche.
The Itch
Now, it’s Wednesday. Christ, this never happens. I’m tellin’ ya, this Feeney woman drives me crazy. The title of this piece is “Elaine Feeney Gives me the Itch”, and that itch is two-fold. One, there is the itch to write about Elaine Feeney’s work. Look at me go. And two, the itch to write my own poetry. Couple months ago, I sketched out a ditty about my elderly Jack-Russell terrier, who was clearly knocking on heaven’s door. The dog died around the time I picked up Rise and I was inspired to brush the poem up. Without further ado:
your dogs forget you.
no matter how you cuddle them
how tight the attachment
you carefully craft over years
of YouTube videos, online masterclasses, Cesar Milan re-runs,
they still forget you.
they won’t turn to you
at the end of their life
and thank you for all the hard graft you put in.
no, your dogs, they forget you.
they don’t know who you are
Or what you want from them
Or what kind of sound
that ball
(that they don’t even know is a ball)
Is making
Check out my Goodreads for pieces on Alice Munro, Michael Chabon, Edna O'Brien, David Foster Wallace and Thomas Hardy.
March 22, 2022
I really wanted to like this book and I did for the most part, but I did not understand most of the poems. This is probably user's error, but it is what it is.
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