POETRY BOOK REVIEW
ROOTLING
(New and Selected Poems)
KATIE DONOVAN
BLOODAXE ISBN 978 1 85224 881 9 £10.95
A collection of new and collected poems from an established female author, born in Co. Wexford, educated at Trinity College Dublin, her poems explore motherhood, birth and breast-feeding; how she perceives the man she loves - the father of her children - how she experiences the eternal battle of the sexes.
Apart from being shockingly honest, the poems are so well made and devised, they claim the universal. “Alive” is a poem about birth (in the present tense) in which she describes how she feels and how she watches and how she thinks her partner, the father feels as she gives birth - he watches:
You see my bottom/flower like a baboon’s/as I brace and grunt .. you’re calm throughout, / and fascinated,/as her head breaks free .. she further describes the father as “..triumphant/when we take her home,/but I am prone to shakes and weeps ..” Again, “You throw her/over your shoulder,/laughing .. the poet is noting these things without comment. They are wonderfully, very true.
There is, however, a tone throughout much of the book (and its 189 poems) almost against men, certainly questioning what men are and seeming to suggest that they are in a constant state of getting away with something.
Yet in a poem called Gambler she describes how sad she is that a sexy man has lost his confidence and has become a man who “keeps a job,/a wife and children.”
Well you can’t have it both ways – or maybe you can and just meditate on things. I love this continuing debate of partnership; it is cerebral; it is also angry, resentful, confused - but always sexy!
Sadly – more than sad - the last few poems in the book are about the death of her lover and are of the most moving sequences of words I have ever experienced.
That’s the thing about a book, you dive in being confident and wanting to be taken over; by the end it can be that the reader is beached, chastened and made better for the experience.