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The local what's on Newspaper for South Galway and North Clare, covering Oranmore, Clarinbridge, Kilcolgan, Laban, Ardrahan, Gort, Kinvara, Bellharbour, Ballyvaughan, Fanore, Craughwell & Loughrea.



"No Vague Utopia"
Review by Dr. Sean Ryder
Emily Cullen, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hardy, is someone who notices things. The things she notices came from all sorts of encounters and events -- a nightclub gig, a shopping trip, a tornado warning, a glance at a thumbnail, a smell of tea brewing, a painful and anxious meeting with a loved one. The things she notices are often simple and quotidian, but like all good poets, she makes them greatly significant. They are observed with sharp economy, made vivid by a telling detail or two. They might be physical objects such as the 'broken trails' of cigarette ash, 'like fossilized worms,' that 'announce seduction as but a crumbling dream' ('Incense'). It might be a conversation crystallised by a precise and suggestive metaphor: 'you throw odd words / in a tossed salad of lunacy' ('Celestial Palsy'). Or it might be a moment of quiet epiphany that emerges from the ordinary run of events: 'Slowly but surely we recognise / Each is pleasing without trying' ('Falling Softly'). These poems make us pay attention to the possibilities for beauty, wisdom and intensity that may be found in everyday experience.

Emily's poems are more than just a matter of well-crafted images and scenarios, though. What is remarkable about these poems is the way in which the sensuous seamlessly links with the reflective; feeling linked to thought. In the poem 'Herbal Confusion,' the sensuous 'vapours of spiced apple tea' metamorphose into the psychological 'spiced apple of retrospect' -- a complex and evocative image. In the poem 'Remaindered,' the speaker's disconsolate mood is perfectly analogised by the image of the piles of remaindered books: 'unresponsive spines / that did not sell the first time.' The agonising scene of 'Celestial Palsy' achieves its power by shifting focus back and forth from vivid physical images of the troubled loved one ('your face at war') to the 'transfixed but anxious' emotional response of the speaker.

The tone of Emily's work is often wistful, matching the reflective tendencies of the poems. There is wit and humour here too, though. A poem like 'Performance Anxiety', which takes us through the emotional odyssey of a committee-room novice, manages to be both entertaining and affecting. Overall, the poems suggest a refreshingly open belief in life's possibilities, a position summed up in the powerful affirmation that 'Dreamers really do exist' ('Carrowkeel'). Even 'Celestial Palsy,' the volume's darkest and most disturbing poem, ends with a blessing.

These are not poems full of verbal fireworks, but they are poems of great verbal skill. Emily's style often gives the impression of relaxed free verse, but actually it is peppered with strategic rhymes and half-rhymes that remind you this is highly-crafted poetry -- witness her delightful conjuring of incense-smoke: 'Now smoky arabesques / tease then evanesce' ('Incense') This is a volume that reminds you what poetry can do that other kinds of writing can't..

There are in fact many accomplished poems here. They are technically skilled and emotionally mature. I first encountered Emily's poetry when judging a university poetry competition several years ago, and the same qualities that won her the prize back then are found in abundance between these covers. Take notice. Dr. Sean Ryder, NUIG.