Description
In New Ways of Being a Stranger, the poet returns to familiar themes: settling into a new house; The island community of Inis Meáin where the visitor is perceived as an stráinsear, the stranger, and the subject of boarding school. Whether a refugee from wartime Gaza, or the telling memories of her schooldays, or Roger Casement, the commemorated Irish patriot, it is the idea of fitting in which forms the backbone of this new collection.
In New Ways of Being a Stranger, Louise C. Callaghan has assembled her finest, deepest, most formal work yet. From the revelatory understatement and lyricism of ‘Not Married Anymore’ to the intensity of ‘The Proposition’, her poems seem to emerge in sudden rapture like alpine gentians out of limestone rock.
Thomas McCarthy
In her sequence ‘Glacial Erratics’, set on the island of Inis Meáin, Louise C. Callaghan addresses ‘a great stone monolith / glimmering on the headland’ – Wanderer, sweeping bright star, borne along the rushing corridors of ice. Her language has become abstract, probing deeply into concepts of ‘creation’ and ‘eternity’ while all the time aware of ‘life’s sure brevity’. Reading the many poems in this collection dedicated to friends past and present, we sense the truth in the words of her late friend, Manchán Magan – ‘Everything is separate, and yet everything is connected’. Life is indeed rich and full.
Susan Connolly