Insistence

by Ailbhe Darcy

A new child should mean new hope. But what if that’s no longer so? Ailbhe Darcy’s second collection unfolds in an intimate world, in which the words home and love dominate. But the private world is threatened by a public one. Written in the American Rust Belt, in an era of climate change and upheaval, Insistence takes stock of the parent’s responsibility to her child, the poet’s responsibility to the reader, and the vulnerability of the person in the face of global crisis. In a long poem, Darcy revisits Inger Christensen’s 1981 Alphabet, a work which expresses the heart-sickening persistence and proliferation of beauty after Hiroshima. In Darcy’s ‘Alphabet', the spiralling form takes over, insisting on hope. But this is a doubtful sort of hope: hope for life on earth, not necessarily human life. Stink bugs work their way across America, cockroaches waltz, and quixotically-named mushrooms rise from the earth in this flirtatious but volatile collection. Described by David Wheatley as ‘boldly overhauling the received categories of the Irish poem’ with ‘cunning and humour’, Ailbhe Darcy’s poems interrogate cosmopolitanism as much as they do rootedness, love as much as grief.

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 24, 2018

Reviews

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some absolutely wonderful poems in this -- poems that are energetic, complex, emotional, and succeed on many different levels. Darcy masters sound, imagery, meaning, and capture a range of different ideas, to create poems that feel alive with energy and full of quiet mystery. Her focus in this collection is on the climate emergency, and what it means to bring a new baby into a world so full of uncertainties. She looks at tiny animals such as silverfish, cockroaches, stink bugs and jellyfish, and travels through the US and Europe, and while her poems often look at the very small, they are large in scope, showing how we are all interconnected. I especially enjoyed her silverfish poem, "Silver", her Jellyfish poem, her explorations of time and place, such as "Postcards from Europe" and "A guided tour of the house and its environs." Her short poem, "Umbrella" looks at an a umbrella, "a silken manifestation" and captures a whole relationship within a tiny space. She is a deft and thought-provoking poet.

Unfortunately, the final, and longest, section of this book didn't work for me as well as the rest. "Alphabet" is based on Inger Christensen's book-length poem of the same name. Christensen's poem was written in the early 1980s, and is about the threat of nuclear work and the sense of imminent loss and destruction. Christensen begins her poem, "apricot trees exist; apricot trees exist". Darcy's poem beings "apricot trees insist; apricot trees insist". For me, Darcy's poem didn't work because it engages too directly with Christensen's and comes across as a bad pastiche rather than something original and unique. Christensen's poem is so dynamic and moving because it feels so utterly her own and her voice is so memorable and full of emotions: Darcy's version feels insignificant in comparison. I think Christensen's poetic forms and work as a whole are very much worth engaging with, but sticking so closely to her poem and using Christensen's voice meant that Darcy's interpretation fell flat for me.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finished: 07.08.2019
Genre: poetry
Rating: D
#TBR list 2019
Conclusion:
My thoughts are my own.
Please take the time to read these poems
...I'm curious what YOU think....and what I am missing.

My Thoughts

[Paul Bisagni · Rating 5 out of 5]

The homage to Alphabet RAVAGED me ~~~

[Jude Brigley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked the poems very much and the poet’s voice resonated with me. I particularly liked ‘Still’ with its references to knot weed and the alphabet poem is superb. In ‘A guided tour....’ the poet writes - ‘I usually care quite a lot about the reader but today / I just want to get the whole thing down on paper’ but it turned out to be my favourite in the collection. Someone wrote on here that the poet is ‘too clever’. I think there is no such thing as too clever.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I heard Ailbhe Darcy read from this book over the summer, I was excited to read it. The fact is, in my hands, the poems weren't nearly as alive as they were at the reading. There's a tendency in these poems to try to be too linguistically playful to the sacrifice of meaning and emotional relevance. Clever...too clever is all I often said after poems.

[Anna Baird-Hassell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just realized I did in fact read this whole collection for class so I should add it to my goodreads. less accessible than other poetry we’ve read but I really like the climate anxiety theme and the experimentation with the Fibonacci sequence