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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Jenny Farrell<\/strong> reviews Bernie Crawford’s new collection, <\/em>Living Water, Chaffinch Press 2021.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n Bernie Crawford\u2019s debut collection is a profound pleasure to read. It is informed and heightened by a life that has been lived very consciously and focused, choosing what matters.<\/p>\n The poet was a teacher of mathematics and biology in Ireland and Lesotho. She worked in Zambia and Tanzania on the Irish Bilateral Aid programme, returned with two daughters, adopted in Zambia, and with horizons that extend far beyond Western First World complacence and myopia.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, the years in Africa and the love for her children feature a great deal. Some of the poems are intensely personal, in a way that makes them universal to parental love, including poems giving insight into the experience of being an adoptive mother.<\/p>\n Other poems about Africa reveal an understanding of a common humanity, rarely seen in European writing. For example \u201cMy Earthenware Pots from Lesotho\u201d:<\/p>\n here in my kitchen I listen again to your stories.<\/em> And I remember how in summer my mother<\/em> This poem is also about how knowledge and memory reside in hands, as well as in hearts and minds. This is an experience which is shared across the world.<\/p>\n The poet\u2019s profound humanity and understanding of the suffering of many is highlighted in several poems, for example one about \u201ca young Bedouin girl\u201d in the title poem \u201cLiving Water\u201d, who is prevented access to live-giving water, as \u201cSoldiers stand beside two army jeeps\/ and shout out in a tongue she doesn\u2019t know\u201d. Another example is \u201cThe Storyteller of El Far\u2019a Camp, West Bank\u201d whose story is shaped by:<\/p>\n the curved well of olive oil<\/em> Planting tomatoes with the hope<\/em> The author\u2019s deep humanity, which allows her to identify with the oppressed and poor, extends to the victims of First World inhumanity to the same extent. The name and needless death of Savita Halapanavar is deeply engrained in the psyche of the Irish as a particularly shameful symbol of the failure of Irish society to facilitate abortion at the calculated cost of a woman\u2019s life (\u201cA Catholic Country\u201d).<\/p>\n Crawford writes this homage in the style of William Carlos Williams. It is one of several poems in this collection that show her connection with other poets and artists. Tributes to Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney, both of whom she greatly admires, are among them. A mother clasps the carcass of the son<\/em> as if to suck him back inside,<\/em> The poet\u2019s training and scientific observation of nature emerges in a number of poems. Her writing about daffodils (\u201cNot a Metaphor\u201d) is a far cry from Wordsworth\u2019s:<\/p>\n I want to see each daffodil<\/em> And how the dry papery membrane,<\/em> This awareness of the natural world includes knowledge of its fragility, the decline of the bee population in Ireland liked to the Famine (\u201cThe Flight of the Bees\u201d):<\/p>\n We watch them vanish<\/em> The choir of the famished sing in lamentation,<\/em> It is clear from the poems that Bernie Crawford has lived life to the full, and readers benefit enormously from this experience. It runs deep, it is all-encompassing, compassionate, angry, loving. We hear reflective tones that reach beyond the age of thirty \u2013 an older voice which is perhaps not heard often enough in contemporary mainstream poetry.<\/p>\n The poet writes about this with humour and acceptance, with an understanding that while older people might be observed by the young as possibly past it, they themselves live with a heightened awareness of the pleasures of life and the need to seize the day. In \u201cOptimism in the Local Pharmacy\u201d, we meet a woman, \u201cher head of flaming silver, her lived-in face\u201d whose energy and enthusiasm has an uplifting effect on waiting customers, as she vocally consults the young assistant about buying condoms:<\/p>\n she cut a swathe through<\/em> deep dive with penguins, <\/em> In \u201cPanic Buy in the Simon Shop\u201d the need to seize the day, even at times of pandemic lockdown, is also central as the speaker sees a pair of exquisite shoes, likened to \u201cscarlet tanagers\u201d that exhilarate her:<\/p>\n A social-distanced head-scarfed woman<\/em> Walk tall, be daring, carpe diem, are the messages in these poems. And of course, there is thinking about death:<\/p>\n Buoyant, you push back the clouds<\/em> Even in a poem about the presence of death and its part in life there is a conviction that there is much beauty in life that we need to own. Bernie Crawford\u2019s poetry heightens this awareness of, in Keats\u2019s words, \u201cA thing of beauty\u201d that ties us to life.<\/p>\n Living Water<\/a> is published by Chaffinch Press, 2021.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jenny Farrell reviews Bernie Crawford’s new collection, Living Water, Chaffinch Press 2021. Bernie Crawford\u2019s debut collection is a profound pleasure to read. It is informed and heightened…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":456,"featured_media":14075,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/456"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The women showed me how to sit a clay pot in a tray of water<\/em>
and make a safe for my butter, milk and cheese. <\/em>
\u2026<\/em>
And I remember how they soothed you<\/em>
with aloes soaked in water<\/em>
after you were sun-dried under a blazing sky,<\/em>
wood-fired in an open kiln.<\/em><\/p>\n
replaced the fire in the kitchen hearth<\/em>
with a clay pot bursting with lilac blossom.<\/em><\/p>\n
Anointing the bowl of hummus<\/em>
\u2026<\/em>
The bulldozers who come at night<\/em>
And uproot him from his dreams<\/em>
\u2026<\/em>
The lost homes in Jaffa and Haifa<\/em>
\u2026<\/em>
The daily resistance of rising<\/em>
And cooking, eating and praying<\/em><\/p>\n
He can harvest the future<\/em><\/p>\n
Responding to a different art form, a sculpture of a grieving mother with her dead son, at the Berlin Memorial to the victims of war (\u201cK\u00e4the Kollwitz\u2019s Piet\u00e0 at the New Guardhouse, Berlin\u201d):<\/p>\n
Her arms, splayed legs, her whole body<\/em>
clutches him<\/em><\/p>\n
undo his birth,<\/em>
dis conceive him<\/em><\/p>\n
as daffodil,<\/em>
know the hollow snap of stem,<\/em>
the tang of scent,<\/em>
the sticky alkaloid oozing from the base<\/em>
of long, tapering leaves,<\/em>
the downward curve of stamens,<\/em>
the placement of carpel<\/em><\/p>\n
enclosing the bud,<\/em>
splits along a rib<\/em>
to allow the flower<\/em><\/p>\n
over the brow of the Earth, a dark buzzing cloud.<\/em>
Afternoons no longer swollen by bees.<\/em><\/p>\n
an orchestra moves down the famine road,<\/em>
as if some strings are bowing out.<\/em><\/p>\n
the internal dialogue at the pharmacy that morning,<\/em>
showed us how to glide on ice sheets, warm snow,<\/em><\/p>\n
befriend our smoking volcanoes.<\/em><\/p>\n
fitting on winter coats, smiles:<\/em>
\u2018Buy them, wear them,<\/em>
Even if you\u2019re home alone,<\/em>
In isolation.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n
and blaze the sky with your sinking sun.<\/em><\/p>\n