Review
V.I. Whitehead, immerses herself in a collection worth returning to again and again.
- Drinking the Colour Blue
- New Island
Drinking the Colour Blue
Eileen Casey’s debut collection is polished, assured and brimming with emotional candour. Blue is the signature colour and it comes in subtle shades, highlighted by contrasts, complimented by darker undertones.
She produces sound pictures which leave vivid visual images. In ‘Black Ball Gown’ a young woman teetering on the edge of experience buys a black evening dress from a charity shop:
A stream of black
flows through my arms, through the mouth
of a paint peeling front door (No 8)
up the stairs into the one room
where my sister and I sleep and cook and dream
Casey tells stories of loss and regret, of past failures and future hopes. She shifts from urban to rural landscape, from past to present, from sunlight to darkening shadow. The everyday is transformed by the telling phrase – Blackberries that rosaried the hillside – Jezebel heat on silk. We are sucked into other lives, confronted by misery and hatred as often as by love and forgiveness. Character is painted with a few deft strokes. Defining moments are evoked with deft clarity. The murderer in ‘Presence of Mind’ shaves
‘With hands that crushed hollows in a woman’s throat’
before leaving sleeping children to wake
‘to a world washed crimson’
The woman in ‘Novenas’ struggles to survive
two funerals in one year
her eldest beaten up
the knocks her husband gives her,
whether in or out of humour…
She lights her thin white candle
swallows deep the first prayer of the day
It pulls her through
great lungfuls of it.
This is a world where we catch a defining moment and a life evolves before our eyes. Recurring imagery of colour, birds and landscape linger in the memory. For me some of the shortest poems worked best. All of them bear rereading. It is a book to dip into time and time again; a collection to savour for its refreshing, acrid, startling and joyful insights.
V.I. Whitehead