REVIEWs

Review of Reshaping the Light by Breda Joyce

Reviewer: Margaret Galvin

Reshaping The Light (Chaffinch Press, 2021) is the work of a very skilled writer, capable of addressing a great diversity of subject matter. Hers is an intelligent voice informed by a knowledge of history, mythology, archaeology, and music as well as a deep appreciation of the natural world.  According to Virginia Woolf: ‘Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of her life, every quality of her mind is written in her work.’  This is certainly true of this collection.  Breda has decided to reveal who she is.  Hers is a deeply compassionate voice, she is outraged by the suffering of others, whether that be inflicted by a brutal regime, the Magdalen laundries or an old man terrorised by a savage attack in his home.  She is also deeply attuned to all that surrounds her and celebrates this in poems that notice how starlings in Bellaghy ‘reshape the light’ as the murmuration rearranges itself in the evening sky. Hens, poppies, blackcurrants, dandelions, and a hibernating wasp all receive her attention.

She is everywhere apparent in her poems, as daughter, niece, sister, wife, mother, and teacher.  Her warm engagement with these roles imbue the many poems of relationship and connection in this collection with tremendous power. Her meditation on her daughters and their myriad pursuits reveal not only a visceral umbilical tie but a brave if wistful apprehension of the transience of life.  Breda’s husband can draw great reassurance from her declaration that the shifting of tectonic plates will not dislodge them. The daughter Breda returns to her beloved father’s deathbed and faces the grief with unflinching recall in her poem ‘The Chorus.’ The daughter Breda remembers the ‘spray of citrus’ when her mother peeled an orange for the poet’s brother, a child sick in hospital. The niece Breda remembers what it was like to visit her aunt Mairead and uncle Stephen in nursing homes.  The faithful sister knows what it meant when her sister Mary offered a birthday gift of lilac from her left hand, the beaten left hand of the citeog.

In conclusion I want to quote something written on the window of a cafe in Wexford, called Frank’s Place: ‘Pour me a bowl of wine, I will sink in it all unkindness.’

This collection imbued with such humanitarian tenderness admonishes all of us to kindness. We are indebted to the poet for her witness.