REVIEWs

Review of Living Water.

By Sighle Meehan

Living Water (Chaffinch Press), Bernie Crawford’s debut poetry collection, is a magnetic invitation to share a life lived closely and to the full.  A narrative exploration of friendship and family love, it is also an informed observation of the purpose and frailty of nature.  In spring she hears “a woodpecker hammer(s) out a love song”. “The uppermost branch tips in the forest canopy/don’t touch” she notes in Crown Shyness “separated by channels of sky-space, /a breathtaking pattern of protection”.  She is alert to the precision of nature; in The Role of Salt in Icicle Ribbing she asks, “If the temperature fluctuates/one degree either way/would a sparrow nest in my hair?”

But it is her style that engages ⎯ intuitive, personal, intimately conversational, whether it’s her mother warning her “never/ to copy those women who bare bronze legs”, or her daughter explaining “we didn’t grow inside her tummy/ we grew in Mum’s heart/ ‘cos we’re adapted” or the hurricane that left behind “the busy emptiness of hands/that longed to hold a daughter/and braid her hair once more/into corn rows”.  

Crawford’s work on the Irish Bilateral Aid programme in Zambia and Tanzania gives an exotic loneliness to many of her poems.  Earthenware pots from Lesotho remind her “how in summer my mother/ replaced the fire in the kitchen hearth/ with a clay pot bursting with lilac blossom”.  Gifts from home were sent to “Mapoteng, Kingdom of Lesotho” rolled in copies of the Limerick Leader “pressed between photos/ of a supper social and the Ballylanders’ notes”.  The last time she saw her father he was “fixing netting over fruit bushes”, the morning she left for Lesotho, “It wasn’t/his way to say much but he offered me a fistful/of freshly picked juicy goose gobs”.  Or sipping “the coolness of the earth/from our cupped hands” by the “grey stone lip of Jacob’s Well” reminding her of “a young Bedouin girl” turning away, thirsty, from a well where “soldiers stand beside two army jeeps/and shout out in a tongue she doesn’t know”.  

This collection is alive with humour.  From stories of her aunt having one set of rosary beads for everyday prayers and “the big guns from Lourdes” for special favours, to her account of being adroit at stealing “Sister Perpetua/said the devil was on my back”.   Even grief is tempered with humour.  “Coffins can be bought flat-pack these days”.  Friendship is special and specially remembered  “You loosen your holdfast/and let oarweed row you out/beyond the rocks./Buyont, you push back clouds/ and blaze the sky with your sinking sun”.

A poet with strong views and a wise tolerance, Crawford’s poetry manages to make the intimacies of a life less ordinary accessible to all readers.  Her preference for “the wild taste of red-ripe raspberries” flavours her poems and hallmarks her individuality.  A debut collection to note.