The Sun is Open

by Gail McConnell

The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, this startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life. 'Each page of The Sun Is Open is rich with exquisite and surprising language, pain, and wisdom.' - Maggie Nelson 'The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant, from Wendy Houses, to the very hairs of your head, to the poetry of First Aid instructions, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking - sometimes pain-making work - making the words fit the columns, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses. A series of ethical considerations and transactions, credits and debits that sometimes demand to be accounted for, or judged, or at least spoken of in the light of whatever the forensics might or might never unfold.' - Ciaran Carson

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Read For School

126 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2021

About the author

Gail McConnell is a writer from Belfast. She is the author of Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears, 2019), Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018) and Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave, 2014). Fothermather, an exploration of queer parenthood, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award and made into a programme for Radio 4. Her debut poetry book, The Sun is Open, was published by Penned in the Margins in Sept 2021.
The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author’s father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, this startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life.

'Each page is rich with exquisite and surprising language, pain, and wisdom.' Maggie Nelson

'In this devastating yet immersive book, McConnell skilfully utilises juxtaposition, understatement and negative space to offer us an intimate work of poetic testimony.'
Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

'The Sun is Open is a work of extraordinary emotion, written with extraordinary control. It is also - perhaps extraordinarily - a work of joy.' Joanna Walsh

'one of the most startling elegies in print.' Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/...

Gail is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast. Gail’s writing interests include violence, creatureliness, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form.

http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/i...

Reviews

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This moving, controlled narrative poem reflects on a childhood experienced in the wake of a father's murder by the IRA. The poem begins with this simple piece:

ON THE MORNING of March 6th,
1984, Mr William McConnell,
assistant governor of Maze Prison,
was outside his home, checking
underneath his car for explosive devices
when he was shot dead in front of
his wife and three-year-old daughter.

This establishes the trauma explored in this book-length poem, and the main characters: father, mother, daughter. At over 100 pages, this is long for a book of poetry, but it's also carefully judged: the reader is gripped, rather than overwhelmed, by the unfolding exploration. It's also an expansive piece, capturing different perspectives on the father, on childhood, and the myriad of experiences, both good and bad, experienced in the wake of trauma. McConnell uses short lines that travel in a column down the page, almost like newsprint, giving us a sense that we are reading reports from the centre of action. She even describes her process, saying "I'm making soft returns / for this you need two keys SHIFT / and ENTER to go down the line / carries on the carriage moving / back." The poem also contains quotes from a number of different sources, primarily diaries and books belonging to William McConnell but also newspaper clippings and pieces from the Bible and Shakespeare.

McConnell establishes a childhood rich in experiences -- the indulgence of a sweet shop ("apple tarts brandy / balls clove rock"), the pleasure of a beach, the mother's affection and care, intercut with "The Tremblies we call it when my / body shakes can't make it stop" and muses on the father's role as a prison guard, and the complexities of the Troubles. It's also a book concerned with time: how certain moment weigh more heavily in our lives than others, how time doesn't always move in a linear way, how the past presses into the present. The poem grapples with huge emotions as well as seismic political issues, and refuses to be simplistic or partisan. Its power rests in its complexity and its depth. McConnell's voice is memorable and full of power.

[Ada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quan l'autora tenia 3 anys, el seu pare va ser assassinat per la IRA davant d'ella i la seva mare.
Tots els poemes evoquen aquest episodi i tot el que va venir després: la consciència de la violència, els interessos polítics, el dol, la supervivència, el saber qui era el seu pare.
Formalment és complexe. No sé si dir que és un poema llarg o un conjunt de poemes independents. No tenen títol, sovint no tenen context. Son com càpsules molt delimitades. Els versos estan tallats on no t'ho esperes i t'has d'acostumar al ritme i l'anarquia de les paraules. Fa molt ús de cites extretes de la Bíblia, sobretot, però també de les notícies sorgides arran dels fets i del diari personal del seu pare durant la seva època universitària.

[betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

edit 1: now writing one of my summative essays on this and the more I look into it and research this text the more I fall in love with it. The exploration of McConnell's relationship with religion and the death of her father has made me tear up several times. I'm used to crying when writing essays but never for good reasons. An essay by McConnell holds a quote that really got to me:

'Writing The Sun Is Open, I went back to the books [the Bible and its stories] that shaped my imagination and recognised something that child me already sensed: that I could set echoing all the anger, pain, terror, grief, joy, hope and assurance they held, and so speak.'

ARE YOU JOKING?? I genuinely cannot express to you what this book means to me, the more I read it the more I want to cry. This is one of the best things I've ever been forced to read.

Gail McConnell, the woman that you are, I am so in love with you.

~
no because that genuinely hurt.

I never rate books I read for school because I always look at them with an analytical and skeptical eye but holy cow this was good. the amount of emotion McConnell was able to inject into her words was startling but there are also moments where she seems completely emotionally absent and I think it's a wonderful commentary on the drastically different emotions someone feels when they're in mourning.

I would never have picked this up if it weren't for school work but I am so grateful we were forced to read this. It is brilliant but really touches the places in my heart that I thought had healed. Turns out they haven't.

[Marjolein van der Spoel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed listening to the poet read her poems more than I did reading the book itself, but this makes sense since I know that poetry needs to be spoken aloud in order to be truly felt. 3.5 stars.

[Debs Erwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very moving and powerful piece of poetry.

P.S. To complement the book I recommend listening to this interview with the author: https://www.publictheologyireland.com...

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review
https://youtu.be/L4YDvpspnrA

[Tom Stanger · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Sun is Open is the remarkable and incredibly personal debut from Gail McConnell reflecting on her childhood in Belfast and the death of her father, who was killed by the IRA in front of their home in 1984.

Whilst flitting between McConnell’s adult perspective and childhood memories of family life, playing games, family holidays, school and watching television, The Sun is Open paints a vivid portrayal of a youth many of us will immediately relate to being children in the early to mid-1980s.

Ingeniously embracing a unique style, combining a variety of sources, ranging from the Bible to resuscitation techniques with a vivid narrative that almost makes grammar feel redundant, yet gives it an air of spontaneity and continuity of the likes Jack Kerouac created during writing his original version of On the Road. However, this spontaneity hides well-crafted prose, making each passage ever more significant than the last.

As a singular poem stretching through the entire book, it’s easy to get carried away with the book, even with the understanding of where and when the book is set, there’s a warmth that imbibes every page, painting a personal testament not just to McConnell’s father but also a childhood which remains a vivid and crucial time of life and history.

The Sun is Open contains a treasure box of literary style and deeply personal memoir of a time and understanding that amid the troubles life still went on among the personal tragedies that prevailed.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-sun-is-open-and-type-face-by-gail-mcconnell/

I like to track the winners of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize because of my own past association with it, and was really interested to see that earlier this month it went to a book of poetry, The Sun is Open, by QUB-based writer Gail McConnell. In fact the 119 pages of text are one long poem broken into chunks, playing with text and with font colour, processing the writer’s reaction to going through a box of her father’s things, long after he died in 1984 at 35, shot dead by the IRA while checking under his car for bombs, in front of his wife and his then three-year-old daughter.

Gail McConnell barely remembers her father and has no memory of that awful day, but of course it has affected her whole life, and the poetry captures that disruption and the effect of engaging with her father through a box of personal souvenirs, most notably a diary and a Students Union handbook from his own time at QUB. There is some incredible playing with structure – quotations from the box are in grey text, documents are quoted in fragments to let us fill in the blanks, at one point the page fills with vertical bars to symbolise the prison where her father worked. It’s provocative and unsettling, and meant to be.

[Peter McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to McConnell talking about Louis MacNeice in an old Radio 3 ‘The Essay’ and was blown away, immediately knowing that I had to read her poetry. This long poem is about a Troubles atrocity, and I think it’s a compliment that I’ve hesitated to recommend it to acquaintances who have family history similar to McConnell’s. In her hands, I actually felt the impact of techniques that I normally, um—let’s be polite and say ‘struggle to appreciate’—especially ‘found’ poetry, which she employs quite a bit, and which feels more honest and indeed more poetic in her hands than many others’.

[Xenia Tran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very poignant and powerful collection of poems, presented in the poet's child and adult voices as she attempts to gather fragments of her father's life and death after he was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. The design of the book and the way the words are spread on the page are reflective of the broken time, political agendas and presentation of news in a unique and deeply moving way.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you process a violent death that happened when you were only 3? How do you remember your father when he died when you were so young? How do you find poetry in such horror? Gail McConnell does this by sifting through the archive of her father’s death and the archive of her memories, using the details of her childhood to create poetry. It is a tough and important read, and the more important b/c her father was killed by sectarian violence.

[Alyssa Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars: I’ve never been a fan of fractal poetry, but McConnell presents it in a way that allows for so much more meaning to uncover. The poems are not titled and are justified, giving the look of newspaper clippings, as if the book is her attempt to piece together the bits of her memories from her late father. She places poems together with a purpose to mirror one another, and I love that you can find a thread that somehow connects all the poems. Devastatingly good.

[Hazel Love · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this a very personal portrait of processing grief in which McConnell cleverly uses word and form to illustrate fragmentation, absence and the meaningless of word.
This isn't a poetry book to be orally performed, but something to read alone and really feel the grief that permeates the poems.

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Earth shatteringly beautiful.

Grief, love, nostalgia, sadness and hope drips from every word.

We are who are past makes us, with this idea McConnell leaves us to question how much of their current lives are the result of past experiences rather than past actions.

[Emma Stephens]

a beautiful compilation of poems about grief and loss and a narrative story about growing up in northern ireland after her father was killed by the IRA. i’m not usually one for poetry but thoroughly enjoyed this read. (i don’t like to rate non fiction work)

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful book of poetry of a daughter dealing with the assassination of her father, her grief, and the murky political situations that flow from the Troubles.

[Jamie Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best poetry collection I have ever read.

[Bryony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful poetry about Northern Ireland