The Bower

by Connie Voisine

How can a person come to understand wars and hatreds well enough to explain them truthfully to a child? The Bower engages this timeless and thorny question through a recounting of the poet-speaker’s year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with her young daughter. The speaker immerses herself in the history of Irish politics—including the sectarian conflict known as The Troubles—and gathers stories of a painful, divisive past from museum exhibits, newspapers, neighbors, friends, local musicians, and cabbies. Quietly meditative, brooding, and heart-wrenching, these poems place intimate moments between mother and daughter alongside images of nationalistic violence and the angers that underlie our daily interactions. A deep dive into sectarianism and forgiveness, this timely and nuanced book examines the many ways we are all implicated in the impulse to “protect our own” and asks how we manage the histories that divide us.  

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 2019

Reviews

[Clay Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and haunting poetry collection about the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in contemporary Belfast, Northern Ireland, Connie Voisine’s book-length lyric narrative, The Bower, acts as both ballad and travelogue. It is a meditation on, and testament to, the exigencies of living where one moment is comprised of a butterfly balanced on a peony; and, the next, a bloody shirt in an alley. In the opening poem, Voisine writes with a clear-sighted edge:

That afternoon a darkness punctured the silken sun,
the slippery ordinary, a knife still in the hand of someone

young and unknown who stood fearless, his face
made of a bright, new material.

The Bower to is a “bright, new material” in the dexterous hands of Voisine’s weavings. Taking disparate elements—from Irish legends to the zombie serial The Walking Dead; and, from Christina Rossetti to the recent murder of journalist Lyra McKee—Voisine coalesces them into intricate compositions: ones that have a muscular resonance as she interrogates issues of motherhood, violence, grief, ontology, and the political landscapes of both Ireland and the US. Ultimately, the book asks the question of how to explain to a daughter, or any child who has yet to be wounded, the brutality of the world that awaits: “All those messes, houses, jobs, countries where we mend, make do and still / we crumble.” The book closes, not with booming manifestos or blustering advice for future residents but with the quiet, and probing questions about our current world: “What will she remember?” “What will you?”