The Heart Uncut by Marian Kilcoyne

 

 

Exile clings to him like a smell

of damp yarn, a low growl of

pain shoots into the atmosphere. A

missile obliterating the pretty stars.

from Elba, Marian Kilcoyne

From Wordonthestreet Galway, The Heart Uncut is Marian Kilcoyne's debut collection. She is an Irish writer based on the west coast of Ireland. She has been a teacher at senior level, worked professionally in education and management for an Aids Organization, and reviewed fiction and non-fiction for the Sunday Business Post. She attended the Seamus Heaney Centre’s Poetry Summer School at Queen’s University Belfast in 2013. She was featured poet on Poethead – Contemporary Irish women poets, January 9th – 16th 2018. She was short-listed for the 2017 Dermot Healy International Poetry Award and placed on the long-list for the 2019 Fish Poetry Prize.

Opening with the dramatic Spectre, Kilcoyne draws one into her well observed inner world where images are sometimes startling in unexpected clarity. In her 'amaranthine garden' 'The breeze hushed and gulped into itself', and Auden-like 'the moon strangled the sun'. Similarly, in Collateral Damage the poet describes the death of a bird who has flown into a window in a pulsating way. On trying to reach the dead bird before her puppy, she writes 'I tiger to where it lies on cool stone.'

Antibes Reverie is a moveable feast where, while eating cherries the poet is 'dazed as a fool by/their sweet flesh and lip sting stain.' The druid guiding Graham Greene's pen in this poem returns in the wonderful The Significant Child. Here, Kilcoyne on a train journey, watches a sleeping child and swoons 'at his beauty and pristine druid-like presence as he trips across worlds'. 

The Heart Uncut itself, is a poem that signals the restorative power of words and the healing that is threaded through this collection. 'But listen, I want to know/if your spirit has healed?' she asks. Memento is a profound realisation of trauma in the souvenir of a broken cup, 'You can never go back.'

Mornings at Carrnowniskey is an exceptional piece. The poet, with courage, places her trust in 'the elemental cosmos' in the face 'of our thwarted humanity'. Kilcoyne's poems are intimate, exquisite and finely etched. The Paradox of You brought to mind E.E. Cumming's writing. Such delicacy of phrase as 'There is a reckoning too and it comes in/disguise' (There Are No Gods) will linger. 

The Heart Uncut is available here.