Tag: review

‘A Master of Endings’: Poetry Ireland Review Critiques Rapture

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I am grateful to Poetry Ireland Review for including a review of Rapture in the latest issue of their literary pamphlet Trumpet. Screen Shot 2018-01-10 at 10.24.39

The text concerning Rapture, which Grace Wilentz reviews alongside chapbooks by Ellen Cranitch, Julie Morrisey, Pardraig Regan, Victor Tapner, and Michael Naghten Shanks, is featured below. The Winter 2017/18 issue of Trumpet is available here.

Rapture, by Roisin Kelly, the first pamphlet in Southword’s New Irish Voices series, is as concerned with the transcendent pleasure of love as the pamphlet’s title would lead you to believe. Unafraid of sentiment, these twenty poems meditate on lost love, longing, and the tendency of intimacy to arrive as an utter surprise, and dissolve just as swiftly.

In ‘A Massage Room in West Cork’, Kelly draws her reader into an expertly rendered scene, as surprising as it is beautiful:

and all night we keep on the orange
crystal lamp to soften four panes
of glass-hard darkness at the window.

Kelly is a master of endings, saving the ‘poetic crossing’ until the last possible moment. The closing of ‘Leave’ opens unpredictably into a wider, more mysterious world through the soft, hushed music of Kelly’s lines:

For now, the runway stretches into darkness.
In the cellars, barrelled apples sleep
and dream their short lives in reverse.

 

‘Unabashed and Unaffected’: New Review of Rapture in Sabotage

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Many thanks to Sabotage Reviews, which recently published a review of Rapture. In describing what he sees as the book’s approach to desire (‘so unabashed, so unaffected’), its ‘ambiguous morality’, and its ‘subversive religious material’, Humphrey Astley writes:

Clearly, [Kelly is] concerned with themes of innocence versus experience, though they seem to coexist in her poetry, in a world where erotic frustration is imbued with prepubescent visions ‘the colour of my childhood bedroom’. In this sense, Kelly can be associated with an emerging school of metamodernism, or ‘naive capability’, if you like. Such art exists between tradition and modernity, in the midst of a coming-of-age, ‘between the old, known world / and some fiery entrance to elsewhere.’

The full review is available to read here.

New review of poetry collections in Southword

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My review of poetry collections by Adam White and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin appears in the July 2017 edition of Southword. 

Read more about What Else is There? and Hofstetter’s Serenade here.

‘Remarkable Emotional Range’: Alison Brackenbury Reviews Rapture

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I am so happy with the review of Rapture by Alison Brackenbury that appears in the latest issue of the PN Review, below.

Rapture, Roisin Kelly’s first pamphlet, brings exuberant colour: ‘June comes to the sky above Leitrim / and Mars is as red as a rose’. Her writing is eagerly physical. Love ‘can be […] like biting into fruit / below the sun, into the juice and pulp of it’. Words addressed to the smallest souvenir ring with tenderness: ‘Little matchbox’… Kelly’s lines carry passionate echoes of liturgy: ‘With your blue sweater, my body worships you’. With ecstatically long vowels and singing sound, these poems are a feast.

Even loss, in Rapture, is transfigured to a constellation: ‘My ex-boyfriend turned lonely Orion’. The poems’ boldness of statement grows almost proverbial: ‘the breakfast table / of love has wrecked many ships’. This brief collection shows remarkable emotional range. Kelly leaves the reader afloat on a tide of colour, her ‘comet’s tail of old ice and stardust / on its way to the red heat of its marriage bed’.

 

Review of Rapture in The Irish Times

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Many thanks to The Irish Times for John McAuliffe’s lovely review of Rapture, below:

Roisin Kelly’s Rapture (€5) is the first publication in what Southword Editions promises will be a series, New Irish Voices. Kelly’s poems might be more traditional than Redmond’s, but they are fresh, sensuous and direct where Redmond drifts, teases and dallies. Addressing an ex, she writes: “Wherever you are, go / with a bride-thought haunting your shoulder, as lovely as snow” (At a Photography Exhibition in New York Public Library). “The words are everything,” she writes in Easter, although her implication of “words” with desire risks, and gets away with, using some of the oldest images: “Now a rose is once again / not only rose but also soft and red / and thorn and bee and honey.”