“It is a wide-ranging collection brimming with insight and curiosity. From flirtations at a country dance, to the physical repercussions of grief, to a sequence of poems exploring the inner workings of the human body with medical precision, these are poems with a philosophical bent and a strong emotional core. A collection that demands to be read again and again.”
– JESSICA TRAYNOR, author of Pit Lullabies.
‘Henry’s unadorned style and sensibility; all the better for the quiet confidence … her unflinching and passionate depictions of sex, love and loss … sensual, explicit, funny and never less than 360-degree honest, these poems trace an aggregated arc through the modern love story… it is the matter-of-fact power of detail that so often carries the force of these poems and sets up dynamic resonance with the passionate candour and humour that is woven into the book.’
– MARTIN MALONE, The Interpreter’s House poetry journal.
‘…strewn with lines which are memorable because you’ve read nothing quite like them before… where others would inflate their language and bluster, Henry is clinical, she zooms in on childhood with a rare lack of sentiment. [Her poems] are unsettling in the way best poems always are, they drip with menace, loss and intelligence.’
– KEVIN HIGGINS, author of Life Itself at Merlin Park Hospital.
At fifty eight I started HRT,
prince’s kiss to my sleeping womb,
long finished its lifetime cycle
of ripening, shedding, bleeding
– it reawakened.
My aging brain may have ceased
its monthly despatch of signals
for the womb to lay down
a lush scarlet bed
where an embryo might bloom.
Now each month HRT promises
the womb that embryo. It does not
reawaken my quiescent ovaries,
so no middle aged egg appears
rubbing its eyes, looking for its glasses.
Instead, month after month,
the womb ripens and sheds,
forever hopeful, forever ready to cradle a baby,
should that egg appear, should that egg meet sperm,
should the pair merge and flourish.
On the whole,
I prefer the nonverbal,
a softened look or a harsh hold.
I want you, I love you,
may be true,
or not.
Two hands cradling the base of your skull,
drawing your lips in to a kiss, says everything
in that moment, promises nothing in the next.
The body too can lie,
divert or embellish, but
its instinctive truth will surface.
There’s nothing wrong,
I’m good, we’re good
could be the truth or a cover-up.
Whereas a lightened or withheld caress,
avoiding eye contact, diminished
interest in the shared quotidian,
all suggest that we’re not.
The old lady sighs, looks into space,
conflicting signals
in her forehead and eyebrows.
She did not sleep last night.
Her young companion oscillates
between attending to her
and to a bleating mobile phone,
whose texts pierce like the cry of a newborn.
She is a niece;
none of the tensions of a daughter.
Her voice shows gentle fondness,
her face hidden behind the beige mask.
Her young body tightly coiled,
leans forwards to hold the old lady’s hand,
and her sacral tattoo sneaks a look out
below her jacket.
They speak of Martha who died;
that she did not fight it, that her acceptance
made her passage easier, that her best friend
had written a poem, that would make a stone cry.
Make him simian,
arms outstrip legs,
knuckles trail,
back-sloping brow,
small hindbrain,
hair tufts on each phalanx
of fingers and toes,
prominent lower jaw,
perioral puff out,
thin lines for lips.
He’ll still give eye contact,
be sensuous, curious,
finger twirling,
body hugging,
playful, attentive,
warmfleshed and enfolding,
he’ll sift through your hair
for creatures and find none,
the same frenetic jog
to the summit.
No intellectual blubber,
no casting about
for meaning,
no past and
no future,
no loss
of home ground,
no terms or conditions,
no entitlement,
no fiscal creep.
My mother loved an emergency,
any emergency.
With six children she rarely lacked opportunity.
From rescuing a woman with a pram
from a shower of golf-ball hailstones,
to rushing a bleeding child to Casualty,
encasing a scalded hand in ice
or driving hell for leather to the vet,
a poisoned dog convulsing in her lap,
to an overdose or two
and some slashed wrists.
Garden emergencies fell within her domain,
screwing interconnecting rods
to clear a blocked drain,
chasing a rat with a shovel,
few things pleased her more.
‘As mo radharc’ she’d bid us,
banished, real work to be done.
‘You’re not an elephant’
my small brother said
as he watched me try to move a rock.
‘Get mommy!’
Emergencies lifted her
away from the humdrum
of meals to be cooked,
tidying and sorting,
cajoling and curbing,
admonishing and yelling.
She went in close
to be there for the worst.
She had no time for Santy;
why fool the children
when life is more like eating raw rhubarb
dipped in brown sugar,
from cones of rolled newspaper.
We squelched meal through our fingers
then scattered it.
Once we helped her chase a hen,
to send it to sleep,
head under wing.
She twisted its neck,
chuckled at our alarm,
then drew us in
to the wonder of it.
As she plucked it from her lap,
a halo of feathers about her white head,
we were given one severed leg each;
pull one cord to open,
another to close,
each waxen claw.
Soon we learned to enjoy
smashing dead fishes eyes with rocks,
watching the mercury discs spill out magic,
imagining what thoughts came
from their walnut-shaped brains.
When a calf died,
she opened it
to find the plug of mucus in its lungs,
the ball of hair in it’s stomach,
or nothing at all astray.
Her advice to my mother on children;
Bí ceannúil orthu,
Ach coimeád id chroí istigh é.
Be fond of them,
but keep it safe inside your heart.
She forgot they see in.
