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Anamnesis
Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Award 2023, shortlisted in the Rubery Book Award, 2023
True to its title, the poems in O'Hagan's second poetry collection, Anamnesis, allude to a world hovering at the edges of our minds, one that can be sensed and yet lies, teasingly, just beyond conscious reach. The arc of poems through time and distance represents a summoning up of, and immersion in, small moments which reveal themselves to be quietly momentous; a distillation of personal experience from which we feel there is something to be collectively gleaned. The recovery of memory in its various facets is explored, and the poetry that emerges is both poignant and lyrical.
True to its title, the poems in O'Hagan's second poetry collection, Anamnesis, allude to a world hovering at the edges of our minds, one that can be sensed and yet lies, teasingly, just beyond conscious reach. The arc of poems through time and distance represents a summoning up of, and immersion in, small moments which reveal themselves to be quietly momentous; a distillation of personal experience from which we feel there is something to be collectively gleaned. The recovery of memory in its various facets is explored, and the poetry that emerges is both poignant and lyrical.
78 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2022
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About the author
Denise O'Hagan
9 books30 followersDenise O'Hagan
Denise O’Hagan is a Sydney-based poet and editor of New Zealand background, born in Rome. She worked in academic book publishing in London and Sydney, and set up her own imprint, Black Quill Press, in 2015. Poetry Editor (Australia/New Zealand) for Irish-based journal 'The Blue Nib' until 2020, her poetry is published internationally. Her recent awards include the NSW Poetry Prize and the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize.
Her recent poetry collection, Anamnesis (Recent Work Press), was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award and shortlisted in the Rubery Book Award (2023).
https://denise-ohagan.com
Denise O’Hagan is a Sydney-based poet and editor of New Zealand background, born in Rome. She worked in academic book publishing in London and Sydney, and set up her own imprint, Black Quill Press, in 2015. Poetry Editor (Australia/New Zealand) for Irish-based journal 'The Blue Nib' until 2020, her poetry is published internationally. Her recent awards include the NSW Poetry Prize and the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize.
Her recent poetry collection, Anamnesis (Recent Work Press), was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award and shortlisted in the Rubery Book Award (2023).
https://denise-ohagan.com
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 18, 2023
Like inside Christmas crackers, those festive table decorations that make a snapping sound when pulled open and a small gift falls out, her poems are like that, you can never guess what the poem will be about. Each poem is a present.
Whether the poet remembers, observes, or reflects her words are colours and pictures painted with her words, not only this, but the poet also brings you into her world, into her past and into the present, she delves into her memories and the reader will be there with her. Yes, her poems have cinematic properties.I would like to conclude saying that O Hagan combines brilliant imagery with graceful structures and original ideas. A book to read!
Whether the poet remembers, observes, or reflects her words are colours and pictures painted with her words, not only this, but the poet also brings you into her world, into her past and into the present, she delves into her memories and the reader will be there with her. Yes, her poems have cinematic properties.I would like to conclude saying that O Hagan combines brilliant imagery with graceful structures and original ideas. A book to read!
January 30, 2023
These are beautiful poems,written with an open honesty and intimacy: moments magnified into a telling clarity. Like looking down into the bed of a rock-pool through clear water.
February 1, 2023
A stunning collection of poems.
October 27, 2023
This book is tremendous. Wonderful phrases and imagery, poetically delightful, compelling and very rewarding. The two sonnets are brilliant.
That’s O’Hagen’s talent. Equal to her talent are the rewards the reader can garner from the content.
It’s a wonderful book, get one!
That’s O’Hagen’s talent. Equal to her talent are the rewards the reader can garner from the content.
It’s a wonderful book, get one!
February 22, 2023
This is a book of luminous clarity, where the three senses of time meld with the daily and commonplace to produce wonderful reflections on remembrance, hope, loss, and being. One of the best collections I have read in many years, taking us deep within and without of ourselves, with an unbending beauty in the lines of words to slowly absorb.
September 7, 2023
The word “Anamnesis” comes from the Greek, and means ‘remembrance’, but perhaps more specifically a recollection of something from a previous existence, like the experience of biting into Proust’s Madeleines. It’s an old-fashioned word, and perhaps it could be said that the use of it is a kind of Anamnesis itself. This is a fitting title for Denise O’Hagan’s latest poetry collection, which engages deeply with notions of memory in all sorts of ways: direct recollection, reviving something by virtue of a scent or image, or even transformation as in metempsychosis or transmigration. Anamnesis is a kind of proof that something remains, even in absentia, even after a long period of time. The remnants of our lives and the marks we leave are permanent and can be revived. Anamnesis moves through a catalogue of memories, sometimes painful, and sometimes joyous, but always sensual, using traces as a route back. These vignettes are like photographs full of detail: the taste of a watermelon slice, the crack of fresh almonds, or the click-clack of heels on stone in an old villa.
O’Hagan manages a delicate balance between immediacy and nostalgia with a light hand that feels natural, inviting the reader into the moment to share in the meaning making. There are layers of desire pervading the work, time and space condensing, folding into itself in sudden revelations that come into a quiet scene with the force of empathy:
The work is quiet and assured and the imagery is tender, using the lens of distance to tease out complexities of time and space against grief:
As with many of the poems in the collection, there are multiple layers. The child is grown, remembering a moment when she found out about a sibling who died in the womb. This sibling is not nonexistent but rather an "echo reverberating", and her absence exerts a gravity over the scene, even from a distance of time. The speaker’s present tense, combined with the multiple timeframes and points of view, creates an evocative and recursive poem. There is the mother’s own memory, “dredged up from the bog of the past”. There is the ‘lost’ baby, the loss of a sibling, the confusion of a child in the face of this loss that continues to exist alongside that same adult's understanding of what it means to have a stillborn or miscarriage and to use the language of loss that way. Perhaps too, the mother is now gone and therefore also 'lost' and so there are multiple types of longing here pivoting around death but offset beautifully by the visual image of the mother caressing the child: “A waft of fingertips at my hair”. So much work is done in the brief space of the poem, and this is indicative of O'Hagan's work.
Throughout the book there are many moments like this - artefacts giving rise to something that had been forgotten but which emerges via stimulus: the garlicky, buttery taste of escargot (combined with the snail's own ability to feel pleasure), a first pair of glasses, discovering Mona Lisa in the Louvre, finding a cache of old letters, visiting the preserved room of an artist, serving up Brussels Sprouts, a hair cut at the salon, a photo of a decaying crypt, a photo of a grandmother who died young of tuberculosis, a news program, or looking through a photo album. The artefacts become openings, not only to something rediscovered, but something created – new words for an old feeling:
There is humour threaded carefully through the book, from a dying mother’s sharp retort to a nurse about not knowing what day it is to anthropomorphic poems that give voice to objects and animals, as in "Goldfish in a Pandemic", where a goldfish muses on the nature of humans during the pandemic:
In spite of the humour, grief pervades the work. There is a ecological sensibility that mourns the loss of homes by bushfires, vulnerable species like the Powerful Owl, depleted wildlife corridors, soldiers long gone, and an array of parents, grandparents and relatives who ghost their way through the pages, making their presence known:
The poems in Anamnesis are moving, but beyond the moments of recollection, there is a sense that this is also a book about the power of language and the way words can conjure and connect, transcending the moment. There is a meta-poetic quality to this book which explores the nature of language and its ability to stimulate resurrection and transformation even in the face of the worst kind of loss. Anamnesis is a beautiful collection, evocative, funny, and complex.
O’Hagan manages a delicate balance between immediacy and nostalgia with a light hand that feels natural, inviting the reader into the moment to share in the meaning making. There are layers of desire pervading the work, time and space condensing, folding into itself in sudden revelations that come into a quiet scene with the force of empathy:
You’d say, and off I’d run; what would I give
To turn back now to you. I no longer wonder
What happened to their legs or why their
Eyes are blank, but fancy I can still feel—
As I watch a lizard slowly cross Psyche’s
Polished thigh—in among the ruins, love. (“In among the ruins, love”)
The work is quiet and assured and the imagery is tender, using the lens of distance to tease out complexities of time and space against grief:
When she told me, I don’t know. There was
A waft of fingertips at my hair, a kiss perhaps,
Her words, dredged up from the bog of the past—
I lost a baby
Two years before you were born. It was the word
Lost that stuck like Friday night’s fishbone in my
Six-year-old throat. Surely my mother hadn’t mis-
Placed my sibling-to-be within the safe shore
Of her own body?
As with many of the poems in the collection, there are multiple layers. The child is grown, remembering a moment when she found out about a sibling who died in the womb. This sibling is not nonexistent but rather an "echo reverberating", and her absence exerts a gravity over the scene, even from a distance of time. The speaker’s present tense, combined with the multiple timeframes and points of view, creates an evocative and recursive poem. There is the mother’s own memory, “dredged up from the bog of the past”. There is the ‘lost’ baby, the loss of a sibling, the confusion of a child in the face of this loss that continues to exist alongside that same adult's understanding of what it means to have a stillborn or miscarriage and to use the language of loss that way. Perhaps too, the mother is now gone and therefore also 'lost' and so there are multiple types of longing here pivoting around death but offset beautifully by the visual image of the mother caressing the child: “A waft of fingertips at my hair”. So much work is done in the brief space of the poem, and this is indicative of O'Hagan's work.
Throughout the book there are many moments like this - artefacts giving rise to something that had been forgotten but which emerges via stimulus: the garlicky, buttery taste of escargot (combined with the snail's own ability to feel pleasure), a first pair of glasses, discovering Mona Lisa in the Louvre, finding a cache of old letters, visiting the preserved room of an artist, serving up Brussels Sprouts, a hair cut at the salon, a photo of a decaying crypt, a photo of a grandmother who died young of tuberculosis, a news program, or looking through a photo album. The artefacts become openings, not only to something rediscovered, but something created – new words for an old feeling:
Now all I want, as I feel the shining weight of space and time,
Is to learn another form of love, and return to you the words
That you once offered me: ‘I’ll always be in your world.’ (“Stages of Wanting”)
There is humour threaded carefully through the book, from a dying mother’s sharp retort to a nurse about not knowing what day it is to anthropomorphic poems that give voice to objects and animals, as in "Goldfish in a Pandemic", where a goldfish muses on the nature of humans during the pandemic:
Beached, they are, these big humans,
Flailing around their lounge as they
Check for updates, make another coffee
(they’ve given up giving sugar up), and
Feed me a little more;
In spite of the humour, grief pervades the work. There is a ecological sensibility that mourns the loss of homes by bushfires, vulnerable species like the Powerful Owl, depleted wildlife corridors, soldiers long gone, and an array of parents, grandparents and relatives who ghost their way through the pages, making their presence known:
That it was all over twenty years ago
Matters not at all; in the double-take of time,
It could be yesterday that we drew up outside
Hospital doors yawning their acceptance
Of people such as us. In looking down
The deepening corridor of years, I see
The space he left is still not emptied, but
Chafes against the string of incremental actions
And the littleness of life. (“In Limbo”)
The poems in Anamnesis are moving, but beyond the moments of recollection, there is a sense that this is also a book about the power of language and the way words can conjure and connect, transcending the moment. There is a meta-poetic quality to this book which explores the nature of language and its ability to stimulate resurrection and transformation even in the face of the worst kind of loss. Anamnesis is a beautiful collection, evocative, funny, and complex.
August 31, 2025
'Anamnesis' is a perfect title for this poetry collection. Throughout there is a swinging back and forth; back towards that time, forth towards a knowing that springs truth. Denise O'Hagan's poem, 'On getting my first glasses at thirteen', is a vivid visual of that very moment when the squinting and fuzziness is overwhelmed by accuracy. Her poems have that inward focus to speak to our fundamentals.
Together, with theme consciously infused, O’Hagan showcases a classic adherence to metre and form in many poems. Along with a Petrarchan sonnet, a terza rima sonnet and a villanelle, there is an ekphrastic poem, 'Mother and child', in seven tercets of mostly hendecasyllable. 'The icon in Room 711', also in seven tercets, provides a contemporary, deflated response to the enigmatic smile and ageless celebrity of the Mona Lisa.
This is poetry for established and emerging poets and for anybody who wants to learn the skills of a professional poet.
Together, with theme consciously infused, O’Hagan showcases a classic adherence to metre and form in many poems. Along with a Petrarchan sonnet, a terza rima sonnet and a villanelle, there is an ekphrastic poem, 'Mother and child', in seven tercets of mostly hendecasyllable. 'The icon in Room 711', also in seven tercets, provides a contemporary, deflated response to the enigmatic smile and ageless celebrity of the Mona Lisa.
This is poetry for established and emerging poets and for anybody who wants to learn the skills of a professional poet.
August 2, 2023
Anamnesis’ is a stunning anthology. Denise O’Hagan has created a fluid and sensual collection- or recollection (as the title suggests) of love, grief, and ordinary beauty in the everyday, in the past, and in dreams. Her portraits and tales capture moments or emotions in perfectly selected details and exquisite clarity. You find yourself nodding, misty-eyed, or smiling as you are invited into her world of beautiful words and ideas. A book to read and return to time and again.
April 27, 2023
Beautiful and sensitive poetry, filled with descriptive images and subtle endings that linger in the mind, both sweetly and poignantly. Words so personal to the author, and yet which manage nevertheless to find an internal parallel with the reader – sometimes emotionally, and sometimes through the layered mirror of reflected events. An absolute treasury of poems.
February 21, 2023
Poignant and profound, Denise O'Hagan's Anamnesis stirs the soul in the personal and historical themes it explores. The poet's reflections on loss and hope are communicated affably, professionally, and with her heart on her sleeve. A wonderful book.
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July 22, 2023not a favourite but a good collection
August 3, 2023
I loved this collection. Denise O'Hagan is a wonderful poet. Her work is intimate and personal, yet her themes are universal. This collection deeply moving and deserves to be read multiple times.
June 5, 2024
Anamnesis carves into the human emotive experience of remembering. Denise O’Hagan’s tender and stoic lyrical voice unveils flickers of truths hidden in familial shadows. Conscious of her art, ‘even poetry staggers in the face of this’, the sheer determination to communicate the incommunicable is where O’Hagan shines, stretching into pockets of supposedly unattainable moments in time.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews