(A review of The Shark Nursery by Mary O'Malley, first published by Reading Ireland / New Hibernia Review)

In an age of wars and pandemics, rising xenophobia and accelerating climate change, when gilded speech seems all too often merely to mask the inertia and self-interest of powerful forces in our society, poetry can appear a frivolous or even a somewhat compromised kind of activity – blithely self-satisfied, as the world goes up in flames. This is part of the reason why The Shark Nursery makes for such compelling and essential reading. Sparking with easy wit and grim humour, smouldering with political anger, rippled through by a sadness that feels both oneiric and lucid, O'Malley's new work critiques its historical moment, while seeming, at the same time, to touch the very root of song. “Dystopia is sudden”, she warns, in a haze “charged with fumes and dust”, through which neither yesterday nor tomorrow look especially happy: “the shades of our dead / hungrily joining the conversation, our days opening ahead.” To know poetry, she further suggests, “just follow the music / from a star long gone.” On such a journey, time and space can change their shapes, begin to move in previously unthinkable directions, leaving gaps behind that only desire can traverse, like “a fine-tuned / messenger / between worlds.” At one point in the refracted flux, “Heisenberg slips past”, more than likely “heading for Heligoland” – where he will begin to develop his theory of quantum mechanics, “riding the waves where they take him”, an explorer of temporal tides and possible realities. O'Malley might be thought of in similar terms.

As anyone familiar with her formidable back-catalogue already knows, O'Malley is a challenging poet, in the most energetic and galvanising sense of the word. As we read her, we find the easy answers and cheap consolations we may once have cherished deftly dismantled, in favour of what is difficult and complex, vital and authentic – and always in poems that echo with a quiet music that seems somehow drawn and winnowed from all that roaring vastness, the turning world. “As it all winds down, a curtain falling on clamour”, she sings, “there is relief.”

There's a side to O'Malley's consciousness that harbours a kind of gutsy and irrepressible kinship with creatures themselves, both marine and terrestrial, as though she, too, rose with the “hare rising to its full height, / ears tuned to some satellite older than the moon”, or descended with the “sharks in the bay” who “keep their secrets / from experts and tourists.” Yet for all their feral sympathies, these are poems that live and breathe in a contemporary world. One piece begins: “Bombs are falling again in Europe. / The cycle of white men's rage wheels on / and stamps our century with its teeth.” Another, “The Dig”, imagines a “distant excavation” in days to come, that will unearth “in a cave under the rubble / tweets, a blog or two, the text fading in the light.” O'Malley resembles a citizen-journalist, intrepidly sending dispatches to the future, as if to say, yes, we saw the signs, some of us saw it coming. “The people march and light bonfires”, she writes, “Driving through, faces scan for non-believers, / small eyes glint in the headlights.” 

The Ireland O'Malley portrays is as much a dysfunctional democracy and a tax haven – a feeding-ground for data centres and vulture funds – as a green, Atlantic island. “There are no birds in the sky”, we're told in “The Ballad of Googletown”, a rip-roaring satire, unsettling in its cultural perceptions: “There are hearts and flowers to buy / In Googletown.” The jolt-shocked image of skies literally emptied of life by a tech-centred, neoliberal society is made all the sharper by O'Malley's own avian affections. “You have stretched Summer almost to my birthday”, reads “Late Swallow”, “Go. I need you safely in the square in Alcala. / This awful year I can't follow.” In “Lift”, the same life-seeking glance leaps to discover “the first swallow [...] poised high / in a clear sky this cold April”: a longed-for joy, miraculously returned.

Dermot Healy's A Fool's Errand (2010) – inspired by the flocks of brent geese that wintered each year near his home in the West of Ireland – had something of this last quality, at once rooted and migratory: a mortal yearning, raised by wings. Like Healy, O'Malley's instinct is to carve out a (not always consolatory) window of sureness, through which the persisting rhythms and teetering precarities of our own existence come clear. “Follow the pattern the shells make / to the tide’s tune”, she urges, “called by the high moon.” In “Circus Act”, similarly, time appears “[like] a god in the house of Atreus”: “he makes a play of our sacrifice / and reaches out for the dying heart.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the shadow of Covid-19 hovers over this collection, infusing even its most translucent moments of vision and emotion with strange darkness, like a chill in the summer night or a fog full of stars. O'Malley registers the eerie vividness and minute rituals that defined life during lockdown, as well as the visceral dislocations that ensued as the plague descended on all of our worlds. “We crave company but nobody calls to the door”, she notes in “Asylum”, “We are stuck inside with our fetters and bad dreams. / Somebody somewhere is pulling the strings.”

Moreso than in previous collections, the laconic poise of O'Malley's address, the sardonic clarity of her gaze, are mingled here with an atmosphere that might be described as elegiac, were it not for the ceremonial connotations of that mode. O'Malley's approach is arguably wilder, and more searching: an almost chthonian urge to seek out and honour what is essential in human experience, the losable vividness (of things, seasons, people, beasts) that teaches us how to live. “I promise when all this is over”, she confides, “I will remember what is holy.” 

This is an art that encompasses dream and myth as well as the palpable quotidian, which materialises over and over in this collection, an intimate expanse, as “a vast library / with parades of fading loves and troubles.” We encounter flinty vision (as in the image of “a giant wind turbine on its side like Ozymandias”) and creative wit: in O’Malley’s rendering, both combine to portray a society perilously balanced between systems of power and processes of nature, and human lives made luminous and vulnerable by time’s relentless storm. Even as she recognises her own inability to repair what is broken, to restore what is lost, however, O'Malley continues to record the seasons as they pass, allowing us to glimpse – as she puts it in “The Ghost Library” – “those we cannot see / who sometimes come to their windows / to look at us briefly, before we fade from their light.” As here, O'Malley's poems have all the gleam and mystery of a star-lit sky at morning: we become more alert, more alive, more rootedly human, by reading them. The Shark Nursery is a shining peak among mountains: a book of and for the twenty-first century, by one of Ireland’s essential poets.