Tears in the Fence

Daragh Breen can’t help but look upwards. His eyes go to ‘Christ’s feet / nailed and fastened to the cross’; to the skies and their many ‘winged creatures’; or further still, to the moon and stars and the whole solar system beyond. When Breen stays closer to ground, he is mostly in the company of those equally ‘moon-minded’ – wolves. But as the poems unfold, it becomes clear that his looking upwards and outwards is often also a looking inwards and backwards. Birds in November is haunted by death, memory, solitude. There is a pervading sense of abandonment, or perhaps a desire for it. 

            a lit trawler

            alone in the night

            as the Universe extinguishes

            all the source of light

            along the decaying bough of its spine

There are ghosts and disappearances everywhere, and the reader is often thrown into such liminal space:

            Boxed by the white glare of the lift

            in the dark realm

            of a multi-storey car park basement,

This is only more eerie given the near total absence of people (replaced by badgers, bees, and birds – all prone to disappearing). But this absence; the frequent lack of subjectivity; the mere handful of instances of the first personal pronoun; the empty environs; none of these makes this a book of poems in which the self is absent, or others deserted. Rather, the book appears in part to be a non-egoistic search for that very self by perpetual half-light (there is a constant candle-flicker). In trying to find to find it and sometimes to lose it, Breen finds others, memories of others, shadows, or nothing at all. Just ‘a lingering smell of smoke’. 

But Breen’s attention is also on the world and its other inhabitants. The book charts his search for purchase through encounters with wild animals, pets, and vanishing crows. Breen constantly contrasts and elides a series of opposites that in review sound trivial – heaven and earth, light and dark, life and death, real and unreal – in ways that are decidedly not. The treatment is more oblique than it looks. In places, it is too indirect and obscure, in others, not enough. But, aside from the occasional clunk, it is very deft work that rewards careful reading.

One of the stronger and more straightforward passages of the book is the titular sequence.  The writing is precise and imagistic, but in the context of the whole can be read many ways. The second section reads:

            Above a damp field

            a ghosting of birds

            against the low winter sky,

            seen and then unseen,

            tilting out of sight

            before teasing themselves

            back from some other world.

            They have been flitting in

            and out of existence

            all morning,

            silently returning

            in dribs and drabs,

            unwilling to stay too long

            in this grey realm.

In a more complicated vein, the opening piece (‘Navigatio’) reinterprets the tale of Brendan the Navigator, an Irish Abbot who allegedly undertook an epic voyage to find the Garden of Eden in the 6^th century. He travelled alone at sea for seven years. Breen digs up another Irishman of extreme solitude. He recasts the tale in new light; the result is solemn and lonesome. It initiates Breen’s search for a hold on the world, his grieving for it, and his companionship with its creatures.

            the voice of the ice-fields humming their own lament

            was finally heard, as something seemed to have finally

            broken deep within.

And in the following passage:

            the wind taunts the shoreline

            with an intensity that suggests that if it

            were to suddenly stop, and all was shocked still,

            then every single thing would disappear.

Brendan is not the only lonely company Breen keeps. He also mentions by name Gagarin, Armstrong, and Woolf. Woolf is relevant for obvious reasons, but all three are appropriate company for the same reason as Brendan. Two walked in worlds of their own; the other gave voice to the worry that we all might. Reading Birds, one occasionally gets the impression that Breen feels he does too. David Bradshaw, in his introduction to The Waves, describes the novel as having a ‘profound sense of separation, even solipsism’ whilst at the same time invoking a kind of collective consciousness. Though stylistically very different, the two writers are of a piece in feeling the allure of solipsism and sharp pangs of grief. 

In Breen’s case, this grief is most keenly felt in ‘Libretto’, which opens with a tragic refrain from Dido’s Lament. The poem ends:

            telling us how their mother

            had endlessly listened to Kathleen Ferrier

            for months after their father died,

            singing along through clenched tears

            as the Heavens rained sparrows about her

            where she sat,

            and that they couldn’t get close to her

            because of all the birds.

            Everything denied flight,

            Everything laid in frail earth.

Birds in November is direct and at times difficult. It strikes cool at first and is occasionally too laboured. The book moves mostly in sequence and relies heavily on motif; it is tricky to take piece by piece and it is surprisingly easy to miss what is in plain sight. But there is much compassion, and it is not all sober.  In any case, Breen’s pithy writing and haunting imagery are well worth any patience they ask for. 

Samuel Bowerman 22^nd February 2024