(First published in the Dublin Review of Books)

In an interview with Jody Randolph-Allen some thirty years ago, Eavan Boland suggested that the “project in the nature poem is a revised way of seeing, rather than the thing that’s seen”. The nature writer, by extension, might be thought of as a figure who contributes clarity and freshness, new complexities, to received understandings, an adjuster of assumptions. Katie Donovan is such a poet, ‘slipping past the breakers / to find my rhythm’.

Some writers seem to gravitate towards the centre – the humming metropole, as it were – of poetic action: what they gain in status and self-assurance, attaining fluency in the accepted styles, they often lose in spunk, as the tousled vibrancy of their original foray is converted over time to the gloss and sheen of the merely eloquent. Donovan, however, is of a different bent, favouring a meandering, wild-meadow verdancy to the curated formal garden; like tenacious valerian in summer, she reminds us that ‘it’s possible / to thrive / on almost no ground / at all’. Something of a suburban drifter (originally from Wexford), she prefers to linger at the edge of things, unobtrusively observant. ‘I like a tangle,’ she notes, surveying a hideaway patch where ‘roses and lilac thrive’, one of many ‘Corners filling up / with unexpected lives’.

This emphasis on the marginal and improvisatory lends vitality to the descriptive momentum of the poems as they unfold, while also giving Donovan room to breathe and reflect. Readers of her work are rarely in doubt as to the importance she affords to a watching, listening self-immersion among the details, which together constitute the gist, where poetry shines. Love, too, flourishes in the mix. ‘He takes me / like a river / takes a stone’, we’re told in ‘Him’, ‘or like the arrow / he flourishes and fits, // and lets / fly.’ Her poem ‘Rootling’, incarnating some of the primal, anachronistic strangeness of motherhood, is similarly charged: ‘Once attached, / you drag on me / like a cigarette’, she says to her newborn babe, ‘puffing between sucks’.

If there is pleasure – even, in moments, a plain erotic happiness – to be had in the sheer act and process of perception, Donovan’s gaze resists the indulgence of a gratuitous wistfulness. Her train of thought, indeed, can encompass grim severities and glistering delights in a single motion. ‘They quiver: two sycamores / shaken to their inmost rings’, she writes in her most recent collection, May Swim: ‘Today a man conducts / a butchering, / to sabotage their symmetry.’ Destruction and cruelty, unyielding pain, are part of the life-world these poems inhabit. Auschwitz, she notes, ‘sounds like a mouth / empty of hope / falling / to the death hush.’ For Donovan, quiet is not always peaceful; singing can be edged by devastation, ineffable and unending.

The frequent corporeality of Donovan’s imagination, however, creates a counter-force to the monolith of melancholy. A soft sussurating poem that nevertheless refuses to flinch from some of life’s harsher mysteries, ‘Wish’, for instance, recalls the author’s young daughter ‘fascinated / by my lumps / and hairy places’, an ageing, adult body she ‘can’t conceive / of growing into’ herself, much though she shall. The shape (and eventual fate) of bodies is a recurring concern. Like much of Donovan’s later work, her collection Off Duty (2016) – written in the aftermath of her husband’s death, and previously praised by the Dublin Review of Books for its ‘uncensored look at the realities of living and caring for someone with a terminal illness’ – measures the physical and emotional toll of grief, gradually giving form to what would otherwise remain unspeakable. ‘In that brutal forward motion of survivors,’ she writes in ‘The Closing’, ‘we intend to discard his death: to thrive.’ The returning thought – whether memory or premonition – and rough fact of such ‘closings’ is perennially ‘there / at the edge of my seam’, where ‘the unravelling / begins again’.

Throughout Donovan’s work, the flourishing of her own senses, the rich complexity of the human and natural habitats she explores, are interwoven with a steely awareness of finitudes – like a truncated spool of music, or a falling aria that ends in enveloping darkness, ‘this moulded soundlessness, / this surrender’. One poem draws quiet exultation from the sight and fragrance of sun-lit shirts ‘billowing in April wind’, the springtime paradoxically rising again in a life that remains pressed and hunched by private pain: ‘He is now so thin, / nesting in the shadows / of shirts that are too big, / smelling of winter and ashes.’ This contradictory mingling of instinctive hope and incurable sadness sharpens the weather of Donovan’s work, as she courageously wonders if, within or beyond the ‘cadaver, some essence remains’: ‘we crave its forgiveness, / the invisible heart of a burning flame.’

One of Donovan’s hallmarks is her persistence in finding a way back, through the thorny labyrinth, to the abundant, sensuous heart of daily experiences. ‘Life is held in the warm / crunch and flake / and melt of good bread, / rolled on the tongue’, she writes in ‘City of Bread’. ‘I’m a seed, a fruit,’ she proclaims, similarly, in another early piece, ‘a luscious thing / snuggling in darkness’. Enda Wyley and Doireann Ní Ghríofa have also written in this poetic vein, in which a world of vanished intimacies is summoned to life, vivid as sunlight, near as breath. Oddly, perhaps, given the weightiness of Donovan’s later subject matter in particular, the abiding atmosphere in her poems is more celebratory than preservational. Like the ‘graveyard’ that is also ‘a valley of fallen stars’, even the most elegiac of her recollections seem rooted, somehow, in secret joy – a ferocious quickening of sensate understanding. Hers is a nature poetry that pulses, even in mourning. ‘I’ll bury the bulbs,’ she writes (with stinging concision), ‘for the rebound.’